San Gorgonios to Big Bear

Day 16: Ziggy and the Bear's to Mission Creek mile 228, 18 miles, plus 1 mile detour to fish farm

Day 17: Mission Creek to Coon Creek Cabin, 18 miles

Day 18: Coon Creek to Highway 18, 20 miles

Day 19: Zero in Big Bear

For breakfast Ziggy served up a smorgasbord of coffee, tea, juice, fresh fruit, and a dozen varieties of cereal, and we two dozen hikers (at least) sat around the back porch munching obediently, like so many good kids getting ready for school. The sky hadn't cleared overnight, but the storm that had pursued me for two days now swirled ahead vigorously enough that I didn't expect to catch up to it--and I had no interest in lingering to visit the buffet at the local casino--so after a second cup of coffee I let myself out the gate of the tall white fence around Whitewater House.

The trail climbs from the desert floor into the bald hills of the San Gorgonios, circling behind the Mesa Wind Farm before ascending straight up the side of one canyon to cross a dozen others. The storm hadn't gone away by any means, making for some dramatic crossings of the plateaus; I held on tight to my hat, and at one point even donned my rain coat. There's a windfarm out there for a reason. Before midday I reached Whitewater Creek, a wide rocky river canyon that looks a little like a glacial runoff plain, and boasts the most water the PCT class of 2013 has seen yet--about six inches deep, and you can step across it in two or three long strides. Ha ha ha. Still, good water is food water. Feeling touristy, I took the side trail to Whitewater Preserve to cook an early lunch under the cover of their picnic pavilion and admire their pondful of truly enormous trout--a token of the preserve's former identity as a fish hatchery.

Making my way back upstream, I saw that the storm had trundled further ahead, and that quite a lot of hikers leaving Ziggy's had come as far as the crossing and suddenly lost their motivation by the banks of the creek. It's hard to remember why we're trudging for miles through the desert when there's a creek, and a wide sandy beach, and a chance to immerse yourself and everything you own in the rushing water. Eventually most people extricated themselves from the clutches of the beach, and we leapfrogged the six miles over another set of barren hills towards Mission Creek, every last one of us toting too much water. It's funny to walk up on the rapidly-evaporating evidence in the sand of someone else's realization that he's hauling more than he needs. A mere two weeks in the desert and we've learned to TANK UP at every source, because god only knows the condition of the next spring. At Mission Creek we consulted the maps to learn that we'd follow the stream clear up the canyon, crossing about twenty times. Water EVERYWHERE. With MUD. And CRICKETS. It felt like a holiday as I plugged my last miles upriver, scoping out campsites.

The day after, of course, you pay for it by leaving the creek bed with a whopping gain in altitude. Yogi's guidebook warns that the climb out of Mission Creek is a "long, hot, slow uphill slog," but I must have lucked out with the cloudy remnants of that storm, because it wasn't too bad. Slow, yes, but not dreadful, because it never got too hot. Plenty of trees for cover. At Mission Creek I encountered my first specimen of the poodle-dog bush, however, and took a good look at this nemesis of hikers and trail crews. I have no idea who named that bastard plant, but a revision is in order. It grows in the wake of fires, looks like something out of Dr Seuss, stinks like weed (you smell it before you see it), bears nettle-like hairs that cause incapacitating blistery rashes similar to (but worse than) poison oak on blundering soft-skinned bipeds, and the best we can do for a name is POODLE-DOG BUSH? It sounds CUTE. It is not AT ALL cute. It is a MONSTER. Luckily it was easy to avoid in the Mission Creek area.

I hike slower than just about everyone out here, but wake up a lot earlier, and with the temperature in my favor I kept ahead of the crowd from Ziggy's well past midday. Just about the time I'd resolved to have lunch at the next water source, I walked up behind another solo female hiker, who started as she heard my approach. She introduced herself as Nicky, and evidently recognized my face--turned out this was Scout and Frodo's daughter, who remembered my having stayed at her parents' house amid the throng more than two weeks prior! She was out for a section hike, hoping to catch the thru-hikers on their way north, but turned out, too, that it hadn't worked out quite as she'd hoped--the kick-off herd was still a little behind--and I was the third person she'd seen all day. It took about ten seconds to see that she'd been feeling lonely, and she admitted that she was planning to call her dad from the next road crossing (coincidentally the campground and location of the spring) to throw in the towel a couple days early. We chatted as we walked--always a little tricky when hiking single file--and she seemed to perk up a bit, but also looked relieved to reach the campground, so I figured we'd be parting ways and left her to make her phone calls as I set off to get water.

Surprisingly, she joined me where I'd exploded my pack onto a picnic table--no cell service! Looked like she'd have to finish her week in the woods after all, and abide by the prearranged plan for pickup in Big Bear. I commiserated with her dilemma, but on the other hand it was really nice to talk with someone who knew and understood the Principal Preoccupations of hikers--food, blisters, water, elevation profiles, miles to the next town, pooping--and yet had nothing to do with them, hadn't invested her whole life in them for six months, so she could talk about something ELSE. AND a woman about my own age. Gadzooks.

We were joined by another hiker, who introduced himself as Stats, from Tennessee, and collectively we agreed to mosey onward eight miles to the next campground. Coon Creek proved to be the site of a large log cabin, with a huge stone fireplace and a couple of smaller outbuildings--all clearly once very fine--now gutted and pocked by the grafitti of thousands of teenagers (and probably hikers). Stats wasn't feeling well, and Nicky was suffering fromthe kind of first-week blisters that afflict most hikers, so they elected to call it a day. I still felt pretty energetic, but looking at the map, it didn't seem like I'd find any flat spots for quite a stretch, and I was enjoying their company, besides, so I joined them. Cooking our variously awful trail dinners, Stats and Nicky told grad school stories; I told Antarctica stories; Nicky described The Day She Climbed the Wrong Mountain in northern Italy; Stats related everything that was different about the AT. Hikers are a pretty accepting lot, one can drop into any collection of personalities and they'll scoot over to make room, so to speak, but I think that was the first time I'd felt myself to be a part of a companionable group that had anything but hiking itself in common.

