Day 13, Zero Day

Man, no matter how hard I try to resist, my body and mind now wake up at 6:00am sharp! I slept on half of the queen size bed with Shadow in the room without the heater, as we don’t mind being colder. It actually felt real nice. Julian is the smallest and fit nicely on the warm comfy couch in the main room, and Joseph slept on the double in the main room. 

I woke up to some light peeking in through the dark curtains, checked my phone and sure enough it was turning from 5:59 to 6:00! Like clockwork! Outside the window everything was dusted in about a 1/4 inch of snow and the light fluffy stuff was still coming down.

Shadow and I talked about the plans for the afternoon, and wether we wanted to head out today or tomorow. Soon, we heard the other two talking in the other room about the same thing. It seems that everyone is on the 6am natural wake up schedule already.

We all mutually agreed that the smartest/most comfortable thing would be to stay one more night. If we decided to leave today we’d have to be out in the cold by 11am for checkout, when it’s supposed to be 35° and raining. Then, we’d have to climb over 3,500ft in just 7.25 miles to an elevation of almost 9000ft. You can imagine it will most likely be snowing way up there for the rest of the day. THEN we’d have to climb down about 5-6 more miles just to get out of the snow to camp! Yup, I think we’ll stay right here :)

This is my first full Zero day on the trail. My body feels great and I feel kinda antsy to get back out there, but this is the best call weather-wise, and I’ll feel even better getting a nice early start tomorow and making it up and over Fuller Ridge and down the hill aways. Including the ~7 miles I hiked yesterday to get into Idyllwild, I’ve done 180 miles in 12 days! That’s 15 miles a day average counting the two nero days I took near Julian and Warner Springs. That’s a GREAT average and I’ll only be getting faster from here. 

Since I didn’t go out for dinner last night I was STARVING this morning! Julian, Joseph and I headed out to the Red Kettle. The best breakfast spot in town! The only other hiker in there was Swayed, who had been hiking with Candyman. Candyman is “tough as nails”, according to Swayed, and went straight up to Jacinto yesterday. I hope he’s ok! 

You know I went for that hot chocolate

And you KNOW I did the full order of French toast as a combo AND got hash browns on the side :)

I think the hiker hunger is kicking in! By the time we were leaving, there was about 15 other hikers in the cafe! Either not everyone’s on the same wake up schedule yet, or we were just extra hungry in the morning! I walked with Julian back up the toad to the outfitter so he could but some gloves, and then we headed back to the cabin for a post-breakfast nap.

What to do for 24 hours when you just want to hike?! Catch up on some blogging and Instagram posts of course :) 

Unfortunately I discovered that I’ve already used all of my data for my phone plan, mainly by uploading all the pictures and words on my blog while not being connected to WiFi, but also being on Instagram in trail towns and sending photos to family and friends. This isn’t the end of the world, it just means that instead of being able to upload daily blogs daily, I’ll have to send them 5 or 6 at a time when I get to the next town and WiFi. I’ll make a seperate blogpost repeating this. 

Anyways, I killed soooooo much time just being lazy indoors as the weather just got worse and worse outside. I ate so much for breakfast I just skipped lunch. At around 5:30pm I headed over to the Idyllwild Brewpub where Ben and his girlfriend were also eating!

Chili fries and a big salad. Also, chocolate toffee cookies for desert :)

Well, I’m super super stuffed and also somehow still tired even though I napped for about 2 hours today! I’m excited to hike tomorow and am planning to get a nice and early start. It seems that about 100 hikers have the same idea as tomorow is the first day without any horrible weather. Hopefully there’ll be enough campsites for everyone! Haha

Thanks for reading!!