Old Lady on the Trail- Triple Crown at 76

by Mary E Davison

  The day warmed up for a pleasant walk on nicely graded trail. I had views to the valley or out to the Mojave, depending on the direction I looked. Low hills in the distance were covered in orange poppies, and I saw quail, ravens, chipmunks, squirrels and a few lizards. That night I slept peacefully with no wind.

  A runner and a dog came up behind me on the trail. Correction, a lot of runners, all wearing bright-orange pants with PRISONER printed on them. I must have camped near a correctional institution. Thirty or more prisoners out for their PT run panted a polite hello as they passed. Well, that was interesting.

  Reacquainting myself with flowers I’d seen last year, I walked three days to Soledad Canyon. The lower I dropped in elevation, the more flowers abounded: popcorn phacelia, chia, fiddlenecks, miners lettuce, baby blue eyes, bush poppy, gilia, whispering bells, wall flower, and witches hats. I loved the desert flowers, greeting them by name seemed like I was greeting old friends, bringing gladness to my heart.

  Later in the day there were blue dicks, yerba santa, paintbrush, comet, lupine, more poppies, Canterbury bells, globe gilia, gold fields, coreopsis and rattlesnake weed. Ah, it was so good to be hiking again.

  Having dinner at the trailer park saved having to carry water uphill to my cowboy camp in the middle of the trail below the top of a gap, the only spot out of the wind I could find. I’d seen only one day-hiker in four days, the trail my personal possession. At dusk, the moon shone brightly over my head.

  In the pink rock formations of Vasquez Rocks, the next day I could see Captain Kirk and Spock in my mind’s eye on the same trail where a few episodes of Star Trek had been filmed. A horse trailer drove up as I was finishing lunch. The guy with the horses looked just like Mendo Rider (PCT equestrian from last year). No, wait, it WAS Mendo Rider. Great surprise meeting.

  “Hello, Medicare Pastor.”

  In the grocery store in Aqua Dulce, I turned around when someone said, “Hello, Medicare Pastor.” Jeff Saufley, just dropping in to get something at the store, gave me a ride the extra mile to the Saufleys, trail angels I’d met in 2007. I’d informed them of my schedule, so they knew when I was coming. Instead of having a hundred hikers in their yard at Hiker Heaven, as they would have in early April, it was just me. I had the whole spare trailer to myself and luxuriated in the shower while my clothes were washing.

  The trailer was filled with thoughtful hiker amenities: multiple plug-ins to charge electronics, two computers, a TV, DVD player, libraries of movies and books, a piano, a guitar, a Navajo flute, music CDs, etc. There was even a Bible and the AA Big Book. Saufleys are nothing if not accommodating. It was a great place to spend a zero day.

  That Palm Sunday rest day I attended the little community church with Mendo Rider and his wife. I had a mild panic attack in the afternoon when my hike plan went missing. I sent out a “Help. Help.” to my friend Kathy by email, and the next morning Donna came over with a new printout of my hike plan. Saved again.

  The climb out of Agua Dulce and up the Sierra Pelona Ridge was very hard. It was hot, no shade to speak of as I went up 2,100 feet. I stopped a few times to rest and give body parts a break. But I had to stop for lunch a half mile or so before the top as I just couldn't go any farther without fuel. Fortunately for me, I found a bit of shade on some nice grass and Miners Lettuce and made myself eat, even though the heat had taken away my appetite. A hiker without an appetite was rare, especially this hiker. I stretched out on the grass and dozed for half an hour after eating and felt better.

  Oaks shaded the trail on the north side of the ridge. After cleaning the box surrounding the spring at Bear Spring, I filled my water bottle, my knee liking my messing around at the spring more than hiking. Descending to Bouquet Canyon and seeing a bee swarm, I remembered an old saw, “A swarm in May is worth a load of hay. A swarm in June is worth a silver spoon. A swarm in July isn’t worth a fly.” (Bees need to gather nectar for a summer to survive a winter.)

  Reaching Bouquet Canyon, I found no water at the cache, but the stream still ran with pools deep enough to filter. I set up camp tucked in the undergrowth so as not to be seen from the road, and as it started to get dark I looked for my headlamp and found it missing. I’d left it hanging on the bedpost at Hiker Heaven. Silly me. That was the third thing I’d misplaced. I needed a keeper.

