When you think of the elements you need to withstand hiking, several come to mind immediately: heat, cold, rain, snow, and the like. Yet we’ve discovered that, out here, there’s another one that’s every bit as important: wind. We’re also learning and re-learning this lesson constantly. When we camped at Fuller Ridge, it was so windy at night that we ended up taking down our tarp after an hour lest something on it actually break. Last night, we managed to camp right at the top of a ridge…and although nothing broke, it got so windy by the end of the night that I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep, worried about our tarp, starting at about 4:00 AM.

And that’s how we got up at 4:20 AM this morning, …

If it sometimes seems like our journey alternates between desire for the open trail and desire for creature comforts, well, that’s about how it feels to us, too. So far, it’s been a good rhythm: just about the time we start to get really smelly and gross after hiking for several days, we end up someplace with hot showers, real bathrooms, and a place to lay our heads…and these places tend to be really good motivators for getting the miles in, since, by the time you’re in range, the idea of a hot shower sounds wonderful. That’s what got us to set an alarm for 5:00 AM this morning. The side benefit was getting to see a truly beautiful sunrise: the early dawn peeking over the mountains just outside our tarp, the sun finally showing itself behind dramatic green hills as we threaded our way down one ridge after another, and the cascading light across rippled hillsides once the sun rose a bit higher.

Our destination, ironically, was …

This trail changes so fast, it’s unbelievable. Yesterday afternoon, we were freezing our butts off, wading through slush and snow as it was 33° outside. This afternoon, we were sweating in the hot sun, trying desperately not to touch any of the poodle-dog bush that was absolutely everywhere on the trail.

Last time I mentioned poodle-dog bush, …

We’d only been asleep for twenty minutes when the storm started. The sound of snow landing on our tarp was new to us, yet we both knew that’s exactly what it was. The wind howled, the tarp bucked, and the snow kept coming…for hours. We were warm in our sleeping bags, yet couldn’t fall asleep, still paying too much attention to our tarp and surroundings — aware of how critical they were to us. In the end, they held firm, keeping us protected from the wind and the driving snow.

Late into the night, the storm finally died down, the wind replaced by the faint noise of snow falling. When we awoke — the world was magic. Several inches of snow had fallen all around us during the night, and was piled up high against both sides of our tarp. Snow covered everything from the picnic table outside our door to every hillside, bush, and tree we could see. It was beautiful. And this was Southern California — in May!

Times like this are …

Yesterday, we got to look down on oceans of clouds from high above. Today, we were inside oceans of clouds. And you know what those oceans of clouds are? Cold. We’re in Southern California in May — in Los Angeles County, even! — and we, and all of our fellow hikers, were freezing all day long. It blows my mind that one of my coldest backpacking experiences ever has now happened not a hundred miles from Venice Beach, home of perpetually beautiful weather.

Today started like most other days here; we woke up and it was chilly, but we expected that, like all the other days, as soon as the sun rose it’d be plenty warm (and, usually, far warmer than we’d like). But you know what happened today? …

Most people only get to see what we saw today from inside an airplane — and airplanes are a whole lot less pleasant than where we were. Once our road walk back to the PCT was done this morning, we spent the entire rest of the day hiking on high ridgetops above the clouds, looking down on valleys below completely filled with those quintessentially puffy, white, cotton-ball clouds. The effect was magic, as if we’d been transported to another planet.

And guess what? Not only is this not another planet, it’s actually Los Angeles. That’s right — on our road walk today we passed a sign saying “Now Entering Los Angeles County”, which we both found pretty hilarious. It turns out …

Sometimes, all it takes is a single moment to make you remember a day for a very, very long time. Today’s was what you see above — except that, trust me, the pictures don’t even come close to doing it justice. You’re standing on top of a mountain nearly as high as the ones in the distance, and you’re gazing out over a panorama like that for something like a 200° field of view — it’s truly just incredible. One moment of coming around a bend in the trail and seeing that…well, it made any amount of pain worthwhile.

(Better yet, we got to follow it up with a trip to McDonald’s!)

I took that photo just …

It’s not all bad, you know, hiking this trail. For example, we get to see beautiful things, take glorious showers…and, today, sit in natural hot springs in the middle of the desert. It was awesome.

What? So, it turns out that the Pacific Crest Trail runs directly through the middle of …

We hiked twenty-two miles today, through desert mountains that were different than anything we’d hiked through before, and beautiful in their differentness. I know I wrote before about how the terrain always changes out here, but today really demonstrated it: we walked through …