Each step, though
seemingly insignificant, always put me one step closer towards a short-term
goal, such as a road junction, a ridge, a water source, or a longer-term goal,
such as making twenty miles for the day, or one step closer to Canada. I
never downplayed or belittled the step I just took, whether it was a few inches
or a few feet; in the overall scheme of things, it was equally as important as
every other step, and taken together, they would propel me 2,665 miles to the Canadian
border. I could not have done it without the help of every step.
At mile 127, I began
seeing small, hand-painted signs that read “trail magic, water, shade, rest,
food, etc.” I followed the signs up a hill and across a dirt road to a
twenty-foot-tall silver water tank that stood beside an abandoned forklift and
other construction equipment. I continued to follow the trail as it moved
towards what looked to be a house. I say, what looked like a house,
because there was so much discarded building material, construction machinery,
and cast-off vehicles and trailers about, that the outline of the house wasn’t
readily apparent until I was close upon it. It was unreal to see a
building/house in this barren desert. There were no other structures
around, only this building. It was so out of place that it seemed
surreal. But it wasn’t. It was Mike Herrera’s place, long known to PCT
hikers simply as Mike’s Place. I wasn’t expecting to see this bit of
civilization, so it was a fantastic surprise to come upon it.
Mike is a trail angel,
one who gives of his time and resources to help the PCT hiker, without
expecting anything in return. He does it just because he can. He,
like so many other trail angels have found the secret to incredible joy, that
“it’s better to give than to receive.”
Mike’s place is miles
from civilization; in fact, I don’t know that Mike even lives here, as there is
a caretaker living in the home. The home is about the size of a
double-wide trailer, with a porch that offers shade from the brutal heat of the
sun, while off to one side is an oversized garage crammed full of stuff.
Several portable shelters covered with blue tarps are strung together and
serve as a makeshift kitchen, under which the day’s meal is prepared.
As I descended the trail
leading to the home and makeshift kitchen, dust swirled around my feet and
settled into the tiny crevasses and folds of my trail shoes, penetrating my
socks and adding to the grime of my feet. I approached the kitchen area
under the blue tarps and greeted several men lounging in chairs in the shade of
the tarps. I wasn’t sure what to expect from these fellows, as they
didn’t look like hikers, but almost in unison, they greeted me and welcomed me
to Mike’s Place. They told me to set my pack down and grab a bite to eat
from the fixings still on the table. The fixings were chicken tacos and
potato salad.
Judging from the number
of hikers lounging in the shade of the porch, I was the last one to come in for
the day, as the fixings for making chicken tacos were slim to none.
Nevertheless, I’m able to scrape together enough scraps to make two
tacos, and I piled my paper plate high with potato salad.
I found an empty chair
on the porch next to a ten-gallon Gott water cooler full of pink lemonade and
settled in. While standing in the kitchen under the blue tarps, I felt
that all eyes were upon me as I was the new guy in camp, but now settled in my
camp chair away from the main body of hikers, I was feeling secluded and
anonymous and I had a chance to survey my surroundings.
To my right stood the
large four-car garage filled with tools, stereo equipment, vinyl records, and
other cast-off consumer goods, while to the side of the garage was a water tap
providing potable water for the hikers. In front of me was the makeshift
kitchen with six large barbeque grills, and to my left were several small
buildings and what appeared to be abandoned house trailers and recreational
vehicles.
I struck up a
conversation with a hiker who had come in before me and asked him if he knew
what the deal was with this place. He said it was just a place for weary
and/or injured hikers to take some R&R. He said hikers were welcome
to stay a day or two and they had access to showers and toilets, a meal or two,
and were permitted to overnight in the house trailer and recreational vehicle.
Donations were optional, but twenty dollars was the usual contribution
one made to the trail angels.
It felt good to sit in a
chair and relax for a bit. I took my shoes and socks off to let my feet
air out, all the while consuming glass after glass of cold pink lemonade.
