When I left Toasty and Dumptruck at the Tehachapi trailhead, I was mentally prepared to be hiking alone. What I had not entirely prepared for was not seeing a single other person for days on end. This lent itself well to fully immersing myself into imagining I was the sole survivor of some dystopian apocalyptic future, which may sound terrifying but is actually really fun, if you just really lean into envisioning yourself as Tom Hardy in Mad Max. Even though, let’s be honest, I’m more of a Nicholas Hoult. Just with fewer face lumps.

Water has proven to be a true challenge, with enormous stretches between sources, and unrelenting blistering sun in the interim with absolutely zero tree cover. This past week every day was between 85-95 degrees with minimal wind and no clouds. Most other hikers (from what I’ve heard) will hike this section in the wee morning hours before the sun comes up, take a break under a bush during the day, then hike again starting at dusk until late at night. Unfortunately, in some past life I must have pricked my finger on a spinning wheel because unless I get 9 unbroken hours of sleep in full darkness, my entire cognitive system goes absolutely haywire and all of my mental faculties break into 1,000 pieces. So my choices are either to hike during the day or quit. So I hike in the day, and get to cosplay being a plate of nachos forgotten in a broiler.

On the second day I checked FarOut (my trail navigation app), and I was informed that I had water at 4 miles, 10 miles, and then 30 miles. When I arrived at the 4 mile source, it was little more than a half-inch wide trickle of water coming through a sandy rut between the slopes of a barren mountain. I sat down next to the tiny stream and set to the task of meditatively filling my water bottles. I sat there for so long, and with such stillness, that a multitude of lizards emerged and trotted lazily up to within inches me. They must have seen me as little more than a small, brightly colored boulder. When I finally stood up, all of the lizards were sent into an utter panic, zigzagging around, likely shrieking “the sky is falling!!” in lizardish while they collided into each other in their haste to get away from the boulder that moved.

I drank a full liter and filled 2 more, plenty to get me to the next source in 6 miles. The next source was marked as a spigot on a concrete box that was an offshoot of an underground aqueduct. The last comment from another hiker on FarOut was from 10/16 (this day for me was 10/18) and said that the spigot was on, functional, and excellent. So I hiked on, through an endless landscape of gigantic white windmills turning lazily in the slow, intermittent breeze. About a quarter of a mile from my destination I checked FarOut again. It had 2 updated comments from the previous day, that hadn’t loaded when last I’d checked.

I stopped in my tracks, the dust I’d been kicking up slowly settling down onto my feet. I blinked at the comments through my sunglasses, and then instinctively shook my phone like a Magic 8 Ball, hoping to produce a new result. Unsurprisingly, this did nothing. I felt slow tendrils of panic begin to creep up. I had about half a liter of water left, and the upcoming 20 miles were along the underground LA Aqueduct, described thusly on FarOut:

“One of the more notorious sections of the Pacific Crest Trail, for about twenty miles the trail walks along the flat, hot, dry corner of the Mojave Desert along the Los Angeles Aqueduct. Hikers often walk this section at night, or in the early morning, to avoid the blistering heat. The walking isn’t difficult for the most part (though the concrete may wear on your joints) — the trail is flat and relatively easy to follow. The challenge comes from the monotony and heat. If you can ignore those two things, however, this stretch of trail can be very interesting.”

I had two choices: go the last quarter mile to the spigot to see if it had been turned back on, or just turn around and head back to the previous source. I went on. I crossed a bridge over a creek so dry that the only evidence of water remaining was the 8-inch deep fissures scarring the barren sand. I located the spigot, turned the handle in vain and waited.

An echoing gurgle sounded somewhere deep below, and like out of a dang movie, a single drop of water formed on the rim of the spigot, dangled for a moment, then plopped down to the sand where it immediately fizzled away in evaporation.

“Well, fudge,” I said to no one in particular.

I picked up one of the very dusty, long-abandoned plastic jugs sitting nearby and shook it. Thick globs of some kind of brown mucus-y algae drifted horrifyingly around inside of the liquid that had maybe, once, long ago, been water. It was like a macabre lava lamp made by Hades himself. I set the gallon down, put my hands on my hips and stared out at the desolate landscape in silence with my lips puckered out, like a dad staring at a project in the yard that has stymied him.

Except it wasn’t silent. There was a sound that up on the trail I’d taken to be wind in the gulley where the creek used to be. But now that I was halfway down, I could hear it better. It was water. Water was flowing somewhere.

I slid my feet down the steep decline of loose sand to the dry creekbed. Nothing was there but a literal tumbleweed. Just as I started to think maybe the sound was my mind in the grips of some hopeful hallucination, I looked to my right and saw movement. I walked along the creekbed for about 150 feet and suddenly, I was staring up at a gigantic concrete slide built into the side of the hill. At the top of the slide was a metal door that was lifted up just a bit, and from underneath the door, water was GUSHING in a waterfall down to the creekbed. The flow took it to the right, away from the bridge, and with the underbrush, both the waterfall and the flowing creek had been wholly obscured (both in sight and sound) from the trail.

I dipped my hands down into the cool water, just to prove to myself that I wasn’t in a full-blown mirage. My hands came up wet, and I whooped in joy. I opened my phone and went back to FarOut – there was absolutely no mention of this aqueduct outlet. This led me to believe that it wasn’t typically flowing, and I had just cashed in on the final remaining karma points I’d built up from being a therapist for over a decade.

