It was another early 4:45am wake up call to beat the heat. Luckily, today wasn’t quite the inferno yesterday was. A decent breeze and some light wispy clouds made things more bearable.

This was a random sign at the top of one of todays climbs. If you zoom in you can see my man Jorge I met the other day has won this race 3 times in a row. Amazing to he can run 50 trail miles in 6.5 hrs!

This is Terrie Anderson a famous trail angel who visited while I was taking a siesta at the fire station. She even gave me a commemorative 2017 PcT hiker bandana.

There are a lot of charred trees in the mix.

In 40 trail miles there were only two water sources: the fire station hose and this seep in the side of the mountain. Needless to say, it was a popular stop on a hot day.

A little engineering to collect the water into a useful stream.

The elevation profile today looked fairly modest but was deceiving…6000′ of climbing !

This is a screen shot from my guidebook app. Users can post comments about what they come across. I like this one about the final water source of the day (needless to say I skipped the water here.

Although not quite sunset the intermittent cloud cover made a huge difference in the heat today!

There was a lot going on today.
It started with a 4:45am wake up call to beat some of the heat.

This was just after sunrise while hiking out of the KOA Campground.

This is how we travel under the freeway…

It was pretty long and dark inside.

Then we meander through Vasquez Rocks State Park. I didn’t even realize the face-profile until after I took the pic.

This feature reminds me of Roxborough State Park in CO.

By 9am I was rolling into the town Agua Dulce…lots of hikers.

The town is home to a Hiker Heaven hosted by legendary trail angels (the Saufleys) for almost 20 years. Each tent has different services: phone charging, sewing repair, parcel shipping, etc

There must have been 50 hikers there.

The Tent city in the backyard. I just took a long mid-day siesta then headed back to the trail.

The Trail Angel house-dog likes napping among the cactus.

A gorgeous sunset was especially welcome because it was another smokin’ hot day. I left Hiker Heaven at 4pm and got cooked climbing up some exposed hillsides until 7 when the sun started to dip behind the mountains.

It kept getting better and…

Better!

I finally got to camp around 8:15 and was exhausted…mostly from the heat.