By Hedgehog
Starting Mileage: 254
Ending Mileage: 266
We broke camp without our usual breakfast and coffee. We were in a hurry. It was TOWN DAY! And we had 12 miles to cover before we could go to town.
We set off at pretty good clip with visions of having a late breakfast at Thelma's in Big Bear.
We had relatively flat terrain and good trail tread as we covered the first four miles quickly. As we passed the spring abiut 1/2 the group from the night before were awake. We waved in passing and kept going.
The water report indicated another water cache with soda about a mile after the spring. Sadly it was mistaken.
I was getting irritated that we hadn't found that cache yet when the trail started a long climb with bad tread; small fist sized, sharp rocks. About halfway up the climb I stopped and we had a snack.
Remember a hungry Hedgehog is a grumpy Hedgehog.
After a 5 minute break we were back at it.
The weather was finally cooler and it was actually overcast. This helped tremendously. For a while I thought Southern California didn't get clouds.
We rounded a hill a I saw my first Joshua trees. A first of many I'm sure but still a cool moment.
We made it to the Hwy in about 4 hours, a 3 mile/hour pace we can't usually maintain.
We were able to hitch a ride into town in about 10 minutes. A nice puppy named Houdini and his owner (a fellow hiker) stopped to give us a lift.
They kindly deposited us right in front of Thelma's.Breakfast was great and their Famous Apple Dumpling deserves its reputation.
After breakfast we started walking to the Motel 6. Even though the 2 hostels had done their best to lure us in a private room and bath won. A local Trail Angel, Mountain Mama, stopped and gave us a lift the rest of the way to the motel.
After showers and laundry we emptied our food bags onto the bed so we could see what needed to be resupplied. Then we went grocery shopping.
The rest of the day was taken up trying to catch up on emails, blogs, etc.
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