After almost two weeks at home, waiting for the snow to melt in the SoCal mountains, I finally came up with a plan to get back on the PCT to continue my thru hike.
From PCT mile 223.2 to 223.2 Total: 0.0 miles 5/22
I really wanted to restart back in Anza, at Highway 74 where I stopped due to snow in the San Jacinto Range. Of course, there was also heavy snow in the San Gorgonio and San Gabriel ranges, so they were similarly out of the running for me. Vicki insisted that snow and ice was too dangerous for a 65 year old solo hiker. Her 65 year old solo hiker. I wasn’t all that excited about it either — I did enough snow camping in my early twenties to last a lifetime. Flipping to Acton and hiking all the way to Walker Pass had worked perfectly. Sadly, restarting in Anza would have to wait even longer, due to the persistent San Jacinto snowpack, so I chose the mostly snow-free option by re-starting north of there, at Interstate 10.
As I read the Far Out app comments, I realized that this might be a bad idea. Apparently, the melting snow made the Whitewater River into a semi-dangerous crossing. One hiker had been swept downstream and injured. Vicki didn’t like this either. As a husband, you often have to listen to your wife and cater to her whims. That’s how you stay married for forty years. So I searched for an alternative route. Looking at the map, there was a trail just beyond the Whitewater crossing that led to the Mission Creek Preserve. I did a bit of googling and you could camp there (for free!) if you got permission from the conservancy. So I set up a date and got the code for the locked gate.
Then I started packing and planning in earnest. I decided to climb the 6000 feet up to Big Bear along Mission Creek in two fifteen mile days. I just finished two weeks at fifteen per day and I survived OK, although my heels were a bit sore those last few days. After that, the trail was easier, and the days were getting longer, so I decided to kick it up a notch to twenty mile days. I made a plan on CalTopo for my camping spots and daily water refill points. I also decided to leave a food cache in a bear cannister mid-way through the two week hike. This worked great last time, and would save me the trouble of hitchhiking into town along the way.
On the chosen day, Vicki and I drove to the cache spot, stashed the can and a jug of water under a bush, and headed south to the Mission Creek Preserve. The gate code worked fine, and we continued up the dirt road to the stone house and the big parking lot. One other camper and her dog arrived at the same time we did, and she was very nice. It was also quite warm that day, down there at 2500 feet elevation, and promised to be hot again tomorrow, the day I started hiking. My best bet was to gain elevation, and that was precisely what the PCT had in store for me.
We had never visited the preserve, and it turned out to be excellent. The stone house was cool inside, with screened windows to let in the air, and it had picnic tables for hanging out. We walked around the area. There was a trail down to Mission Creek itself, and it was flowing very strong, at least compared to the last time Vicki and I hiked along it back in 2019, when we headed downhill out of Big Bear on the PCT. This year it was just wide enough to be impossible to jump across. I hoped it was smaller upstream, when I would be crossing it many, many times, but I wasn’t expecting much luck in that regard. Oh well. It is what it is.
Vicki and I usually sleep in the back of my “camperized” Rav4 when car-camping, but today had been really hot and I figured that it would be tough to get any sleep, even with the side windows open. That’s why I finally got a chance to deploy the SUV Hatch tent contraption I bought over a year ago. It was a great idea, but was useless for stealth-camping at a trailhead, and you couldn’t really lock the car with the back hatch wide open when taking a dayhike at a public campground. It took too long to set it up and take it down, but I might get faster with practice — this was my second time setting it up and the first time not in my driveway.
It turned out that the new hatch tent worked great! There was a lot more room in the car with the hatch open, and the screen door/window let in plenty of the cooler evening air.
We cooked up some dinner and ate it inside the stone house with our neighbor, talking about the area. I told her how to find the trail to the PCT and the main Whitewater Preserve. After dinner, she and her puppy set up their tent nearby. No one else arrived that evening, and the preserve became a very peaceful place to be. It was promising to be a pleasant desert night at the Mission Creek Oasis.
For a topographic map of the hike see my CalTopo Page
For LOTS more photos of the trek see my Flickr Page
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