  Ah, the desert. First it fries you by day, and then it freezes you by night. There was a heavy dew in the early part of the night, but by the time I woke, everything not in the sleeping bag or pack was covered with frost.

  In the afternoon I came to the Oasis water cache created and maintained by the Andersons, the next set of iconic trail angels. Besides having several camping chairs, REAL CHAIRS, a treat for a hiker, they’d decorated the little cove in the scrub oak with skeletons of various kinds, a blow-up monkey hanging from the branches, a palm tree, flamingos, and other odd surprises. Oh yeah, there was water, too, and a cooler full of ice, tangerines, and other goodies. Not wanting to leave a chair un-sat-in, I sat in one and ate a tangerine.

  Donna and Jeff were hiking behind me that day. They liked to be on the trail as well as to care for scruffy hikers. The early part of the season, before the big influx of hikers, was their time for hiking. That night at the Andersons there was a mini trail angel convention with the Saufleys, Andersons, Roger and me, I the lone non-angel hiker. Terrie served her famous Taco Salad, and everyone sat around talking until midnight, real midnight, not hiker midnight.

  Joe and Terrie gave me the bed in the spare bedroom, perhaps because they knew I was a pastor. But Terrie wasn’t too intimidated about my being a pastor to give me her traditional mooning as I left the Casa de Luna, though Joe was a little aghast. I was honored just to be considered a hiker.

  Joe drove me back to the trailhead, and I started out up the hill, up definitely the direction for the first couple miles, up into clouds that hid the mountain tops and blew back and forth across the valley, playing peek-a-boo with views and casting shadows playfully over hills and desert below me. The clouds eventually produced some showers as Donna walked up behind me with a cheerful hello. She said the Andersons would be there shortly with fresh water for the cache and for us. So we stood there chatting in the rain and taking pictures of each other in raingear in sunny Southern California.

  I loaded up another two liters of water when the Andersons arrived. Jeff, who had not been feeling well in the morning, decided to hike on with Donna—but first, they all went for lunch someplace. Strong hikers can take their time and do such things. Me, I just had to keep going. I trudged up the hill on another long climb, this time with four more pounds of water, which meant I didn’t do nearly as well as in the morning. My campsite in a lovely glade of Black Oaks on a grassy hillside came with a picnic table, a pleasant surprise after walking through miles of desert chaparral separated by patches of scrub oak. Jeff and Donna came by while I was fixing dinner; they were aiming for another three miles.

  Hiking strongly and early the next day, I passed the turn off to the campsite where the Saufleys were staying. Their footprints didn’t continue, so I knew they were still in camp. While stopping to filter a liter of water from a trickling stream across the trail, Donna and Jeff caught up to me. We hiked together, chatting, before they again outdistanced me, playing leapfrog until after lunch when they passed me for the last time. What fun to hike with such gracious and interesting people. I made nine miles before lunch, though I stopped a little late to do it, pleased at such good time for a decrepit old lady.

  On Good Friday I sang some of Holden Evening Prayer and hymns from the Tenebrae Service as I walked beside bright-green miner's lettuce on the forest floor beneath large oaks. Although the knee complained, I walked quickly down long switchbacks with views of lower hills, Antelope Valley, and the Tehachapi Mountains.

  Solid banks of flowers covered hillsides with yellow, white, blue, or purple. Bright yellow daisies and chia lined the trail; later, clumps of lupine filled the air with fragrance. I walked between two
different weather systems. Behind me over the mountains big black thunderclouds were building with menacing rumbles; on the desert side the sun shone.

  Hiker Town was across the highway and on the corner, a touristy hiker place, done up like an Old West town complete with dummies dressed in period costumes. Slim, a hiker who hung around the trail working odd jobs for folks, suggested I sleep in the jail, but there was already a dummy on the bed, so I took up residence for the night in a trailer bunkhouse instead. It was a good night to be inside, the trailer shaking in the fierce wind of another storm. I hoped Donna and Jeff were OK up ahead at Cottonwood Creek Canyon.

  Crossing the Mojave from Hiker Town on a cold, extremely windy day the Tehachapi Mountains sported a fresh blanket of snow ahead of me. Walking on a flat desert over aqueducts taking water to LA, water was important to me as well as city folks far away. But that water wasn’t accessible to a hiker. When I spilled a liter by accident, I rationed water the rest of the day.

