City of Desert Hot Springs

The one with snow angels, endless dangerous squiggles and a remote cabin!!

📍 Location: MM 232 to MM 246

🏔️ Elevation: 8500ft!!
🥾 I actually walked: 14.4 hard miles!
💰 Money: no money spent
⛑️ Health: I can feel the start of shin splints on the last section of todays hike so was glad to see the cabin. I’m not brave enough to take off the plasters and tape on my feet. I’ll do that when we get to Big Bear in the comfort of a hotel room. For now, they seem to be holding up.

☀️ Weather: This morning it was freezing, but it soon warmed up and I was moaning about the heat. By 4pm I had gloves on and was moaning about the cold and the snow!!

🍲 Food: Snickers at 5am! Lunch was noodles and a packet of tuna fish. More snacks followed by Chicken stew and dumplings (dehydrated meal). I also ate my first Hershey Bar today. Yum!

💤 Sleep: Pants! I’m sweating so much and the moon is so bright that I hardly catch a wink of sleep. It’s going to be a very long 16 miles today!!

🐍 Snake count: 9 - no extras today.

THE LONG WINDED VERSION:-

👋 4am - wide awake. Joey is packing up as well and I wave him goodbye at 4.30am. By 4.50am I’m ready and head down to the first river crossing with my head torch on. I need to fill up with water but I’m not keen on crossing this river on my own in the dark, so I wait for Disco and DinkyDi who are only 10 mins behind me.

🥶 We cross the river and my feet are instantly wet and super cold. Even my waterproof socks haven’t kept my tootsies warm. I tell myself to suck it up and deal with it. The sun will rise soon and before I know it I’ll have bone dry, warm feet.

🥾 6.40am Disco has already taken flight so it’s just me and DinkyDi. We are both slow up hill and today we have 16 miles of incline! It’s gonna bd a tough day! We stop for an extra breakfast and Di swigs her cold soaked oats. It looks gross! She has an Ozzy saying “that’s terrible Muriel” as she shakes her head. We trudge on, climbing over blow down trees and more freezing river crossings. The views are spectacular when I remember to look up rather than stare at my boobs! 😂

🥗 10.45am - DinkyDi and I stop at the creek for a long break. We crack open the stoves and have a hot early lunch of noodles with bacon bits which was a real luxury. We rest our weary bones knowing that we still have many miles of incline before we can rest.

🤕 The trail today is relentless and my right hip is feeling the pain. My flutes are screaming at me and my right shin is also throbbing. But, I know I’m not in as much pain as DinkyDi. Her pack is digging into her shoulders and each step she’s in chronic pain. DinkyDi stops to stretch it out every 2 mins or so. She never moans and is made of pure grit.

🚻 12.16pm - We finally reach Mission Creek which was our next goal for a break. We instantly take off our heavy packs and they land with s thud on the sandy ground. This alpine forest with its cute little creeks and floor Leiden with pine cones is gorgeous. I need a wee so grab my trusty portable buddy and go looking for a spot. I crouch down near a bush not realising how close to the trail I was. A guy from the. Netherlands called “Barry” waved at me just as I was pulling up my trousers! 😂 Oh well, it was bound to happen sooner or later. We fill up with four litres of water as this is the last water source for some time. 4 litres of water is heavy! As mentioned, Di is in chronic pain with her shoulder and needs a new backpack. She tried on a fellow hikers “Osprey” pack and likes it. Let’s hope they sell backpacks at Big Bear.

🌲 The terrain is starting to change. The bare rock with bush is vanishing now and we are seeing more beautiful Redwood trees, soft pine needles on the ground to walk on. We sing and laugh, stop and stretch and constantly leapfrog Barry and his wife (I’ve forgotten her name). It’s a bit like a game.

👼 13.18 We then come across a big patch of snow. Like a little kid, DinkyDi screams “Snow angels, come on Jukebox, let’s do snow angels”. So I set up the camera and we lie down in the freezing cold snow making snow angels. We laughed like children as the cold ice seeped through our thin shirts. We just got up and Barry and his wife turned up. “We’ve just done snow angels” says DunkyDi with a big grin on her face. He looked at our efforts in the snow. I must admit, they were a bit pathetic. Barry showed us how it should be done. He dived into the snow, made a perfect circle with his arms, and then his legs. He got us carefully and filled in bits with his hands as if he was making a sand castle on the beach. These Netherlands people know how to make good snow angels, but I think DinkyDi and I had more fun!

