Journal Entries

Mojave River Dam and Spillway

Walking towards the sunset and Mojave River Dam.

Morgan (aka Johnny) on the rainbow bridge after Deep Creek. She decided she didn't like Johnny as a trail name later on.

Deep Creek Hot Springs!

May 16th- Day 25- 21.3 miles from Holcomb Creek crossing at mile 292.4 to North Fork of Mojave River at mile 313.7

As I'm opening up my tent to get up in the morning, shivering with the cold, Frederick passes by with a towel around his waist, headed to the creek. "Shower time!" he announces, and then there's a splashing noise somewhere out of view.

I stare in shivering disbelief at Galy, who is taking his rainfly off his tent to pack up. "Did he really just get into the creek?" I ask.

Galy says yes.

I shake my head. "Just thinking about it makes me cold."

"Me too."

I pack up, waiting until the last minute to take off my puffy. Galy makes coffee and offers it around, so I get my pot and have some. It's hot and black, and sits warm and hearty in the pit of my stomach and the back of my throat.

I leave first, lengthening my trekking poles to cross the creek along a high and precarious log. I help Twinkle Toes across, then race up the trail, trying to bring the feeling back to my toes and fingers as they sit numbly in my shoes and around my trekking poles. It's nowhere near as cold as the day before, but it is still chilly.

I suddenly have a sudden desire to see Whizkid again, even though I've only seen her a few times. I miss her random trivia and her little jingle that she sings whenever she sees me, "Ameelia!! Fuck yeah!"

I write a silly little jingle for Twinkle Toes as I walk, to the tune of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, and I sing it to her when I pass her taking a snack break:

Twinkle, twinkle little toes, my oh my, what are those. I haven't seen mine for weeks, hidden under dusty sheets. Twinkle, twinkle, twinkle toes, My what pretty feet are those!

It's a silly song but it makes Twinkle happy when I recite it to her. Not long after seeing Twinkle Toes, Frederick steamrolls up the trail with his long legs and giant magical pack, David hot on his heels. Galy and Spider Bite are next, not nearly as fast but still faster than I want to be going right now.

I come up to Fred, Galy and Spider Bite by the side of the trail, where they've found service. I tell Frederick that his trail name should be Steamroller. The international hikers seem much less impressed by the trail name thing; apparently Fred already has 3 trail names, and David has accepted This Way as his trail name even though he doesn't use it. I play "Steamroller" by James Taylor as I walk away. Still not sure if Fred is impressed, but I feel like it was one of my better exits. They all steamroll past me again less than a minute later. Maybe it should be their group name.

The trail winds along the side of the Mojave River canyon, the side of the hill across dotted with big green bushes. I pass the 300 mile mark(s). There are a bunch of benches by the side of the trail, and I pass Spider Bite sitting on one of them, her bright red backpack perched beside her. It would be unfortunate if the backpack fell off the bench and down the cliff below...

The trail crosses a creek that flows down into Deep Creek. It's cool and sandy under cottonwood trees, and I almost want to stop but there are at least 10 other hikers here, and I know none of them, not even their faces. It's disorientating and I turn around in place a few times searching for someone I know. I hop over the clear, clean, sandy creek, thinking about how nice a swim here would be. But, the hot springs are only a couple of miles away.

I stop to watch two vultures circling on an updraft. Spider Bite passes me just before the turn off to the Deep Creek Hot Springs. A pool has been built with boulders and concrete to catch the hot water flowing right out of the sandy creek-bank. I set down my pack and pull off my shoes, and walk down to the pool which is built into the creek. I hiss and scream quietly as I put my legs into the water, the heat burning the chafe on the inside of my legs. Once it stops burning my skin it feels good, and I switch several times between the hot springs and the chilly river water.

Twinkle Toes comes, and then Johnny. "Picnic!" she says when she sees me. I'm not sure about this name, but it certainly seems to be sticking a bit. Several people from the picnic table yesterday come up, saying "Picnic Table!" very enthusiastically, and I have to explain to everyone else why. "Because you have to appreciate the simple luxuries," I say, although I don't really remember the exact conversation chain that led to the name being suggested. I even introduce it as my maybe-name to a couple of people.