  In a serious mishap, the wind blew my maps and guidebook pages right out of my pocket. I reached for them and felt nothing there. No sign of paper anywhere in sight; they were probably miles away over the desert by the time I noticed them missing.

  Reaching Cottonwood Creek I found the water cache, and I found Heinz, an older German day hiker in an RV van. He had a copy of the guidebook, and I quickly and furiously scribbled notes and drew maps to hold me until my next resupply box holding maps and pages for further up the trail. Saved again and again. If I didn’t lose so many things I wouldn’t have to be saved so many times.

  Easter Parade

  Easter morning was gloriously memorable. The morning went smoothly with one glitch: I became temporarily disoriented. (Mountaineer euphemism for being lost.) Well, I wasn't exactly lost. I knew where I’d last seen a trail sign, and I knew I was on the ridge above Tyler Horse Canyon. I also knew I was no longer on the trail. I’d followed one of the many trails made by bikers, and it put me on a jeep road on the ridge.

  I could hear water running in Tyler Horse Canyon below me, but my altimeter said I was nowhere near the elevation I needed to be when I would descend to it. So, I just went up the road. Eventually I saw a PCT sign on the westward ridge running parallel to me and saw it would meet my jeep road. I didn’t lose the trail again.

  Gold Fields put on a flower show as did a really nice stand of Globe Gilia. The rest of the afternoon the flower show became a breathtaking Easter Parade. Whole hillsides were covered with yellow daisies and desert dandelions, alternating their yellows with gorgeous carpets of blue and white of low growing flowers, whose name I didn’t know. Hillsides burst with a profusion of colors: white, pink, orange yellow, blue, purple, maroon, and lemon yellow.

  These hills had burned sometime in the past, leaving Joshua Trees and Oaks as just a few charred-and-weathered stumps and branches. The foothills of the Tehachapi Mountains were mostly piles of decomposed granite sand, and between the burn and the bike riders, much of the footing was very unstable, like walking on tall, steep sand dunes.

  But ah, the flowers! The flowers were trying mightily to stabilize the hillside. I felt I was committing a grave sin any time I stepped on a tenacious flower trying to bring stability and beauty to that sandy hillside. I developed a great antipathy for the bike riders, who had scoured paths of uprooted flowers wherever they’d gone joy riding.

  The PCT takes a deep curve west from San Jacinto to Agua Dulce around the Mojave Desert before gradually going east again. The views were wondrous across the Mojave to the San Gabriel Mountains and all the way down to San Jacinto, many days' walk south of me trail-wise.

  Twisted and contorted skeletons of Joshua Trees reigned over the views as I followed the Saufley’s footsteps over sand-covered hills through more fields of flowers down to Gambol Canyon. In June, when the main body of hikers would come through Tyler Horse and Gambol, the flower displays would be gone, and they would see only sand. How truly blessed I was to have seen those flowers as an Easter Sunday gift. Section hiking has its rewards.

  Many more flowers lined the trail on the way out to Willow Springs Road, also going over more old burn areas, weathered and whitened remains of Joshua Trees on the ridge looked like ghost dancers on the skyline.

  For 40 minutes on a quite cold and windy afternoon, I had my thumb out to hitch at Willow Springs Road. My luck wasn’t good as the cars were speeding by too fast for drivers to register my need before they disappeared past me. I would have had better luck at a turn in the highway just a bit further if I’d read Yogi’s Town Guide.

  Cars slow down on a turn, hikers can be seen better in that slowed-down space, and a ride might have materialized more quickly. Ken, a retired State Patrolman, did stop, asking me what I was doing out there in the middle of nowhere. He took me in to the town of Mojave, even though it was twelve miles out of his way.

  In Mojave, I took a heavenly shower. I didn't think I was that dirty, but the black on the washcloth said differently. Mojave turned into a two- day zero, although only one had been planned. In the first attempt to get back to the trail, I found the storm had left an ice-covered road blocked off with orange cones.

  Returning to Mojave, I ate meals at Denny’s and had the best hot-fudge sundae ever, gifted with a bowl of extra hot fudge when I told the waitress, who now knew me after my four previous meals, how much I loved hot fudge. Yum. I also arranged a needed transportation piece by asking the server if she knew any regulars who might help me. Roberta, a wonderful little red-haired lady of 80, volunteered.