Several hikers were tending to their feet, bathing them in Epsom Salts or
popping blisters and applying new bandages.
Beaker, a retired
schoolteacher from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, was showing the younger hikers how to
lance a blister and swab the open wound with an iodine antiseptic. Iodine
with alcohol stings like you wouldn’t believe. Beaker told his patients
to grit their teeth and hold onto their ears as he poured the yellowish orange
liquid into the open sore, and scream they did, but he assured them that the
blister would heal much quicker by doing so. Some of the hikers I knew by
their trail names and others only by their face. New hikers I met were
Beaker and his wife, Dragon Fly, and Doodles and Clair, two young girls hiking
together.
After a two-hour break,
it was time to get back on the trail. A few hikers were staying the
night, and several had already left, but at 2:00 p.m., I shouldered my pack and
headed back out into the desert sun. My belly was full with real food,
and I’d resupplied with four liters of water.
The trail - dry and
dusty and void of any real green vegetation, began a gradual ascent up the east
side of Bucksnort Mountain. Not far from Mike’s Place, I passed Maggie
from Oakland, California, sitting in the trail eating snacks. She missed
out on chicken tacos at Mike’s Place as she arrived after all the food was
gone, but she did resupply with water. I guessed Maggie to be in her
mid-twenties, and as we both walked at about the same speed – two miles per
hour, we passed each other frequently on the trail. Sadly, I never got to
know her or hear her story. She reminded me of a schoolteacher from the
television show Little House on the Prairie.
As the trail continued
to climb in a northwesterly direction, I had a grand view of the Anza-Borrego
Desert several thousand feet below me. As hot as it was walking in the
shadeless terrain of boulder-strewn Bucksnort Mountain, I was grateful the
trail builders didn’t have to route the trail down through the desert, for in
this part of Southern California, much of the land is in private hands.
In other areas where the trail has passed through lands in private
ownership, the trail builders have had to route the trail in a haphazard manner
to avoid conflict with the landowners, often resulting in a trail that is
circuitous just to get from point A to point B.
To my left appeared the
community of Anza. From my vantage point high on the mountain, the
community appeared to be nothing more than a grid of dirt roads graded into the
desert soil, but the guidebook asserts that phones, laundry, groceries, hot
showers, and campsites are available at reasonable costs.
After leaving Mike’s
Place, there were two more water sources before reaching Highway 74, also known
as the Pines-to-Palms Highway, which lead to the Paradise Café. The first
was at Tule Springs, and the second was a water cache maintained by a trail
angel. One mile east of the trail junction with Highway 74 was the
all-important Paradise Cafe where water, chocolate milk shakes, and pie were
available. Between Mike’s Place and the café, it was twenty-six miles of
desert, and without the water cache maintained by the trail angels, it would be
difficult to cross this stretch of barren, mountainous terrain.
At the water cache
maintained by trail angels, I met hikers Beaker and Dragon Fly, educators from
Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and a few others who were resting in the shade of
chaparral bushes. When I meet new hikers, I ask if they have a trail
name, and if they say yes, I write it down in a small notebook; that way, I can
address them by their name and say, “Hi” when I meet them again. As I
became acquainted with hikers and their idiosyncrasies, I realized that the trail
name attached to a hiker, more often than not, revealed a quirky characteristic
about the hiker, while others simply had hilarious names in keeping with the
lightheartedness of the trail experience, i.e., Leftovers, Puddle Jumper, and
Track Meat.
I saw a middle-age
female hiker resting under a bush and inquired about her trail name. She
didn’t answer me directly, but from her speech, I detected what I perceived to
be a European accent – German maybe. She said,
“First tell me something
about you.”
I told her my trail name
was Rabbit Stick and I was from Salt Lake City.
“Oh,” she said, “Are you
a Mormon?”
I answered in the
affirmative. She said,
“How many wives do you
have?”