I'm hungry so I get out to eat lunch, tortillas with tuna and cheese and random things. I hear a kerfuffle somewhere behind a rock, and Spider Bite says "Oh! Someone please pull them apart!"

Fred and Galy spring up and sprint down the beach a hundred yards to where the commotion is, out of view. I stand up to look and there're two guys arguing, a guy with long blond dreadlocks and a guy in a baseball cap who Fred is in front of, gesturing at his face where it's bleeding and bruised a bit on his cheek. I don't think either of them look like thruhikers.

Twinkle wants to camp here tonight, but with the fight and all of the people and the several hours of light left, I want to head on. I stay for an hour or two more, talking to people in the pool. I'm surprised to find I have my first blister, on a spot that's been tender for a few days in the side of my heel. I hadn't thought to look at it because I thought I had just bruised it on a rock. I drain it and cut all of the skin away, since I've heard leaving it on can make it worse with the dead skin rubbing against the new skin; Chris the doctor uses this method and Colleen swears by it, so I trust it. The blister is not too deep.

The guy with the cap who was in the fight comes over, and it turns out he is a thruhiker, which is super weird. His name is L.S., and the guy he hit was his friend, who came to visit him along with L.S.'s girlfriend. His friend "made a move on her" and L.S. went for him. I kind of understand, but then I don't... I definitely don't want to hang around this guy too much even though he seems nice enough.

I head out with Johnny, finding the trail again amidst the maze of other trails. A nude man is being pulled around the side of the hill by a husky, far off, which is an amusing sight.

There's graffiti everywhere on the rocks with all of the day-hikers visiting the hot springs. The trail crosses above the creek on a rainbow bridge, and then follows the curves of the canyon high above. My plan is to get to the picnic area that is 20 miles from the hot springs tomorrow afternoon, where you can order pizza delivery, or at the very least have a bathroom and picnic tables and running water. Picnic might be sticking... Then it's 15 miles from there to the McDonald's at Cajon Pass. I've only ever gotten milkshakes there, and the fries smell super gross from what I remember, but it's food so I'm excited. There's also a taco truck in "town," I hear.

Johnny and I turn a corner to a view of the valley ahead, far off, the sun setting pink through a bar of clouds. Mist rolls off of the mountains on the left, and I can see a marching line of miniature power lines on the horizon. It's very pretty, and the hiking feels wonderful, the temperature perfect.

I convert Johnny to trying a pee rag, and the trail switchbacks off the side of the mountain and past a vast concrete slope, and across the base of a gravel dam the size of a mountain. Both testaments to human vastness, surely, even if they serve no apparent purpose. We walk by a field of green tumbleweed, and I tell Johnny that it's edible, so we both put some of it in our mouths and chew. It's pleasantly hairy and crunches between our teeth. We think about making tumbleweed salad, with vinaigrette and big fresh heirloom tomatoes. Johnny wonders whether you could get enough Vitamin C from tumbleweed to prevent scurvy. I tell her the daily nutritional value of tumbleweed is probably not online.

We cross the creek again, passing a bunch of people setting up camp and passing on their offers to join them. A bunch of people are camped on a big wide sandbar in the middle of the creek, an Israeli couple and a German couple, and we decide to camp with them. Karmel and Ram, and Julian and Anika. We take our shoes off to cross, and set up our cowboy camps. I make a ramen bomb for dinner.

We tell our neighbors about the fight at the hot springs, and they tell us Sarge at the Big Bear Hostel had to call the police to get L.S. off the property. Apparently he was super drunk, which is not allowed at the hostel, and when he was asked to leave he started shouting and being belligerent. He was chased off the grounds by the police. He was also apparently littering at the hot springs. He's also hiked the AT, and everyone on our little island is just as surprised as I was to hear he's a thruhiker, since everyone on trail is as a rule really nice and respectful.

Anyway, trail gossip, as it is. Not much to gossip about usually.

We decide to call our island New Honolulu, and when two hikers come by in the dark, we invite them too. It's Phil and Austin, who were both at the hot springs though I didn't recognize them without their hiking clothes on. A train blares in the distance and I tell Phil and Austin that it's the Ghost Train coming to get them.

