Woke up, got packed, on the trail.
15 days on this journey, 12 actual days of hiking.
Everything now has it's place, a system for getting up and out on the trail, whittling off minutes each day as I figure out what's most efficient.
I don't miss the city at all. I love the connection to nature and seeing the landscape around you change completely every day out here and I don't miss the the stress of hitting ten red lights in six miles.
Crossed the San Diego/ Riverside county line, nothing but the desert in store today, following the trail along the dry hills from water to water.
People complain about water. "Oh it tasted like sulfur or oh it had water bugs..."
They talk about how all these springs and troughs are open to dead animals and reptiles, and how they fall in and decompose, and the salmonella they carry.
I carry a UV light, a steripen. It fries
The DNA of anything biological so it can't reproduce and get you sick.
So far it's seemed to work, and I've been good. I've had sulfur water twice, it smells like egg and you deal with it, you're not getting any other water.
Today we're arriving at a cistern (big concrete tank) buried in the desert that is the next water and might be the only water around.
As we walk up and see the gaping hole in it we joke about getting some Vitamin L ( lizard) in our water, and we start to pump it out into our bottles to purify.
Almost as a joke, I stick my head down in it to check for dead things. Sure enough, at least four dead lizards I could see were all RIGHT at the bottom of the intake tube that we were pumping water from.
I'm busting up laughing, telling Joe not to pump too hard because I can see their skins that had come off and he was gonna suck them up.
"Maybe theyres a gravel filter," he says optimistically. I stick my head in and pull up on the pump. Bare tube.
"Nope. No filter."
"You didn't have to tell me that."
I couldn't stop laughing. He had a giant floatie in his bottle. I suspect vitamin L.
That night we trying to get as far as we could so we would have less to hike in the morning before we hit the Paradise Valley Cafe. We were ready to get a REAL meal and I didn't wanna get too excited about it and get all worked up. I kept envisioning a harvest of plenty, a cornucopia of bacon cheeseburgers and ribs, hashbrowns and biscuits and gravy, and more bacon. And a coke.
Not to get distracted, weather was moving onto our ridge fast as the sun started to go down. Grey puffy clouds rolled over the mountains and spread like the tide across the clear blue sky we'd enjoyed all day. They moved through as we set up camp and the temperature started to drop.
I put the rainfly on my tent and got it all set it up and got ready for a cold night. I then noticed a big boulder looming over my tent on the hill above. My tent was already getting wet from the fog, and I had to get in my bag to get warm.
"What are the odds it'll come down tonight," I thought as I drifted off. It wasn't a dead tree. It was a rock. There for millions of years.
As much as you try out here, sometimes you just have to take chances. :)
P.s. came across the perfect cathole today. Check it out below. It's built for a king.
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