May 24

The daily heat is beginning to wear me thin. We travel along the shadeless slopes carpeted with chapparal shrubs. All day the sun is a beam of light concentrated through a magnifying glass on the crown of my skull, following me as I walk. By midafternoon, I become delusional, nearly stumbling down the trail, the heat radiating up from the rocks, my mind rocking back and forth. The plants are too short to offer consolation in the form of shade. The trail is like pavement, it consists of crushed granite and broken twigs that have had no chance to decompose in this arid world. Sometimes, I can feel the moisture lifted from my skin and replaced with dust, large crackshave formed on the bottom my feet. There are several forms of relief from the heat. Scooping a handful of frigid water from a snow-melt stream and splashing your face with it. Climbing high up above 7000' into the crisp climate of tall shady pines and fields of snow. The little umbrella that I open up at high noon creates a portable microclimate, at least 15 degrees cooler within its circumference. Even the most shallow gust of wind brings me great satisfaction andprovides the illusion of air conditioning.My shoes are disintegrating. What started as two smalls holes in each shoe havegrown into gaping openings at the toes and the sides. It is less like shoes and more like two pieces of rubber tied to me feet. As I walk, gravel pours into the shoes and pebbles bite at the bottom of my feet. As I walk, my toes stick out and bang against rocks and cause me toscorn the ground. I will have to walk another fifty miles until I get a new pair in the mail.

A park ranger (camped tonight at a State Park) offered to take us to town for groceries. He never showed up and we were disappointed, ditched. Hours later, while we were just falling asleep, he found us and apologized. He had been held up by a drowned man that he could not resuscitate. That the ranger thought to apologize at all is amazing.

Game trails run like faint incisions across the cloth of the hills used by coyotes, rabbits, bobcats reminding me that the PCT is just another trail amongst a whole matrix of paths.