Day 21 (Tape)


Alright. First thing in the morning. I believe today is Tuesday the… 7th of May? That sounds right. And ah, so ah I’m not sure if I made any entries yeste rday at all. But it was a pretty good day. We started off going mostly down. Ups and downs, mostly downs. To the campground and ah, passed like some wierd p onds and ski area lifts and stuff like that. And finally plummetted down to Vin cent’s Gap, which is at ah, 6500 feet. And from there shot straight up Mt. Bade n Powell, which we went to the top of. Pete with his pack, I left my pack below the summit. And ah, the top of that is 9400 feet. So that’s almost a 3000-ft straight climb there. And ah, that was, it was really nice. It was pretty tiri ng but we took quite a few stops, and had a nice long lunch. There was a spring on the way up. And ah, it ended up being feasible. And then we came down alon g the ridge. A lot of smog, I noticed, during the day. Especially south of her e, the San Gabriel valley was just incredible. You could… ah, really limited view, even from the mountain tops. You look that direction all you see is a thick brown bank of permasmog. So that was kind of a bummer, especially for picture-taking. But other than that the view off the ridge was pretty good. And ah, we descended… ended up making it about a 19-mile day, and pulled in to ah, to Little Jimmy campground. Which was ah, really the first campground we’ve pulled into that had other hikers at it. And ah, let’s see, if I can remember… Do you remember the guy’s name who gave us the gorp? That’s the only one I’m blanking on. Pete. Oh well. See there was Brad and Betsy, they were kind of a couple hiking the trail. And ah Carl and Gretchen were a married couple, they were older, and had some really interesting stories. Carl had been bitten by a rattlesnake in the San Jacintos, and they had to ah… they did the rattlesnake kit on him, and evacuated him out to town, to a hospital, and ah said it, when all was said and done the whole bill for the thing was $10000. That is pretty incredible. But ah, they all had good helpful hints and advice for us. And Carl and Gretchen were actually just doing a section of the trail they hadn’t done before and heading south to Cajon Pass. And ah, then there was the third guy, who was kind of ah, he was just here ahead doing some trail work and kind of hanging out. And he actually gave us some extra food, a couple of power bars and some extra gorp. I wish I could remember his name properly, I know it starts with a B. It was either Brian or Byron or something like that. But we have his name and address written down, or Pete does. And ah, yeah he was really, really helped us out. Cause ah, we mentioned in some of our stories that we were kind of on ah, meager rations for parts of our trip. So they all kind of helped us out, it was terrific. And ah, that’s pretty much it. We talked until well after dark with all of these folks, and then set up camp and went to bed. And now it’s morning of another day, it’s looking like a beautiful one. Sun hasn’t come up over the ridge yet. And ah, we’re walking until breakfast.


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.