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Five days to the Cactus to Clouds hike on Saturday, the day after I turn 39.

I had no idea that it was an UNSANCTIONED hike on an UNMAINTAINED trail.

Chad and I scoped the trailhead behind the Palm Springs Museum yesterday and hiked the first 35 minutes or so to the picnic tables at 1,000 feet. Only 9,ooo feet elevation gain and sixteen more miles to the peak. Will I make it? I consider myself normally relatively fit, but I am just back from three weeks of walking very slowly and lots of floating on my back in a pool. If I had planned better, I would have walked up the stairs everyday to the seventh floor – two or three times.

Then we headed over to the Palm Springs tramway, which will bring our leaden bodies back down to sea level at the end of the day. Not much to see there at the tram base: just a silly giftshop and a few tables outside under the misters. A round trip costs $21.95 and an unlimited summer pass costs $50. Rumor has it that it is free to ride down, if you didn’t ride up, but we didn’t bother checking. There is a restaurant at the top of the tram that we may consider eating at – I don’t know, we’ll see.

If we start at 5 am (to beat the sun), then we may be at the ranger station (top of the tramway) by noon. Plenty of time then to bag the peak (5 1/2 miles further up) and stumble back down onto a downward tram.

Here’s a blurb from backpacker.com:
5. Cactus to Clouds Trail Mt., San Jacinto from Palm Springs, CA Score: 80 Miles: 23 Elevation Change: 13,400 feet X Factor: Broiling temps
Sure, it’s a big deal to climb Mt. Whitney-but on the highest peak in the lower 48, you begin at 8,360 feet. To conquer Cactus to Clouds, you start on the desert floor and ascend 10,700 feet-a vertical half-mile more than Whitney. Two fun ways to put your pain in perspective as you churn up the unmaintained trail: The trek to San Jacinto’s 10,804-foot, boulder-strewn crown is only 800 vertical feet shorter than the climb from Everest basecamp to summit-and comparable to doing more than a thousand flights of stairs. Start before dawn, because temps hit triple digits more than 100 days a year, and there’s no water below 8,500 feet. But come prepared for wild temperature inversions and possible rain and hail up high; the worst scenario is to be forced to descend waterless in the ruthless afternoon heat. From the top, where you’ll see every major peak in Southern California and all the way to the coast, most people hike down 2,300 feet and take the tram back to town; the hike’s tough enough without adding another 8,000 feet of downhill. Contact: Long Valley Ranger Station, Mt. San Jacinto State Park, (951) 659-2607; Palm Springs Aerial Tram, (760) 325-1391

We’re putting together our backpacks for the day. We’re also borrowing some hiking poles.

So far:

• 1 1/2 gallons water per person (camelbak plus water bottles and gatorade)
• sandwiches
• 3 L’arabars (Chad’s bringing 5 Tigermilk bars)
• oranges
• 1 # trail mix (dried fruit and nuts)
• First Aid kit (paper tape, neosporin, ace bandage)
• rain ponchos (could serve as “blankets” in case of emergency)
• headlamps
• extra socks
• long-sleeve shirt
• sunblock and lip protection
• hat
• bandannas (for nose-blowing, sobbing, and sundry)
• pain-killers

Can you think of anything else we might need?

For another account of this hike, one that was published in the LA Times Outdoor section in 2004, go here. The author, Robie Madrigal, hiked to the tram top in November and writes with entertaining detail, especially about his fellow hikers.

Check out this view of the hike, Cactus to Clouds, or affectionately known as C2C.

Crazy!

More information can be found at hiking4health.com. To put the trail in perspective, there is a 67-year-old Rialto native, Cyril Keicener, who likes to do this 22-mile hike once a week; to date, he’s hiked it 181 times!!!

