Almost there!

30/5/2015

We are at mile 566 already, and hiking for more than a month already. Keeping trekking of this blog is pretty difficult we noticed, since we just want to eat and sleep after a full day off hiking. But since I am now on a comfortable soft bed, I ll try to give a short summary of the last week(s)...

So... Bubble bath jacuzzi was the last thing I remember talking about. That was cajon pass. We had to wait two days for the heavy snowstorm to calm down. We never expected that to happen here in sunny California. So we did wait. And on the last afternoon, we happily hiked out again. Confident about our hiking skills, we found a path that seemed to be a short cut. After 1,5 hour of bush whacking, we ended up 5 min walk from the motel where we stayed, eating junk food at McDonald's. We got to do 1,2 miles that evening. So no more short cuts for us. ( a bit later we learned that we only had been 10 meters away from the trail, at the point where we decided to go back...)

The day after that we walked to Wrightwood. Our friends tutone and methinks had enough resupply for the coming days, so Felix and I walked a bit further to be able to get to wrightwood in one day, for our resupply. It was a long day ( about 24 miles) and during the last hours I was feeling worse with every step. At that point we were in the snow at relatively high elevation, so I thought about altitude sickness. But as we were decending via the acorn path, I wasn't feeling better.

And there they were again,...trailangels. As we were walking in town, a married couple called Corrine and Tom, stopped by with their car and asked us if they could give us a ride. We jumped in and explained that we were heading out for a hostel and pizza. Instead of driving us there, they offered us a place to stay. And we were very happy with that. Especially when we saw the wonderful cosy room with shower. After cleaning up they called us and served us pizza and wine. I still wasn't feeling too well, so Felix was again a pizza king, but the circumstances already made me feel way better. The next morning I felt so bad, that I didn't want to hike. It felt a bit uncomfortable to ask, but Tom and Corrine let us stay another night. They made lunch for us, took us out for dinner to a authentic Mexican restaurant and told us about their two sons, fresh born grandson, rescued dog called Summit, work, wildfires, climbing mount Whitney....It was fun and wonderful. So incredible friendly people.

The day after we summited snowy mount. Balden powel (9399 something feet). I was able to get 1 mile per hour (even after Felix took my water) and we hit the record of a 10mile day ;p, but it was worth it. The view was stunning. And we were happy to not been hiking in the snow storm. You could see the power of the storm leftovers everywhere. And with the illness; after we were in Acton, we heard about a virus that got around and slowed a big group of hikers down at wrightwood. Some even were picked up by a helicopter because they couldn't stop throwing up... :s I might possibly been effected a bit.

After this, winter ended and summer started while we were descending back into the heat of the desert. We were lucky with relatively mild temperatures till now though, but we are probably going to be grilled tomorrow. We are in Mojave right now ( seen "wild"? Sherryll strayed started her journey here). Tomorrow morning we will through our heavy monster packs (7 days of food, 7 liters of water) on our backs, and we will start our last heavy and hard goodbye hike through the Californian desert. We will be rewarded with one of the most beautiful places on earth: the Sierra Nevada. Only one more week, only 135 miles to go.

See you in Kennedy meadows!!

ps: I need to go to sleep, but I will put some pics of a weird guy we met on a campground while searching for water. He was hunting rattle snakes and showed us one. He was very friendly and helped us out, but also a bit freaky. But we saw a rattle snake now and even touched one ;).