Dinner was freeze-dried chili mac from Mountain House; within minutes a bag of brown, dusty macaroni morphed into a hearty meal. We remarked on its excellence while exploring Kitchen Creek in the twilight.
I listened for the mating call of the Arroyo toad, an endangered species native to the seasonal creeks of Southern California. We’d been told that this was the height of the spring mating season. The Forest Service certainly took this seriously, having closed Boulder Oaks Campground, five miles to the south and posted “Do Not Disturb” warning signs near Kitchen Creek. But if there was mating going on at Kitchen Creek it was not of a vociferous nature; we heard nothing but satisfied after-silence. The twilight pinks and oranges reflected off the rocky hills and the creek bubbled peacefully. We retired to the tent and, taking a cue from the toads, slipped quickly and quietly into sleep.
“I saw a skunk last night. He looked at me through the tent. I was sooo scared I couldn’t even breathe. He was right there!” Angela was animated in telling her story of a late-night visitor.
“What? I don’t think there are skunks around here. It must have been a raccoon. Did it have eye patches?”
“I don’t think so, but it had a stripe on its nose. It sure looked like a skunk.”
“Chigger, you should have woken me up. I would have protected you from that vicious . . . raccoon.” Chigger was an affectionate nickname I had for Angela. I often display affection in odd ways.
“It wasn’t a raccoon!” she insisted. “And if I had tried to wake you up, the skunk would have sprayed us.”
“Couldn’t be much worse than we already smell.”
“Speak for yourself.”
As we walked back up Kitchen Creek Canyon Road to the trail, we continued to debate the identity of our curious friend. Schaffer’s guidebook didn’t mention skunks in the area, and I was about to press the point when we spotted a van coming toward us. It was an ancient, white VW clunker, barreling down the hill. As it passed, the driver and passenger gave us wide grins and enthusiastic waves.
“I bet they just dropped off some illegal cargo,” I remarked.
Or perhaps they had just successfully passed a Border Patrol checkpoint. Under Operation Gatekeeper, instituted in 1994, the U.S. government has adopted a policy of considering certain roads near the border as being the border. Kitchen Creek Canyon Road was one of them.
We kept a keen lookout for border-crossers that morning, but all we saw was chaparral. Before hiking the PCT, I’d never heard of chaparral, and at first I thought the name referred to one particular plant. Chaparral, however, is the name for a plant community that is prevalent in the high desert and foothills (3,000 to 5,500 feet) of Southern California. Chaparral consists of a collection of extremely hearty and drought resistant shrubs and small trees—manzanita, sage, ribbonwood, mountain mahogany, chamise, sumac, mountain lilac, and poison oak, to name a few. These plants share a number of characteristics—long roots to search the rocky subsoil for water, stiff evergreen leaves to limit water loss, and sharp, calf- to waist-high branches to scrape the bejeezus out of hikers’ legs.
As we hiked through a sea of skin-scarring shrubbery, our views were occasionally enlivened by spiny yucca plants and red-stained gneiss, sprinkled with white forget-me-nots. In the early afternoon, the topography began to change as we ascended into the Laguna Mountains, and scattered Jeffrey pine trees offered us a hint of the sublimely alpine. Traipsing toward Mount Laguna, the first re-supply stop on the northbound PCT, we amused ourselves by counting the critters around us. Lizards of all shapes, sizes, and colors dominated the data collection. Most of them scurried frenetically about the trail—all but the horned lizards, often called horny toads. Yellow-brown in color, round in shape, and with a regal crowns of horns, many of these horny toads sat stoically in the middle of the trail, color and texture allowing them to blend in almost seamlessly.
By midafternoon we’d counted fifty lizards, thirty-three butterflies, a smattering of bunnies, a couple of black beetles, and one large ebony snake. We didn’t count the bees, though; there were just too many of them. We were switchbacking up chaparral-infested foothills when they started swarming and buzzing around us. I thought immediately of Bob’s report of the recent arrival of killer bees.
“It’s just a matter of time,” he’d said, “before they nest someplace on the trail, and just a matter of time before a hiker disturbs ’em and gets the royal sting treatment.”
