This one was fun.  When I got back on trail a heatwave was starting to roll through the area, leading all the way up to Kennedy Meadows basically.  I got one final send off (IE “Fuck you”) from the desert before making my way to the Sierra through this video and the next, and while in retrospect I have good memories of it… it sucked in the moment at times.  But there was some cool stuff despite all that:  Walking along the LA aqueduct, windmills, Tehachapi in general, and other things.

The trail has a habit of making weird shit happen.  Despite me having to leave the trail here and there a bunch of times for various reasons, I kept running into Exo.  After dipping in and out of heat exhaustion, feeling nauseous and not eating, doing the night hike and hiking on a few hours of sleep.. I was a little worn out.  I crawled my way through the windfarm and up the first climb back into the mountains, down into a little canyon, and there he was.  He convinced me to stop hiking for the day and just recover for the rest of the day, drink a lot of water, eat a lot of food, etc.  Had he not have been there I absolutely would have kept going and regretted it because there was no shade for quite a ways, whereas this place had a nice huge tree to chill out under and was right next to a stream.

Also I did not hate Hikertown.  It’s a a tad strange and the owners charge if you stay the night, sure.  But it had shade, chairs, and cold water that I didn’t have to filter, all of which were a godsend at that point.  I found it really underwhelming after hearing so often that it’s “So weird!“, it’s just a residence with mini-buildings and chickens/roosters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91UftXyIfD0

Next stop: Kennedy Meadows.