After camping on a little bluff overlooking the rush and tumble of Rock Creek in a beautiful mixed flora canyon of Cedar, Pine, and Oak, we set out this morning tired and achy -- the second day out is a tough one on the body. Unhappily we crossed the creek's bitter, thigh-high waters a few times.
The day was somewhat humdrum for both of us. We got to worrying about our plans and timing and about our mysteriously missing bounce-box which we haven't seen in three weeks. What can we do, though, but walk for now?
Crossing the highway again (the Angeles Crest winds it's way throughout the San Gabriels) we spotted a motorcycle highway patrolman who pulled up and gruffly asked us if we were with "those other two." No, we're by ourselves, officer. Images of half of our hiking cohort sliding down off a thousand foot rock face, plumetting like lemmings to their horrible crushing demise below on the boulders . . . "Well, I just passed a girl named 'Swift' up the road a few miles. She looked kind of upset, said she got lost or something. There was another back behind her; red hair, braces . . . " He cocks his head a little, raising an eyebrow behid his steely shades, "Said she was walkin' from Mexico all the way to Canada." He laughs to himself: joke's on you guys, he's thinking. "If I were gonna do that I'd have to take this here along with me." He pats his shiny BMW two-wheeler lovingly and pulls out into the empty highway. "Take care, kids!"
We were relieved to hear that Swift and Flippy were safely road walking and down off the mountain top. That left another three guys unaccounted for, but we knew for sure that they had full, six-point crampons and had presumably stayed together up there.
We wondered at the peculiarity of the cop referring to Swift by her trail name. I think of all of the times I've had to hang my humble head down before men of the law. I don't think my record would be so clear as it is now had I ever dared to give a self-indicting freakish cult nickname like "Wolf" whenever the flashlight came hammering down on the window and my life as a free man came screeching, momentarily, to a halt. You might as well just fess up, "Hey man, dude, you can just call me pot head, outlaw, canine man, cuz that's like my identity, bro." But then, there we were, hearing about our friends "Swift" and "Flippy" from a big, tough chopper cop. Life on the trail . . .
The rest of the day was uneventful. We are already sick and tired of our food supply for the week -- we are going to make a concerted effort to get off the junk next week. We went ultra-cheap, ultra-hydrogenated, ultra-high fat and calorie content coming out of Wrightwood and our bodies are definitely paying the price. For lunch today I ate a peanut butter, cracker crumb, pretzel, cookie crumb burrito. It wasn't too bad, really. It did made me feel pretty bad, though, really.
Swift caught us later and told us about her harrowing trip down from the mountain. She had slipped down a washout and ended up hanging onto an old stump's roots, overlooking a good two-hundred-foot drop, trying to figure out what to do as the scree slid out from underneath her feet. Running out of time, she jetisoned her pack and let herself go behind it, making sure to roll out of the fall line, in an effort to avoid being struck by rocks following in her wake. She made it down with just a few scrapes, thankfully, and camped that night at the bottom. She sounded pretty shaken up by the whole thing. Her ice axe was lost at some point during the fall and her water bite-valve was broken as well. We were glad to have avoided the experience ourselves.
We camped atop a shoulder of Pacifico Mountain at a viewful, sunny spot adjacent to a jeep road. We never caught the remander of our crew. They must be just ahead.
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