Just realized that I sent my journal for this section home with Chuck, so I’ll have to recreate it all from memory…
I left Idyllwild Friday morning, on the 8:15 shuttle from the Idyllwild Inn. Brian and Julia, a couple from Canada, got the same ride, and I’ve seen them of and on since then. The climb up the Devils Slide trail was not too bad, but the section immediately afterward was harder than I remembered. GipC and Hamburger were also hiking that day, as well as Sea Hag and Robo-Knee, a couple from BC who are section hiking California. I think we were all feeling the effects of the altitude – we were up above 8000 feet for much of the day, and the whole thing felt much harder than it should have. We stocked up with plenty of water before Fuller Ridge, only to find two more well-flowing streams a few miles later. Fuller Ridge was just as hard as everyone says – a lot of up and down, rocky trail, and small sections of snow to navigate carefully all contributed to slow going. We all ended up camped together about a mile before the Fuller Ridge trailhead – it was about 6:30 and none of us had enough energy to go any further.
The next day was a long day of descending. After passing the FR trailhead, there were 16 miles of switchbacks, descending 6000 vertical feet. Of course this was all on an exposed ridge with very little shade, so I would periodically curl up next to a large rock to get a few minutes out of the sun. There were also killer bees! I noticed that one set of bees seemed closer to the trail than others, and sure enough they followed me for a few minutes as I hiked through quickly and yelled at them to go away, but I only got stung once. Some hikers ran, and several were stung multiple times as they went by – maybe the bees got angrier as more people went through. I reached the bottom of the descent, and water! – a seemingly random faucet sitting in the middle of the desert, around 2:30 in the afternoon, and stayed there enjoying the meager shade with the other hikers until around five. I ( perhaps foolishly) declined the ride from the water authority security guard, and set off to hike the last five miles to the home of trail angels Ziggy and the Bear. This was a very windy, sandy five miles of trail – not very fun, except for the “oasis” under the 10 freeway, where I hung out with a few other hikers and downed two cans of coke (one too many, it turned out – I couldn’t fall asleep until 11). I finally made it to Z&B around 7:30 pm after my first ever 21 mile day – I was just in time for ice cream! I also got the customary hiker foot bath, scored a roll of carpet to lay my sleeping pad out on, and won a Milky Way bar in thru-hiker jeopardy. It was a fantastic place to stay, with lots of shade (and chairs! And port-o-potties! Things that become luxuries when you’re hiking.), so I decided to stick around until about 5 pm on Sunday to avoid the heat and recover from my long day.