If I haven’t posted by the following Monday, call for help…

The following is my friend, Caryn’s, account of the grueling Cactus to Clouds hike from the base to the summit of Mount San Jacinto; the hike Chad and I will tackle next weekend for my birthday.
Hello from a comfortably reclining position. No, I’m not sending belated Passover greetings–I’m hoping to capture some of the highlights of last Sunday’s epic hike up Mount San Jacinto before my memories of it go the way of all flesh. And as my flesh finds its way back to an acceptable state of equilibrium, it could use a little talking cure, which is, I suppose, what follows:

I left the high desert with Jen and Mike, my amazing coworkers, and Savannah, Jen’s friend, at 3:45 A.M. Sunday morning. Our first objective: to arrive by car at the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway gate at 4:30 A.M. in order to be there when the gate was opened so that we could leave one of our two cars in the parking lot for the end of the hike.

Calling it a “hike” is kind of like calling the L.A. Marathon a “run”. Of course our folly involved plenty of hiking, but hiking of a magnitude my sorry little ass had never experienced before. I knew only abstractly what we were up against: a mountain whose escarpment is reputed to be the steepest in North America. In 22 miles we were going to climb from 400 feet above sea level to over 10,800 feet at the summit. Somehow, when one has come to take the mountain for granted (since it’s always looming high above Palm Springs like some incongruous alpine backdrop), an attempt to reach the peak doesn’t seem particularly daunting. What did I know?

We hit the trail at 5:15 A.M., loaded with enough water to drown a medium-sized town. Twenty minutes into the ordeal I knew I was in over my head. In fact, I had seven hours to contemplate the exact wording of my bid to bow out of the second stage of the “hike” as I huffed and puffed my way up an insane section of trail that included over a hundred switchbacks. Our objective at that point was to arrive at the tram station at 8,400 feet by noon, eat lunch, register at the ranger station, and trundle up the 5.5 mile stretch of trail that begins at the ranger station near the tram and ends at the summit. We would then descend the same trail, racing against the waning sun, catch a tram car down to Palm Springs, and eventually return to our starting point on Ramon Road.

Back down on the Cactus-to-Clouds portion of the trail I was so looking forward to collapsing at the tram station I could just about taste it. Screw the summit, I thought disdainfully. I just wanted to survive part one of the ascent under my own power so that I could get to something mechanical that would carry me back down the mountain with minimal effort on my part. That’s pretty much what got me through the first seven hours. That, and a lot of heartfelt encouragement from my partners in folly. I couldn’t have done it without them. Jen, who had already completed the hike twice in previous years, had the good sense to skip the grueling details when describing the hike to me earlier this year. She and I took many walks together during the months preceding the San Jacinto trip, and I imagine that she must have had some recurring doubts about my seriousness – especially when I would report back to her, proudly, that I had done a couple of miles on my own after work or on weekends. She realized, I’m sure, that I’d had no effing clue what was in store for me. Jen smiled a lot on the hike–did she worry that I would wake up to its raw brutality at some point and seek revenge on my trail buddies? No, I think she was truly enjoying sharing the challenge of the mountain with friends. After all, it was she who had spent four months hiking the Pacific Crest Trail from Southern California to the Canadian border so, clearly, this was Jen’s idea of a good time.

Mike was a steady source of good-natured story-telling and comfort. Hell, he’d been trekking in the Himalayas, so he had a good idea beforehand of what we were in for–or that, at least, had been my impression. Much to my secret delight, Mike’s eye widened at times and he communicated via several forms of expression that he, too, was finding this challenge a bit close to the edge (metaphoric and otherwise). Generally one is advised not to look down if there is a chance of feeling queasy about heights. In this case, it was wiser not to look up–the distance between You Are Here and the ultimate destination was so great that, well….

