Miles hiked: 28.5
Well, today was a bit of a character-building day. I woke up around 4 this morning with some anxiety about the day's hike. I had pretty much committed to skipping the hitch hike in to Julian where I could refill water and take advantage of the rumored free pie. This meant that if I didn't want to rely on water caches, I had to make it all the way to Barrel Spring on the 5 liters I had left from the Rodriguez Spur tank. I've been using much less water than I anticipated, and I figured that with the cool weather I should be able to make that push OK. But the big unknown was how my body, and especially my knee, would handle all those miles, potentially all in one day.
I set out around 5:45, right around when it was light enough to get back to the trail without stumbling into a cactus or yucca. It was partly cloudy but still quite windy, with gusts up to about 30 mph. But it was a spectacular morning! As I followed the trail down off the flank of Granite Mountain and out into the flat San Felipe Valley, the sun slid up into the gap between distant mountains and cloud and set everything aglow. Rocks, century plant flowers, the shaggy little junipers I was now seeing, all were set alight in their own particular shade of warm orange. There was even a partial rainbow in the west off toward Julian. A Loggerhead Shrike scolded me as I passed.
I passed Sprout in her windblown little bivy, and eventually made it to Scissors Crossing, where the trail crosses hwy 78. A big tumbleweed and an occasional car passed by, and I didn't linger long.
Climbing up the south-facing slope of the San Felipe Hills, I was immediately into a new habitat. The scrub, yucca and prickly pear cactus of the north-facing slope of Granite Mountain were now replaced with barrel cacti, very abundant century plants, and the strange creosote bushes, with their skinny, leafless stocks topped with little red flower clusters. House Finches, Cactus Wrens, Anna's Hummingbirds, and a woodpecker I didn't quite get a good look at were all out and about as the trail switchbacked up into drier and drier country.
Eventually the trail leveled and traced in and out of countless hidden canyons as it wrapped from the south face of the SF Hills around to the western slopes. I brunched at 10:30 at PCT mile 84.7, adding 2 peanut butter packs to my granola for a shot of around 700 calories. Next the trail climbed slightly higher into a very desolate-seeming landscape, which apparently had burned sometime recently. But even here, where at first glance the only sign of life was the charred remains of century plants and shrubs, upon further examination one could observe Black-chinned Sparrows and Rock Wrens feeding fledglings. The chicks of both species were pretty damn cute, all fluffy and clumsy and naive perching right in front of me.
As I continued to the NW, the wind increased and clouds darkened. The approach to the turn off to the 3rd Gate water cache was a bit exciting, as the trail traversed a steep slope about 1000 feet above the valley below, and gusts up to about 45-50 mph peppered me with little raindrops and pushed me sideways (luckily uphill).
I got to 3rd Gate (PCT mile 91.2) around 1:50, and had a little rest with Avenger, someone who doesn't want to be Big Country, someone who doesn't want to be Anakin, and Pilgrim (hiked and camped with him night 2). Sprout showed up shortly after I did, and around 2:10 we all set out to tackle the next section. Just as we were leaving a couple arrived and said it was forecast to rain more tonight, and in retrospect this could have been a good time to have a more-careful gander at the map and re-evaluate our plan to push on a few more hours. For the next couple miles the trail made ridiculously lazy switchbacks (Sprout was a quarter mile ahead of me, and a few times when we passed each other we were only about 50 vertical feet apart) up the east side of a ridge, and we were somewhat sheltered from the weather. Eventually however we rounded to the west side of the ridge to find the storm had arrived. We were on the same steep slope as before 3rd Gate, but now the winds were gusting up into the 60+ mph range. I had been feeling a bit slow before, but now the wind and building rain provided all the incentive I needed to pick up the pace. We formed a bit of a train, nose to butt, pumping trekking poles, and trying to stay upright and on the trail. At mile 94-ish we had a little break and discussed our options. I'm not sure if I was the only one of us who could read a topo map, or just the only one who had the map handy, but I became the unofficial navigator, checking the map to see when we would switch back the east side of the ridge and maybe find a sheltered spot to camp. It looked like the the former would happen around mile 96, and the latter might come along a mile or 2 after that.
About now it started to actually rain (not just heavy sideways mist), and we kept up the pace to try and stay warm in our little hiking clothes and semi-functional desert rain jackets. Pilgrim took a little bivy spot just past mile 96, and the rest of us took a little break at Billy Goat's Cave (a little human-made cave carved into a rock face; PCT 96.1) then decided to just push all the way to Barrel Spring. We tromped on past the 100 mile point of the trail. My phone storage was full so I didn't get any photos. Somewhere along here I also saw Wrentits feeding fledglings.
We got to the spring at 5:45. I was a bit ahead of the others, but I knew Sprout and Avenger had pretty minimal tarp shelters so I waited for them to pick the most sheltered spots to set up. I set up my tarp, helped Sprout a bit with her's (while a turkey wandered through camp), made sure Avenger was good to go, then dove under cover.
My dinner cooking attempt was a comedy of errors. First I burned a batch of polenta far beyond edibility. Luckily I was camped on coarse sand, so after scraping that disaster into one of my water bottles I was able to scour the blackened crust out without leaving bed. Next I tried some curry lentil soup, but that was too spicy with all the dried jalapeño I had included. My water bottle was too full so this went into a ziplock. Defeated, I just snacked on jerkey and cookies.
My body handled the miles pretty well today. My knee never really had any pain, my ankles got a little sore, and I got just two baby blisters that are really too small to show to any other hikers.
Cold rain in the desert, go figure.
Birds (might be forgetting a few because weather prevented notebook use)
*= new for trip
CALT
SATH
LOSH*
WETA*
TOWA
Sage Sparrow
CAWR
HOFI
ANHU
OCWA
BCSP
WREN
WESJ
ATFL
GCSP*
MOQU*
WITU
Un-ID woodpecker
Un-ID shorebirds flying by over San Felipe Valley; best guess is American Avocet or Willet- didn't get the Hubble on it, just saw black and white go zipping by.
Man, that's a serious day of hiking. I love that you're posting the miles hiked and the mileage marker for the day. Great photos too. The colors are amazing for a camera phone.
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