We got a pretty early start today--around 5:45am. In a landscape more inhospitable than yesterday's, we crossed a 4 mile flat desert section in heavy wind. Due to my laziness (I didn't want to carry 5 days worth of food), we had a planned resupply in Cabazon. So when we reached Tamarack Rd at mile 4, and found no traffic there, we walked up to I-10 and hitched form the on-ramp. We got a ride fairly quickly from a guy named Pete driving a very clean mini van. Dwight had him let us off at the outlet mall in spite of e saying repeatedly that I'd never been to an outlet mall that had a grocery store. We lucked out though and found Hadley's--a store that sold mostly dried friut and nuts, but also had other health and gormet food items. A much better alternative to resupplying at a gas station convienience store which was our other option.
Now the sucko part: we had to walk the 6 miles back to the trail. We tried to hitch back from the interstate on-ramp but a cop pulled up and asked us if we needed help. Since hitching is illegal here, Dwight told her we were waiting for a friend to pick us up there (because your friends always have you wait for them next to the interstate, right?). Anyway, she suggested we find a safer place to wait--like the casino. We were actually tempted to go there because my bother-in-law's girlfriend Brittney works there--but Dwight said you needed to put down a $100K deposit just to walk into the room she works in. So, on to Plan B, or is it C?
Plan C (executed by Dwight) was asking all the trucker's at a nearby truckstop if they were headed that direction--but they were all headed west. Oddly coincidental that none were going our way?
So then we tried to hitch from a frontage road that wasn't actually a frontage rd at all...and the only option left was to walk back in the dusty, dry, hot, shadeless desert. To be fair we did have a light tail wind.
We eventually made it back to the trail, and not long after came across a large cooler filled with ice cold bottled water left by trail angel's Olivia and Art Garcia. Their home is visible from the trail. While we were drinking the water, they walked up to us bearing appples and oranges, and introduced themselves. They are recently retired and are a very youthful lookig 56 and 67 years old. They were very enthusiastic about hiking and seemed genuinely excited about meeting hikers. Art encouraged us to have a second bottle of water and I must have been thristy because I just remember it being gone in no time. I'll never stop being amazed at the folks that reach out to hikers.
Around 1pm we took respite from the sun in the shade of an empty water tank--staying until around 4:30. as the sun was setting we were walking through a narow canyon. The light on the canyon walls was beautiful--I see why artists enjoy painting the desert.
The walk down to the Whitewater River, in the San Gorginio (sp?) Wilderness Area was quite nice. We are camped at the nearly waterless Whitewater River, so named because it is apparently a torrent of water after the initial snowmelt. It is now down to a 5 ft widestream, but we are thankful for that.
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