It’s not the first time
I’ve been asked this question, and generally it never bothers me, but the tone
of her voice and the manner in which she asked the question really irritated
me. I thought she was either incredibly stupid, not knowing that polygamy
hasn’t been a part of Mormon culture for over 130 years, or she was just trying
to make fun of me. Without answering her, I turned and walked away.
She was a slow hiker, and I never saw her again.
Table Mountain is the
name of the desert terrain I’m currently walking over. It was hot and dry
and the trail was dusty and rocky as it followed the ridgeline along the
mountain. Heat waves shimmered on the desert floor below, and though not seen,
the Salton Sea, that inland sea with salinity greater than the Pacific Ocean
and formed by a flooding Colorado River in 1905, lay just over the horizon to
the east.
Cacti, Manzanita, and
chaparral shrubbery was the predominate vegetation along the desert corridor.
The area was so devoid of moisture that even lizards would sit on rocks with
their mouths open revealing their pink tongues and mouths as though they were
soliciting water from passing hikers. Horned toads, rattlesnakes,
lizards, and roadrunners make up a short list of wildlife that scurried back
and forth across the trail.
I was on a mission now,
to make it to Highway 74 before 7:00 p.m. One mile west from the point
where the PCT intersected the Pines-to-Palms Highway was the Paradise Café,
which meant chocolate milk shakes and pie, two of my favorite comfort foods.
I tried to keep a steady pace as I moved along the trail, but the heat
had a debilitating effect on my body, causing it to move slowly in order to
conserve energy. In the course of several miles, I passed six hikers
sprawled on the ground, laying on their Z-pads in the shade of trees, rock
ledges or chaparral bushes, whatever they could find, which wasn’t much.
Eventually, I too went down and crawled under a bush to get some needed
rest and relief from the blazing sun.
As the trail crested
over the last ridge in the distance far below, I spotted the sinuous ribbon of
paved asphalt of Highway 74. I picked up the pace a little bit, and swung
my trekking poles in cadence with my moving feet and counted one, two, three,
four, five, six, seven, eight, and then repeated the sequence. I did this
over and over until I was off the mountain. Not far from the road, I saw
a blue pop-up tent with people milling around it which could only mean one thing
– trail magic and cold sodas.
The trail angel under
the blue tent was Dr. Sole, a self-taught foot specialist who provided
first-aid assistance to trail hikers with feet problems, and he had no shortage
of patients this evening looking for help. Dr. Sole, whose real name is
Hector, is a retired long-haul truck driver. Several years ago, his son
hiked the PCT and Hector went to visit him. In camp he noted the
appalling condition of the hikers' feet, and had empathy for them; he resolved
to learn what he could about the proper care of feet, that he might provide a
measure of relief to them.
I moved past the pop-up
tent to the edge of the open field and set my backpack down. From habit,
when encountering a new and unfamiliar situation, I quietly moved to the edge
of the crowd, trying to be as unobtrusive as possible, to allow time for
observation and to make an assessment of the situation unfolding before me
before joining in the conversations. I observed the hikers, about a dozen
of them as they mingled among themselves, and listened in on conversations,
trying to glean as much information as possible about the protocols of this
particular trail angel site.
I wanted to know if
there was food and drink available, if the small water cache I spotted beside
the wire fence separating the highway from Dr. Sole’s tent was for the hikers,
and most importantly, might there be transportation to the Paradise Café a mile
down the road; also, was it permissible to overnight in the open grasslands
surrounding Dr. Sole’s tent?
A number of hikers were
gearing up to cross the highway and head up into the mountains. They had
been here for several hours and wanted to make some miles before dark. I
saw other hikers talking with the driver of a midsize van making arrangements
to be driven to the Paradise Café. As they were getting into the car, and
without asking for permission, I squeezed in with them. I needed that
chocolate milk shake.
This large metal tank is the first thing one sees when coming into Mike's place
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