Day 17: Car Town, USA

Highway 18 Access to Big Bear (266.1) - Tentsite (278.6) | Mileage: 12.5 + 1.1 (To a coffee shop and the bus stop)

I wake early but still felt tired. The morning light leaks in around the thick green curtains showing off the dirt on the walls but Katie is still asleep. Sweet Pea lies in the other bed scrolling his phone.

The clothes on the towel on the floor are still wet so we finish repacking the food in our underwear and sleep shirts. Somehow Sweet Pea has about three times as much as us despite being only one person and we leave him kneeling at the foot of his bed in a pile of gummies and chips and macaroni and ziplocks.

The air outside is crisp and chilly and we don’t see anyone on the walk into the village area. Waking up early is excellent. We hadn’t gotten out of bed or finished any of our chores remotely efficiently, but we’re still up and out more than two hours earlier than our city life standard. Nice.

Plus there’s super convenient sidewalk recycling!

Katie leads us to the Copper Q, which sells coffee AND cooking classes and drips with entrepreneurial genius. The crossover is evident as soon as we step across the rustic threshold because the space is tall and open with natural light and gleaming hardwood floors and a few oversized tables separating the coffee counter from a white paneled kitchen island with industrial appliances. Think Pete’s x Williams Sonoma.

All of this is particularly good news to me and almost worth the absurdly priced $8 (before tip) iced coffee we share because 1) there is so much open air 2) no one else is there except one guy that does not look like a hiker and 3) the tables are spotless i.e., no loose crumbs that may or may not be carrying norovirus. I exhale, fill a water bottle from the big pitcher thing, wash my hands in the one bathroom that has soap (slightly alarming), pull out a stool at the tall two-person table we snagged, and get cranking on my journal. Also I eat the wilted fries and the stale garlic bread out of the Clif bar box. Hopefully the employees don’t mind. Katie meanwhile stands in front of the table and does a crazy stretching dance involving a lot of split leg and knee jabs and bending at the waist. I’m honestly so proud of her for remembering wow.

We sit in there for a lot of hours and it gradually gets busier but we stay at our table and I use the soap bathroom like three more times and eventually we run out of thoughts and steam and it’s clearly time to get moving so I fill our bottles and we find the bit of concrete wall outside that looks the least used and we eat protein chips (who knew those existed!) and they’re pretty good and then we soak our oats and eat them while I read the God pamphlet aloud and it’s actually hilarious and starts with some fact about the leading cause of death in the United States that cannot be real and I should have written down some quotes because the content was that good but I unfortunately recycled it already. The older couple on vacation that walked by must have thought the girls with the huge packs and the stained shirts cackling on the sidewalk and extolling God’s word from a tiny chimpanzee zine must be insane, but it was really an excellent way to spend the morning. And I’m still perfectly content to be a semi-decent person and one day decompose under a tree. If that’s not heaven, I’m not sure what I should even be repenting for.

It’s the afternoon now and we’re hikers after all so Katie texts Tiana from the day before. She responds immediately and says she’ll give us a ride back to the trail and we ask if we can scoop Sweet Pea who went back to Stater Bros for more food? and she says yes but there’s a slight miscommunication where we think she wants to pick us all up there so we boot up the internet and figure out when the next shuttle will come and then we speed over and stand below the street sign and chat with a noro free hiker guy (phew) and the bus in an outfit that looks like a street car pulls up right on time.

I’d been to Big Bear briefly at the beginning of college, but that was notably with a car and I didn’t really remember what the town part was like. So when all of the hikers were so excited about zeroing in BIG BEAR before we’d even made it to Julian, I’d assumed it would be as cute and outdoorsy and walkable as Idyllwild. I could not have been more wrong.

Big Bear Lake is a four mile long, four lane wide road designed to accommodate ski traffic with lots of gaudy Bavarian lodges interspersed with crumbling parking lots and strip malls. A sidewalk exists about half the time, but it’s mostly buried in rocks and asphalt bits kicked up from the road. And the car noise is absolutely deafening. To Big Bear’s credit, they run a free public shuttle year-round, which is awesome for equity and accessibility, but if the intention was to reduce carbon emissions, it seems like a very expensive and futile enterprise given I don’t know how you could even get to Big Bear besides 1) driving your car from LA or 2) hitching in someone else’s car after hiking in on the PCT. So maybe the shuttle is actually just trail magic made for hikers?

When we get off at the Stater Bros, Tiana is already waiting in her white van and we bounce around and wave at Sweet Pea across the parking lot to get him to hurry up and then we’re back in the same seats (Sweet Pea is such a chauvinist to take the front seat twice in a row) and Tiana is eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich but not with the pineapple jam she loves because she forgot it at her sister’s house and hasn’t had time to pick it up because she’s been too busy driving hikers around and crossing off times and names and destinations off the clipboard sitting on the dash. And then we’re speeding back up the curves along the opposite side of the lake. An ugly brown couch had been gored by the guardrail, how, I have no idea, but white stuffing spews out across the road and Tiana is very unhappy with the sanitation department for leaving it there. We pass a lone hiker walking on the side of the road toward us kind of in the middle of nowhere and so we pull over and she leans over and shouts across Sweet Pea at the guy and it’s clear that he’s lost and confused why a woman in a giant van is yelling at him to get in the back and none of us has the slightest clue how he ended up here on this stretch of road miles from the trail and the town. He scrambles over all of our packs and sits in a folding chair in the cargo area because the actual seats are full which is nice because he’s farther away from me in case he had noro and he looks totally bewildered it comes out that he’s German and took the bus several stops too far and was trying to walk back but it must have been the wrong bus because we are going to a totally different trailhead than where he wants to go but regardless Tiana has saved the day.

She drops us back at the dirt pullout where she picked us up the day before and we hike in just far enough off the road to pee and change into our shorts and now somewhat drier sun shirts and the sun is full bore now but we’re only going 12ish miles so it’s okay. We’re slow to move because sunscreen and Katie’s on the phone with Lily so Sweet Pea hikes ahead and we climb up the dry flower tree hills and soon we’re high above the lake and the sun is setting behind it and we see the harbor and the little strip with the Cooper Q but I can’t find the park where Jenna and I practiced our handstands. We look at the wide grass strips and the chair lifts and play How Big Is The Ski Mountain and decide somewhere between Okemo and Killington but there’s no service to check the trail map. And then we drop off the backside of the ridge into the trees and it’s gloomy and colder and I miss the sun. There was a comment about lots of sick people the night before at the established site 14 miles from Big Bear, so we stop just short at the most unused trampled area where probably no one puked into the dirt and we set up the tent between some bushes. Sweet Pea rolls in (no idea how he got behind us) and it immediately gets less creepy among the scruffy bushes and the empty and it’s still early so we soak two Knorr rice packets which turns out not to be the move because the top half of the jar is still crunchy and we sit on a nice smooth log and eat it with refried beans out of a bag which I did not know existed before and an avocado and a jalapeño and some tortillas and we joke and it’s fun to have friends but the sun always goes earlier when you’re in the trees and I get cold cold cold so I leave Katie and Sweet Pea to clean up and crawl into the tent where it’s sooo much warmer somehow and I wrestle with the sleeping pads and the inflation sacks for a while and Katie comes back and we pack everything away and go to sleep in the dark woods without seeing even one big bear.