Day 3: Canadians Are Awesome

Date: April 12, 2017
Miles: 20 – 32

“The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.” ~ Alexander Supertramp (Chris McCandless)

There was a surprising amount of frost on my tent when I woke up this morning at Lake Morena campground!  It made me glad that I brought a light pair of liner gloves, although I didn’t remember that I had them until after I froze my fingers putting away my tent stakes…next time, I suppose.

Skye’s mom had camped at the lake as well, and she was nice enough to drive Skye, MacGyver and me to Oak Shores once again for breakfast burritos.  It was a tough choice between staying for burritos or leaving early in order to get a lot of hiking in before the mid-day heat, but…actually no it wasn’t. Anyone who knows me knows that I will choose burritos over my physical comfort. Every. Time.  So I got a bit of a late start, but it was worth it.

Today’s hike was really pretty. During the first half of the day, it wandered through some grassy meadows, under bridges and through a couple creeks.

Around noon I stopped at Boulder Oaks campground to eat lunch and ran into a few people I’d met briefly at the campground the night before, Strongback (Connor), his girlfriend Katie, and Sage (Spencer). Strongback and Katie are from Vancouver, BC – originally Ontario – and are super funny, really nice people. Sage is a young man from California who reminds me of Chris McCandless. He has unruly, curly hair, uses an overloaded external frame pack, and carries himself with what I imagine is the same itinerant spirit. He got his trail name because he likes to pick and eat the sage that grows wild here and pungently smudges the whole desert when a breeze blows through. It’s lovely.

I hiked with the three of them for the rest of the day. The trail started to look more like I had imagined…more ‘Crest-y’, I guess, with sweeping views of the desert below, before dipping down into Fred Canyon, which was where we set up camp for the night with a few other people.

Tomorrow we head in to Mt. Laguna, where I hear there are bacon cheeseburgers…