Day 35
Today's Miles: 27.4
We woke up this morning, decided to check out late and night hike the long dry section between Cajon Pass and Wrightwood. It's 22.5 miles with no water and in a burned area to boot, so it seemed like a great night for our first night hike! Oh, did I mention that the moon on the 5th would be the brightest moon of the year? Needless to say, we were excited to see how this decision would play out.
We hung out at the McDonald's for a few hours until it was time to hit the trail and did some more food damage. We both had another order of nuggets and fries along with sodas. I went back for another large fry and a good ol' hot fudge sundae, while Twist went "healthy" and downed a whole bag of "spicy" fruit from a street vendor.
We set out for the trail at about 3:30pm and while it was still warm out, we knew it would only get cooler as the evening went on. The first few miles out of Cajon Pass were pretty interesting. We went under the freeway and got to see where all the train noise we had been hearing the last day and a half had been coming from.
Walking under the freeway:
The train tracks next to the freeway.
Just after we crosses the tracks, a train came rumbling through.
We had a few hours of daylight left and wanted to at least make it to Swarthout Canyon Road before dark. Along the way, our Rattler count rose to seven with our first baby rattler sighting.
He's somewhat hard to spot in the photo, but he was a curious little one that came toward us for a couple feet before we went around.
We reached Swarthout with plenty of light to spare and because we weren't counting on it, didn't need to take any water from the cache there. While we were there we met Brake Man and Grasshopper along with Donkey Legs who had hiked the AT together four years previous. Shortly after dropping our packs and talking with the other hiker's, Alex and Coop hiked up. They were also planning on night hiking. Twist and I didn't take any water from the cache but it's a good thing it was there because just as we were getting ready to head out, Coop bumped his Platapus water bladder into a Yucca instantly poking a hole in it and lowering his water capacity for the dry dry stretch of trail ahead. We tried to patch it but nothing was working and we had to get moving so I think he ended up taking one of the Arrowhead jugs from the cache as a container until he got into town. After this I wanted to name him "Pokypus" but I don't think it'll stick.
We left the road and our first crossing of the San Andreas Fault. Soon enough the sun went down and the biggest full moon of the year came out!
The moon rising back over Cajon Pass.
This being our first real night hiking experience, it took some getting used to. Twist had a little bit of a difficult time getting used to hiking in the dark, but by the end of the night she adapted to it like she was nocturnal! Ha! The craziest part of night hiking is all the glowing eyes watching you as you march by. A couple times we stopped when a pair of eyes would be watching us from the middle of the trail just up ahead. Later we would find out that these blinking eyes actually belonged to small owls who would land on the trail and fly off when we got too close, but we managed to get close enough to identify them more than once.
The moon was bright and given the section of burned trail we were hiking, we got some amazing silhouettes of burned trees all around.
We hiked pretty much non-stop all night, only stopping for five to ten minutes at a time because if we stopped too long our body temp would drop quickly. The temp was around 35 degrees near the top of our climb. Dancing through the Poodle Dog Bush In the dark was interesting as well. Let's just say neither of us will be breaking out the Poodle Dog Shuffle at the local bar anytime soon.
We reached Wrightwood at about 4am and LUCKILY the owner of The Pines Hotel was there to answer our rings at the office door. He checked us in (only charging us for one night) and showed us to our room. We instantly took hot showers to warm our bones and jumped into bed. We are looking forward to seeing which other hikers are here in the morning. The plan is to resupply tomorrow....actually today after a couple hours sleep and get back on the trail tomorrow morning. We learned a couple lessons from our first night hike; 1. We like night hiking. 2. We don't like it enough to do 27 miles all at night. Instead, we will try and keep our night hiking to a few hours or 10ish miles at a time instead of hiking all through the night unless we absolutely have to.
-Tailgate
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