Day 1
Daily Miles: 7.8 MilesTotal Miles: 7.8 Miles
What a great day to return to the PCT. We were up by about 5:15AM with the plan being to be on the road around 6AM. It was just under a 2 hour drive up to Mojave from Fullerton. The plan for today was to do a short warmup day with Scott, however we had only one car. I wasn't sure of the parking scenerio at Highway 58, so I wanted Scott to park at Tehachapi-Willow Springs Road. Scott was going to drop me off at the Highway 58 road crossing and I would walk south back to T-WS Rd. He would drive around to the other end and walk in to meet me, then turn around and walk back with me to his car. The temperature actually went down the last couple days into the low 80's and it should stay there for the next 4-5 days, so all of this is good luck for me.
Originally, I was going to carry the full pack and 3 liters of water today, but at the last moment decided to just leave as much weight as possible in his car because I wasn't sure how fast my body was going to adapt to the desert again. Before he dropped me off we swung by T-WS Road because I wanted him to know where to park and I wanted to take a picture of where I got off the trail in 2008.
At the parking lot at T-WS road we also ran into trail magic (on Day 1!!!!) that I turned down because I felt like I hadn't done anything yet worthy of accepting it. For those reading this who are new to thruhiking terms, "Trail Magic" refers to an unexpected act of kindness that literally comes out of nowhere like magic. It can be drinks or food in a cooler at a road crossing, an offer of a ride to or from town, an offer of a place to stay while in town and so on. In this case a former hiker named Legend was there with his camper and was making pancakes for a few hikers who were seated around the trail. They introduced themselves though I can't remember any of their names. The one that stood out was a young Korean man who said that this was his second trip to the US and that on his first trip he rode his bike from NY to LA, and now he was hiking the other way across the US from Mexico to Canada. Pretty cool.
Saying our goodbyes we headed on out to drop me off at Highway 58. I didn't think there would be any parking there but there actually would have been plenty of places to park. A couple more pictures and away I was walking south back to T-WS road.
It was only 7.9 miles so I figured it would take about 3-3.5 hours, and I would probably see Scott about 4.5 miles in. After a steady 1000 ft. climb I made it to the top of the ridge and into a wind farm.
In fact this whole area is covered in wind turbines and wind farms. At the top of this ridge if you turned around 360 degrees I bet you could see 500 - 750 wind turbines. These things are massive too and I can't imagine how much each one costs to build.
I was pretty close on my estimate of meeting Scott. At somewhere around 4.5 miles for me, he came walking up the trail the other way. The whole valley was wide open so not only was it windy (i.e. the wind farms) but I could see him and the trail almost a mile away. We slowly meandered back down to the car only passing about 4 thruhikers the whole way. Back at T-WS road there were 3 more trying to hitch into Tehachapi. After talking to them for 5-10 minutes a truck stopped for them, they all jumped in and sped off to town. We were at the car and done for the day - an easy first day (tomorrow will be much more difficult). 7.8 miles in 2 hours and 40 minutes. Not bad just under 3 mph.
We were done for the day and it wasn't even noon yet, and we couldn't check in to our hotel until 3pm, so we headed back down to Lancaster 25 miles away and went to a movie. We saw "Now You See Me 2." Not as good as the first one but a decent entertaining flick. The movie was out by 4PM and we headed back to mojave and the motel 6. This was the same hotel i stayed at for 3 nights when i got hurt in 2008 and was waiting for a ride back to Las Vegas. Very good hotel for the price and very hiker friendly including 4 hiker boxes in the lobby.
Dinner was at Denny's (mojave is almost all fast food joints, and we wanted a sit down so this worked), then back to the hotel to try to shake a few more pounds out of the pack. I was able to drop about 5 more pounds - mostly in food. I had gone a little overboard when shopping the other day, so I gave some of it to Scott and told him to mail it ahead for me because he didn't want any of it for himself. I tried to get to bed early but we had noisy neighbors next room over and I might have been a bit nervous. Lights went off about 11:30PM. Alarm goes off at 5AM with a hopeful eta on trail of 5:30-5:45 AM
Tomorrow is it. I'm on my own ready or not!!!!
Patch
No comments:
Post a Comment