I scampered up the side of the concrete slide to a spot that looked easy to fill my bottles from, and collected 5 liters. After a moment of consideration, I went back to the nightmare jugs, emptied them into the dirt, rinsed them in the cool fresh water, and refilled them. As the outlet being open was clearly a fluke, there was no way to know how long it would be open. I was horrified to think that some poor hiker after me would also miss the updated comments, arrive and find nothing.

I treated the new water with my chlorine drops and then left the jugs next to the spigot with a note. The whole process took about an hour, the long engagement largely due to me accidentally dropping one of the jugs down the slide when it was half-full, and having to take off chasing it down the unexpectedly fast stream. The bottle continually bobbed away just out of reach, while I was bushwhacking along next to the creek, repeatedly dunking my feet half into the water and yelling at myself, “this is your punishment for doing something niiiiice!”

Instead of attempting to write about the LA Aqueduct walk, I will present you with this video I made while hiking it:

I think that just about sums it up.

Hiker Town was kitschy, bizarre and delightful. It is a small ring of pretend Wild West fake storefront buildings, some of which have tiny rooms inside to stay in, and is managed by a lovely woman named Marta. I met one other hiker there, Joscha (from Fryeburg, Germany) who was taking a midday break from the heat before he moved on. We chatted for an hour or so, and he let me borrow his charger and gave me some gummy worms. At about 4pm he hiked on, and I was left alone in Hiker Town, population: 1 human and 6 cats. At least I think there were 6 cats; there could easily have been many, many more. Marta told me that none of the cats had names, they were just there as pest control.

I sat for a while in the doorframe of my tiny wooden room, as the single window didn’t open and it was brutally hot inside. One of the friendly cats ambled over to me with a twitching lizard in its mouth and deposited it amiably at my feet. I barely had a chance to say “Oh no thank you, I couldn’t possibly-” before the lizard lept to its feet and sprinted away around the building, my new cat friend hot on its tail.

Just as the sky began to turn pink with oncoming dusk, I made my way to the outdoor faucet to fill my water bottles. There is one real house in Hiker Town, and its resident, a 65-year-old trail angel named Watermelon Sugar High, popped her head out of her door and called out to me in her lovely Brazilian accent,

“What are you having for dinner?”

I turned from the faucet and smiled at her, “I was just going to cook some beans I think.”

“That sounds awful,” she said cheerfully, “come in and have dinner with me. Do you like white wine or red wine?”

So it was that I was fed a beautiful meal by a fascinating soul who may or may not have gotten me wine drunk and told me all of her life story. I won’t share any of them here because they’re her stories not mine, but suffice it to say I was so fascinated and charmed that I stayed up way past my bedtime and staggered back to my room with a belly full of food and a mind full of adventures.

At 3am I woke up to use the bathroom, and made my way across the open dirt square to the small building that housed the restroom and small kitchen. When I opened the door, my lizard-delivering cat friend awoke from her spot on a chair and wound around my feet mewing until I pet her. She purred furiously and made little biscuits on my toes while I washed my hands. She also tried to give me a (blessedly dead) spider.

As I was leaving the building I was startled by a loud meow somewhere above my head. I turned and saw a huge orange cat staring down at me owlishly from its Cheshire Cat perch on the roof, its eyes glowing green in the spotlight of my headlamp.

“Oh, hello,” I whispered, and waited patiently for him to give me a riddle. When nothing was forthcoming, I went back to bed.

The rest of this section took me back up into desert mountains, which brought a welcome resurgence of tall plant life that offered shade. However, the tall plant life is all different varieties of spiny, thorny bushes that have knitted themselves together across the trail, making hiking feel a bit like being thrown into a burlap sack with a bunch of angry ferrets. Also, the gnats are so thick that I’ve had to wear my headnet from the moment I emerge from my tent in the morning until the moment I get back into it. The headnet gets repeatedly caught on the tall thorny bushes and yoinked back across my face like a very ineffectual murderer is attempting to suffocate me, except joke’s on them, the only thing that gets murdered is my dang patience.

The last few days the trail has run parallel to a dirt forest service road, which I’ve elected to take (on the advice of other hikers) to avoid a section totally overgrown with an enormous plant called Poodle Dog Bush that, if you touch it, causes any exposed skin to erupt into painful itchy blisters that last for weeks. The forest service road is marginally active with folks in their trucks out hunting. Several times I’ve camped relatively close to the road, and when trucks barrel by I feel a little like a hoary goblin lurking in the bushes. So, not very different from my normal state of being.

Hiking alone has, so far, genuinely been quite a wonderful journey. On Friday night I sat atop a concrete water tank, my feet dangling as the sun slowly sank behind the low desert mountains. As the sky turned to total darkness and stars popped out one by one, I watched a slow, brilliant meteor dazzle its way across Orion before fizzling out. I said a distant hello to Halley’s Comet, as the last time she came around was the year I was born, and she’s about halfway through her orbit back, shedding her meteors as she goes.

I am dearly looking forward to more reasonable temperatures on the horizon (60’s and 70’s, so they say!!), as well as getting back into a bit higher elevation. I’ve only seen one rattlesnake so far, and it was one that had been run over. Not sure if that’s a good sign or a bad sign, but regardless, whatever comes next is sure to be an adventure!

Love,

Thresher