Day 40: memorial day desert walk

Monday 5/28/12
Miles 518-541 (23 miles)
Elevation 4,738'

Remember all those photos from yesterday that I took from the top of the hill, of the valley? Well that's pretty much what I walked across today. The desert is so lovely. I was pretty stoked, since my whole goal the last week was to figure out where I was going to be on memorial day weekend so as to avoid all the madness. The desert was the perfect place. I only saw one other hiker all day.

Afte leaving Hikertown I basically walked through a bunch of ranches. The whole day was kind of a surreal experience, and it definitely started out as such. When I left Hikertown in the morning there was no one around. I thought that was odd, since there were so many people the nigh before. So my day started off in solitude and that's pretty much how it was.

I passed by a real funny looking house. I took pics of it, the house looked like an igloo. There's actually quite a few ranches out here, surprisingly enough.

For about 15 miles the trail went on or next to the LA aqueduct. The first part was wide open like a river, I have a pic of that. Afterwards the aqueduct was either in a pipe or it was paved over so it looked like a road. I have a pic of that too. It's so ironic how there's nowhere to get water for a 17 mile stretch even though we're walking on top of a crapload of water. Lol.

There were tons of Joshua trees about. That made me happy. I love Joshua trees.

I took a 3 hour break in the middle of the day. I like doing that on hot days, because I think it's quite silly to walk during the hottest part of the day. A group of dirt bikers passed by me. One of the guys asked me for water because he thought his bike was overheating. I was somewhat reluctant to give him my water since I was still 5 miles out from the next water source and it was hot. He said he lived about a mile away and he'll bring me more water. So I figured all was well. True to his word, he found me up the trail a bit later and brought me a gallon of water. Awesome!!! Unintentional trail Angels are the best :)

I ran into a guy Chris up the trail later, the only hiker i saw all day. we both ended up at the water source around sunset. At that point I did about 17 miles. Man, it was a tough day. I don't know why but I'm unusually tired. I hope im not getting sick or something. :(

I made some dinner and then kept going because I wanted to put more miles in. There was a stream about 6 miles away so that's where I headed. To get there you walk though a windfarm. And boy it was WINDY!! Plus it was night so it was not exactly the most pleasant night hike but hey at least it wasn't hot :)

I finally made camp around 11:30. Boy was I tired!! There were a lot of other hikers asleep around the stream.

The whole time I was night hiking I was trying to figure out my situation this next week, I made a slight logistical error. I sent my bounce box to the post office at Onyx, which isn't open on Saturdays. Oops. So, today is Monday and I won't get into Mojave til tomorrow. Onyx is about 90 miles away. Basically that means either I do 30 mile days and try to get to onyx before 4pm on Friday, or I have to delay myself 2 days and get there Monday. Both were solutions I wasn't stoked about, but I decided on the latter. I'm not going to kill myself over 2 packages. Lol. Who knows maybe this is the Universe's way of telling me I need to slow down a bit. :). I'm still trying to bust some big mile days because the majority of the herd of hikers is just behind me. I hope my 2 day delay won't put me smack dab in the middle of that insanity. Ah well.