Day 12: Mile 178.5 to 190

My camera broke and it somehow deleted all of my pictures off of the card. I will keep trying to recover them.


About 16 miles


Today started with the 2.5 side trip miles from Humbar Park back to the PCT. After another couple miles, we decided to take a popular PCT detour to climb Mt. San Jacinto peak which is at 10,834ft. This was a 6 mile detour that skips 4 miles of the PCT. 


We hit more patches of snow on the way up. Since it was the weekend, there were many day hikers out hiking to the peak. We all noticed how in shape we are getting because we were flying by them on the way up.


The summit was great, it wasn't windy, it was warm, and it was also very crowded. There was a group of hikers who were nice enough to take our picture and email it to us. 

The hike down from the summit had a lot of snow. It was difficult to find the trail at times. At this point is was just Sara, Nathan, and me. We waited for Brendan and Prudence but we thought they were far back and we decided to get the 4 miles to our camp spot before it got dark. 


The last 4 miles of the day were on Fuller Ridge which was pretty amazing. Sara and I were wondering why we had never hiked here because it was so awesome. The ridge was dense forest with sections of views on either side down into the valleys. 


Near the end of the ridge, we came up on Brendan and Prudence! We were a little shocked because we thought they were behind us. We found out that they had taken an accidental shortcut. They lost the trail on the way down from the peak and had followed a creek all the way down to the trail. While they were doing that, we had followed the trail which took us on a long switchback decent. They had basically cut the corner and passed us.