Day 21: Big Miles and Big Bugs

Date: Tue 5/8

PCT Start Mile: 280.0

PCT End Mile: 303.9

PCT Mileage for Day: 23.9

Off-Trail Hike Mileage: .25

Total Mileage for Day: 24.15

Total PCT Mileage: 303.9

Total Overall Mileage: 319.94

The Highlights:big miles, lots of gnats and mosquitos, and 300+ miles in the books

Our day started with news of an early morning earthquake centered in the San Gorgonio Wilderness area, which we had just hiked through only four-five days ago. Apparently the 4.6 magnitude quake could be felt from Idyllwild to Big Bear Lake. Though we were not far from the north shore of Big Bear Lake, we didn’t feel a thing, still catching some morning Zzzs when it occurred.

Today’s plan was to put in some big miles… the reason for which I’ll make clear in a couple days. We were aiming for about 24 miles for the day – our longest hiking day yet – and the easy grade of the trail made the first 12 miles relatively quick work.

We took our lunch break at Holcomb Creek only a little after 11am. I soaked my feet in the cold water. Here we saw Uncle Jed again. He asked us our names and introduced himself to us … again. “They call me Uncle Jed”, he said. Ummm, yeah, Ten-Second Tom, we know. We met you yesterday. Twice. You camped right next to us last night.

Just before Holcomb Creek, we started to hit a lot of swarms of gnats. The product of a situation with water but not a lot of airflow.

While I was hoping this would only be a short occurrence, we ended up hiking through gnats frequently throughout the rest of the day. It would be one thing if they were just flying around me, but they seemed pretty determined to fly into me… into my face and ears mostly. And close enough to my sunglasses to make me go cross-eyed looking at them.

I waved my trekking poles in front of me like windshield wipers. Am I continuously walking through swarms of gnats, or is a swarm of gnats just following my hot sweaty stench bubble? Not everything about nature is neat.

Other than the gnats, we also walked by a lot of these fly-bee mutant things. I don’t think they were bees, but they had large yellow-orange wings and seemed to like to land on flowers so…. hmmmm. At any rate, I was fine with these mutants because they left me alone.

Another 6.5 miles down the trail from our lunch break, we took another break at the Deep Creek Bridge. We had just been commenting about how the bubble of hikers around us had changed and we were no longer seeing many of the people that we had been hiking/leapfrogging with for the last two weeks, when we saw some familiar faces resting by the stream – Pat (Electro Daddi – though he’s not sure about keeping this name), Grace, and Jim.

While we hadn’t met Jim before, we had met Grace several times. She had apparently smelled something minty around her one day and, seeing a bunch of ants, thought it might be the ants and popped one into her mouth. Those around her had tried to dub her “Aardvark” for this stunt, though I’m not sure that she accepted the name. I forgot to ask.

The three were lazing on a small beach next to the river where there was enough breeze to keep away all bugs. We quickly joined them.

Pat needed to leave the trail for several days in about a week to go home for a wedding and had discovered that a town with bus service to LAX was about 200 miles away, which he could make it to if he hiked about 25 miles a day. He had set out on his overzealous plan yesterday, hiking 25 miles. This plan had worked so well that today, he had hiked only 6 miles and had been sitting on this small beach since 11am. It was now about 3pm. So, his new plan was just to get to Wrightwood (about 70 miles away) and then hitch to somewhere that had a bus service to LA. Good idea.

We also met a guy named Metric Ton here. He was carrying an 80 pound pack, just because he wanted the hike to be “a workout”. Ummm… I am carrying a pack that is typically less than half that weight and I feel like I’m getting a workout.

Apparently he’s only been averaging about 10 miles a day with this motherload…you don’t say. He wants to get this up closer to a 15 mile/day average to ensure he can finish the trail before the snow flies in the Cascades, so he’s trying to figure out how to bring his pack weight down to 70 pounds. After he gave us a rundown of what constituted the 80 pounds, including something like 34 pounds of food weight, I had a few ideas. I kept them to myself though, as did everyone else. No one wanted to seem judgy. I can’t imagine hiking with that much weight, though. There have been guys in past years that have also purposely carried heavy packs, they ended up with the trail names Kitchen Sink and Hundred Pounds (the latter literally carrying 100 pounds).

This little space next to the river was so nice, we stayed much longer than we intended, soaking our feet, chatting, and watching the ducks fight. Eventually we pealed ourselves away to hike the last 5.5 miles. This included passing the 300 mile marker:

It also included more gnats. Most of the last 5 miles was really nice trail, high along the mountainside, following the river valley. Unfortunately, this nearby water presence also meant … more bugs.

Our campsite area was plagued with mosquitos and we walked around while we ate our dinners to keep them off of us. Then we quickly threw everything into our tent and zipped it up to escape the swarms. Somehow we managed to get into the tent without a single mosquito.

And now, a very loud cricket is serenading me to sleep.