For those who don't know what the PCT is... it is the Pacific Crest Trail. Its is over 2,000 miles and stretches from Campo, California.. right at the border fence of the United States and Mexico through California, Oregon, Washington and finally ends on the border of Canada and Washington.
Normally the trail is hiked, by most, from one end to the other in a time span of 3-7 months starting in March or April. Cameron and I decided that we wanted to hike the whole thing, but seeing as how we do not have the time, nor the funds, to hike it all at once.. we'd do segments of it until we reached from one border to the next. We also decided to bring along our (almost) 4 month old son, Xander. He's been a great kid on all of our other hikes, day adventures and camping trips and out of all of us, has it pretty easy. Just to sit in the pack and eat when he wants... he's got the good life!!
A quick stop at Cameron's store (hehehe) for a potty break before we hit the trail for a week. Its possible that this will be the last flush toilet that I'll use for a whole week.. yippe.
(This is Cameron. I'll be typing in italics.) We actually looked for a bathroom right near the border. There was a Border Patrol station and other places of business and no one had a bathroom. There was even a post office and they said they didn't have a bathroom. What? Do they just go in the bushes?
When we got to the fence, you could see that if you tried you could climb over it, what a great fence! HaHa.. I think "Team Engineer" might need to rethink the design of the fence in this case!!
If you look closely, you can see the Minute Men on the hilltop above us! Whoohoo!! We really wanted one or a few of them to come and visit us so we could get pictures with them, but sadly, they left us alone.
Some Minute Men, if you ask me. We spent close to half an hour by the fence taking pictures and such and not one of them came to find out what we were doing. We could have easily been waiting for some illegals to hop the fence and then take them away in our car.
Down the left.. more fence.
There was a lot of fence. I wonder if it goes all the way across
to Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.
Rabeka (me) being silly in the car before we took off for the hike :)
Siriana and Xander
Siriana dropped us off at the Mexican Border in Campo. We wont see her again for a week, when she picks us back up in Harrison Park. She is the best!!She'll also have the luxury of a place to herself for a week.. What a nice getaway!
As she drove away I thought "oh crap! Here we go! We're committed to it now!!!"
I thought the same thing as we saw the car disappear into the dust, though I didn't really think we would have any problems.
PCT monument
Cameron, Rabeka and our baby Xander at the PCT Monument
All set and ready to go!!! A quick picture, or two or more, before we left and were on the way.. :)
Once I put the pack on, it sure felt heavier than when we tried them on at home. Maybe it was because I had Alejandro on as well. Still, I was pumped and ready to tackle the trail.
So, the start.
We started on Monday 21 Julio, 2008 at 0800...Campo, California and the Mexican border. We posed for pictures by the PCT Landmark and took many pictures of the border fence, we thought it was humorous that the fence was ribbed, just enough so one could use it as a ladder to climb right over. Effective border eh?! A helicopter flew over head stirring up a bit of dust as we started on the trail. And I'm certain that the Minute Men atop their perch on an adjacent hill watched over our festivities.
We had wanted to start on the trail by 7 o'clock at the latest, but we didn't get out of the house until almost 6:30 in the morning. With an hour drive from our place to the trailhead, and with the small detour we had to find a bathroom at Cameron Corners, we got off an hour behind schedule. We knew it would be hot, which is why we wanted to get on the trail early. Still, we were in good spirits as we headed out.
The View of where we're headed.....
It's a long way away when you have to look at it like this.
Cameron had been reading other blogs to see what the PCT has in store for us .. from trail conditions to water supplies to weather... some of the most interesting people and experiences. He also found that most people have trail names and we wanted to implement that into our trekking experience. No serious hiker is without a trail name. So as we set off... We thought of names for each of us.
Reading the other blogs didn't really help all that much. All it did was reinforce that the first day of hiking was going to be the toughest day out of the whole trip. 20 miles from one water stop to another, which was Lake Morena Campground.
As we set off I remember feeling that something was amiss, but couldn't quite put my finger on it. Something kept nagging but what was it? Since I couldn't figure out what it was, maybe it was just nerves. After all, we hadn't been backpacking in a while and not since the baby was born. Continuing on the trail was our best option ... it wasn't getting any cooler.