It got cold pretty quick, that high in the mountains. Having some little experience with log cabins, I had a sneaking suspicion that sleeping on the concrete floor of the cabin would be colder than sleeping on the ground--and so it proved to be--but the sky threatened rain and my comrades demonstrated less faith in their shelters than I had in mine, so I got a chance to find out that my $400 sleeping bag was
money WELL SPENT. Trial run for the Sierras, right? Next morning I rolled out first, as usual, agreeing to meet up with Nicky and Stats at the notorious Animal Cages, retirement prison for famous exotic animals no longer of use to the movie industry. (Southern California continues to astonish and horrify me.) By the time we reconvened, Nicky had gotten ahold of her dad and arranged for pickup off of the highway at Onyx Summit; still feeling under the weather, Stats opted to hitch to Big Bear from there; I bade them adieu and continued the twelve miles to where the trail next crossed the highway. By then I was more than ready for a town day: shower, laundry, non-trail food, and to my surprise it happened that Paul was still hanging out at the hostel.

My first time hitching alone! I got picked up within ten minutes by a woman who introduced herself as Jenny. I asked if she'd like a couple of bucks for gas, as hiker courtesy mandates, and she replied, "Oh no, just get in the car, honey! You can put your sticks in the back, okay? I've done this literally hundreds of times!"

We took off like a shot, Jenny driving freely across the centerline like a maniac, discoursing all the while. A good hitch-hiker is supposed to provide a little entertainment, a few stories, ask a few questions, in exchange for the ride--this has the added benefit of encouraging townies to pick up other hikers in the future--and Jenny required very little prompting before she had the conversation entirely in hand. Where was I headed? Oh yes, the hostel, she knew exactly where it was, she'd taken literally hundreds of hikers there, no problem at all. And did I have a trail name yet? Gosh, I wasn't hiking all by myself now, was I? I looked like I was about eighteen. No? She'd never have guessed. She was sixty four years old. Her boyfriend was seventy nine. Fifteen years wasn't too much of an age difference, did I think? She let a male hiker stay at her house once and her boyfriend got SO MAD, but she thought he was just ridiculous. We're just hikers, nobody's going to rape someone her age anyway. She was studying nursing and just had her chemistry exam--what a terrible subject, how was she supposed to remember any of that stuff from high school?--and in order to pass you had to score a sixty-nine percent on the exam, sixty-nine, just to PASS, and here she just got her exam back this morning, she was shaking so bad, she just knew she'd done terribly, and she got a SIXTY-NINE POINT FOUR! In chemistry! So she and her girls were going out to celebrate. Her boyfriend wasn't in town anyway. And she knew she wasn't supposed to talk on the phone while she was driving, but she was going to do it anyway, I wouldn't tattle on her, right?

Jenny didn't seem to have mastered the use of her iPhone anymore than the steering wheel, so the conversation with her "girls" took place on speakerphone. I had the privilege of listening to every word as she rounded up friends for drinks in "the Village" and I clung to the armrest. You know,'she'd just been coming over that ridge and wondered if there would be any hikers needing a ride and there I was! And she was just so happy about her exam that it seemed right to help someone else out. Jenny remembered abruptly that she had groceries in the back seat! Her house was right on the way to the hostel, would I mind if we made a quick stop? Oh good, and she could let the animals out at the same time. Yes, she does animal rescue, has done for years and years, fostered literally hundreds of cats and dogs. There are seven dogs and ten cats right now, her boyfriend just won't let her have any more in the house. Oh this is it, it'll only take a moment. Yes, of course, if I wanted to grab those bags in the backseat that would be a great help! It'll only take a moment!

Jenny opened the front door to an explosion of barking--the dogs were evidently housed in a back room somewhere, but the cats burst into the yard with the attitude of cats that have been cooped up inside all day. I carried in a couple of bag of groceries while Jenny darted around. She was just going to freshen up a little bit, alright? That way she'd only have to make one trip! Did I happen to see where she put down the car keys? I betook my smelly self outside and tried to coax one of he cats into being petted while Jenny rushed around, iPhone in one hand, hair brush in the other, making shushing noises to the din behind the dog door. She'll just be a minute! Oh, could I look behind the passenger seat to see if her purse is there? Yes, the big green one! That's it, no, it doesn't need to come in,'she just wanted to make sure it was there. She's just going to brush her teeth and then we can go, it'll only take a moment!

We did eventually get underway, and on the short drive to the hostel the sky opened and the rain that had threatened for days finally came crashing down on poor parched California. Jenny and I both crowed over the good timing. She let me out in front of a large blue house with a banner welcoming PCT hikers, and I thanked her again for the ride before she caroomed away to meet her girls. Oh don't mention it, honey, she's done this for literally hundreds of hikers!

Folk at the hostel that I hadn't seen for days greeted me with shouts of "Goodall!"--which offset the madness running the hostel itself. Paul scrounged a towel for me and let me borrow his nail clippers. Shower, laundry, Himalayan food, first night sleeping on a mattress, package pick up (thanks, Mom!), big breakfast at Thelma's, resupply, new shoes, iced coffee--maybe I'm starting to get the hang of this.