Butt-Up Beetle (Darkling or Stink Bug): Team mascot of Djibouti or Bust
Stick bug on Hasty's pack.
Big-Ass Bug, runs hella fast.
Flowers and rock.
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Djibouti or Bust!
Getting happy as I get out of the desert...
Monday, June 7, 2010
Mile 598: sweaty and slow
Wow, this is a hot, dry section. We left Tehachapi carrying eight days of food an 25 miles of water. Ow my shoulders and hips! Pack weight definitely over fifty pounds.
It seems like everyone is speeding up except me. I am either staying the same or getting slower. I don't like it. I know that somebody is going to be the slowest, and it should be okay if it's me, but it's starting to bother me mentally. I think I'm going to try to start hiking super early tomorrow morning so I don't have to be the caboose for a while.
When I got into camp, my entire backside was soaked in sweat, from the top of my shoulders down to my butt. It was so gross. I'm also sticky from head to toe, and my hair is the greasiest it's been in my life.
Yup, I need an attitude adjustment. My mom is sending me the Tao te Jing by Lao Tzu to Kennedy Meadows, where I will sit on my clean butt for four or more days smelling relatively tolerably in clean clothes. I am looking forward to replacing my one pound brick book that is entertaining and interesting, but impossible to make any progress through with a thinner book that gives me bite sized spirituality/philosophy lessons to mull over as I hike.
- Typoed on my iPhone
It seems like everyone is speeding up except me. I am either staying the same or getting slower. I don't like it. I know that somebody is going to be the slowest, and it should be okay if it's me, but it's starting to bother me mentally. I think I'm going to try to start hiking super early tomorrow morning so I don't have to be the caboose for a while.
When I got into camp, my entire backside was soaked in sweat, from the top of my shoulders down to my butt. It was so gross. I'm also sticky from head to toe, and my hair is the greasiest it's been in my life.
Yup, I need an attitude adjustment. My mom is sending me the Tao te Jing by Lao Tzu to Kennedy Meadows, where I will sit on my clean butt for four or more days smelling relatively tolerably in clean clothes. I am looking forward to replacing my one pound brick book that is entertaining and interesting, but impossible to make any progress through with a thinner book that gives me bite sized spirituality/philosophy lessons to mull over as I hike.
- Typoed on my iPhone
Mile 584.6: heaviest packs yet
Coming down the last little bit before tehachapi, we We resupplied in Tehachapi, and got some fantastic packages. Amy sent us a Cosmo that was read cover-to-cover by several people, other girly stuff, and tasty treats. Carmen and I both recieved packages of good food from our parents. Hasty might have hit the jackpot though: three letters, a box full of Pro bars that his mom scored in an amazing sale, and goodies like homemade granola.
Hasty, Carmen, and I hitched in together, we got a ride into town from a student named Amanda. Once she dropped us off, another woman named Leslie saw us on the curb, drove us to the post office, waited while we dealt with and mailed our stuff, and took us back into town to the grocery store. Another woman saw us sorting through the food we had and gave us $10. I explained that we weren't homeless, we were just dirty hikers, but she insisted that we get ourselves a treat.
DayGlo and Brian, meanwhile, had found room with a guy that would let us sleep in his yard and give us a ride in the morning. Dan ended up being really cool and interesting. We took him out for Thai food. We ate family style, and My favorite was chicken panang- looks like I really am my father's daughter.
The hike into and out of Tehachapi was strewn with wind turbines: and wind turbines usually come with wind. It really wore on everyone's morale, but I totally nerded out and got really excited.
- Typoed on my iPhone
Hasty, Carmen, and I hitched in together, we got a ride into town from a student named Amanda. Once she dropped us off, another woman named Leslie saw us on the curb, drove us to the post office, waited while we dealt with and mailed our stuff, and took us back into town to the grocery store. Another woman saw us sorting through the food we had and gave us $10. I explained that we weren't homeless, we were just dirty hikers, but she insisted that we get ourselves a treat.
DayGlo and Brian, meanwhile, had found room with a guy that would let us sleep in his yard and give us a ride in the morning. Dan ended up being really cool and interesting. We took him out for Thai food. We ate family style, and My favorite was chicken panang- looks like I really am my father's daughter.
The hike into and out of Tehachapi was strewn with wind turbines: and wind turbines usually come with wind. It really wore on everyone's morale, but I totally nerded out and got really excited.
- Typoed on my iPhone
Mile 533.8: night hiking at last!