Killer bees, also known as “Africanized Honey Bees” or “Africanized bees,” are descendants of African bees imported in the mid-1950s by Brazilian scientists attempting to breed honeybees better adapted to the South American tropics. As if dutifully following a bad Hollywood horror script, some of the bees escaped and began breeding with local Brazilian bees. Killer bees were born from this fateful match and rapidly multiplied, extending their range throughout South and Central America at a rate of two hundred miles a year.
Their amazing proliferation is attributed to two behavioral adaptations. First, killer bees are much less discriminating in their choice of nests than native bees, willing to utilize just about anything they might come across—hollow trees, walls, porches, sheds, attics, utility boxes, garbage containers, abandoned vehicles, and perhaps even PCT trail registers. Second, they aren’t shy about engaging in group-sex rituals (also known as “swarming”) on a more regular basis than their comparatively chaste cousins.
In the early 1990s, the Africanized bees began invading North America. The first swarm was found in October of 1990 in Hidalgo, Texas. Subsequently, colonies were found in Arizona and New Mexico in 1993 and finally in California in 1994. Now, more than eight thousand square miles of Imperial, Riverside, and San Diego Counties are colonized with killer bees. In July of 1993, eighty-two-year-old Lino Lopez attempted to remove a killer bee hive from an abandoned building on his ranch in Harlingen, Texas. He was stung more than forty times and became the first U.S. death attributed to the ill-tempered bees from Africa. More deaths have followed, and I hoped that Angela and I wouldn’t become the first thru-hikers to join the list.
Amidst the swarming and occasional collisions, I noticed that these bees didn’t look much like honeybees; they were darker in color and larger. Later I learned that this discrepancy was a good thing, since killer bees closely resemble the friendly and harmless European honeybee. They may be just a smidgen smaller than your average backyard flower friend, but only an expert can tell the difference.
I pushed the brim of my hat down and walked faster up the switchbacks. Bees bounced off me freely as I motored forward. Every so often I looked back at Angela to be sure she wasn’t being engulfed by a swarm and carried off; that sort of disappearance would be hard to explain to her family. I didn’t know much about Angela’s parents, but it seemed clear that they thought our hike was foolhardy. Losing their daughter to a bee swarm certainly wouldn’t help sway this opinion.
We hiked through bees for several miles without suffering a single sting or kidnapping. One good thing about all those bees—their fury of movement helped distract me from the pain of the long climb up to Mount Laguna.
Like Campo and many other towns near the PCT, Mount Laguna is a small settlement. For the most part, when it comes to towns along a Pacific Crest hike, small is better. In a petite town, hikers tend to experience less culture shock, and re-supply is more convenient because the facilities, and really the whole town, are centralized in a small area. Plus, in small towns there are fewer people to offend with hiker-stench.
The Mount Laguna residents didn’t complain about our hygiene. With all the hikers passing through at this time of year, they were probably accustomed to our unique form of air pollution. And the locals certainly didn’t threaten to toss us out of town on account of our unkempt appearance, something that Chigger had fretted about all afternoon. Our first town stop was brief. We weren’t picking up a box in Mount Laguna, and no matter how we tried to rationalize it, we didn’t feel we’d earned the luxury of a ho
tel stay. We purchased sodas and chips from the general store and sat outside recovering from the morning climb.
During our first day of hiking we’d decided that we absolutely had to lighten our packs, and in a more drastic way than had Ricky Rose. The grueling climb up into the Lagunas had accentuated this urge to purge, as did the lineup of lightweight packs we saw propped against the steps of Mount Laguna’s general store—packs that were dwarfed by our bulging behemoths. If a backpack skirmish were to break out, my Mountainsmith and Angela’s Gregory would have a tremendous advantage in size and weight. As it turns out, though, backpacks are generally docile creatures and would rather pick their fights with those who carry them than with each other.
