Saturday May 4th

Saturday, May 4th: Mile 179(plus devils slide trail out of idyllwild- 2.6miles) to mile 206.  29.6 miles
Even trying to calculate the cumulative loss and gain in elevation of this section makes my knees hurt.  The rest of my hiker friends stayed in Idyllwild to take a day off, and I pushed off alone.  The weather forecast reported thunderstorms, wind, and rain starting Sunday at noon. I wanted to try to race the storm out of the area (SPOILER ALERT: I lost), so I climbed up and out of Idyllwild onto the ridgeline of the San Jacinto mountains. 

Even with the gain of 4,000 feet+ of elevation, I was feeling very strong physically.  Mentally I was stuck in a set of circular, negative thoughts and was feeling very lonely with all of the new hiker faces around.  Running into a new pack of hikers feels much like being a new kid in school, so I was feeling extremely self aware.  I was walking in a funk when I ran into a woman, Melissa, from San Diego (Melissa! Hello if you are reading this!) who was out for a day hike.  I stopped and talked with her for nearly thirty minutes and she offered to send me some brownies further up the trail.  Feeling better, I continued up the trail. 

Towards the end of the day I faced an obstacle named "fuller ridge." Why is fuller ridge an obstacle?  Simply put, it is an enormous ridge of Mt. San Jacinto and is a 15 mile switchbacking descent from 9,000 feet down to 1,500 feet onto the desert floor. There is no water during its entire length, and with Fuller ridge, the word "descent" is used very loosely as the ridge includes several steep climbs.  If you actually like descending on descents, you should probably avoid looking at an elevation profile of the ridge to save yourself some heartache.  There were many times on the way down when I would take a switchback down and see that the trail on the switchback above me was only five or so feet up. 

Okay, so you get it: Fuller Ridge is long, hot, and a terrible place to hike. How, you may ask, did I plan to tackle this challenge?  Why, with a SOLO NIGHT HIKE, of course!  At the start, my solo desert night hike was one of the most liberating, empowering, experiences of my life.  Walking amongst sage and chapparal, with the crunch of my shoes on the dusty soil the only thing breaking the unforgiving, endless silence of the desert night.  The milky way was visible above me and I felt like I was truly a part of this landscape.  Part of creation.  One with the earth.  A man without time.  I felt young.  I felt strong. I felt as if maybe, just maybe, I could be the one person to crack the riddle of mortality and live forever.  This lasted until about 25 miles into my day.  The remaining 5 were a different story all together.

In a ten minute period my flashlight stopped working, wind gusts of 50-60mph erupted from the slopes of the ridge, I ran out of water, and exhaustion kicked in.  Without water I was not eating. I became the walking dead.  All of my humanity left me and I became a purely sensory being.  I had no past or future.  I felt only the wind, the relentless wind, my thirst, and my heart beating.  My mind was devoid of all higher thought as I staggered through the darkness, barely keeping on bath.  This was my new life: the desert walker. I knew nothing else.

After what seemed like an eternity I came upon my goal: a water fountain strangely places in the middle of the desert floor.  It seemed like a hallucination.  It was not. A problem arises when one tries to obtain water from a water fountain when the wind is blowing in excess of 50mpg; none of the water gets where you want it to go.  I spent over thirty minutes filling my water containers and taking an unwanted shower in the process. 

I drank deeply.  I ate.  It was good.

I tucked my sleeping bag in between two small desert shrubs to provide myself with at least the illusion of a wind break, and I slept. It was 2:00AM