Last night we hiked across the Mojave stretch. It was a good decision to night hike; the seventeen miles consisted of:
Follow concrete covered aqueduct
Follow powerlines
Follow aqueduct some more
The scenery was probably pretty boring, but wastching the moon rise and the silhouettes of Joshua trees was neat. DayGlo kept seeing shooting stars, but even though I was training my eyes on the stars forhe majority of the time, they always occured at the moments I was looking down. I really wanted to see one, so I ended up walking at least a mile holding on to a strap on Hasty's pack like a mama elephant's tail (it worked well once he started navigating rather than stumbling around looking up too). Unfortunately I never saw one.
Since it was pretty much a roadwalk all over again, but this time spiced up by bouts of nervousness and searches for trail markers, we stuck together and tried to talk, but we mostly just plodded on in exhausted silence. I was impressed that I never got very crabby or emotional, but that will probably hit today. This morning, I was already awake and had just gotten back in my sleeping bag from a trowel-stroll when Carmen said my name. "What?!"
I said in a very, very grumpy voice, poking my head out with a scowl on my face. Turns out she knew me all too well and had a camera ready just for that. Today might be a good day to hike alone.
Working backwards...
(518)
Yesterday we only hiked 10 miles in the morning and holed up in Hikertown for the heat of the day. It was a very unusual place, it was like a compound with all sorts of old movie sets, and inside each set-building was a bed. We napped. Rumor has it though that the owner is a porn movie producer, but I have my doubts, or at least I justified taking a shower there. It was nice to chill there for the day, we ate hiker food and watched movies.
(508) When we realized we wouldn't be making Hikertown by dark, we called it a night early and played Mad Libs. Hasty wrote a particularly funny one with truly excellent word choice from us girls (read: dirty and inappropriate). It had us all busted up, nearly peeing our pants, clutching our sides, and gasping for air. After reading a very suggestive love poem by Shakespeare on the inside of a Chocolove bar, I think we may start writing dirty poems if mad libs become boring. Anyway, thanks to one of my mad libs, we may have changed our name to Djibouti or Bust. Hasty had earlier asked me "What's the only other country besides Denmark that starts with a D?" and then wrote Jabouti at Hikertown.
574: The Andersons
Completely different from the Sauffleys, absolute party house. Everything and everyone was trashed, I had to take a two hour hammock nap to adjust to the atmosphere. I woke up to hearing DayGlo teaching the Michigan Boys a drinking game. It was impressive, since they seem straight out of a college party frat, but DayGlo kept up with them until two in the morning. I had no idea she had it in her, but she was hurting the next morning for sure. I personally went to bed quite tipsy at the ungodly late hour of 10, after three entire beers a swig of... something.
- Typoed on my iPhone
Follow concrete covered aqueduct
Follow powerlines
Follow aqueduct some more
The scenery was probably pretty boring, but wastching the moon rise and the silhouettes of Joshua trees was neat. DayGlo kept seeing shooting stars, but even though I was training my eyes on the stars forhe majority of the time, they always occured at the moments I was looking down. I really wanted to see one, so I ended up walking at least a mile holding on to a strap on Hasty's pack like a mama elephant's tail (it worked well once he started navigating rather than stumbling around looking up too). Unfortunately I never saw one.
Since it was pretty much a roadwalk all over again, but this time spiced up by bouts of nervousness and searches for trail markers, we stuck together and tried to talk, but we mostly just plodded on in exhausted silence. I was impressed that I never got very crabby or emotional, but that will probably hit today. This morning, I was already awake and had just gotten back in my sleeping bag from a trowel-stroll when Carmen said my name. "What?!"
I said in a very, very grumpy voice, poking my head out with a scowl on my face. Turns out she knew me all too well and had a camera ready just for that. Today might be a good day to hike alone.
Working backwards...
(518)
Yesterday we only hiked 10 miles in the morning and holed up in Hikertown for the heat of the day. It was a very unusual place, it was like a compound with all sorts of old movie sets, and inside each set-building was a bed. We napped. Rumor has it though that the owner is a porn movie producer, but I have my doubts, or at least I justified taking a shower there. It was nice to chill there for the day, we ate hiker food and watched movies.
(508) When we realized we wouldn't be making Hikertown by dark, we called it a night early and played Mad Libs. Hasty wrote a particularly funny one with truly excellent word choice from us girls (read: dirty and inappropriate). It had us all busted up, nearly peeing our pants, clutching our sides, and gasping for air. After reading a very suggestive love poem by Shakespeare on the inside of a Chocolove bar, I think we may start writing dirty poems if mad libs become boring. Anyway, thanks to one of my mad libs, we may have changed our name to Djibouti or Bust. Hasty had earlier asked me "What's the only other country besides Denmark that starts with a D?" and then wrote Jabouti at Hikertown.
