Day 24. He is risen!

Happy Easter! Well, when I wrote this.

Emily and Katlin are two sobo’s that we just met at breakfast. They started in Ridgecrest on April 2. We were able to exchange some trail information which is always appreciated.

We purchased 4 gallons of water and are going to have our trail angel ride stage those at Highway 58. We hit that 8 miles into today’s hike. We have no water on today’s section so we will need to carry water for a dry camp. Additionally, we have a new 6 day load of food. That is a lot weight added at one time.

Our Trail angel Mike took us to stash 4 gallons of water at the 8 mile mark which is nice. It decreases about 6 pounds that we have to carry for our first 8 miles. We’re hitting the trail at 9:30 expecting a great day. 

The first 4 miles of the trail are mostly uphill and we come across some neat views of the valley about midway, and then this little wooden bridge 

Out here on the hillside is an enormous crane I can only assume is used for raising the windmills during installation 

 

We came to another fairly new construction of a very nice looking bridge over a drainage 

We still occasionally come across some of these inspirational painted rocks. I haven’t taken pictures of most of them in retrospect I kind of wish I had. 

Just in case, I forget where I’ve come from and where I’m going 

We’ve been reading about this bench with a view. We’ve finally reached it and it has beautiful views of the valley below. To the side is Highway 58 where our water cash is, and in the opposite direction a couple of homesteads. 

We bumped into Emily and Kaitlyn coming back up trail at this next bridge, and came across this downed wire. Thought I would bite it for a little bit of energy. It was dead.

We will be crossing the railroad tracks down below in the bottom of this picture, it has a train passing by, found some more painted rocks again.

Leaving the mountainside trail, we now have a mile and a half Road walk to the highway 58 overpass. We will have lunch, refill our waters and prepare for 4 1/2 mile uphill slog.

Crossing the railroad tracks, you saw from the hill with the train passing through.

Made it to the highway 58 overpass, refilled our water, ate some lunch, and took a short break

After lunch, we parallel the highway for a little more than a mile and took a 90° turn up in the mountains I had about a 1 mile easy climb, and that is followed by 2 mile 10% grade to our campsite, more painted rocks too. 

Looking down at Highway 58 about 3/4 of the way up the climb

Impressive cliff erosion on the other side of this valley 

We arrived to the area that we had planned to camp at which was 12 miles we’re feeling good we continued on two more miles along, a ridge top again with impressive views of the valleys and surrounding area.

We arrived at the new location and Ryan and I decided that we still had some in us and pushed an additional two for a total of 16.5 today 4 miles more than we had planned..

We got into our campsite with the sun still up. Got everything set up ate dinner and got ready for bed.

Today’s miles 16.5. Total trail miles 275.7. PCT mile mark 575.0 due to Flip of 299.5 

We switched from the southern California to the Sierra map today so the elevations are in two pictures.