A Long Beginning

Day 1: Southern Terminus to Lake Morena Campground, 20 miles

What do you call a twenty- mile trek across the desert?

A good start.

Earth Day! We left Scout and Frodo's house at six on the dot in a caravan of two vans and a pickup, all loaded to the gills with excited hikers. An hour's drive brought us to Campo, the air still cool and fresh. Cuddles, a repeat offender from 2008, treated us to a cello serenade at the monument. Supposedly he plans to bounce the instrument to various points up the trail; he hikes a good bit more confidently (faster) than soft newbies like me, so I might not hear him play again, but on the first day, particularly, live music felt special and lucky. We all shuffled around for a few minutes, signing the register and taking photos, before sidling between the orange cones to touch the Mexican border wall, setting trekking poles to stun, and marching hopefully northward.

The desert here is remarkably lush with green shrubby plants and wildlife--not at all the barren wasteland you might imagine. One of the omnipresent birds, a pretty black and orange thing, sang such a lovely, intricate, articulate story that I had to stop and listen. I'll take a good omen wherever I can. The rolling terrain opened out regularly to reveal the landscape ahead and behind, veiled in haze according to the distance, and the trail tread we hiked was relatively gentle, leading over and around granite boulder-strewn hills. The rocks reminded me of tors, if less imposing thanks to the crowding vegetation. Pretty sweet way to start.

But a desert is designated a desert by the absence of rainfall; no matter how pretty, the first twenty miles of the PCT (except for a creek around mile 4) are dry this year. Meaning, we needed to make it to Lake Morena on that first day. Paul and I left Campo with a generous allotment of water, and I knew excitement and first- day freshness would help, but as the sun rose and the temperature climbed with it, damn if that twenty miles didn't turn into a very long hike. It was hot. The hills, however pleasing to the eye, foster mostly short bushes, which don't offer a lot of shade. Thank god for long sleeves, trousers, and wide-brimmed hats. And desert wind. There were some nice points. We met a few other hikers--even two donkeys!--leapfrogging each others' shade breaks. It was still hot. By four o'clock I felt DONE. Even Paul, who moseyed patiently in my wake, admitted to feeling pretty footsore by mile eighteen. We plugged along wearily--because that's how it goes when you MUST reach the next water source--and stumbled into Morena campground a little after six, I think.

A few hikers were already there--some who'd started just before us, others who had hiked in the day previously and decided to take a zero to recover (not a bad idea). Paul and I rewarded our toils with a trip to the shower block, where I washed off the most grime that I have ever accumulated and discovered a weird rash on the backs of my calves. I don't think it can be poison oak, since it's neither blistered nor itchy, and coincided interestingly with the dirt, but it's angry-looking enough that I treated it with sympathy and rinsed out all my socks and trousers. Paul cooked his meal and ambled off to another campsite to be sociable, but I wasn't feeling it. Without further ado, I pitched my tent, stirred up one of my no-cook bean "salads," brushed my teeth, and went to bed. I think it was eight-thirty.

At one in the morning I woke with an intolerable headache, raging thirst, and throbbing feet. Rummaging for my little Rosie-the-Riveter tin of ibuprofen, I honestly had to laugh at myself. What a lark I signed myself up for! DAY ONE.