Several of the lightweight packs scattered about were not much bigger than what the average junior high student carries to school. I recognized their brand as GoLite, an ultralight gear company inspired by Ray Jardine. Ray Jardine is the celebrity in the long-distance hiking world; his name and ultralight (and corn pasta) advice is well known throughout the thru-hiking community. Like most of our Pacific Crest brethren, we’d dutifully read Jardine’s books—The PCT Hiker’s Handbook and Beyond Backpacking: Ray Jardine’s Guide to Lightweight Hiking. But while we were well versed in the “Ray Way” of hiking, we hadn’t exactly been following all of his recommendations. We’d figured that we were too green to risk packing ultralight. Now, however, we were ready to give semilight a shot.
I bought two boxes at the Mount Laguna post office and we filled them with unneeded luxuries. Into one box went an extra titanium pot, a collapsible water jug, two pairs of hiking socks, and a large handful of Angela’s underwear. We sent this box home to Philadelphia, hoping that my mother would not be curious enough to open it. Into another box we put stuff to send ahead to Idyllwild, 140 miles north—my wilderness medicine field guide, Angela’s Palm Pilot, our Counter Assault “grizzly tough” pepper spray (carried primarily for drug-trafficker deterrence), a pair of dirty khaki shorts, and a number of items from my very complete (and very heavy) first-aid kit. As I heaved my pack, which I’d started sarcastically calling “Big Red,” back on, its burden didn’t seem at all diminished. Perhaps Angela’s felt better?
“This pack is still too heavy,” she sighed.
A day and twenty miles of hiking later, our packs remained obese and our supposedly semilight operation was ready for a night in town. Bullied and nearly beaten by winds whipping across a parched meadow, we hiked off-trail for a mile before reaching the rusty barbed-wire gate that led to Sunrise Highway. Our plan was to hitch a ride into the resort town of Julian, seven miles up the highway. Once famous for its gold mines, Julian is now known for its pie shops and apple cider. A piece of boysenberry pie, piled high with vanilla ice cream, would be a delicious change of pace. We hiked for several miles along the highway before a Chevy pickup with a built-on camper came to our rescue. Angela jumped in the back while I sat in the front with the driver and admired a collection of mementos neatly arranged his dashboard—quartz crystals, eagle and hawk feathers, and a sequoia cone. Our driver’s name was Tim, a young guy with an innocent and earnest face. He lived in Julian, where he was house-sitting with his girlfriend and commuting to San Diego for school. At the moment, however, he was returning from a week of meditation and fasting in the Anza-Borrego desert. I was intrigued. Why had he chosen the desert for his fast?
“The fast is my way of dealing with fear. The desert is a tough place. I have great fear of the desert. That’s why I went there.”
My initial reaction was, “Wow, this guy’s a little loopy.” But after a moment of consideration, it made sense. I remembered my own desert “vision quest” ten years previous and how intimidated I’d been, and then asked myself: Why was I hiking through the desert again? Why was I walking to Canada? Facing my fears certainly played a role—facing fears of the unknown, of commitment, of finding my limits and pushing past them.
As Tim rolled the camper into Julian, Angela was busy in the back, nosing through a hippyish milieu—tapestry curtains, incense, and literature, lots of Buddhist literature. Angela filled me in on a few of the selections once we got to town. There was the classic Living Buddha, Living Christ, the renowned Tibetan Book of the Dead, and the provocative What is Zen? None of these, however, sounded as practically useful as Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness: The Joyous Cosmology by Alan Watts, a work reviewed by Contemporary Psychology as “The classic book on the hallucinogenic drugs LSD, mescaline and psilocyine. Alan Watts describes with startling clarity and poetic beauty his drug-induced experiences.” Tim seemed to have been supplementing his desert fast with Buddha and conscious-altering substances. Given our experience in the desert so far, I guess I couldn’t really blame him.
We had an excellent evening in Julian, starting with a shower at the Julian Lodge and continuing with a six-pack of Sierra Nevada. Actually, we didn’t make it through the six-pack; it only took two beers, combined with three and a half days of constant sun exposure and sixty-two miles of hiking, to put us into TV-entranced comas. Eventually, we got around to some grocery shopping and dinner at the Boar’s Head Salon, a cowboy-friendly joint in an otherwise touristy town. A dinner that didn’t include freeze-dried food was a big relief to my stomach.
