May 16:

Back on the trail today. I caught a glimpse of a bear cub this morning, retreating uphill through a grove of live oak. I never saw his face, but his thick brown back side and clumsy, loud movements gave him right away. That was a treat, and a nice welcome back to the mountains after having a bit of a break in Wrightwood.

Coming to Vincent's Gap, we left the PCT, opting for the safer and, presumably, much easier road walk around Mt Baden-Powell. After much debate, it seemed like the hikers we saw in town this weekend were fairly split on which route to take. The PCT route, which runs over the summit of the mountain and down a steep, north-facing backbone ridgeline has only been done once so far this season, just last week by a British couple who posted their accomplishment, along with a lengthy description of the trail's dangers and difficulties, on the PCT list-serve. I had considered attempting it, but it was very likely that I wouldn't be able to make it down far enough to reconnect with Eliza -- she didn't give it a second thought, she was NOT going up into the snow-covered peaks -- and since we share tent and other accoutrements, my decision was made for me, which was fine by me. It turned out to be the right choice for both of us.

First of all, this road walk was no ordinary road walk. The Angeles Crest Highway has been closed all winter and will likely not open again until the summer of 2006. The ten-mile stretch that we walked today has been utterly destroyed by avalanches, landslides, and washouts this winter. It was really wild to walk through and witness firsthand the carnage, the shear, magnificent power of earth, and wind, and water. At points, where the snow had actually melted off, the blacktop of the road was barely visible under a fresh layer of recklessly strewn silt and granitic boulders. At other points, the highway was gruesomely cracked and sagged under its own weight -- the earth underneath having been washed away leaving nothing to support the poor, invalid roadway. For the most part, the road was still covered with snow -- great, avalanche drifts, over ten feet deep at points, speckled and dimpled with dirt and grime, stones and boulders, all sunk into the once white surface where the sun had heated their hard, black backs.

The way was spectacular, but very slow going. It's not often that one is in constant danger of spraining an ankle on a road walk. There was just so much rubble out there today. The snow was the real hindrance, though. As we plodded, soaking, over the drifts, the mountaintop clouds howled and whisped overhead. The trail was up there somewhere, veiled in mist, lost underfoot. We knew a good handful of people who had gone up earlier this morning and we hoped that they would all make it down safely.

At Islip Saddle, a point where the PCT crosses the highway, we ran into Tomato, a guy in his early 30s whom we've been seeing a bit of lately. He had just descended from Baden-Powell and seemed pretty shaken up. He had gotten split up from the others and had eventually followed some meandering footprints which had led to the top of a great landslide, hundreds of feet over the road. He described faling at one point and sliding so quickly down an icy chute that when he finally grabbed ahold of a tree branch his body actually left the surface of the snow, lifting up violently, and nearly dislocating his shoulder. We wondered, why were you alone? Where are the others? He had seemed like one of the more experienced mountaineers in the bunch we've been hiking around and if he was this spooked, what about Swift and Buckeye, Kickstep and Wildhair? We left Tomato to eat his dinner and walked on after a short stop (two other guys, Smiley and Scrubs who had road walked as well were there eating too). The clouds were moving in quickly and the day as starting to feel awfully eerie.