I don't know if it's just a girl thing to always feel like you've forgotten something, but the only thing I felt was excitement. But, as has always been proven, woman's intuition is rarely ever wrong.
By mile One we still did not have names. I think it took us a few miles to come up with them but when we did.. we love 'em! Baby Xander's is "Mono" which is Spanish for monkey. We named him this because he rides on our bellies like a baby monkey would. Cameron's is "Tiny". We thought this was a bit funny since he is so tall... and mine, Rabeka, is Fire Ant. Ants are such small creatures but they carry such big loads on their backs... are tenacious and relentless, they rarely give up. I felt like my pack was a zillion pounds.. maybe I should have left something at home. but what? I had to make sure I had plenty of diapers and wipes to last for the week... those weigh a whole lot more than you would think!
It was nice to see a mile mark and that it was less than what we had started with! I really like to see the progress that we've made, it makes things go a lot faster and keep up morale. Knowing that we were hiking anywhere from 10-20 miles (depending on water supply) it was comforting to know that we were that much closer to our goal! We saw some cows along the way (don't know what happened to the picture) and when I mooooed at them they mooed back.. it was a funny coincidence that it happened.
It's interesting to note that when I saw the sign saying that there was 19.5 miles to our destination, it didn't sink in how far that really was. With an average hiking speed of 2 mph on the trail, that's 10 hours of hiking, with no breaks. We did really well at the beginning. Even with some small breaks, we were averaging 2 mph and setting a good pace.
The plants here were pretty cool, they look like they are really hairy. Not quite sure what they are called, I think I need to look it up. If I were a bird, I'd use them as a nest material.
The orange stuff on top of the plants is called witch's hair. It's a sort of plant that has a symbiotic relationship with the bushes and trees it attaches itself to. That's about all I know and probably enough for this blog. If you want to know more, go to Wikipedia.
Mono was asleep already!! He slept most of the way, only to wake up to be changed, fed and played with! He was really not too happy to go back into the carrier, but once he was in it, he was okay and fell back asleep.
It took him a while to get used to the carrier. We felt bad each time we put him back in, but there wasn't another way to carry him. When he gets older and can walk, it'll be a lot easier. Of course, we won't be able to do 20 mile days.
PROGRESS!!! Yes!! We've gone about 2 miles at this point, and thought that we'd see more signs as we went along.. NOPE! the next mile marker that we saw on the trail was when we had 5.1 miles left... that's a WHOLE LOT of hiking without ANY sign of progress! Even though we knew that with each step we took brought us closer to the goal for the day it would've been nice to have a mile marker or two... Cameron pulled out the copied section of our trail guide and referred to it often. I love the book that we chose. The author has great details (sometimes I wish he would've left out stuff about the arduous slope) , he had every turn down to the minute detail. I almost thought he would've put that we should come across a Horned Toad or a snake at mile ?.?. But he didn't. In fact, we didn't see any snakes out there at all. I thought it was peculiar as it is prime rattler season. But nope. No snakes. Just a bunch of Jack Rabbits and birds. Although we did run across a Horned Toad later on in the trip.
I agree with Rabeka that having mileage markers as you hike really gives you a sense that you are getting somewhere. I think that applies to life as well. Sometimes it's nice to see that you have made progress with different markers in your life instead of having to trust that you are going in the right direction.
As we crossed over the lumber footbridge that takes you over a little crick (creek) we were surrounded by oaks. It was nice to hike in the shade for a bit. The trail snakes around many different little hills and, thankfully, some large hills until it crosses the railroad tracks. There we saw a PCT post marker (a rather large one) and posed for a few pictures before continuing on. If you look one way the tracks seem to go on for ever never bending never stopping, and if you look the other way, they keep going for a mile or two before bending softly with the landscape. Tiny thought for sure that we were stuck in a cartoon and even though we looked both ways a few times before crossing, we'd still be hit by the train. After all, doesn't that happen to Wiley Coyote all the time?!? By this time we were getting a bit hungry and wanted to find the "shady spot" to sit and have a bite. Hiking for another half mile we dipped down into another ravine that was shaded with more live oak. We maneuvered around some poison oak (I took pictures, of course) and we found a nice shaded lunch spot and had a bite to eat. Mono was glad to be out of his carrier and happily played and talked to us.