I scrape my pot clean in the light of my headlamp, and send my nightly Spot signal out. We don't decide on the mayor of New Honolulu before everyone falls asleep. The river gurgles as I write my blog post and the stars peek out from behind the cottonwood trees.

The clouds.

May 15th- Day 24- 17.3 miles from Van Dusen Road at mile 275.1 to Holcomb Creek crossing at mile 292.4

I wake up and I don't want to get up because I know it's absolutely freezzing outside of my sleeping bag. Finally I do, and pack up as best as I can. All of the guys from last night are smokers, and they roll up cigarettes and I can smell the smoke every now and then.

I get going, the hair on my legs raised against the cold in the weak morning light. The sun does a half-hearted job at peeking through the pine trees. My right thumb is the coldest part of my body, where I held my tent poles as I folded them up.

As the morning wears on, I can't get fully warm. The air is cold but on the verge of warmth; I try to stand in the sun but it doesn't help, and I don't feel like getting warm layers on. I leapfrog with a guy named Rick, who several guys were trying to name Dots since he carries out a ziploc of them.

I follow the trail around a ridge where the trees are sparse, and see an enormous bank of clouds rolling on the not-distant-enough mountains. It looks like they're headed away, but I'm still nervous as I don't want to deal with nasty weather. It's already cold enough in the sun.

I come up on one of the San Bernardino National Forest campsites, which has a composting toilet and picnic tables, and a trough and corral for horses. I sit at the picnic table with the guys from last night; there are so many that I can't distinguish all of them. There is Linus, and Spiker, and Johnny-On-The-Spot, or just Johnny.

I express my love for picnic tables, and combined with my disappointment about not having a picnic table last night, Linus decides to call me Picnic Table. He jokes that I'm hiking from picnic table to picnic table. I don't exactly say no.

After a lunch of salmon in a tortilla and whatever I had in my food bag, and several rounds of hikers packing up and moving on, I drag myself away from my beloved picnic table. I walk down the trail, shivering and my teeth chattering, not able to be warm. I finally stop and get my rain jacket and warm hat out and it's much better. Sometimes laziness doesn't pay off. I filter some water in Holcomb Creek where there are muskrat dams creating terraced pools of still, clear water ringed by bush willow. A younger Australian guy named Olly is there. I assume it's short for Oliver, in typical shorten-everything Australian style.

I hike on. My knee thing is bothering me still, but it's less pronounced than before. I know hiking on simple injuries can eventually end a hike if you don't take them seriously enough, but it doesn't seem that bad, something that will go away eventually. It seems like the muscles, not the actual knee, but I might be wrong. I can soak it in Deep Creek Hot Springs tomorrow.

The trail follows along Holcomb Creek at a distance, among small, dithering hills. Eventually it slips back into the creek's little canyon and dips down and across. There's a road here covered in big rocks that seems very familiar, maybe from a vlog? I run across Twinkle Toes camping by the creek half a mile down, and after looking at my maps decide to stop so I can have some company. I set up my tent and cook some ramen, the second proper one I've had in my life, and the first of recent memory. Johnny joins us from her campsite further up and we start a campfire. We sit around and talk. Twinkle Toes is a lot funnier than I expected her to be, doing impressions in a Russian accent at one point.

A hiker named Frederick from Denmark comes up and we invite him to join us at the fire while he waits for his friends to come. Galy the Israeli, David (aka This Way who stayed at the Nobody's the night after I did) and Spider Bite all come up and we all hang out and cook food. Frederick has a huge pack and has brought a coffee mill, and he makes coffee. They pass around the huge bag of Taco Bell hot sauce they got in Big Bear. I tend the fire after Johnny and Twinkle leave, and we stay up until hiker midnight. David plays music and we sing. Galy gives me advice about how to enjoy my time in camp more (basically I should probably stop being lazy and just sitting around freezing in my short-shorts). They all hope Hot Sauce and Helen will come into camp, but they must have stopped a bit earlier.

