Day 18 – The Golden Arches
Originally published on Mason Hikes the PCT 2017.
Mileage: 29 miles with 7700′ up.
For some reason my life on trail is just surviving until I can eat a real meal again. In between those I live snack to snack. McDonald’s is my reason for hiking today.
See it? See it!?
I had hiked pretty close to Cajon Pass so that I could get some McDonalds breakfast, wait a bit, then get some McDonalds lunch. I hiked into town, got myself a table, then placed the biggest breakfast order I’d ever made: two sausage and egg burritos, an egg McMuffin, a bacon egg and cheese McGriddle, a hash brown, a large vanilla milkshake, and a large lemonade.
Health food
It was a solid 2,000+ calorie meal, which I followed with some electronics charging and then lunch: two quarter pounders with cheese and 10 chicken nuggets. I ended up sitting in McDonald’s for about five hours before embarking on my uphill journey of the afternoon.
Whenever I see a big hill on the map, my mind seems to say “Hmm… I wonder what the dumbest thing I can do is.” In this case, I had been talking to a friend about a possible surprise visit to LA to surprise all of my roommates and a bunch of friends. They had been planning a beach weekend and I was going to be really close, so I decided to try to go. My plan was to hike really far to get ahead of schedule and then attempt to hitchhike into town. This would mean 69 miles in two days with over 15,000′ of elevation gain and 13,000′ of elevation loss. 😬
Yikes
The rest of the day was a high fructose corn syrup-induced blur of endless uphill, culminating with me getting lost trying to find the campsite. It turns out that camping on a 30° slope doesn’t make any sense and they definitely didn’t put the campsite there, but it had been a long day.