Day 16: Wind Blows

April 26, 2017
1.3 miles from PCT 185.70 on San Jacinto Summit Trail to Mile 201.69 Campsite 

Last night was fucking terrible and tonight is shaping up to be the same. We had gale force winds plow through our campsite at just under 10,000 feet. They eventually calmed down but it was harrowing for a while. Glow Worm’s tent collapsed at one point. We descended almost 4000 feet as well as going down Fuller Ridge which was still very snowy. We used our microspikes and got through it. The rest of the day was all downhill. It wasn’t exceptionally hard just tiresome and long. We were all a bit cranky from the night before as well as hiker hunger kicking in. I’m going through my snacks faster than I anticipated. We got to where we planned to camp around 6:00 but the site was mostly full so we went a half mile down the trail and set up there. The wind immediately started picking up again as it had all afternoon and the campsite had no shelter whatsoever. It took forever to stake down my tent and it collapsed on me a few time. Making dinner consisted on sitting between two bushes with Glow Worm and trying to shield our stoves with our hands as I’m writing now at 8:15 pm the wind is still fucking nuts. It has to be at least 50 mph gusts. Every time the wind increases I just grit my teeth and hope my tent holds. Update @ 10:54 pm – insanely windy. Already had two stakes pull up on either vestibule. The fabric sounds like it’s going to be ripped apart. McDirty and Cougar already packed up and went further down the trail in search of shelter. It’s also too damn hot for this 20 degree quilt. I would be shirtless but there’s so much grit and sand on my sleeping pad that it just makes it worse. Everything on this tent is loose. There’s not a single guy wire that’s properly taught. This is living hell. I have no idea how I’m going to get any sleep.

Attempting to not slide down the slippery slope.

Update

So apparently posting that you’re in a tent with 40 mph with no explanation causes a bit of an uproar so even though I vowed to never blog about my trip, this might be a bit warranted. So yesterday we woke up at our campsite just under 10,000 feet after a night of pretty high winds. Enough wind to make sleeping difficult, but nothing too crazy. We then proceed to make our way down the ridge which wasn’t hard, just incredibly tiring since it was a constant 6000 foot decent to our planned campsite. Unfortunately everyone else had the same idea and there was no room left in the inn so we hiked an additional half mile to the next site. The wind had been strong afternoon, but we thought it would die down eventually. Yeah…it didn’t. We managed get our tents up, but we had to cook our dinner gargoyled in the dirt between a couple bushes to block our stoves from the wind. After eating and going to bed the wind picked up even more and started gusting at Ludicrous Speed. A couple people decided to bail on the site and try to find shelter elsewhere, although me and someone else in our group stayed and hoped to brave it. After a few hours of the tent making a sound akin to hundreds of obnoxious 4 year olds shaking trash bags in your ear and makes tent stakes pulling out every 30 minutes I opted to move on to the next campsite 3 miles away in hopes of a more restful spot. So here I am, midnight in the middle of the desert with stupid amounts of wind tossing me around like an abused baby doll in a daycare and finally get to this campsite only to find that it wasn’t any less windy than the previous. Meanwhile, I can see multiple pairs of eyes glowing in the light of my headlamp. They were definitely the eyes of a cougar, or a bobcat, or a liger, or April the Giraffe seeking revenge for months of media abuse. In all honesty it was probably a herd of mangy cats,m that are avoiding the foul stench that is their litter box, but the other options sound cooler. Anyway, I hiked another mile further down, this time around 2:30 am and came to another campsite with multiple people camping. Several of which I recognized from some who bailed earlier in the evening in search of more shelter. If the wind of this campsite was on a scale of Lance Stephenson to Hurricane Katrina then it would have been closer to Lance Stephenson blowing on the metaphoric ear that is the desert floor. Instead of setting up my tent and going through that rigamarole again I just cowboy camped off to the side in what I thought was a campsite, but turned out to be a gravel parking lot. The next morning I woke up to a familiar South African voice and looked up to see the rest of my group that I’ve been hiking with (fun fact, not all South Africans look like Morgan Freeman). Turns out that almost everyone bailed from the various campsites along the ridge and had trickled into the spot on the desert floor throughout the night. On the hike out we crossed paths with a local and asked him if these winds were normal. “It’s always windy here, but last night was about as bad as I’ve seen it. I could feel the house shake,” he said. “Yeah, no shit,” I thought. So yeah, as I write this as I eat a banana I found in a styrofoam box under the interstate, I have successfully concluded that I’m not dead. So yeah…yay. 

Said banana.