Hitting mile 500 was a nice milestone – while there are still many miles to go, the miles already covered are starting to feel significant.
After Wrightwood, we had a few cooler and largely uneventful days. We continued to travel west through Angeles National Forest, where a fair number of other hikers have seen or heard mountain lions, but I have been lucky enough not to. We got our first real Trail Magic – a group of Korean hikers brought beer (Sam Adams!), watermelon, and a variety of other snacks to one of the trailheads to share with PCT hikers.

Soon it was time for another long descent back to the desert proper. As I was starting to head down, Andrew suddenly appeared, having finally caught up to us after his zero in Big Bear. He said to let him know if I wanted to hike ahead of him if I was going faster, to which I laughed out loud.
On the way down, Stoplight started having a lot of trouble with her quad, so when we got down and went into the very small town of Acton to resupply, she decided to take the afternoon off and skip a few miles ahead to the even smaller town of Agua Dulce. I went back to the trail and hiked the intervening miles to the same place in the evening. When I got to the campground we’d agreed to meet at, I found Andrew but was surprised that Stoplight wasn’t already there. On texting, I received the somewhat confusing reply that on her way to Agua Dulce, she’d met a man who had let her take a shower and taken her to dinner. Andrew and I greeted this response with skepticism. Not long after, he dropped her off at the campground and I did agree that the man didn’t seem especially creepy, just very eager to be helpful. Stoplight was freshly showered and came bearing cheesecake for me and Andrew (bought by her very eager personal trail angel). She explained that he’d recently bought a house up the road and wanted to turn it into a PCT hiker hostel and was apparently starting his mission to help PCT hikers with her. In addition to the shower and dinner, he had also apparently offered to take her to get a massage, to the movies, and to Los Angeles.

We’d had a few cooler days, but after Agua Dulce, the heat was back. We continued hiking early and late, avoiding the middle of the day. On day 20, we achieved the dubious accomplishment of arriving at Hikertown. Hikertown is a ramshackle collection of buildings decorated to look like an Old West town square that offers showers, shade, and bunk rooms (possibly filled with spiders) to hikers. The most notable thing about Hikertown, though, is that it is the last stop before the most infamous part of the PCT desert section, the 20-ish mile walk along the LA aqueduct. While not a challenging hike – it is basically flat – the aqueduct is long, boring, hot, and exposed. Most hikers either do it very early in the morning or at night. While waiting for the optimal hiking time, they hang out at Hikertown. This is what we did, waiting out the long afternoon hours in the shade, downloading music, podcasts and audiobooks, and charging headlamps and phones. A number of other hikers arrived, but we spent most of the afternoon with Brian, a guy around our age, and Lloyd and Tanya, an older Canadian couple who made and packaged all of their own trail food.

Stoplight and I left to start hiking around 4:30pm. Most of the aqueduct walk is along dirt roads, so cars occasionally drive by. One car drove by early in the walk and, after we’d moved out of the way, called out the window “you’re so beautiful!” Stoplight and I exchanged glances and rolled our eyes. But not long after that, a four wheeler drove up from the other direction, and it was one of the guys from the car. He’d brought us both a coke and resumed telling us that we were beautiful, asked us if we had boyfriends (yes) and if we’d give him our numbers (no). I got the vibe that Stoplight was the main target of his attention, but if I’d responded favorably it would have been acceptable. Eventually, after a good amount of deflection and uncomfortable laughs on our part, he did leave. We were both happy we’d been together for the interaction.
Four hours of an audiobook got me through about 12 miles of the aqueduct and I stopped to take a break as it was getting dark. At that point, Stoplight and Brian caught up and after that, we walked together for the next six miles, all grateful to have some company. The moon was so bright and the road so open, we barely needed headlamps and walked with just the red light on. We made it off the aqueduct and started through a large wind farm. The sight of so many wind turbines looming out of the darkness and whirring in the night was cool but a bit eerie. Brian stopped to camp around 11pm, but Stoplight and I pushed a few more miles as, further into the wind farm, it got windier and windier. Around midnight, we managed to find some semi-sheltered space behind some Juniper bushes and set up our tents for what was really more of a nap.

We got back up at 4am to finish the climb back into the hills before it got too warm, mostly too exhausted to appreciate that the aqueduct walk was behind us. We finished the next 21 miles to the road that would take us into Tehachapi, our next town stop, with minimal breaks, and by mid-afternoon we had a hotel room, capping our mileage from the last 24 hours at 41 miles.
The vibe in Tehachapi was pretty uniformly exhausted, as everyone had done some variation of what we’d done to get there, some people hiking more like 50 miles in little more than 24 hours. We found Andrew and went to Walmart, every hiker’s favorite resupply, as prices are about half what they are in the standard trail town grocery store. Stoplight and I were also excited because we were going to get flip flops. We’d both started the trail thinking we were hardcore and didn’t need camp shoes, and after three weeks we had decided that actually, we did. Andrew was obviously aghast: “You’re supposed to be getting rid of things, not getting new things! How many grams do those weigh?” (Andrew has obviously weighed everything he carries to the gram.) But he couldn’t lessen our satisfaction with our $4 purchases. Brian joined shortly after, and after pizza and a well-earned soak in the hotel hot tub, we all collapsed. Up next is the home stretch to Kennedy Meadows and the end of the desert!

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