Day 26 – 21 miles/362 Waking up in the hotel, we enjoyed a fairly slow start, checking out around 8:30. A quick walk back to McDonald’s for breakfast again, where we ran into many of the hikers from the days before. They too had themselves some fun at the Joshua Inn. One girl that was…

Day 21 – 9 miles/275 After pair of good hotel omelets, Maggie and I organized our packs and cleaned gear in our room. We enjoyed our hotel room up to 5 minutes before the 11am check out. We grabbed some lunch in town then started making moves to get back on trail. We waited a…

Day 17 – 20(+1) miles/231 After three physically demanding days and a few nights of bad sleep, we were off to a slow start… We were aiming to hike our first 20 mile day to reach Big Bear Lake in three days for resupply (54 miles by the end of Friday). The trail started off…

Mt. San Jacinto is the first major obstacle of the PCT. Over 60 miles, we climb more than 11,000 feet and descend 14,000 feet. The peak stands at 10,834 feet, taking us from exposed, dry desert to subalpine, snowy mountains. Talk of San Jacinto dominated conversions between hikers for the first two weeks. Snow conditions,…

Day 7 – 15 miles/94 Unspectacular scenery most of the day. It seems we left most of the week 1 bubble in Julian, we only saw about 6 other hikers we didn’t recognize. We had a long steady climb up the San Felipe ridge. This is a particularly dry segment, so water is provided by…

Day 2 – 13 miles/28 After the rain ordeal, Maggie and I slept in, even though our tent was poorly pitched and slowly sinking under the weight of all the moisture. We ate a light breakfast and commiserated with our camp neighbors about the unreasonable amount of water that fell from the sky overnight, our…

Day 1 – 15 miles Looking at the forecast for day 1, we were worried. An inch or more of rain was predicted to fall most of the day. That concerned us to say the least… Morning came with mostly sunny skies, which made us optimistic the weather would be better than predicted. Jane made…