PCT SOBO DAY 90 – Independence
12th October 2016
0 miles
A terrible nights sleep. Neither of us got to sleep until around 2am. It was hot and noisy. Yummy breakfast at the Mt Williamson motel. Bacon eggs and English muffins. We got treated well because Catwater and Strider are friends.
To the post office to pick up my new pack - excellent service from Hyperlite Mountain Gear (look out for the full review of the pack), my resupply only arrived that morning and there is a problem with delivering packages from REI and Amazon to general delivery addresses. So no tent.
Had to sort out my pack and food, my bed is normally the neat one!!
Subway for lunch. This time I had a foot long. And long live the free soda refill.
Independence is a funny town. I don't know if you can call it a town, it's more of a street. It is pretty much in the desert flanked on both sides by huge mountains. It's nice to walk down the street in shorts and a t-shirt (loaner clothes provided by Strider, she's got it all worked out!)
We debated about sending our bear canisters home. They are so heavy and such a pain in the bum. But I am the first to preach about how they are used to protect the bears, not us (if bears associate getting food from humans they can become aggressive in their search for food and that ultimately leads to the bear mysteriously disappearing. They either relocate it or kill it). Despite this my first reaction is worrying about a fine from a ranger. But there are no rangers about and there are no bears about. We do some online research and we discover that in the area we are going into we don't actually have to have a bear canister as long as we camp somewhere there is a storage locker for the next 40 miles. Well that's that sorted then. We happily waved goodbye to the damn bear canisters!
The afternoon was spent catching up with life. Getting angry with Wordpress, eating Cheetos puffs, drinking chocolate milk and feeling sick.
We went to the convenience store to look for some dinner. Catwater got some microwave meals and I got a tub of Ben and Jerrys. A perfectly acceptable dinner! And America has gone and destroyed another food stuff by making it cinnamon flavoured. They know no bounds.
I called REI and arranged to have my tent delivered to Tehachapi. Nearly 2 weeks away. Not an ideal situation but what can you do?
We made plans for the next section. There are talks of bad storms north of us, a lot of the people who got scared about the weather in the Sierra being bad in October and flipped to walk south are now stuck in bad weather and we are cruising through the Sierra in the sunshine. Stay 'true to the thru' I say. You can get bad weather anywhere (I had snow in the desert last year), you can't predict it so just deal with it when it comes.
A good rest day and much needed after a gruelling 9 days.