PCT 2022: Idyllwild to Cabezon

Here is the 5th installation of my 2022 nobo PCT trail journal (a few weeks off the present timeline as a safety precaution).

From freezing high altitude evergreens with snow, to low, windy desert, we marched on.

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Day 20: Friday April 15. Mile 205.7 to 215.7 + 1 in Cabezon (11 mi).

We woke up before dawn and realized that we had camped right next to the Krusty Krew, and were super excited to see them again after they had started hiking while we did a second zero in Idy.

A man waved to me and said hi, using someone else’s trail name, and I told him he had the wrong person, my name is slowly dying. He responded saying, “I get you two mixed up, I’m Squire, we met near Snoqualmie last year, right before you got off trail with shin splints.” I only sort of recognized him, but he then reminded me that last year he was going by Sunshine, and I do vaguely remember meeting an older fellow by the name of Sunshine. Small world, right? He was planning on doing all of California, which he hadn’t been able to do last year because of the fires.

The trail became road for a short section before it faded back into the desert, crisscrossing paths in every direction overlapped with dry washes from the last times it had rained made for a complicated tapestry of trails that we navigated by wooden posts that we could see in the distance. Twinkle decided to catch a hitch to save his knees with three Slovanian hikers who were ubering to Walmart, and was aggressively told he had to pay 1/4 of the ride even though he was only going half the distance they were.

“My massive leg muscles don’t mean shit! Your’s are so powerful”

Project to Slowly Dying

Project and i struggled across the sandy ground with constant strong wind and even heavier gusts pushing us back. An older hiker came up to us and commented that Project’s sleeping pad was flapping like wings. Project shouted over the wind to me “My massive leg muscles don’t mean shit! Your’s are so powerful” as she struggled to keep up with me.

We watched a raven chase down a dove and kill it, feathers flying up as it grabbed the body and flew away; I’ve never seen a raven act predatorily before.

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The trail went under the road and train tracks, where there were some hiker related things left by trail angels.

Proj and i caught a hitch with a man, Angelo, who was on his way to work. Right as we were getting out of the car, he told us his story of how he was electrocuted, died, met God, spoke to Him about his only regret of not having kids, and being put back in his body and his wife had twins 9 months later.

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He dropped us at the old casino where there was a $10 trucker breakfast with 2 eggs, bacon, hashbrowns, coffee and 2 big pancakes. Twinkle was supposed to meet us at a cafe at the casino but he went to a Starbucks instead, so we feasted without him, charging our electronics at the diner. Two old cootes took it upon themselves to make uncomfortable comments to us about our appearance, so we weren’t that excited, but the waitress Pam was very nice and attentive, and let us stay there for a few hours even after we were done, giving us coffee galore.

We got a ride in the casino golf cart to the new casino, and from there walked to the fast food joints by the gas station.

We bumped into Jonah (now going by Pickle, from Lil Pickle that we were joking about last time we saw him) and Courtney, and their group at In and Out.

Twinkle went to Chipotle while Proj and I got Panda Express. At check out I told Proj, “I kinda want a Monster. Fuck me up” and she cracked up so hard. We joined Twinkle at the Chipotle and charged up some more, then got some massive ice creams nextdoor and sat outside, me journaling and them on Instagram.

About an hour before the sun set, we decided we should probably go resupply and get back on trail. We started walking down the frontage road, thumb out trying to hitch to the Dollar General on the other end of town, and eventually got one in a car that smelled intensely of weed.

We each grabbed a cart (they only had 3 in the whole store) and set to work getting together 5 days worth of food (minus some items we had bought in Idy). Twinkle kept telling Proj that she had too much and that she was buying out the whole store, and i didn’t necessarily agree with him, but i didn’t say anything. I finished first, as is always true with the three of us since those two are some of the slowest people I’ve ever met, at any activity. Especially Twinkle, who gets easily distracted and is hopeless at multitasking.

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I went outside to repackage all my stuff into daily bags, and they eventually joined me. I watched worriedly as the sun set and they were still unpackaging things. A woman, Jennifer, came up to us and asked if we were hikers and mentioned she’d given some folks a ride to trail, and we asked her if she could do the same for us. Proj rushed to throw her stuff in her bag and ended up giving her extra food to Jennifer instead of trying to get a refund from the Dollar General.

