Only 17 miles to go today and thank goodness because everyone was overtired and hot first thing. Sleep wasn’t great again because of the wind. We filtered some water from the tiny stream and headed out to climb through he hot desert again. I was carrying a lot of water because I knew it was going to be hot and our next source was a cache which you can’t always rely on.
Jake pushed ahead of me so he got to the cache before me. He was going to walk right by since he had enough water but Daniel, the cache maintainer, called out to him asking if he’d like some fruit or something. When I got there I was so amazed and excited to see umbrellas providing shade. Daniel was cutting up pineapple for us and I also had a mandarin orange. I drank an entire liter of water while we were stopped there and then grabbed a little package of cheese crackers for the road. It was such a nice surprise!
We only walked a little ways more to find some other shade in the trees to eat our lunch and hangout until late afternoon when it might be cooler. When we got there I needed to go to the bathroom so I started to trudge up the hill into the trees and almost stepped on a huge snake crossing my path. Yikes! It wasn’t a rattler so I wasn’t too worried but still I don’t like snakes and I especially don’t like stepping on them. Once our lunch break was over we headed on to our camp spot.
Along the way we passed Mosey who was having a tough time with her IT band. She was hobbling along, I felt so bad but there wasn’t really anything we could do to help so onwards we went. The wind was bad again in certain areas so I had pulled my hood tight over the brim of my hat and was just looking at the ground trying to get through these last miles. I got to a point where I looked up and there were multiple trails and I panicked for a moment because I didn’t see Jake. For a second I thought maybe I lost the trail but walked just a bit further and saw Jake standing in the shade of some Joshua trees, phew!
Finally we were at our camp spot near the first road to Tehachapi! Once there though we started to worry we were going to have another windy night. Neither of us had the energy to be fighting the wind again and we just wanted to relax so we decided to hitch into town a night early. We didn’t have to wait long before a guy coming home from work kindly picked us up and dropped us at our hotel. We called in a takeout order, went to pick it up, showered and then just laid in bed watching silly stuff on TV, it was glorious.
PCT Hike 