July 24, 2016 Mile 529.3-549.0 19.7 Miles My alarm wakes me at 4:30am. Waking feels like clawing my way to the surface from deep underwater. My eyes are dry, my mouth is dry, a deep aching radiates from somewhere behind my eyes, and all I want to do is go back to sleep. But I am in the desert in late July, and this is the coolest part of the day. If I ever want to finish the desert, I need to hike now. I sit up and take a long drink from my platypus. I set out about fifteen minutes later. The stars are still out, but the sky is hinting at dawn. I can just make out the silhouettes of Joshua Trees and manzanita along the road’s edges. After a few minutes of hiking, the pain in my head begins to clear. Probably dehydration, I think. I need to be careful about drinking enough today. Constellations of red lights blink in synchronization to the northeast. Each light marks a massive turbine in the Tehachapi wind farm. I think, “That is where I am going.” I look around at the enormous plain, and all of the other possible places I could be going. None of them seem any more interesting than the wind farm, so I decide to keep going. The sky lightens slowly. The road drops down into the floor of the desert so I can’t see beyond the dirt walls that reach just above my head. Side roads, when they appear, make me want to go explore. I am a rat in a maze. Or a labyrinth? Minotaur dreams surface to consciousness. Finally it is light, and I find a game trail parallel to the road. It gets me out above the road and gives me a view of the morning desert. After about a mile it turns north, away from the road, and I'm forced to abandon it in favor of the official route. After a junction, the trail follows a manicured gravel road north through a forest of complex, Seussian Joshua trees, headed for the windfarm and the mountains behind. I stop for breakfast in the shade of a monstrous tree. It is a round, tangled swarm of spiny branches, but they completely blot out the sun and the ground beneath is flat and clear. As I force down oatmeal that is entirely too hot for this weather and wash it down with warm water, I realize that I haven’t seen or heard a single vehicle all morning. Or any other sign of humans, for that matter, aside from a couple of fences and these roads. For all I know, the apocalypse might have happened overnight, and I might be the only human remaining on the earth. I am delighted with the totality of my solitude and I’m also suddenly very lonely. The next hours heat up rapidly. A bridge passes over the dry bed of cottonwood creek. The water report tells me there is a faucet here, but it is off. I am directed to traverse a slope down to the creek where there may be a small amount of water downstream from the bridge. I still have some water left, but it’s not a lot. The next source is the last for a while, and it could be dry, so I really need there to be water here. I climb down a sandy bank where I see several other footprints. Who knows how long ago these were left, or whether they found any water. We're all following the same water report, and the last update was three weeks ago. I get to the bottom, and the creek is bone dry. I check the report again, just to make sure I didn't miss something. It says I should head downstream a hundred yards or so. I don't quite understand how there would be water a hundred yards downstream from a place where there is no water, but I decide to follow the directions anyway. I continue down and around the scattered bushes, and lo and behold, there is a tiny stream of water that seems to come out of nowhere. I drink as much of my hot leftover water as I can and sit down to filter. There is no shade nearby, so I just sit in the full blast of the sun. The heat has sapped all of my energy already, and certain parts of my brain have shut down to save energy, so I just sit and squeeze water through my filter, and stare—a thousand yard stare that goes nowhere and means nothing. The trail rejoins the aqueduct. Or is this a different branch? The aqueduct disappears and reappears under hills that the road stays above. Uphill. No shade. Downhill. No shade. A steady, tired, draining rhythm. Even the bottoms of my feet feel hot. I reach the wind farm. A hundred or more triple-bladed giants shred the sky into pieces above me. Every downwards slice of their scythes feels like it is aimed directly at me and I am walking beneath a living, malicious chandelier of Damocles. What would Don Quixote have made of these monsters? A latticework of dirt roads connects the towering windmills, but for the first time in over twenty miles, the trail becomes a single-track again, eschewing the roads for a more direct route toward the mountains. A single small building sits off to the east, just below one of the windmills. The guidebook tells me that the workers there sometimes provide hikers with water and soda, but there are no vehicles parked outside and it’s a quarter mile out of the way, so I decide to forge onward, into the mountains. The trail finally leaves the desert floor and climbs up an exposed south-facing slope. The temperature is surely over a hundred degrees by now, but I have no way to check. I come around a corner and drop down into Tylerhorse Canyon. There is flowing water here! And good thing, because I am going through my water faster than I imagined. I am already down to half a liter. Someone has built a small rock dam to pool the water and make it easier to fill bottles, and there is even a shady tree nearby. I take off my shirt and dip it in the water to cool myself, then sit in the shade to devour my food and water. When I start the climb out of the canyon, I don't feel well. I am heavy with food and water that my body doesn't want to digest, my muscles are raging at me for the continuous abuse, my head is aching again, and the heat is persistently leaching away what little energy I have left. I realize that I barely slept last night and that I never intended to hike through this part of the day. Somehow I forgot that and just kept going. I stop to take a nap under a squat Joshua tree. I lay on my pad for an hour or more, shifting every fifteen minutes or so to get back under the imperfect shade and brushing off carpenter ants, the only living creatures I've seen all day. I am unable to sleep, but my headache subsides and my food digests, so I continue on. Up and over a mountain where I find a water cache and some plastic chairs that someone has left for hikers. I sign and read the register; it appears that the last person came through here two days ago, and someone else four days before that. The trail drops down into a steep canyon. I can see all the switchbacks up the other side, and I groan. Down, down, down. Up, up, up, up, up. I am no longer a human being, I am a walking factory. I am a lifeless assembly line that produces cheap plastic footsteps, one after another after another, with no concern for quality or consistency.
The miles disappear in a ruinous waste of disintegrated desert and fire-scarred Joshua tree stumps. When the day finally cools and I find a campsite, it is apocalyptic. There have been big hardwood trees here, but that was eons ago. They have been flayed—bare of leaves, branches, even bark. Their skeletons were toppled and left to petrify for unknown ages. I pitch my tent, so drained that all I want is to lie down to be petrified and sleep with them until some unimagined future beyond the age of man when we may all arise together and witness the end of the universe.
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Nick is a teacher, writer, and amateur adventurer. Archives
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