Yay! We have just been welcomed home from a 5 day camping trip by the most splendid little packet of trail letters! How lucky are we?! We love you two SO MUCH and can’t wait to swap desert stories!
Love, Car & Bridget
5/2/08 10pm Mexico Border to Hauser Creek ~16mi
1st night on the trail! We are camping 16 mi in from the border, in a little valley near a dry creek bed (as in, no water), waiting to hike up to the campground we stayed in last night until morning. long day in the sun, but not as hot as I expected, and the umbrella worked great! felt silly with a parasol and puffy light pink wind/sun protection pants, but we’re not out here to look stylish, are we? Alex is already asleep next to me, but she did say several times today how excited she was that we’re on the trail. Here we are! Critters make lots of noise in this dry brush, and I’m glad I’m not alone here. I think my favorite critters are the big black beetles. they’re awful cute crawling across the path. kind of turtle-like. Comic-book animated-like. extra-special shiny and perfect angles. They don't quite look real, just like ayla's stuffed animal face. Alex's favorites are hummingbirds, next to the orange sherbet flowers, next to a push-up lizard. they really do pushups, but not like we do. they push up instantaneously, sporadically, in jolty movements and apparently because we're in their territory. which we are.
5/3/08 Hauser Creek to Kettle Creek, ~12.5miRattlesnake rattled loud before we passed, a big thick one. ground bee hive right on trail, but we didn't get stung. we're doing ok here in the desert, finding water, keeping covered, making shade with umbrellas. we're not to the mohave yet, though.
5/4/08 Kettle Creek to Burnt Rancheria Campground, ~14mi
A few easy days because we're waiting to get to laguna until the post office opens. this campground is nice--not open so no toilets, but who needs those really? Running water & benches that I stretched on, and fire rings. Cooked dinner over a nice fire in the windy pines. There are pines in s. cali, and cold winds! Desert-dwellers warned us of the cold…
Alex & I may not be completely food compatible. which is why we have 2 pots! Alex liked our goopy pasta & veggies last night, I liked our soupy beans & rice & veggies tonight (which al calls moth balls & beans, because it was from my mother’s ancient cache of hiking food, and one of the packages did show remnants of moths.)
~Sye
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May 1, 2008
Lake Morena- we’re staying out of phone contact tonight. I’d meant to call a couple different folks. My mom, because even before we’ve stepped a foot onto the trail, we need something from our piles of stuff residing at her house. Specifically, we need the instructions for pitching our tent.
Somehow I managed to pitch the pages into a box of miscellaneous junk. I even looked at the pages and thought; “now I put up the tent that one time a month or two ago. I know exactly how to do it.” And then we pitched the tent tonight-Sye’s first time ever, and the night before we actually and irrevocably begin trekking to Canada, I remembered, oh, half a knot. Sye’s pissed at me. And we need those instructions.
Poor Sye. This is not the first he’s had to put up with consequences of my blaze attitude. Sometimes I think I really lucked out, having him as a hiking companion, and he got the short end of the stick. He is so meticulously organized- I don’t know if this planning process would have happened at all without him.
I, on the other hand, seem to think all will be well and things will go as planned, even if I do no planning. Most of the time my method doesn’t work. Like we don’t know how to pitch our tent.
I also meant to call Lucy. She left me a voice mail the other night in a panic. We haven’t been separated for more then a couple weeks for the last 5 years. That’s as long as we’ve known each other. And now we have no phone reception and I can’t let her know all is well, that we found cinnamon rolls the size of your head-a whole pile of them-sitting next to a bookshelf featuring the book “20 Minutes in Hell: What one man heard and felt in the place of Torment”. Or that we ate Mission burritos and hung at the Lex in San Francisco the other night, and then saw millions of Elephant Seals cuddling like yams on the beach.
But we’re out of cell phone range-another eventuality I didn’t really plan for our last night in “civilization”-and I’ve stood Lucy up. More bad planning on my part. And I don’t just sometimes think I lucked out to have Sye as a hiking companion-I always think that. I’m excited to start the trail with him tomorrow.
And I really wish I could hear Lucy’s voice.
May 3, 2008
Day 2 on the trail:
Lessons we learned today
Hiking early in the morning is invigorating.
Taking a 3hr break at Lk Morena @9am is not the best time for breaks, because
by the time you start hiking @12pm it is HOT.
Don’t listen to what any of the guide books say about H20. It is nowhere. Except
unexpectedly and unpredictably cached under trees or rocks.
Carry lots of H20 (5L) all the time. Unless you are Sye, in which case carry 20L
@ all times (seriously, he drinks as much H20 as a horse, and pees that much too).
Beetles are cool. But why are the big black ones black? In this HOT climate
where everything is sandy grey black seems distinctively disadvantageous.
Apparently, when I wear my button-up white shirt to protect me from becoming a
lobster, I look butch (I started wearing my hair in pigtails as soon as Sye told me this).
Sye looks like a space cadet all the time.
We like H20. Not just drinking H20. We like to be in it, near it, to sleep by it.
Kettle Crk is gurgling nearby as I write this. We were going to keep hiking for a couple more hours, but we came across this place and it’s the first real stream (not just a trickle of H20 ?curtained ?contained with algae) we’ve seen. And it has picturesque pools and waterfalls and it called to us and we’re camping here. And of course, we splashed around in it.
Doing 10 miles/day is supposed to feel like a lazy day. It doesn’t. I’m beat. Sye
might be beat, though he seems pretty chipper right now. We camped @ Hoaser Crk (no creek actually) last night, next to some poison oak, climbed 1000ft before 9am. We did another 6 from Lk Morena to our current camp by Kettle Crk. Ray Jardine says we should be averaging 18 mi per day. I say phooey.
My feet are sore and I like backpacking so far.
~Alex
[...there's a bit more of this letter soon to come, but it's late here on the islands and bedtime for now.....]
Sye was dubbed "Spaceman Spiff" this morning. Check out his helmet and cape. If we get moving before 6 am we get to see the sunrise. And hike in the cool.
This water from Tule Spring was disgusting. Tasted like old moldy pipes. This is a pretty typical "spring" in the desert. We had to loose about 100 ft of eleveation and walk half a mile to get to this big cement tank of water. We ended up spending 3 hours here, waiting out the heat of the day, before hiking another 7 miles before camping.
