There is a moment, just as the sun sinks behind the mountains, when I am consciously aware of the heat rapidly evacuating my body. As though my core temperature is directly tied to the light in the sky, if I am not in the tent before the first star emerges, my teeth will begin to involuntarily clack together with comic exuberance. During the day, the sun blazes down on our backs and sets us to sweating buckets, driving all memories of chill from our minds. But then the night comes again, enveloping our trembling, grimy bodies in the frigid blanket of winter. All of this happens at about 4:30pm.

One afternoon, Toasty was able to find a break in his work schedule to hike in with us and camp for the night. With Dumptruck’s triumphant return to the trail, he and I are back to using our 3-person Nemo tent, and I returned Toasty’s 2-person tent to him. When I was hiking alone, I used Toasty’s smaller tent while Dumptruck took ours back home with the hopes of getting it repaired, given that most of the zippers had been irreparably damaged from the wind storm weeks ago. Alas, Nemo’s repair turn-around time is 7 weeks. So, Dumptruck returned to the trail with our much bedraggled, though nonetheless beloved, un-repaired tent. Foreshadowing: this did not go well.

A quick side note: backpacking tents, in an effort to be as lightweight as possible, will also be as small as possible. What that means is that a “2-person” tent is really only big enough for 1 person and a garden gnome. A little garden gnome. Without its hat. When Dumptruck and I did the Appalachian Trail we started in a 2-person tent, and it’s a testament to our relationship that we did not murder each other, either intentionally or unintentionally (via smothering). It culminated in one night Dumptruck literally squeezing past me and tumbling out of our tent like Winnie the Pooh being yoinked out of the hole to Rabbit’s den. He somersaulted and landed on his rear end, letting out a “whoof,” and then declaring in no uncertain terms that we were upgrading to a 3-person tent.

On the night that Toasty hiked out with us, we set up our matching matryoshka Nemo tents next to each other under the shelter of a tree just as dusk began to settle on the ridgeline around us. The wind began to pick up, all of us shivering in our wet sweaty clothing as we huddled together and made dinner. After climbing into our tents, I snuggled into my sleeping bag as Dumptruck began making a series of frustrated noises. I peeked around his shoulder and grimaced: both the rain fly zipper AND the tent zipper on his side would not stay closed. The zipper teeth were too damaged, and the wind kept ripping the whole zipper back open, the doors flapping inward on Dumptruck’s face. This would not do. We had no way to keep the zippers closed other than one tiny safety pin in my first aid kit, and the temperature was dropping rapidly.

But then, as with all superhero origin stories, Toasty rose to greatness in a time of desperation. This greatness was twofold. First, he emerged from his small tent with a literal fistful of safety pins. I don’t know why he had them, all we know is that he did. We safety pinned all the left side zippers closed, but as the inner zipper is curved, there were still open gaps where wind was rocketing in.

“We’re going to be so cold,” Dumptruck fretted. Toasty, now sitting in the tent with us, then came into to the second part of his superhero ascension:

“No you won’t be,” he said, “Because I will sleep in here with you both, and I will sleep on the broken side.”

To say Toasty is named Toasty because he “runs hot” is an understatement on the level of saying that the sun hurts our eyes because it “is bright.” Toasty’s true name story comes from a time when, years ago, the 3 of us went backpack snowshoeing in Baxter State Park in a VERY COLD winter, and near the end of the first day I fell into the beginning stages of hypothermia. Dumptruck and Toasty immediately zipped 2 sleeping bags together, and jammed me into them with all of my layers and Toasty. I am not exaggerating when I say that my symptoms dissipated within 15 minutes. At some point during those 15 minutes I am told that I mumbled drunkenly into the muffled sleeping bags,

“You’re so toasty.”

And so a name was born. And then cemented about an hour later when he accidentally threw a pot of boiling water into his own face. But that’s a different story.

Thus it was, in the cold desert night, with a cobbled-together shelter, that the 3 of us squeezed together into the tent with me in the middle. It was very much like being a pimento in an olive. The only thing missing was the gin, though I suppose hikers are aromatic enough to suffice.

The next morning Toasty had to hike back out, so Dumptruck and I switched tents with him, and have had to make do with jamming ourselves into the totally functional yet totally itty-bitty 2-person tent. It’s not so bad, considering the alternative. Although Dumptruck’s legs are long enough that he barely fits into the tent even at an angle, so the 2 of us in there together is not dissimilar to a couple of beer snakes jammed into a can.

We are currently taking our last zero (there’s thunderstorms!) and Dumptruck is going to see if we can do some sort of better fix with our tent using velcro. Both of our backpacks also have mouse holes in them, and the baffles in my inflatable sleeping pad have started to separate, leading to a (progressively expanding) 9x4inch blister in the material that presses into my upper back at night. It’s like getting a very ineffective, though persistent, massage. We only have 70 miles left, so it only seems appropriate that all of our gear should just now catastrophically fail. Gotta get the full money’s worth!

This past section took us over our last 8,000ft+ elevation, going through the San Jacinto Wilderness. The first day back for Dumptruck after 3 weeks off was 25 miles of unbroken 10% uphill grade. Welcome back to the trail, indeed. It has been several weeks since I’ve been at that altitude, and I can now say with confidence that my body really does not like it. As soon as we stepped foot above 8,000ft, my very classy constant wheezing returned, and my hands and feet went numb. Not numb from cold, numb from some kind of nerve problem from my extremities not getting enough oxygen. My head felt like a bowling ball balanced on a toothpick, and we had to stop hiking earlier than expected because several times I very nearly blacked out. My sympathetic nervous system, at it turns out, is a total drama queen.

In spite of the challenge, San Jacinto and the miles South of it was absolutely, stunningly gorgeous. The plants have been varying dramatically from delicate golden autumn foliage (when we are near water) to angry, sharp, spiny brush that has turned the skin on Dumptruck’s willowy legs into a Jackson Pollock painting of abrasions. The trail took us over peaks so high that we could see sun glinting off the ocean 50 miles away, and down into desert ranchland where we had to face off with herds of cattle huffing and grumbling about having to hoist themselves off the trail. We’ve seen jackrabbits and coyote, all of whom were much too fast to be captured on film. The water sources have been outlined in ice with increasing frequency, and we can feel that we’re getting close to water even when we’re still several hundred feet away, as it will suddenly feel as though we’re entering a walk-in freezer. Winter is upon us, and even though we’re less than 100 miles from Mexico, it’s no less profound than if we were at home.

Which makes sense, because we are home.

The next blog entry will likely be from the Southern Terminus of the Pacific Crest Trail. It feels completely surreal, and I don’t really believe we’re that close. It feels both like walking into, and walking out of, a dream. This is, I feel, a mark of an adventure well loved.

Love,

Thresher

P.S. The town we are zero-ing in, Borrego Springs, has a bunch of enormous steel sculptures of creatures. Also, we made friends with an excellent human named Little Rock, with whom we got pie from a place called Mom’s Pie in Julian, who gives free pie to hikers. I cannot have dairy, but Little Rock and Dumptruck gladly ate the extra piece. Life is good.