Day 31: A Month Of Homelessness And Joblessness
May 11, 2017
Mile 403.13 Three Points Trailhead to 427.00 Campsite
It’s my one monthiversary or my one month trailiversary or whatever. Regardless, it’s been now one whole month on the trail and it really boggles my mind how much has gone on in that time. It really doesn’t seem all that long ago that I started on the Mexican border, yet I’ve been hiking for over four weeks now. The trail is has slowly become the norm for me with towns almost being like mini vacations. My tent has become more like home as well. It my little place of consistency and “cleanliness” that is a constant on my day to day travels even though the location changes. I feel weird walking without my pack on anymore too. It’s almost become an extension of my body as have my trekking poles.
While I was hopeful that today would be a celebration of a month on the trail it wound up being a desperate march to find a place to camp. I hiked most of the afternoon with Glow Worm and we arrived at a fire station that had bathrooms and water at around 1:00 and we stopped for lunch. We spent almost two hours there catching up with some old friends that we hadn’t seen in a couple weeks and waited for Dr. McDirty and Cougar who had camped a mile behind us the night before. The plan was to camp at a campsite that was on the Guthook App five miles away, bur when we got there, there were only a few very uneven and small camp spots so we opted to move on a mile down the trail to the next water source which was barely a trickle. There were some spots for tents next to a dirt road there, but it also did not look appealing so we decided after some deliberating to hike another mile to the next water source in hopes of finding a place to sleep. Once again, we were thwarted. The trail was on a ridge and there was thick vegetation everywhere making laying down on anything bit the trail impossible so once again we moved on. We knew that there was an actual campsite six miles away, but we had already down over 20 by this point. The further we hiked the less likely it seemed that we would ever find anything before that campsite six miles away, but soon we could see in the saddle of the mountain a person moving next to an orange tent. When we arrived a few minutes later around 7:30 we were greeted by loads of flat ground and several tents. For dinner I pounded two deluxe ramen dinners with two packets of tuna and a healthy squirt of mayo totally something along the lines if 1500 calories. I’ve never been so happy to be in camp in my life. The upside to all this is we now only have 17 miles instead of the planned 20 to the KOA in Acton that has a pool and a convenience store. And after that only ten miles into Hiker Heaven!
Letting the people know.