  After I slack packed over some quickly melting snow and ice to Cameron Pass, Roberta met me with my gear. She also brought me dinner and cookies, which I ate even though it was only mid-afternoon. She refused to let me give her money for dinner or gas. Saying she was having fun, she proceeded to regale me with many tales from her 50+ years of living in Mojave and being a nurse. She was a delight.

  After that lovely bit of trail magic, it was up the hill to find a tent spot among the Joshua trees, searching for shelter from the strong wind. I finally made my choice of spot tucked behind Junipers and Joshua trees without too many sharp desert pointy things. And then the wind shifted so that my tent was no longer sheltered.

  I built a rock wall toting rocks from the ravine. The Incas built better walls with no mortar, but mine wasn't too bad. However, the wind blew even stronger, and the inside of the tent was catching windblown dirt. In disgust, I collapsed the tent and cowboyed on top of it. My rock wall and the juniper had a better chance of protecting me from the wind and the dirt, and I didn't have to listen to the tent noisily flapping all night.

  Watching the sunrise the next morning, I listened to some sort of hen clucking in the ravine. Hiking uphill, I shortly took off coat, gloves, and both shirts to hike in sports bra. Two and a half hours later, I was 2,000 feet higher, and the weather changed from the icestorm, which had closed roads four days earlier to a sports-bra day. Flowers cheered me, and at 6,000 feet there were again pines and oaks.

  Two far-away snowy mountains peeked over the farthest range of mountains to the north. I cowboy camped that night near enough to Golden Oak Spring to hear frogs singing.

  “Yer head’s leakin.’”

  I carried five liters of water uphill north of Golden Oak Spring on a nice warm day in the 80s. On some long, exposed stretches I passed windmills turning noisily to make electricity. Green Miners Lettuce abounded on the hillsides, and there were enough flowers to entertain me. I loved to hike with just my sports bra, but my right arm was rather sunburned from the walk between Tyler Horse and Gambol Spring Canyon.

  The last two days I’d been popping perspiration blisters under dead skin and was beginning to peel. I would look like I had an exotic skin disease when I saw people at the annual Kickoff at Lake Morena.

  Reaching a lovely broad meadow under oak trees by 2:45, it was too early to stop for the night, so I decided to stop for a long break and have my dinner, which would rid my pack of another liter of water w
eight before going up the next hill. Stretching out in the shade on my foam sit pad with my legs up over my pack, I used a little of the water I’d lugged to wash face, hands, legs and feet. I even gave myself a manicure, at least I cut and cleaned my nails, and put some much needed lotion on my hands.

  This scene of complete contentment was rudely interrupted by a tick that decided to bite my leg. I pulled the bugger out with a steady hand on my nail clippers, working them like tweezers, hoping he hadn’t been carrying anything nasty. I remembered taking a tick off another hiker’s back from under her bra strap when I was a Girl Scout. I hoped none would bite me somewhere I couldn’t see or reach to remove.

  Non-hikers always think bears are the most dangerous animal on the trail. Mice cause the most damage to gear. But the most dangerous animal is the tiny tick. I have known several hikers forced to leave the trail with Lyme or other diseases carried by ticks, some of which can have lasting systemic effects causing lifelong problems. I have not known anyone attacked by a bear.

  After my two-hour rest with ticks and dinner, I finally packed up and went onward at 5:00. I enjoyed hiking in the late afternoon and evening when the sun wasn't so hot and I was rewarded with beautiful meadows filled with baby blue eyes.

  As I was puffing up a hill, glad I wasn’t in the direct sun, along came Billy Goat. Really. Billy Goat was then a 70-year-old PCT hiker. He is now a friend and quite famous, having been on the cover of the PCT Communicator, on the front page of the Los Angeles Times in 2008, and the subject of an article in Backpacker Magazine in 2017. He still hikes long trails, though pushing into his 80s. I’d met him at Kickoff in 2008, but meeting him on the trail made us friends.

  Billy Goat was ambling down the trail SOBO as I was puffing uphill NOBO. He said we should chat a bit. Panting, with sweat pouring down my face, I was only too glad to do so. While chatting, Billy Goat looked at the sweat running into my eyes and said in a completely deadpan voice and a twinkle in his eyes, "Yer head’s leakin.’"