Savannah ultimately provided the solution to my crisis of stamina once we’d reached Long Valley and the ranger station at about 12:30 P.M. After allowing myself a brief crydown, and weakly delivering my proposal that everyone go on without me while I sipped hot cocoa at the tram station and waited, I heard Jen say, “But Caryn, the rest of the trail is easy from here!” Yeah, I thought, I couldn’t schlep my ass onto a moving sidewalk at this point. Easy doesn’t cut it; immobile sounds ideal. And then Savannah said, “Look–why don’t you just try it, and if it seems too hard you can always turn around.” I could always turn around. I wasn’t part of a chain gang! Wow. That sank in immediately. We ate our lunch on the deck of the ranger station, savoring the Fritos Flavor Twists and Trader Joe’s peanut butter pretzels and Snickers bars with as much relish as if we were nibbling on fresh-broiled lobster tail dipped in garlic butter followed by crêpes dentelles drowning in fudge rum sauce. It was all good. Then we refilled our water containers and set off on phase two of the trip, the ascent to the summit.

And so I tried it, and the trail was indeed far gentler than what we had climbed in the morning, and my buddies’ good outlook and cheerfulness inspired me to push on, and we eventually reached the summit just after five o’clock. More tears. Just a few, really, since I was only milliliters away from dehydration and couldn’t afford the additional water loss. I have to admit that I didn’t take full advantage of the spectacular view at the top. Exhaustion and a certain breathlessness induced by the elevation kept me riveted to the most level rock I could find. But even from my rock I could see so far in all directions that I felt as though I’d been plucked from the earth by a prankster raven and deposited on the chimney pot of the world. It was cold and breezy up there, and after fifteen minutes or so we threaded our way back down the boulder pile that comprises the summit of Mt. San Jacinto and picked up the trail again.

It is a fraudulent notion that going downhill is easier than climbing uphill. I was using a hiking pole for the first time and I believe it helped me a lot in negotiating the rocky path back down to the tram station. There was some snow and ice on the trail, and after the struggle to the top it was a challenge to stay upright and to keep my knees from buckling underneath me. Gravity kept giving me a little boost here and there when I least needed it. Most of my energy at that point was concentrated on keeping my balance until we reached the tram building. I began then to have olfactory hallucinations: I was convinced I could smell hot cocoa wafting through the pine trees.

It was beginning to get dark when we arrived at the tram station. As we wended our way up the wide, ridiculous cement walkway that led to the building housing the tram, we heard a voice on the loudspeaker announcing the imminent departure of the next car. At that point I willed myself into a slow-motion sprint and finally deposited my body in the glass-and-metal pillbox described as “360° of WOW!” by tramway publicists. I couldn’t bear to look anywhere but straight ahead–it was too overwhelming. In fact, I couldn’t bear to look at much of anything so I became engrossed in the task of hooking together my gloves, an activity that seemed nearly manageable and within my energy budget.

In seven minutes we were back down at the bottom of the mountain. Within seven minutes we covered the same distance that had taken us seven hours to climb. There’s something so absurd about that fact that it almost makes me want to do it again. Almost. Mike, Savannah and I waited on a bench in front of the tram station as Jen bravely hitched a ride with some fellow passengers who drove her to her car. She picked us up ten minutes later and we drove to my car, redistributed bodies and then headed for Mexican food at Santana’s in Yucca Valley. I don’t remember what I ordered. I don’t remember what I said. What I do remember is feeling giddy and deeply grateful to my friends for their companionship, encouragement and good cheer. Thank you very much.

I thought about several people along the way, especially about those of you who’ve faced the more serious, life-threatening challenges thrust upon you in the last couple of years. I thought about the tremendous mental and emotional demands you faced, and still do, and how your courage has been an inspiration to me and many others. You were in my head and heart as I struggled on the mountain.
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“Sovovo” is the name used by the Serrano Indians to refer to Mt. San Jacinto. I don’t know what it means, but my guess is that it is something close to “great, hulking, intimidating mass of sheer granite not to be fucked with.” Although I hesitate to second-guess the Desert Indians’ spiritual view of the mountain, if ever there was a local landform to be worshiped, Sovovo is it. I am still wondering about the hagiography of Saint Hyacinth, but that is another project for another day. In the meantime, I will take great pleasure in gazing upon the mountain, even as I speed by it on Highway 10, and in remembering the long day spent crawling up its crags and valleys, to one of the few places where the mountain does not dominate: its summit.