L.A. bound

i am getting better at this. i still get sore and my feet hurt every day. the food is a little monotonous, but good enough. the water is sometimes awful and sometimes ice cold shooting straight out of the side of a mountain, melted snow filtered through the ground, better than any filtered water i've ever had. funny, as i'm poised to spend a week in L.A., my LAX fantasies hold less appeal than they did a couple of weeks ago. my thoughts are less "what am i doing?" and more "this is what i'm doing". it's not like i suddenly love hiking, it just seems so much more possible now and i kinda can't just quit 'cause it's hard.
so here we sit at hiker heaven, the saufly's back yard mobile home hiker hangout in agua dulce. the mobile home, old rv, and many large tents with cots filling the yard can sleep up to 50 (!?) hikers. only about 20 of us here tonight.
we just climbed to the top of the snowiest mountain yet (see photos below, look closely, i'm in one of them) and then walked through the hotest section of desert yet. i have learned how to manage my blister issues- 2 pair of injinji toe socks rotated and rinsed in creeks whenever i have the chance and always taking my shoes off when i take a break to let my feet cool off and dry out. i have officially lost 2 toenails and fear another will follow in their footsteps... it's not painful but i hope they grow back nice.
the wildlife has begun revealing itself to us. within a few minutes of walking out of wrightwood we saw a coyote. it just trotted along the trail in front of us, looking over it's shoulder every few seconds until it veered off on it's own route.very cool. then i had to pee. i went over to a rock with a nice view, gave it a quick once over, climbed on, did my business enjoying the view, started to stand up and OH MY GOD A RATTLE SNAKE BEHIND ME! BEHIND ME! i did a quick hop hop off that rock before it dawned on me that i would have had to step over the dang snake before i stuck my butt in it's face. no wonder it was mad. very scary.
this last section of trail was rerouted around a recent forest fire. the first 7 or so miles of the detour were on a really nice piece of trail that followed a canyon down down down to a creek. about half way down moss alerted me to the presence of a bear A BEAR up above us on the hill. it was not interested in us and scooted away pretty quick. we got a great view of it's back side though. very exciting. when we got to the cold rushing creek we did laundry, took dips and layed around in the shade for 3 hours in the heat of the middle of the day. awesome.
the middle of the detour is all on roads. though some hikers are choosing to do the whole road walk- "from mexico to canada"- we chose to skip the 37 miles on the edge of a hot paved highway and got a ride from the new trail angel on the scene- mr. vegas. he has a lexus suv and we will be getting our 3rd ride from him in the morning to the train station. we will be in L.A. for the next week, i'm sure you'll get to see pics.
btw, even with the hitch, we have walked 400 miles. 400 MILES!
love