Day 2: (03/31) 15.4-27.7

We slept poorly. It will take a while to get used to sleeping in the tent again. We bought some nice new ThermaRest mattresses that weigh less than a pound with an R value of more than 6, which is really warm and really light! They come with a bag that looks like a large stuff sack, but it attaches to the air valve and you use it to fill the mattress by expanding it and quickly closing the air into in and then pushing it into the mattress. The bag must be filled at minimum 8 times and often more depending on how much air you manage to lock into each bag. It’s a little tedious inside the small space of our tent. We may get really sick of it, but they sure are comfortable mattresses! We were also reminded last night, as we were attempting to eat dinner inside, that our tent is incredibly small and is best reserved for sleeping only, in order to maintain our sanity. Many solo hikers use 2 person tents such as the one we have and many couples use 3 person tents for this reason, because the extra space really increases your quality of life! We are determined to make due in order to keep our packs light.

The base weight of your back is a big deal in the through hiking world. Getting it under 15 pounds is considered ideal. The base weight refers to the weight of the pack and all your gear that you’re not wearing, but it excludes the food and water weight. Jeff’s base weight is about 15 pounds and mine is about 12. Jeff carries our tent and our 2 person sleeping bag and water filter plus the water. I carry all of the food, unless it will be a really long stretch without resupply, in which case Jeff helps. His weight tends to vary throughout the day depending on access to water and mine slowly goes down as we eat. For our leg, which is 4 days, both of our packs were under 25 pounds including the food and a few liters of water. That is light enough that they did not cause us any discomfort!

Our morning hiking took us up and out of the creek to Lake Morena, the first resupply location at mile 20 of the trail, and the highest elevation reservoir in San Diego County. Lake Morena is also a county park with large campground, but it was closed down and deserted due to corona virus. There were still maintenance workers around though and we were able to get water from the faucets and dump our trash. We were very grateful for the dumpsters since I was carrying all of the crap we found dumped on the trail, and it was heavy. It was all contained in a heavy duty shopping bag from Target and contained a vinyl rain poncho, a whole roll of duck tape, a full squeeze bottle of mayo, a full jar of peanut butter, lots or other uneaten food and tons of wrappers for freeze dried food. There was so much that we wondered how any one could possibly have been carrying so much so early in the trip. Why bring mayo and duck tape? How could you eat so many freeze dried meals in only one day? And why dump it all? We took all of the uneaten food (minus the mayo and hydrogenated poison peanut butter) with us because I couldn’t bear to throw it away. I’m not sure what I will do with it. In normal seasons hikers have access to “hiker boxes,” at various stopping locations, where you can leave food or gear you don’t want or need and other who want or need it can take it, but I don’t think there will be many or those around this year! I left the mayo and peanut butter displayed near the dumpster in hopes that someone would see it and want it. They were both unopened. Of the the remaining food the only thing we ate were some Clif shots, which are just pouches of sugar syrup for instant energy. There were also many packages of Gu, which is the same thing, but just a different brand. They are often used in endurance activities like cycling races and marathons or half marathons. I have never had one, and wasn’t willing to try the Gu since they are GMO, but the Clif brand is non GMO and had caffeine, so we gave it a try this morning. Holy smokes was is ever disgusting!!! It tasted like a really thick coffee flavored fake maple syrup. It was so awful I never want another, so sickly sweet. Some of the Gu packs had crazy flavors like birthday cake!! I can’t even imagine how gross that would be! Why eat straight sugar anyway when you can have something more nutritious??

Many hikers carry only 1 day of food and make it the full 20 miles to Lake Morena on the first day and acquire more food down the road at a place called the Malt Shop. We are getting our resupplies from family only and probably wouldn’t want anything from the malt shop anyway, so we continued on fully self sustained with our 4 days of food in my pack. At this point we passed the other hikers that we had camped near and never saw any of them again. They had stopped for malt shop food and rest and one of them had found a place to use a power outlet for recharging.

We thought the afternoon would be a boring hike parallel to a road, but it ended up being on a ridge above the road and was really scenic. In the late afternoon we walked through another closed campground that was also closed. This one was forest service run and called Boulder Oaks. We were still able to get water from the taps which is nice, because we don’t have to take the time to filter it like we would with the natural sources like rivers/streams/creeks and lakes. The campground is right along the big highway 8, so shortly after the trail took us through and underpass and we hiked a few more uphill miles to a secluded camp above the highway. Many campsites are right on the trail but we prefer to look for the ones that are a little away from it when possible. We also had a surprisingly lovely view of the freeway. In times of corona virus the traffic is low, so it wasn’t noisy, but we did hear border patrol helicopters all through the night again.

We slowed our progress a bit, making it only 12.4 leisurely miles today, to ensure we don’t make it to our pick up point too quickly. We have been used to doing most of our backpacking in the fall in past years due to the busyness of our summer jobs in Alaska’s. We have never had much day light at these times or the year and always found it hard to cover more than 12 miles a day. Now it is easy and we must make a conscious effort to take lots or breaks if we want to do less than 15 miles! Eventually we’ll be doing 20 mile days! I never would have thought we would be capable of that, but the days will keep getting longer.