Today we woke at Nitsy’s ready to go. We ate. Had coffee. Drank Gatorade and water. And used the bathroom. Natasha and I scrambled to get our packs packed up. We didn’t have a chance last night with dealing with the kids and bedtime routine. We had barely got the food and laundry sorted before we went to sleep. But packing bags went fairly quickly today despite some struggles to fit our food.

Then we waited.

And waited.

And waited.

I have no idea what happened.

Some misunderstanding maybe?

Or maybe Nitsy had a plan to force us to zero out the hot weather? 

But the group waited and waited. I think Nitsy was helping other hikers run errands – whatever it was – whenever we said we were ready to go she would disappear for an hour. It was 11am before we left her place.

We had wanted to go early because it was going to be a hot day. Forecast in Banning was for 30 deg C. We would expect it to be hotter on road and trail.  Actually starting to hike at noon would be a terrible idea.

We all were getting anxious.

By the time we left, our options were limited. One option was to hike in 30+ deg C weather on roads and desert with no water sources (big water carry) or just go to whitewater preserve and wait out the heat and start there tomorrow.

We made a rushed decision to go to whitewater. In hindsight it was one that Nitsy seemed to push for. She made a point of mentioning it to me the night before.

It was probably for the best with the kids given the options we were presented with. But we skipped miles and had an afternoon to burn. On a hot day.

We sat inside the ranger station. Charged devices (Natasha used her phone to read stories to Toothless while we waited all morning). Lil Flier napped and played. I would take Toothless outside for short walks. We checked out the river. The wading pool was closed so we couldn’t use that, which was a bummer. It was too hot to just hang out outside.

By 3pm it started to feel cooler. 4pm was tolerable.

There was some trail magic and Natasha got spaghetti dinner. Lots of hikers rolled in. It was busy.  There will be pancakes and coffee for breakfast.

Toothless did like playing in the grass in the evening. And Lil Fliers sun burned face cleared up. So there was some positive. But it was a hard day that didn’t have to happen that way. We were ready for the trail, getting back into a routine and I was looking forward to going to the wind farm.

We really hope to get going quickly tomorrow. It’ll be a big day. And we still have to manage breaking camp at a front country site – which usually takes too much time mostly due to bathroom breaks needing to happen at actual bathrooms. And the trail magic will take time – to eat and to socialize with others. But we just need to get on trail and get past the hot stuff and into Mission Creek tomorrow.