Day 21
Start: Big Bear Lake
Finish: Polique Canyon
Daily Mileage: 13.1
PCT Mile: 279.2
The hostel we stayed at was at the far side of town, so we had to run errands on our way back to the trail. We stopped by the post office to mail home some gear we weren’t using, then hopped on the bus to the grocery store to get our food. We bumped into Not English (a Welsh hiker) and completed our chores together.
Google said another but was coming that would take us to the edge of town where it would be more direct and easier to catch a hitch to the trail, but we realized Google lied when the bus didn’t show up and didn’t match the posted bus schedule. We stuck out our thumbs at the bus stop and after a bit got a ride from the same guy I met on Black Mountain Road who was shepherding his wife and daughter down the trail. He asked us where we wanted to go and whisked us to the trailhead.
Though there was snow on and off over the past couple days in town, it was clear and dry when we got to the trailhead to resume our hike around 11. After almost immediately missing a turn on the trail, I took lead from Not English, and we headed off through rocky high desert terrain with pinion pines and other lower trees and vegetation.
We climbed a bit on easy trail and stopped for lunch at a pass. The resupply food had been weighing me down as always leaving town, but I especially wanted to dig into the small child size sub I strapped to my pack from the grocery store. It’s always nice to pack out some fresh food the first day out of town instead of the same assortment of dry bars and trail mix.
We headed on, and the trail abruptly changed. We had been hiking on southern exposures before lunch, but turned the corner and wrapped around the northern side of the mountains. This got us into deep snow since we would be well above 7,000 feet for the rest of the day. There was good boot path for us to follow, but we did some postholing at times despite the path. The day slowed down dramatically.
We were doing pretty good through nice forest with some huge old cedar trees when the boot path started to go down when I knew we should be going up. Checking my map, I confirmed we were diverging from the trail. We hadn’t seen a separate boot path, but weren’t far from the PCT at that point, so we decided to climb up through the snow to the trail to see if we could regain the path.
We did and got to where the trail was with much postholing to our waists, but it was completely covered with untouched snow. We were near a ridge with southern exposure, so we went up to that and saw a boot path on the far side of a small valley where the trail should be. Not sure how the hikers got there without us intersecting our path, but we decided to scramble through the valley and directly regain the trail.
Going down was fine since there wasn’t snow, but going up was another story. I kicked in steps in the steep snow and was rewarded with a waist deep posthole every few steps. The snow was covering bushes which created an air void below the snow cover and wouldn’t always support our weight. At times we were basically crawling through the snow because we were punching through so often.
After much struggle, we regained the trail, and continued through the snow in the footsteps of others which made for much easier travel. The trail went back and forth across a ridge giving us some glorious dry trail alternating with slow snow covered trail. Though today was a shorter day owing to our late start, I was still getting exhausted towards the end of the day. We had a campsite as a goal, but I had to dig deep and push to get to it.
At last I arrived. I grabbed a camp spot and had to tear back into my sub to get some energy to set up camp. I killed it in short order. We’re camped in a nice dry campsite in a saddle high above Big Bear Lake. Our shoes and socks are wet, and it’s supposed to be mid 20s tonight, so everything will likely be frozen tomorrow morning, but we can deal with that then. It quickly started cooling off so we retired to our sleeping bags early to a coyote sarenaded.
There was quite a dichotomy today between easy dry trail and boot paths through the snow. We still made good progress, but it did show what treats the= Sierra could bear for us. It is just over 400 miles ahead now.