In these first few days of hiking, we discovered that freeze-dried meals, while surprisingly tasty, do funny things to the GI tract. A couple of hours after a meal, we’d erupt into such a gaseous concerto. My booming bass and Angela’s tender soprano must have delighted our wilderness audience of lizards and the like. Before our trip, I thought Angela was incapable of a fart. On the trail, I was relieved to discover that she was capable of quite melodious, if not pleasantly aromatic, flatulence. It was starting to look like our trip might turn into the Long Summer’s Fart. Thankfully, though, we were fart-free that evening, which allowed us to explore Julian without offending the locals.
The next evening, we began our most challenging stretch of trail thus far, a 23.8-mile waterless trek through the San Felipe Hills to Barrel Springs Campground. For the first time we were in true desert, the Anza-Borrego. We began in high spirits, refreshed by our day off, and made good progress in the twilight up Granite Mountain. The only impediment to our buoyant mood was our water supply. We’d been unexpectedly unable to supplement it at a “water cache” at Scissors Crossing, the intersection of Highways S2 and 78, at the base of the San Felipe Hills. Trail angels and PCT-friendly locals maintain a number of water caches along dry sections of the trail. Cache locations are advertised on the Internet and propagated by word of mouth. We had no difficulty finding the Scissors Crossing cache, the first on the northbound PCT, but were dismayed when we saw that it was completely dry. More than forty plastic one-gallon jugs lay in the sand, bone dry, pointlessly secured by a rubber-coated serpentine chain and lock.
It is in part because of experiences like ours that water caches are controversial in the long-distance hiking community. Critics note that hikers are more likely to engage in irresponsible water-carrying practices if they know of caches along the trail. If these hikers carry less water than recommended (two gallons per day) over a waterless stretch and then find an empty cache, the result could be quite thirsty indeed. Long-distance hiking “purists” (a term Angela explains at length later) also charge that water caches detract from the natural challenge of the trail and make it more accessible to hikers who perhaps aren’t properly equipped, mentally or physically, for the task. Of course, most hikers are overjoyed at the sight of a water cache, and the presence of one at a location like Scissors Crossing can save them either a trip into town to re-supply or from carrying two days’ worth of water. We arrived from town, but had done so without a full store of water, counting (irresponsibly) on the presence of a cache.
But for the time being we had enough water to maintain hydration, so I focused my attention on the changing habitat. Here in the “true” desert, chaparral gave way to cacti, yucca plants, and agave—asparagus-shaped plants ri
sing four to eight feet in height. We switchbacked past a forest of ocotillo shrubs, plants that the guidebook described as a “bundle of giant, green pipe cleaners.” Octillo shrubs spend most of their lives covered with spiny and lifeless branches, but perhaps half a dozen times a year, always two to three days after a rainstorm, they “sprout vibrant green clusters of delicate leaves along their entire length.” The ocotillo is a perfect example of the unique adaptation seen in the desert environment. With less than two weeks of rain a year, and summer temperatures of up to 120 degrees, it is incredible that much of anything can live out there, but on that evening the San Felipe Hills were bursting with highly specialized life.
After three miles of energetic hiking we found a cozy and scenic campsite on a dry creek bed, surrounded on three sides by granite boulders. With our tent snuggled in between the boulders, it was like being in a sauna—the rocks, after absorbing the sun’s heat all day, now radiated it. We hung our sweaty clothes on them and sat down to admire the view west across San Felipe Valley to the lush Volcan Mountains. From our boulder-protected perch, the Volcans looked tantalizingly wet and green. An extension of the Laguna Mountains, the Volcans act as a barrier to cool and moist air moving east from the Pacific Ocean. Coastal air settles and precipitates on the mountains, spawning a verdant tapestry. On the eastern side of the mountains only hot, dry air remains, and in this air the San Felipes bake day after day. Unfortunately for hikers, the trail does not pass through the Volcans. Back in the PCT’s planning stages, the Forest Service wasn’t able to convince private landowners to allow the trail to be routed through the Volcans and instead had to plan this waterless stretch through the Anza-Borrego.
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