574: The Andersons
Completely different from the Sauffleys, absolute party house. Everything and everyone was trashed, I had to take a two hour hammock nap to adjust to the atmosphere. I woke up to hearing DayGlo teaching the Michigan Boys a drinking game. It was impressive, since they seem straight out of a college party frat, but DayGlo kept up with them until two in the morning. I had no idea she had it in her, but she was hurting the next morning for sure. I personally went to bed quite tipsy at the ungodly late hour of 10, after three entire beers a swig of... something.
- Typoed on my iPhone
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Mile 454
Wow, it's been 150 miles since I last posted. Let's see, what has happened...
Wrightwood is definitely the most hiker-friendly town I've ever seen. We got picked up from Inspiration Point by a tattoo-covered skateboarder driving a super-nice Mercedes Benz. The hardwear store has a list of host families for hikers, and DayGlo called and made arrangements for us girls. As Carmen and I were waiting in the postoffice, THREE more Wrightwoodites gave us their numbers, beseeching us to come stay in their homes, eat their food, and drink their beer. Turns out that the folks we stayed with that first night were the wealthiest family in this already super-wealthy mountain suburb of Los Angeles. They had not one, but two climbing walls in their house, a kitchen I drooled over with two dishwashers, a detached three-car garage with office space above, a home theater, a driveway pull-around like a swanky hotel... the works. It was amazing.
The second night we stayed there, Hasty joined DayGlo, Carmen, and I at one of the families that had offered us up their home. It was very different from the first night, the family was in the process of going through all of their stuff since they were in the process of losing their home, but they still had the warmth and generosity to insist we stay and eat. Mike was a most interesting person, he was a veteran and told Hasty some crazy stories, including the forensic work he did once he got out of the forces. He also restored cars, and showed us some amazing photos of truly beautiful old cars he had worked on.
Right after we left Wrightwood, we went over Baden-Powell. It's named after the guy who started the Boy Scouts. I thought the Boy Scouts were a pretty good thing, with the whole exception of the don't-ask-don't-tell homosexuality hatred issues, but there's all that camping and knot-tying stuff. We ran into lots of Boy Scouts on the mountain though, and it was clear that it was very very poor leadership and bad judgment on part of all the adults involved. There were kids crying from the cold with no adults, trying to get down the snow as fast (and therefore, rather dangerously) as they could.
We followed the switchbacks until we hit solid snow, then tried to go straight up toward the summit. Hasty and Carmen started to truly shine, while DayGlo and I got more and more sketched out by the steeps. We made it up though. I was super duper uber happy I had my ice axe and microspikes. We followed the ridgeline to get down, and snow was expected that night, so we ended up camping 5 miles short of where we expected in order to stay sheltered and find a spot (I had lost my headlamp, amongst many other valuable items, and was becoming more of a liability with every missing piece of gear). Sure enough, we woke up to a few inches of snow, so we slept in hoping that dust-on-crust would soften to something a little better to walk on.
And... we hiked a lot. I'm trying to remember anything exciting or of note. I'm really settling into this hiking thing, so nothing seems to out of the ordinary to me.
We had to detour along roads to avoid a burned area. That ended up being really really enjoyable to me, since we hiked as a group and told stories and played games and laughed and talked the entire way, mostly with amazing views, the roadwalking wore on my psyche much less than I was expecting. The last 5 miles though were on an awful, noisy, ugly, headwind road, and I was ready to be on the trail by the time we hit the KOA.
I decided to ditch the polkadot spandex shorts and safari shirt because
a.) I have lost weight and my spandex is now saggy, with the crotch invariably below mid-thigh
b.) The spandex is cheap and now disintegrating and itches as it does so
c.) I started hiking in my camp/sleep clothes and discovered that I'm cooler in my baby blue wool shirt than beige nylon safari shirt, and BodyGlide solves all my chafe problems with just a cool, breezy skirt.
So I've also ditched the name Polkadot. Never fear, though, I instantly earned another one by the time I got dressed in Agua Dulce. I was doing my usual indecisive thing, trying to figure out what of Donna Saufley's loaner clothes to wear after I took a shower. At one point, Carmen looked over and I was debating between five choices. On the roadwalk, we talked about how the Valentine's sometimes used "thump thump" as the sound effect for indeciveness: like a squirrel that can't make up it's mind when facing a speeding car barrelling down the road. "Go right! No left! No right!" Thump thump.
We are now at the Saufleys in Agua Dulce, and Hiker Heaven has truly earned its name. For a donation only basis, Donna washes all our clothes, feeds us often, lets us chill out in her guest trailer, ride her bikes, and gives us military tents and cots to sleep in. DayGlo met up with her parents here, so we've just been chilling out, waiting to keep Mexico or Bust together.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
