June 5
The third installment of the Trail Angel Trail took me theough more desert hills, sagebrush and chapparal, and down into the Antelope Valley, a broad flat expanse of true desert one must cross via the LA aqueduct.
But before the aqueduct was the angel. This one is Hikertown, a surreal property on the wasteland's edge. It looks like the set of a Western, fake store fronts saying "saloon" or "town hall." It looks like Pioneertown. The owner has a slightly murky reputation -- mega generous and definitely fanciful, but also prone to attempting to impress young women by telling them he is a Holywood producer, or showing them his Ferrari. Whatever, he has good wellwater in a terrible dry stretch. I filled up, rinsed my socks, showered, and hitched to the nearby store.
Said store, also owned by the Hikertown guy, coughed up a couple days worth of food, a bowl of delicious pozole, and a six-pack of beer.
I was ready for the aqueduct.
I left as the sun was diving toward the hills ringing the western edge of the valley. This was a planned, premeditated night hike, not like my occasional fumbling crashing exhausted extension of an already long hiking day. The low elevation and lack of shade make this a famously good place to night hike.
And it is. The aqueduct, after briefly being open and looking like an inviting concrete river, becomes closed and functions as a 20-foot-wide sidewalk. This removes my main issue with night hiking, that being that I am clumsy in the dark. It left my attention free to wander upward toward the sky. The sunset bled from gold to purple, then finally dusked out, leaving first Mars and then Jupiter and then Vega to appear. Scorpio came out from hiding and caught Mars in its pincers; Big Dipper showed me the through-hikers favorite celestial body, the north star, which then gracefully led into the little dipper.
The third installment of the Trail Angel Trail took me theough more desert hills, sagebrush and chapparal, and down into the Antelope Valley, a broad flat expanse of true desert one must cross via the LA aqueduct.
But before the aqueduct was the angel. This one is Hikertown, a surreal property on the wasteland's edge. It looks like the set of a Western, fake store fronts saying "saloon" or "town hall." It looks like Pioneertown. The owner has a slightly murky reputation -- mega generous and definitely fanciful, but also prone to attempting to impress young women by telling them he is a Holywood producer, or showing them his Ferrari. Whatever, he has good wellwater in a terrible dry stretch. I filled up, rinsed my socks, showered, and hitched to the nearby store.
Said store, also owned by the Hikertown guy, coughed up a couple days worth of food, a bowl of delicious pozole, and a six-pack of beer.
I was ready for the aqueduct.
I left as the sun was diving toward the hills ringing the western edge of the valley. This was a planned, premeditated night hike, not like my occasional fumbling crashing exhausted extension of an already long hiking day. The low elevation and lack of shade make this a famously good place to night hike.
And it is. The aqueduct, after briefly being open and looking like an inviting concrete river, becomes closed and functions as a 20-foot-wide sidewalk. This removes my main issue with night hiking, that being that I am clumsy in the dark. It left my attention free to wander upward toward the sky. The sunset bled from gold to purple, then finally dusked out, leaving first Mars and then Jupiter and then Vega to appear. Scorpio came out from hiding and caught Mars in its pincers; Big Dipper showed me the through-hikers favorite celestial body, the north star, which then gracefully led into the little dipper.
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| How Tinseltown flushes its toilets: The LA Aqueduct |
Hours passed and so did the stars, wheeling down to the west. I have in all my hikes never experienced the stars with as much intimacy as on this one. I am not sure why, other than that my age seems to be bringing with it an increased appetite, voracious sometimes, for knowledge about nature. I have so far learned nature on these hikes experientially -- this mud is solid, that plant stings, that rock will be slippery, that snow is rotten and will not support me -- but now I care deeply about things that do not matter to my survival. I care about the things that will never care about me, and it feels like being set free.
I hiked the last few miles in to camp with a young man carrying the same Grafix three-foot acrylic bong that had been considered absolute state of the stoner art when I went to college. We talked Boy Scouting (he was very, very deeply involved), got lost, found ourselves with the aid of another hiker. She and my companion argued about whether waterless urinals were inherently misogynist; I wondered about how odd it is that human consciousness exists in the universe. Both lines of thought were ended the same way when we reached a water source: By sleep, finally, around one a.m. I had hiked 36 miles and slept in a manner appropriate to that.
I hiked the last few miles in to camp with a young man carrying the same Grafix three-foot acrylic bong that had been considered absolute state of the stoner art when I went to college. We talked Boy Scouting (he was very, very deeply involved), got lost, found ourselves with the aid of another hiker. She and my companion argued about whether waterless urinals were inherently misogynist; I wondered about how odd it is that human consciousness exists in the universe. Both lines of thought were ended the same way when we reached a water source: By sleep, finally, around one a.m. I had hiked 36 miles and slept in a manner appropriate to that.
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