September 27th Spanish Needle Creek to Near Yellow Jacket Spring

One thing this section has is some beautiful sunrises, especially when there are enough high clouds around to soak in the morning's sunlight. It's a lovely way to spend the first hour on the trail watching the changing colors of the sky. Five miles into today's hike, I was at the junction where a half mile side trail leads down to Joshua Tree Spring. The trail was really steep and made more difficult by a large downed pine lying right in the middle of the path. I couldn't go uphill or down to get around it for fear of losing my footing on the loose rocky soil and taking a tumble, so I climbed up on the trunk and slowly picked my way through what remained of the broken branches. Quite the tightrope trying to keep my balance, as the branches tried to snag my pack and trip me up. An improvised game of Twister. At the spring, there was the merest trickle of water and a host of bees and wasps gathering what moisture there was from the ground nearby. Careful not to disturb them, I used a bit of the foil from a Pop-Tart package to create a chute to funnel a small stream into my Platypus bladder. It took some patience, but eventually I had enough to see me through to the next source, which just happened to be a small cache at Walker Pass Campground. A climb from 5,000 to 7,000 feet landed me on a flat plateau that had seen a bit of fire damage from years past. An hour or so later, I came out on a dirt road, which I took to the right to McIvers Spring. As I approached the area, the first thing I saw was an old wooden outhouse and then to my right, the rickety shack of McIvers Camp. From the logbook I found inside, more than a few northbounders had holed up here on their journey to the northern border, but the place had definitely seen better days. All I found coming out of the pipe was a slow drip. A drop at a time is not the most efficient way to fill a bottle. I followed the source higher into the soggy ground, which indicated that there was water here. However, the best I could find was some dark brackish water in what looked to be a seep that someone had dug. "Great," I thought, "now even the springs are drying up." Reversing direction, I continued along the dirt road until I came across a hunters camp. The three of them were just sitting down for the evening meal and they invited me to join them. I thanked them for their generous offer, but said I would be most grateful if they had any water to spare. They gave me a couple of small 16 oz. water bottles and one of them said he had a gallon jug that was mine for the taking in the bed of his pickup truck, which was parked just off the trail at the radio tower, about four miles off. Thanking them for their generosity, I set off for that gallon jug. By the time I was nearing the tower, the sun had set and I was wearing my headlamp to light my way. One hundred meters from the tower, I came across an even bigger camp with a fire blazing in the campfire ring. The hunters saw the light from my headlamp and invited me over. When they learned that I was a PCT thru-hiker, their interest was piqued. As they put it, "We've always known that people walked this trail from Mexico to Canada, but we'd never actually met one. We just thought they were all crazy." As I answered their questions, they kept placing food and drink in front of me. Potato salad, nacho chips, hard-boiled eggs, a banana, a chocolate pudding cup, a can of Coca-Cola, a bottle of orange juice, etc. I was only able to truly eat when I became the listener, as they shared some of their hunting stories with me. It was a really enjoyable evening. Before I left, they said I could get all the water I wanted out of their large blue plastic water barrel. Wow. Thank you, thank you. Bedded down beneath some pinyon pines near the radio tower, reflecting on the acts of human kindness I witnessed today.

Sierra Sunrise

31 Miles