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We got dropped off back at the trail and I waited for Proj and Twinkle to get ready before we strapped on our headlamps and started walking.

I quickly got ahead of the two of them, proceeding through the slightly eerie desert, piles of clothing and trash looking like unknown animals or people crouching in the underbrush. A car slowly drove by on the road that paralleled the trail, and when it stopped in the middle of the road, I was very glad I hadn’t turned my lamp on yet, because I didn’t want to be noticed all alone out there.

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The full moon rose to light my way, my light so bright that my shadow was impressively pronounced even in the middle of the night.

At the top of a hill, I stood watching the lights coming from Coachella in the distance and tried to pick out my friends down below, having trouble until I saw some shadows approaching. I stood in the middle of the trail and said, imposingly, “None shall pass,” like the black knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and they giggled. I then headed off again, deciding to go my own pace and assuming they’d catch up once I picked a campsite.

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The full moon glinted off shattered glass in the river bed, looking for all the world like the rainbow scales of the rainbow fish in that children’s book.

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I saw a person sleeping on a queen sized mattress right to the left of the trail and hurried past because it was a little too weird. There were a surprising number of hikers camped everywhere in this section, which was weird because Guthook’s (Far Out) didn’t have any comments or markers saying this was a good place to camp.

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I saw a Long Nosed snake chilling in the middle of the trail, and watched as it very slowly slithered out of my way, unable to move quickly due to the chilly night temps.

Twinkle texted me a few miles in saying that they had stopped for the night, but I was still caffeinated from the monster I’d drunk in town, so I decided to press on and to let them catch up in the morning at the Preserve.

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The night was full of the smell of flowers, and huge blooming bushes of yellow asters, piles of pink blooming cacti and impressive valley walls reaching up above me made me regret not hiking the section during the day.

I could see a nearby town glowing beneath the full moon.

At the top of the high point for the night I turned my headlamp on because the moon sunk below the ridge as I did, following a series of snaking switchbacks all the way down to the base of a windy valley where I decided to set up camp for the night.

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The wind tugged at my tarp as I set up, placing the shelter over two yerba santa plants because it was the flattest space around.

Day 19: Thursday April 14. Mile 187.5 to 205.7 (18.3 mi).

I woke up in the middle of the night, cold AF, and realized that due to the wind, there was no dead air space in my quilt, so it wasn’t retaining any heat. The only thing keeping me warm was my down jacket. So I struggled out of my tarp and lowered the sides of the shelter as much as I could, made more difficult by the fact that we were sharing a trekking pole and that it was pretty windy. Reducing the wind chill and wind itself helped a lot.

Twinkle and I both got separate head starts on Proj, needing to warm up quickly. I caught up to him when he stopped to take a break after a particularly long stretch of trying not to slip down the solid ice on the north side of the peak.

We realized that the snow must have refrozen over the last few days during the really cold spell, otherwise there wouldn’t have been such unanimous commentary from a week ago about not needing or even wanting spikes in this section. We were fine without spikes, but we definitely would have been able to move faster if we’d had them. Proj caught up quickly, rocking her own spikes that she had decided to not send home, and flaunting how easily she could move on the hard snow.

We were getting low on water, since we had planned to camp further along the night before, so we scraped snow into our dirty bladders and strapped them to the outsides of our packs to melt in the sun.

Today’s hike was all downhill, from almost 9,000 ft to 1,000 ft, but well-graded so I didn’t feel too much strain on my knee after I double taped it the way Morgan had told me to. That being said, we were all feeling super sluggish and having a hard time making miles, stopping regularly.

For basically the entire day we had amazing views of San Jacinto, the snowy couloirs looking like ski resort runs down the mountain.

Once we were low enough altitude, the plants changed from everygreen trees to low shrubs as we approached the deserty valley floor where Cabezon lies. Everything seemed to be flowering.

We spotted what we initially thought was some sort of king snake, but turned out to be a Long Nosed Snake.

Twinkle was not so lucky to escape the downhill unscathed and he was moving so slowly and painfully that I eventually sped up past him so that I could call David with a little bit of privacy while I walked. David gave me a run down of all the shitty things that are going on in the news (way to stress me out, David).

Once I got to the bottom of the mountain, I sat in the dark to finish talking with David quietly before I made camp by a dozen other hikers a little further along the trail, close to the water spigot.

