Day 31 04/18 Deep Creek

Mileage: 19.6
Camp: 321.5

He loses, I find.
It's late at night. That means the sun is down. Joe and I are sitting on our footprints (ground cloths) that overhang off the side of the two foot wide trail where we're camped.
We're cooking and laughing, high off our stories of the trail and breaking personal records when I hear a crash in the bushes below.
Far below.
"Dude, did you drop anything?" I ask.
"What do you mean?"
"Like did your stuff just roll off this cliff?"
"No, I don't think so."
"You're not missing anything."
"Nope."
Joe goes on about his business.
I'm not convinced.
I'M definitely not missing anything. It wasn't an animal. It was a
"Doomf Doomf CRASH."
Very specific. Tumbling and weeds breaking.
As hard of hearing as I can be, this guy either legitimately didn't hear it or was in denial.
I stand up in the dark and start climbing down the steep hill.
"What are you doing?" he yells down.
"I'm not gonna sit up there anymore, thats gonna get anything back! I'll let you know from the bottom."
I wanna find out what it is. What did Joe lose this time?
I almost walked right past, it's black rounded shape lodged under a bush, almost lost in the dark.
"UHH... YEAH...YOU MIGHT WANT THIS," I yell up.
"What? What is it?"
I made him wait til I got back up there, huffing and puffing with his treasure in hand.
His $300 Mountain Hardware sleeping bag.
Joe is astonished.
It was warm, we hadn't gotten in our bags yet.
He would have figured it out eventually.
So that's one down jacket ($200)+
one down bag ($300)+ sunglasses ($60), a tyvek footprint($10) and one croc shoe ($??) totaling=
-----------------
a ton of money.

Joe said it best.
"What would I do without you, kid?"

We got up early this morning, packed up and got on the move. Not half of a mile later we're at a river crossing and I go to take a picture and realize I don't have my phone/camera.
I frantically check my pockets.
It's gone.
Last place I remember it was in my sleeping bag last night when I fell asleep. I didn't remember picking it up this morning. And I double checked our site before we left like I always do...
Oh God.
It must have slid off that cliff in the middle of the night just like Joes sleeping bag.
Joe took a break while I ran back to our camp, uphill. I hoped to encounter Dan holding up my cell phone.
"Looking for this?" I'd imagine him say.
Nope. No Dan. I had to go all the way back to our campsite. And even if Dan had got up early and come through here already he wouldn't have found it.
Guess where it was?
At the bottom of that steep hill. Right were I found Joes bag last night.
After that debacle we hiked along Deep Creek for the majority of the day. Unfortunately we skipped the hot springs, but we were making excellent time.
As we got closer to the Mojave Dam I was disappointed to see that the part of the trail closest to my hometown of Hesperia was the only part of the trail with graffiti. And it was covered in it, all the way up the canyon to the Hot Springs.
The spillway was massive. I don't see this thing ever getting used. There would have to be a flood of biblical proportions for Deep Creek to fill enough to come over.
After that was a river, our first real river that we had to ford. It went smoothly despite sinking into the riverbed a little bit. I did it without my boots on. The sand below my feet formed little dunes.

We hiked a little more into an area of the trail that looked less used by the locals. It led into a little grove of trees and green area that completely suprised me. I was from the nearby town. I didn't know there was anything this pretty this close! It looked like we had crossed into another world.
We camped above a beautiful high desert ranch as the sun began to set. Being from Hesperia, I was glad to see that there were places nearby that more than made up for all the graffiti earlier in the day.