Longest day so far

Thursday, April 27, 2023

Just ate an entire bag of chocolate chip cookies. Hiker hunger already?

I got packed up and ate the rest of my bbq sandwich for breakfast in my motel room in Mt Laguna and got on trail around 9am. I figured the bubble I was with the day before had started way earlier and wondered if I would see them again.

After a couple of miles, I ran into Christina and Nick (sister and brother from Southern California) admiring a view. I joined them and looked out and saw a snow capped mountain. Holy shit, it was San Jacinto! The first 10,000 foot peak of the trail that we are due to traverse in a couple of weeks. I couldn’t believe we could see it this early.

This would be one of many vast desert views we would have today.

We hiked 11 miles to Pioneer Mail Picnic Area, which was our first water source. At first, it was…not ideal.

Then we read the sign that said to use the top faucet and it ran clear. We still filtered it of course.

We also passed the 50 mile mark! First big milestone and definitely the longest I’ve ever hiked.

We ate lunch and the bubble from yesterday slowly trickled in behind us. They had stayed up too late partying last night and got an even later start than me! I also discovered that peanut butter and jelly tortillas are DELICIOUS.

The spacing of water sources and campsites in this section is not great, so we had to have either a big day today or tomorrow to get to Julian on Saturday. We chose to push today, though my blister on my heel definitely isn’t happy and I had to do more surgery tonight. I’m going to let it air out overnight and see if it heals a bit.

We have another 13 or so tomorrow to get us close to Scissors Crossing, where we make our first hitch into Julian on Saturday morning.