May 7, 2016

Today we crossed the stretch known as The Death March. It's a 17 mile stretch through the Mojave desert along the LA aqueduct with no water, no shade, and no landscape changes. Usually it's upwards of 100 degrees in this section. Hoping to minimize the discomfort we planned on being up and out shortly after 5:00am.

Russian Ketchup, who had joined us later in the evening, began cooking a dozen eggs which slowed our departure a bit. We headed out around 6:30 as the sun began to rise. Fortunately for us it was a partly cloudy day with a good wind and reasonable temperatures. The beginning of the aqueduct walk was actually pretty cool before we veered away from farmland and into the desert and before the aqueduct headed underground.

The rest of the morning was uneventful and the stretch lived up to its reputation of monotony. We finally arrived at the single spigot along the aqueduct and stopped for lunch. The clouds had intensified and it looked like it might rain so we took a nice long break to wait that out.

It didn't rain but the long stop was still a success. Rickets fell asleep, the others of us dozed. We packed up at 3:00pm and diverged from the aqueduct to instead travel through the wind farm we had been approaching all day.

Raptor's shin had been getting progressively worse all day and with a steep climb up into the mountains and away from easy access roads I began feeling uneasy about not saying anything about getting off trail to take care of it. After all, my medical training was focused on emergency response not diagnosing soft tissue problems so who was I to make a call for her? The closer we got to the edge of the wind farm the more I felt I should at least put it out there.

Eeyore and I picked up the pace to catch up to Loopy and Raptor, who had left a bit earlier than me. We caught up to them stopped at a gravel road. As I was about to say my piece Loopy informed us that they were in contingency planning mode and the call had been made to take a few days for the shin.

The question then became how to get Raptor to a town. Loopy and Eeyore ended up walking back towards the wind farm office to try to catch someone there. While they were gone Raptor, Rickets, Russian Ketchup, and I sat on the road listening to the turbines and watching the clouds roll by. Forty five minutes later we got a call from them saying they had found a ride from a family out dirt biking. Fifteen minutes later they rolled up in a pickup truck, Raptor hopped in, and we headed on to camp.

We had 3 miles left of steep uphill to camp. It had been a draining day and Eeyore and Loopy had done 3 bonus miles so we were moving slowly. Add to that the updates from Raptor about the burger she was having in town and it dragged on even more.

We finally made it up and over into a small valley with a stream. It was quite windy and the tent sites were rock hard but the day was over.