You like that pack?

Yes, the trail is crowded. I chided my old PCT pal Eric Limprecht (aka the Croatian Sensation, the Croat for short) for declaring the PCT over and done on Facebook. People have a right to be out here, and many people are delightful to be around. If I have found this experience to be so transformative, allowing me to release a lot of my rage and materialism, why shouldn't others have that? Wouldn't that be good for us as a people?

All well and good, but when the next evening found me rolling into a tent city at the Rodriguez Truck Trail water tank, I began to see that the Croat had a point. Like 20 tents arrayed around the precious tank. There are just a lot of folks at these campsites, and we are surely having an impact on the desert. Just the amount of nitrogen we are adding to the soil via pooping must be a shock to the system. I mean, imagine 2000 people pooping in your local city park over the course of four months. It would be a different park, even if everyone carefully buried their scat 6" deep etc etc. 

I set up my tarp in a pitch that could only be described as "provisional" and got my allotted eight hours of sleep/listening to space age fabrics smack around in a 40 mph wind. Woke up, had coffee (Rwanda Gitesi from San Diego's Coffee and Tea Collective -- tea-like in body, pipe tobacco and barely-ripe currants in the cup, and yeah excuse me I am still a total coffee geek even while in hiker mode). Hiked out of camp with a dude named Jake from Montana, who told me (among other things) that his dad had once shot a mountain lion with a bow. He reported that the meat was mild, but stringy. I mused that it was cool that Hercules had moved to Montana and was having sons, because who but a demigod goes out into the woodsw with a bow and comes back with a dead lion. 

We plowed down to Scissors Crossing, a set of road crossings in the exact middle of nowhere. There was a water cache here in 2008, but sometime in the interim the people maintaining it stopped because of some hiker malfeasance. Yes, the trail is crowded. What exactly the hikers had done is unknown to me, although I remember prominent trail angel Meadow Ed was always muttering to himself that hikers were "washing their privates" in the water. The word "tea-bagging" was often used by him in this context. POD, Disco, back me up on this.

The missing cache sucks, because the next stretch of trail takes you up into the brown, brown San Felipe hills, where the trail canoodles around on a contour line for like 20 miles without ever touching water.  I searched every nook and cranny of the underpasses. Found: One young dude with a guitar, who was apparently trying out for the role of Contemplative Young Dude With Guitar. I don't know, maybe it helps him get laid. He could learn a real song first, though. Not found: Any water. Ah well, they tell you not to rely on caches anyway. I had just enough water to make it to the legendary, still stocked Third Gate Water Cache, some 17 miles into the hills. I put on my big boy pants and started hiking. 

More hikers. Hikers everywhere. Yes, this trail ius crowded, and with that crowding come the natural social ills with which the AT has had to contend for so long: Broism and poorly played string instruments. I passed two women with no clear connection to each other who were each vying for "Kooky Girl with Ukelele." (Amber, you're not kooky per se, and yours is a banjolele, so you are in the clear. Tim, yours just fits you so well. Plus you both can play.) 

I came into camp at the cache, filled up, and as I was doing so was accosted by an Average White Bro.

"So, you like that pack?' he asked. 

I glanced at my pack, a wee little frameless jobby from ULA. I do like my pack, so I told him so.

"Looks like it has a lot of miles on it," he said with raised eyebrows.

"I, uh, yes, sure. I used it prior to the trail," I answered, kinda non-plussed. 

"Yup, I can see the wear and tear. That's why I got THIS pack. I wanted one that could really hold up, y'know?" he said, holding aloft his Hyperlite Mountain Gear pack. Well, not really aloft, He was kinda straining under the load. But as aloft as he could. 

[Side note: Hyperlite is a new company making gear much like ULA or Gossamer gear or Z Packs... but with an added design gesture of machismo and about a 20% upcharge. The aesthetic implies the gear might make you into a snow ninja. Maybe it's great stuff! They are sponsoring my friend Fidgit in her trans-American trek, so that's cool. It definitely has provided a gateway for Bros to get into ultralight gear.]

So you can all guess what happened next.

"Oh yeah," I replied in an offhand voice. "Thing is, I've used ULA packs on all three of my hikes in the Triple Crown" (BOOM) "and I just love them." God, sometimes I love that bomb. 

The next day I hiked down through open grassy meadows, past eagle rock (a rock that looks like an eagle, go figure) and into the hamlet of Warner Springs, where I was met by Lily and her father Don. We camped a bit away and ate steaks and potatoes baked in the coals. Don went birding, a pursuit I seem pretty well destined to pick up, given its reliance on being in the woods and staring into the middle distance a lot. Lily brought me Sierra Nevada beer and all my spare gear -- I want to take a second out and just thank her for everything she's done and is doing to help me. The biggest thing is just understanding that I needed to do this, and that I love her. Everyone please say thank you Lily!!!

the weirdest yucca of all

The brown, brown hills

a solitary poppy along the way