Pacific Crest Trail - Day 16

Start: Mile 160.8 - Backcountry campsite
End: Mile 175.4 - Backcountry campsite

Buttcrack rock. We may have buried some horrific Cajun flavored rice and beans here. I know, Leave no trace, but these Louisiana Fish Fry Red Beans and Rice were inedible offensive slop that contained more salt than the Salton Sea we could glimpse in the distance.

Mt. San Jacinto in the distance.

Medusa.

The snow/ice remaining on the ridge under the shrubs looked like ice you’d get out of an ice maker.

Cramming it in a water bottle and letting it melt in the sun was still better than hiking a steep half mile to a spring for water.

Nice catch!

Rough to see the devastation from a forest fire. The trail was re-routed through a steep bypass that was more fire-line than trail.

Nosebleed seats for Coachella.

I know it looks sketchy, but don’t worry, the run out on this only goes to Palm Springs or so.

Highlighter green lichen.

This rock bridge had CCC vibes all over it. We, and by we, I mean the United States, stopped building good public infrastructure around 1942. Thanks, Obama.

Pretty typical trail section for the day.

Hopping over blown down trees on a steep escarpment under a massive fin of granite we were hiking on a popular trail 5000’ above the knob that knob Robert F. Kennedy was “mountaineering” on above Palm Desert the other day. Mountaineering, of course, being the sport of walking up a hill above your insanely wealthy vacation-home community to post thirst trap photos to a rapidly dwindling audience of aging men checking their phones from a bathroom stall at Red Lobster between baskets of Cheddar Bay biscuits. RFK, cheers to your incredible accomplishment over a few fingers of prohibition era Cutty Sark.

If you squint, you can see the trail traverse a couple dozen side hill steps across an icy runout among a burned out and blown down forest.

We decided to make a 5 mile push up the ridge to a high camp site. It was a slog, but we made it and somehow had an insanely beautiful spot above the ridge that was also somehow protected because the wind was coming up from the north. We got very lucky with the wind direction all night and put on every layer we had in our bags in anticipation of a very cold windy night, but stayed warm and the wind rustled the trees but passed overhead all night.