I woke up in the middle of the night to the sounds of scratching outside the tent near my head. I turned on my headlamp to find hundreds of ants crawling all over my bag and in the vestibule area. I was stressing and Jake told me that we could deal with it in the morning.
Waking up in the morning to deal with the ants was annoying. At least 10 large ants had gotten themselves into the end of my Sawyer water filter so I spent about 20 minutes knocking the filter against a rock and back flushing to get them all out. So much for getting an early start. Finally I got all the ants out of my things and we were ready to roll out to our first water cache of the day.
The water cache was fully stocked and we loaded up with what we thought was enough water to get us to the next cache. Turns out the high for the day was going to be 103 and I didn’t have enough water to not have to ration. We made it to our lunch spot as the heat was the worst and tried to find some shade. We first tried the old mining equipment but soon were over run by ants so we moved over to the shade of some Joshua trees. Jake got restless and said he was ready to go to our camping destination around 3. I wasn’t ready yet so I told him to go ahead and I would see him later. When he left I took a nap and tried to pump myself up to get back into the heat.
I left the spot around 3:40 and started hiking. I was cruisin at first because it was all downhill. Soon I was climbing and the clouds had dissipated enough to make it very warm again. I tried eating candy to distract myself from my thirst and put on some music but it was still a slog. About 2.5 miles from camp I was done with the climb and needed to know how much water I had left because I was struggling. I was excited and a little annoyed to find out I had an entire liter in my hydration pack. I started chugging water and almost running the downhill to camp. I ran out of water just as I got to the last turn to the campsite and water cache.
Jake was sitting near the cache waiting for me to show up. I filled some bottles and started drinking to catch up from the day of not enough water. We stayed in this spot for a while to eat dinner. Soon other hikers started showing up and saying there were at least 8 people behind coming here to camp. I heard this and moved my stuff over to the spot we thought would be good for the night. When we were getting ready to head over to our spot another hiker started chatting with Jake for a long while and I looked up to see Honeybear coming down the trail. It was great to see a friendly face and catch up for a while.
Finally we got all set up right before the sun completely went down and got mentally prepared for a 3am wake up call. We are planning to hike by 4am to try to not suffer too much in the 107 degree day.
PCT Hike 