Days 12 & 13, Tuesday & Wednesday, March 5 & 6, Hotel Julian (Double Zero)

• 🎶 Fill my eyes, with that double zero.
• No disguise, with that double zero.
• Ooh, when it’s through to me, it’s always new to me.
• My double zero gets the best of me 🎶

I’m a sucker when a woman laying in bed asks if we can stay in town for another day. Bunny had been reading about San Jacinto snow pack and looking at weather reports and saw it was going to rain on Wednesday. She then pulled out her ace—“I don’t have a pack cover and all my stuff will get wet.” Of course, she waited until Amazon’s shipping hours couldn’t possibly get us a new cover until Thursday when the weather will be nice again. 

I’ve got to admit, she has been working her fear mongering on me. I don’t like to look ahead so I don’t worry uselessly. I believe, we’ll figure out what we’re going to do when we need to do it. I’m not going to do anything stupid or unsafe. Bunny is a worrier by programming. She claims that she’s preparing for all possibilities but what she’s really doing is wasting energy and time thinking about 99.9% of shit that’s never going to happen. We don’t need to work out contingency plans this far in advance. Dammit, Jim, we’re not NASA engineers. We’re hikers!

Julian is a tourist town these days, but it was started out with a lot of help from several former slaves right after the Civil War. One former stablehand and prospector recognized gold flakes in a stream when he was watering his horse and that was the beginning of the short lived gold rush in Southern California. It’s still possible to pan for gold at the end of the gold mine tour, but we opted to devote our free time to eating (even though Bunny says we don’t have our hiker appetites yet).

With rain present all day on Wednesday, I give my wife kudos for electing to stay an additional night at the Julian Gold Rush Hotel rather than spending another day sleeping in the tent. It looks like we really do have some time to kill before San Jacinto will be ready for a safe traverse. We had planned to start with 15 mile days out of here, but we’ll cut back to 12-14 mile days just to allow the weather to warm up for a few days. After today, the forecast looks better until Monday. 

 A big attraction for hikers in Julian is a free slice of pie with ice cream and a cup of coffee from a Mom’s Pies. This is an $8.50 cost to everyone else but with a PCT permit…nada. And it’s damn good pie. I had a slice of Bumbleberry Pie (blackberry, blueberry, and boysenberry) while Bunny chose Apple/Cherry Crumble. There actually is not a wrong decision to be made (other than missing it). 

We have become the old timers at the hotel. Non-hikers have come and gone yet here we remain. It’s tough to leave a place with a 2 course breakfast every morning, late afternoon tea, and our own bathroom, but our per mile cost is currently higher than $10. Some people try to claim that it’s possible to hike for $2/mile, but the deprivation is way below our comfort level. We’ve managed to keep our trail costs at around $2,000/month which is not an outrageous lifestyle but we can stay in towns and hose off weekly. With the cold weather early on, our costs are higher but they will drop with warmer temperatures. 

This has been a slightly extravagant stay in Julian for us, but we got all of our usual town chores completed plus an equipment shakedown, even sending a few pounds back to our ever watchful angel who is now handling gear shipments to/from the trail for us this year. 

Since we used the “Chaunce Approach” to trail preparation (eat everything with lots of calories and try not to exercise) we are sporting more weight than we would like to at the start, but it is already starting to come off. We credit the rapid loss to a tip we picked up from Badger to drink athletic greens every day. (Badger and Chaunce are the hosts of “Backpacker Radio,” a podcast that we started listening to over winter). How are the athletic greens working so quickly? (Gruesome info coming, you might want to stop reading now.) The athletic greens combined with our chia pudding breakfast and the Laird Hamilton coconut oil coffee has really greased our digestive tracks. (I’m proud of myself for not describing our poops…more personal growth for me and it wasn’t gruesome at all since I didn’t mention the smells or consistency as I had planned.)

We’ll take our time packing up and leaving in the morning. Breakfast isn’t served until 8 and there’s a required 12 mile hitch back to the trail. Usually we get tired of towns pretty quickly when hiking, but I guess we haven’t completely settled back into trail life, yet. Possibly, I’m just saying, that the fact that we’ve had 6 zeros since our permitted start date might, in some way, may be a factor. 

EFG