Day 65 : Hiking someone else's hike

23rd June 2013
Mile 864 to mile 872 : Sallie Keyes Lake to Vermillion Valley Resort
Mileage : 8 + 15

Today was the first time on the trail where I didn't feel like I was hiking the hike I wanted to hike. A phrase commonly heard on the trail is 'Hike Your Own Hike', meaning that there is no right or wrong way to hike, and also meaning that one hiker should not judge another should they being doing something different to oneself. I have decided that my hike will be a continuous hike from Mexico to Canada with a line of footprints to prove it, with probably over 99% on the PCT, but not all. I took a detour when I summited Mt Jacinto bypassing several miles of the official PCT in the process, but given the detour was longer and more arduous than the official trail, i didn't worry. Today we detoured around a section of the PCT in order to take a supposed shortcut to a popular hiking resort jsut off the trail called the Vermillion Valley Resort. The short called for us to take a side trail called the Bear Creek trail. We had had secondhand information that the trail wasn't too long, and was a descent for most of its length, so far so good. The problem was that no-one had a map or elevation profile for the trail, or knew where it ended, and if it did indeed end at VVR. I am generally comfortable navigating my way across and landscape with a map and compass, but without a map especially, I get uncomfortable. Especially given we didn't know how reliable the information was regarding the distance. Non-hikers as a rule do not estimate trail distances well, nor is it clear if times they quote to get from A to B are on foot or by car. The trail junction we intended to take was 8 miles into our day and at that point all was going well. As I we were all led to believe that the distance was not considerable, all of us put off eating lunch thinking we'd be eating real food at the resort in no time. So when we got to the junction we set off down it at speed. About 7.5 miles later we emerged at the other end of the trail. VVR was nowhere to be seen. All there was was a dusty car park with 2 or 3 pickup trucks for the day hikers we'd seen near the trailhead. The day hikers had confirmed that the resort was about 20 mins away, but again did not confirm by what mode of transport. It was buoyed by this news that we emerged at the carpark to find no resort. There was a map of the surrounding area at the trailhead which showed us where we were. It was still over 7 miles to the resort. Perfect. Knowing that we probably wouldn't be able to get rides with the day hikers, given how many we'd seen, we started off down the dirt road toward the resort. Before long we had joined a surfaced back country road with some traffic on it. Kat pretty much jumped infront of the first pickup truck that came past and it stopped. The driver was going past the resort and agreed to take us there. It was at this moment that I had to make a decision about my hike. Were I to have gotten the ride, I would have forfeited my continuous hike that I'd been so careful about up to now, but not getting the ride meant several more hours of hiking. It took a lot of willpower, but in the end i decided that retrospectively I would be more annoyed by not doing the hike, than I would be for doing it in the present. I watched the truck pull away wondering if i'd made another stupid decision that day. I ahd asked the driver how far it was to VVR from where we were, he'd replied '2 or 3 miles'. It wasn't, it was more like 6 from where we were. As I had thought it was so close, i hadn't bothered to fill up on water at the last creek crossing, and so was out of water. This wasn't really a problem like it was near Tehachapi, but it did mean i didn't really want to eat. Eating food without water when thirsty is difficult, so i trudged on not eating the food i knew was in my rucksack. With my low energy levels, given how little i'd eaten so far that day, the hike took a long time.

I was in a thoroughly bad mood during that hike, mostly with myself. I could have decided to carry on up the trail and take the more common detour like most people, but decided to follow the others without finding out whether or not they even intended to hike all the way there like I would have to. About half an hour after the truck pulled away, my day was changed for the better by a group of middle aged gents having their annual drinking weekend up in the mountains. They offered me water, soft drinks, beer and food without a second thought. A couple beers and a couple rounds of beer pong later, I was in a much better mood and continued up the road to VVR, finally arriving almost 3 hours after having watched the others depart in the pick up truck. I was glad to be done with the hiking.