Day 14: (04/18): to 170.9 :: 13.5 miles

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We woke up to what we thought was fog, except that it never lifted. We walked for hours up the ridge past views point from which we could see nothing through the cold wet fog. The trail today was all up on top of ridges, where there is no water, so we took two different side trails for water. The first was was called Tunnel Springs. Water from a pipe was tapped into the spring and flowed into a trough. The water flowing out of the pipe was clean and nice, but the standing water was growing algae and had a dead bunny in it! The water from the pipe was coming out so close to the water surface that we had to submerge our bottles in the nasty water to in order to be able to collect the clean water. We lingered there having our breakfast hoping the fog would clear, but it did not.

Later in the afternoon we walked a mile downhill from the PCT on a side trail to Cedar Spring. We went down enough that we got out of what we had thought was fog and realized that we had been in a cloud cap. We enjoyed glorious warm sun and huge old cedar trees at the spring. This spring was in a more natural form, a creek flowing out of the mountain, but there was also a pipe and trough that we didn’t need to use. We had lunch at the spring and got to see for the first time the views of the desert and the city of Palm Springs below. We’d been walking through a burn zone up on the ridge, but the area around the spring had been spared.

We had hoped that getting out into the sun meant that the cloud was breaking but we went back up into it and remained there until sunset. It was depressing and tiring and at times I felt I could barely put one foot in front of the other! The burned up tree skeletons were saturated from the clouds and dripped on us and the wind howled at times and it was very cold. We almost gave up and tried to find someplace to set up the tent in an especially depressing field of fog, but decided to push on. We hadn’t gone more than 10 minutes from the depressing field and we finally emerged from the cloud to glorious views of Mt San Jacinto!

We hiked just a little further to camp, passing one scary section of snow on the way. We camped in a little patch of dwarf trees, protected from the wind. Someone else was already there when we arrived and really creeped us out. Their camp looked like an abandoned homeless camp, with a bunch of stuff that resembled garbage strewn everywhere.  It took us awhile to realize there was a person in there, laying on the ground, wrapped in some sort of bright orange plastic sheeting, it looked like a body! There was no where else to go and it was getting dark, so we had no choice but to stay!


Tunnel Spring, AKA dead bunny spring

Walking in the fog 

Neat to see a big yucca high in the mountains, desert meets alpine

Mountain yucca

The view clears on the way to the spring 

Big cedars at Cedar Spring 

Pipe and trough 

Joyful that we are finally leaving the cloud in the evening 

Scary snow slope 

Steep drop below the snow 

Apache Peak 

Neat watching the clouds blowing over the ridge 

San Jacinto and the fog bank

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