I smell like campfire and I stumble back to my tent in the dark to find a light. I help David put out the fire, head back to my tent, and fall asleep, exhausted, to the white noise of the creek.

May 14th- Day 23- 9 miles from I-18 at mile 266.1 to Van Dusen Road at mile 275.1

I wake up at 7 (late) after staying awake late last night, from a dream that I met Carrot Quinn and someone took a bad picture of us together. My phone is buzzing- it's my mom, so I talk to her half-asleep at first. We FaceTime for a good 45 minutes with the rest of my family, too, before I need to get out of bed to go to the bathroom. I would talk to my family for hours if I could. I realize afterwards that it's Mother's Day so I send a text to my mom.

I finish repackaging my food. Macadamia nuts obviously belong in the same ziploc with dried apricots and spicy peas. I think I have way too much food but I don't want to get rid of any of it! I spent so much money on it; I have no idea how much I've spent so far total, but food is so expensive. My pack is going to be so heavy and full.

I head downstairs and back up several times, talking with Rachel and Donny and watching the dogs play. A hiker calls from the hostel and Rachel goes to pick him up. It's David, aka This Way (but everyone calls him Crocs because he hiked in them for several days to let his blisters heal from ill-fitting shoes). He's from South Korea and carries a shell on his blue Osprey pack, and is super nice. Apparently he got the illness a few days back that's been affecting all of the international hikers. I guess there must be a bacteria strain or virus here that isn't everywhere else? I haven't heard of any Americans getting sick with it. Or maybe it's from Hillbilly's place back at Cabazon; I've heard crazy stories about Hillbilly and his house. Apparently he offers everyone moonshine and really strong weed when they get there, and it's kind of unsanitary. He has a room full of M&Ms memorabilia and lots of guns.

David takes a shower as I pack up and start bringing my things down. Rachel and Donny are driving him to the community church since it's Sunday, and last minute I decide to go with them so I can get a ride back to the trail. I throw my stuff in either my pack or my plastic grocery bag, fill my water bottles, and head out the door. Just before leaving I put the card I made for them on the kitchen table.

I say goodbye to David as we drop him off, and then they drive me back to the trail. We take pictures, and say goodbye, my eyes getting a bit watery. They're awesome people and I'm really bad with goodbyes... I sit around the trailhead for an hour or two, updating my blog with the ten days worth of posts that I have backlogged, and get maybe 2 of them up. There is trash everywhere from trail magic that's been left at the trailhead or from day hikers/thruhiker snack breaks, so I use my empty plastic grocery bag and pick it all up. There's a Triple-Crowner parked at the trailhead, Stone, who takes the trash. We talk for a long time about trail things.

A car pulls up and drops off a hiker who looks very familiar, who waves and comes over to say hi. I'm always nervous when that happens because it might be someone who I really should know the name of, but have forgotten. But no, it's a hiker named Twinkle Toes who I've only met briefly in passing, and was just happy to see a familiar face after taking 4 days off-trail in LA.

I dump half of my water since I didn't have time at the house to look where the next water source is and just filled them all up. My pack weight feels immediately better. Then off I hike, with Twinkle Toes for a bit before I stop to pee and fall behind. I think I must be getting my hiker legs, because I'm going fast. I stop to inhale a whole bag of popped rice chips in one sitting.

My knee muscles start acting up again, and as I walk I try to figure out what is happening with it. Maybe it's the downhill that triggered it? I decide to stop at a campground 8 ish miles in that my paper maps say have a picnic table, which I'm super excited for, but when I get there there are no picnic tables to be seen. The only person I know here is Twinkle Toes. As I cook my dinner, I listen to an AT veteran named Sketch. He says that I shouldn't call the veggie meatballs with spaghetti I'm making for dinner meatballs; apparently he got an associates in the culinary arts and it's bad form to call veggie meatballs, meatballs. I ask him what I should call them instead and he doesn't answer (I will continue calling my vegetarian meatballs whatever I want). Thank you Dad for making the meatballs for me, because they were delicious!

It's really cold out even though it's like only 6, so after talking with Twinkle Toes for a bit I crawl into my tent and talk to my mom for a while via text and otherwise kill time until I go to bed.