❄️ 15.10 Little did we know that the patch of snow was about to get ten times worse and I regret loosing one of my Microspikes. As we traverse icy cliffs with landslides to our left I shout out loud to Di “I’m glad my mum
Can’t see me now!”. We are tired and it would be easy to make a mistake. It’s late afternoon so the snow is melting, slushy and slippery. It’s quite dangerous and Discos words are etched in my head. “3 points of contact”. I’m following DinkyDi and we are helping each other through a tricky bit. She stops suddenly after negotiating a blow down tree and looks up.
We hear a voice from above and it’s Barry. “What are you ladies doing down there?” He bellows. “The fast road is up here”. Di looks at me and we both check the map. Yep, we’ve been following an animal track and not the trail, which is about 100ft above us. Squiggle! Oops. We can either double back over that landslide or be adventurous and scramble up the rocks. Scramble it is! Again, I’m glad my family can’t see me now as it’s not something I’d recommend!

🥾 We trek on and it’s getting late and I’m tired. The trail was not clear today and we made lots of squiggles, traversed more “iffy” land slides and if I’m honest, I was questioning what I’m earth I’m doing here! I should be at home with my family, in my nice warm house, eating Matt’s wonderful jambalaya. It’s the first time since I’ve started that the grumps have appeared in my mind and that’s not good. I know this mindset is not healthy so I switch on an audiobook. I’m listening to “Never Finished” by David Goggins and it’s the perfect book to get me fired up for the last stretch.

⛺️ 5pm - Todays walk has been tough, so DinkyDi and I decide to cut it short at 14.4 miles and stay in the remote cabin. As we approach Coon Creek Cabin it’s looking a bit run down and not what I was visioning at all. Joey is outside and we high give him and ask if he is stopping here. “Yes, it’s a roof and it’s going to get cold tonight. I’m not sure if I’ll stay in the main building or one of the huts out the back” he says. There are bear boxes and fire pits outside. DinkyDi lay out packs on the picnic benches and go to explore. In Joeys words “it’s a good fixer upper”. He is right. This is literally just a big wooden building with no windows or doors, but it has three rooms and a roof as well as massive fireplace. The floor on the room to the right is all sunken and looks quite dangerous. Our friends from the Netherlands turn up and start pitching their tent outside. I turn to
DinkyDi “what do you think?, Inside out?” She looks at me and says “how often will you get a chance to sleep in a derelict cabin in the woods in California?”. “Ok, let’s do it” and we grab our packs and make camp in the main building.

😃 Joey and Erica make camp in the room to the left, and then in walks some familiar faces! Handyman is here with Kodak, Hops and Sorry! It’s so exciting to see them all and it raises our spirits. We stop to share stories in the trail and catch keith where our other friends are. Amber and Harry are literally 5 miles away so we may see them tomorrow.

🐻 6.30pm It’s freezing so we all clamber into our sleeping bags. I’ve got my puffy pants on and I’m starting to feel toasty and warm. Di was adamant that we should put our food bags in the bear boxes outside but everyone else said that there won’t be bears around here. “But there are no doors and a bear could easily get inside” she said. No one wanted to venture outside into the cold so she gave in with the protests and we all shoved our food bags deep into our rucksacks as a way of preventing odours escaping.

🐭 What on earth!!! There is a commotion from the room in the right and I look up to see Erica screaming and bashing her sleeping bag as if it was attacking her. “Get off” she screams as a little mouse runs around her and over her sleeping bag. It scuttles through her room into ours and DinkyDi, the animal lover, says “ah, how cute”! Everyone gets up at this point, grabs their food from their rucksacks and head out to the bear boxes outside. DinkyDi was right and we should have done that in the first place!

8pm - snuggled up I rest my eyes and it’s not long before I’m fast asleep. Well, sort of!

Thanks for reading my rambles. All the comments and encouragement is really helping. I schedule these posts so sometimes it may be a few days or even a week before I can catch up with the comments but I do read them all. ❤️❤️Read more