Walks A Ways: PCT Day 29

PCT Day 29, 10 June 2022 (Friday)

“A Lighter Shade On Trail”

(Bonus Points To Anyone Who Gets This Reference)

Start Location:	Tehachapi	Destination:	Wilderness Campsite
PCT Miles Day 29:	20.9	Cum PCT Miles:	587.3
Non-PCT Miles Day 29:	0	Cum All Miles:	613.8
PCT Miles Remaining:	2,065.3
Elevation Gain Day 29:	4,099	Cum Elevation Gain:	99,302

For a good majority of the PCT in Southern California, shade can be hard to come by. It is not unusual to go miles and miles and be lucky to find a medium size bush, cactus, or rock throwing off a couple feet of shade that you can duck under. This seems to be especially true on the hottest of days. Today was a nice exception. Although there were still stretches without much shade, there were also plenty of opportunities to find good shade.

This is a good thing on a day like today, because water was exceptionally hard to come by. The only water for 36 miles after leaving Tehachapi at Highway 58 is Golden Oak Springs. This spring is kind of notorious right now. There is water that comes from the spring down through a PVC pipe that dumps into a cistern. But this time of year there is only a small trickle that comes out of the pipe, and it takes at least five minutes to fill a 1 L bottle.

There is a rather large pile up of hikers waiting there to fill their water bottles from the pipe. Because of fear mongering among hikers, people are afraid to take water from the cistern because there is, in my opinion, an unfounded rumor of algae blooms or some other really bad thing that can get you very sick that’s in the water. So this has most hikers fear stricken.

So, while others were literally waiting there for hours, I took water from the cistern, filtered it through my bandanna, and then purified it with my Steripen. Also, the water from the pipe would change colors from mostly clear to brown, and every shade in between. So the water I have in my bottles was clear, but the people that were getting water from the pipe had very yellow looking water in their bottles.

There were other hikers trying to contact trail angels to see if they would bring bottled water to whatever the nearest road was, which would likely have been a back country dirt road. I don’t think they were successful, because unless a trail angel was extremely familiar with the back roads in this area, it would be very hard to find the right road. All the same people that were there when I arrived at the spring, were still there when I left.

Fear mongering is a very real and significant thing out here on the PCT. There are some really misguided, misinformed, or worse, demented people who get sick thrills from scaring other hikers about many different things. The best thing to do is to use good judgment, take proper precautions, and mostly ignore what you hear and read.

Anyway, this section between Tehachapi and Kennedy Meadows South is definitely a challenging one. Since the day I started doing detailed planning for this hike, I knew this section would be tough. So far, right on. Even though I have dry camped many nights already, this is the first night I’ve been at camp where I’ve had to be concerned with conserving enough water to get to the next source, which is in about 15 miles, unless there is a surprise water cache somewhere.