Captain's Log: Day 10

April 23

After the late night we slept in until 5:30am before breaking camp. We still had 15 miles to cover before water and it was all downhill, dropping over 7000 ft. A grade of 500 ft/mile isn't bad at all. For 15 miles straight with no shade and rationed water is a different story altogether.

Not much was said on the way down as we were all focused on just making it to the bottom without any repetitive stress injuries. I hadn't had to deal with blisters or soft tissue problems on the trip yet but by the time we reached the bottom I had tape my feet, an ankle, and knee.

The bottom wasn't much better. At 12:30pm there was no shade to be found and 6 miles left to cover before reaching Ziggy and The Bear's, the trail angels we were shooting for.

The trail followed a paved path for the first mile at the end of which Copper Tone was set up serving root beer floats. He was only there for two days and we had just missed we the last of the ice cream but we enjoyed the bit of shade and fresh bananas.

Without much choice we continued on in the heat of the day across the 4 miles of flat sand to Interstate 10 (the starting point of Cheryl Straid in Wild). We had been warned that the afternoon would start windy and get windier but I certainly didn't expect how difficult the small stretch would be. Even with my poles the gusts made it impossible to keep a straight line. Our faces were getting sand blasted and the soft sand meant a fight for every step on top of the pains from the descent.

We circled a small residential neighborhood for the last mile. We knew Ziggy's was in there somewhere but didn't know how to get to it. Finally we saw signs and hobbled down into a backyard with 15 or so hikers hanging out. Ziggy wasted no time in getting us a cold Gatorade and making sure we signed in while The Bear was in charge of photographing each hiker.

We now had to decide what to do about the next fire closure section. The options were to hike in 25 miles to the closure and then back 25 miles to I-10 and then hitch around the closure, or to just hitch around it. Given the time constraints for Eeyore and Rickets we opted to take a shuttle up to Big Bear City. Raptor finagled us all a spot on the Saturday afternoon shuttle, the earliest option we could get by far, so we'll be taking a forced nero (near-zero mileage day) tomorrow.