Here's us stopping to eat in the cool of the shade. Luckily, there wasn't any poison oak where we stopped, but we did have to hike down a small hill off the trail to find shade. All was fine as we got up to leave when I dropped a yogurt cup and Rabeka tried to use the walking sticks like chopsticks to pick it up. If we weren't so hot and tired, I probably would have laughed.
We had to make a few diaper changes along the way. We kept track of how many diapers Alejandro went through in a day the week before we left so that we knew how many to take. It was about 6 to 7 diapers a day. So, we used his diaper changes as good times to take a water break.
Here's a view of what we hiked up to that point, which was about 9 to 10 miles. You can't really see it in the picture, but off in the haze is the Mexican border and the fence. Even 9 miles away, we could still see it from the trail. Crazy.
Rabeka loves taking pictures of the trees and the surrounding atmosphere. She's always looking for that one good shot of a tree or a mountain or rock formation. One day she's going to win a contest with her photography. She wants a much better camera than the one we have, but that will come.
Here's our horny toad friend. As we were hiking along, we saw it just off the trail. I stuck my walking stick out to try to touch it, and it let me pick it up. All it really did was puff up at me. I held it onto the end of my stick, just waiting for it to bolt up the stick and into my face as Rabeka took the picture. He was cool looking, but we left him go so that we didn't disturb him any more than we already did. I wonder if he has a blog somewhere writing about the weird day that he had.
Along the trail, we came across some interesting signs, besides the ones that told us our mileage. However, they were all in Spanish. Since we knew that most of the PCT hikers aren't predominately Spanish, we figured it was for the illegals trying to hike through the mountainous desert to civilization. What a nice country we are to take care of people breaking the law.
Here is a view of the trail leading up the other side of the canyon. This was with 5.1 miles left to hike. Here would be a good place to mention what we've alluding to since the beginning of this post. As we got into the hike, Rabeka noticed that one of her hydro-packs wasn't working and she couldn't get any water out of it. We thought it might be pinched somewhere in the backpack, but when her other hydro-pack stopped working as well, we knew there was something wrong. We decided to check the backpack when we stopped next for a diaper change. Well, when we stopped, we found out that Rabeka was completely out of water. Now, this was only a couple of miles into the hike, and from then on we only had my water to rely on. So, instead of a gallon of water for each of us, we only had barely a gallon for the both of us. By mile 10, half way through the hike, we ran out of water completely. Now, we had to make it to Lake Morena just to have water again. By the time we got to the picture below and saw the trail on the opposite side of the canyon going almost straight up in switchbacks, our confidence almost left us. We were so dehydrated by that point. As we got to the bottom of the canyon and started hiking up the other side, I couldn't even produce enough saliva to swallow a bite of an energy bar. It just turned to paste in my mouth. At this point, Rabeka carried Alejandro as we headed up the 1,000 foot climb and 4 mile hike leading to Lake Morena Campground.
As we started hiking up the canyon wall, the sun was setting and it was getting dark. We had already said numerous prayers by this point, but we said one more. The last four miles to the campground were ones I will never forget. I drew closer to my Heavenly Father and to Rabeka than at any other time. There were so many times that I thought I was going to fall over on the trail and collapse in exhaustion and dehydration. I know that Rabeka wasn't doing much better. When we came down the last little hill and entered the campground, it was such a feeling of relief. The water flowed down our throats as we only thought of where to set up the tent before we fell over asleep. We got the tent set up and everything in and were in bed by almost midnight, four hours later than I had planned on us getting there.
Finally, we made it. Here are pictures of us in the tent the morning after. Alejandro never had a problem. We, on the other hand, were so spent from the 20 mile hike, doing half of it without water, that we decided to call off the rest of the trip and head home. Rabeka called Siri to come and get us, and we decided to tackle the trail some other time.
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