Twinkle and Proj found me eating with my tent barely holding on for dear life in the windy evening.

Day 18: Wednesday April 13. Mile 179.4 to 187.5 + 1.5 in Idyllwild + 2.5 up Devil’s Slide + 5mi hitch to Devil’s Slide trailhead (12.1 mi).

In the morning we shook down Twinkle Toes’ pack and sent home a few pounds of extra stuff. Alyssa roasted the shit out of him for some of the things he had, but couldn’t take the heat when we turned the same attention on her pack. The girls were all curious about my ultralight pack, and we took fifteen minutes before Laura had to take us to town to look at everything I was carrying. They didn’t have much to say about my pack that I didn’t already know (I had forgotten to send home the cork ball I’d found, and I still hadn’t cut the strap on my new fanny pack).

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Laura made breakfast, again refusing help, and we all devoured the eggs and veggies.

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Laura dropped us at Nomad Ventures so that Project and Emeline could get an extra layer or two, both asking for my advice on the best options.

While Twinkle ran to the post office, Project and I got muffins and coffee from a local coffee brewer and the nice barista Tanya told us that drinks were on the house since someone had donated a gift card for PCT hikers.

I got to see how awesome my hair looked in the bathroom mirror: I call it the “squished toothbrush” look. We did a little girl talk that’s hard to do while Twinkle Toes is around and then joined him outside talking to Morgan.

We stuck our thumbs out to hitch back to the Humber Park Trailhead, and to our amazement Laura drove up next to us picked us up.

It was after 12:30 when we finally started hiking up Devil’s Slide, excited to be back on trail after two full days off of it. We saw a baby rattlesnake that wanted nothing to do with us and peed at least 4 times on our way up the short entrance trail, over hydrated from town and coffee.

At the intersection with the PCT we met Leaky Faucet (he pees every 0.4 of a mile) and his mom, Boomerang and Mainard.

“It’s so weird how the trail provides”

Slowly Dying

I found a decent Buck brand knife just laying on the trail. It’s so weird how the trail provides: I’ve been wanting a knife for a long time, just for every day use, and Project was as thinking about buying a knife for the trail–and I just found one. Same thing a few days ago, Proj needed a hat and one literally was hanging on a branch. And I was wishing I had a more colorful Kula cloth, and Keeper found one on the ground (I washed it first of course).

There was some pretty crusty snow we had to walk slowly on on the north side of the mountain, but when we came back out on the south side, even at 9,000ft, there wasn’t anything.

We had stunning views of Tahquitz for a long while.

Poor Project was immediately feeling the altitude, and after two days off trail felt as though she’d lost her trail legs. Twinkle fell behind for a little while to tie his shoes, so I was hiking with Proj, trying to keep her spirits up and her legs moving, since we still had quite a few miles to hike before we fell asleep: our goal was to get down below 7,000ft so that we could be warmer while we slept.

We stopped to grab water at a little water fall that was probably frozen not so long ago, waiting on Twinkle to catch up. Twinkle got a bloody nose, from the altitude, or from picking his nose too much, we may never know (my vote is on the latter). The temperature was dropping rapidly and having to filter 5L of water for the coming 20 mile carry was brutal on our poor fingers.

Even with most of my layers on, I had to start walking before they did so that I could stay warm. The golden hour leading up to sunset was magnificent, and I basked in the last bit of warmth.

We got off trail for a little bit in the dark, since there was a social trail that had been made probably when there was still snow on the ground. Proj stopped to see a man about a horse, and Twinkle and I both stopped further up the hill to do the same and to let her catch up.

The trail went back to the north side of the mountain at almost 9k feet and I made the call that we should just suffer the cold and camp, instead of trying to slide our way down ice in the dark.

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We set up our tents together, forming what we decided to call the HexaDu. We hastily layered up and started dinner, already freezing.

“An unending litany of fart sounds accompanied our dinner and sleeping tonight, the gassy aroma impressive even late into the night”

Slowly Dying

An unending litany of fart sounds accompanied our dinner and sleeping tonight, the gassy aroma impressive even late into the night. We decided to blame all the veggies that we’d eaten at Laura’s that morning.

What’s Next?

Check back in in a few days for the next section’s trail journal entries!