People are AMAZING

So we made it, crawling, stumbling, and squinting into Wrightwood.  Crawling, because I scraped all the skin off the bottom of my right foot.  Stumbling, because we spent twenty miles climbing to approximately 8,500 feet.  Squinting, because there was a snowstorm up here last Friday, and though we were not caught in it (we were, however, caught in pouring rain at a lower elevation and ended up taking refuge in the overhang to a pit toilet.  We were there for hours, but that's another story), it has been soggy and completely socked in ever since, and we lost the trail twenty million times.

When we finally fumbled our way onto the highway we were miraculously scooped by a wonderful couple, Dolores and Harry.  They took us back to thier house and proceeded to drape our soggy selves in silly robes and fluffy slippers while we did our laundry, tossed us into deliciously hot showers, and gave us each our own room to sleep in, both equipped with beds and blankets and real pillows.  And they fed us dinner and desert and hot tea and breakfast and bacon and drove us back into Wrightwood the next day.  They were amazing.  Dolores even stuck our nasty, soggy shoes into the dryer and then put foot powder in them afterwards. Utterly amazing.  I think I'd like to own a house sometime in the future for the sole purpose of scooping beleaguered soles and doing for them what Dolores and Harry did for us.  They even had a bird book, and I found out that the beautiful orange and black birds we've been seeing are black headed grosbeaks.  

This last stint from Big Bear City to Wrightwood has been a bit crazy.  We were hit by crazy weather, spent half a day basking in hot springs (unfortunately this did not coincide with the rain and cold), passed not one, but two ridiculous dams, ate dinner inside some massive pipes (Sye kept calling it the Tube Farm), ate skittles and played poker with Duck the Do-Badder (he's one of our favorite trail mates), gorged ourselves at a McDonalds, and hopefully dodged shitloads of poison oak.