Episode 56 - PCT Update #4
Big Bear —> Wrightwood
Day #: 24
Total Miles Hiked: 363
Miles remaining: 2287
Percentage done: 13.7%
If you’ve been falling along for the last few episodes, you know that Hudson and I dropped off Brooke at the trailhead on Saturday, and then we two headed back to UCLA to chill some more in Westwood. Besides wanting to hang out some more with friends, my mind was begging me to finally, finally, FINALLY write my beloved E-Wing Gallery blog.
Then on Monday, I returned back to Big Bear after an epic quest of traveling 120 miles across LA solely on public transportation and hitchhiking, and I made it to the trailhead back in Big Bear. The only thing was, I was 50 miles behind Brooke, we had already booked a night for Wednesday in Wrightwood (90 miles away), and I had only three days to accomplish this mighty traversal. What unfolded is an epic quest of me catching up to Brooke and traveling 90 miles in three days.
As always, please send me letters, postcards, mail, or care packages! I always get so excited heading to the post office, and the next one will be in Kennedy Meadows. I can’t wait to see what you send!
PCT Hiker — Dennis Gavrilenko
c/o Kennedy Meadows General Store
96740 Beach Meadow Rd.
Inyokern, CA 93527
Day 22, 6/2/2025:
23 miles today with 2000 feet of climbing. We’re back on the trail, baby!
After picking up the letter from the post office in big Bear, I sat outside on the bench to read it and started asking the post office visitors if they can give me a ride. The very second person, Curtis, said, “sure!”, and drove me all the way to the Cougar Crest trailhead! I had an amazing talk with Curtis, hopped the car, whipped out my trekking poles, and I was off. Brooke, here I come!
I was absolutely flying the first ten miles, averaging about 3.5 mph in that time window. Surprisingly, I ran into Wesley, who I once again thought I’d never see again and once again, was completely wrong. This just goes to show never say never — my situation with Wesley is very much a tortoise and the hare situation. I fly ahead and then take a massive break, while Wesley just continues trucking along. This man is an absolute legend.
Wesley and I had a great time catching up about the past few weeks, and even found this bee-infested toilet in the middle of the woods. Wild. Later, we intersected a campsite road, where the drivers of the parked car there offered us some blueberries. Trail magic already! So so soon!
Wesley stayed at the campsite and called it a day, and I carried on ahead. And in my boredom and with all this time I have from walking literally all day, I have invented a new game. Here’s the story:
On the bus ride over to Big Bear from UCLA, I noticed that the tips of my trekking poles weren’t dented or damaged at all despite 300 miles of hiking with them. I learned that the tips were made of tungsten carbide, and subsequently went down a rabbit hole of learning about the tungsten carbide — it’s apparently the second hardest material after diamonds, and is used for a bunch of different industrial applications.
With them, I’ve been loving stabbing different logs, sticks, and branches with these tungsten carbide poles and seeing what sticks, and now that I’m in a pine forest, the game is to stab pinecones on the ground, try to make them stick to the trekking pole tips, and then flick your trekking pole perfectly so that the pinecone launches high in the air to maximize hang time.
My current record is 4.5 seconds.
Lots of pretty white and yellow flowers today, they were growing everywhere and were so beautiful. There was also the most stunning sunset on trail, and it was just amazing hiking in the twilight as the darkness settled in. So special.
Walked for a bit with a Berkeley math first-year and Sunnyvale Eagle Scout and a lady attempting to complete the Triple Crown in a calendar year. She’s already finished the Appalachian Trail, and is now doing the PCT. Insane.
Currently camping at a random dilapidated Splitser Cabin with two old men (named Mule and Pheasant) who remind me of Appalachian mountain backwoods residents — white, long unruly beards, rural accents, and unionized. One worked as a road builder in Fairbanks, then quit when it got smoky from a wildfire and went to Denali to chill for the tea of the summer. Neither of them have permits, and are just 100% chilling. Their logic is that they don’t think they’ll finish the thru-hike, so why take away permits from others? Absolute legends.
First time ever dry soaking food today, too! Dry soaking is where you backpack without a stove to reduce weight and only use cold water to prepare food. I made ramen in my Talenti jar (a goated ice cream company) today, and it actually slapped so hard. I’ve been converted!
First time cowboy camping on the trail today. I’m so pumped, the stars are gorgeous.
Also random side note, but Hudson introduced me to an app called Dumb Phone over the weekend that’s designed to reduce your phone addictivenes. This is my new Home Screen, and I absolutely love it:
Day 23, 6/3:
I AM A LEGEND AND HAVE HIKED 50 MILES IN ONE DAY! LET’S GOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Woke up at 3:30 AM this morning to start an epic day of long hiking. My plan was to go as far as I could today, and the target goal was 50 miles. I had talked to Hudson about doing a super hard epic mega Godspeed day, and today was that day. Packed up camp super easily because I cowboy camped with no tent, and I was off at 3:45 am. Me! Getting up so early!
Made good progress this morning, though not nearly as fast as normal because I couldn’t see the trail perfectly with just my headlamp. It was really cool to start hiking before the sun was even up — it was still pitch-black and slowly, but surely the night sky started to brighten, and finally the sun come out around five. It was really cool to see the hill turn golden in the morning sunshine.
The first highlight of the day was around mile 10, when I finally got to Deep Creek Hot Springs. Apparently they’re quite famous, and lots of people come here to enjoy swimming in the Hot Springs and the nearby deep Creek River. I stripped down my underwear to take a dip into the water, and another day hiker with a fabulous beard pulled up to join me in the hot spring, and he stripped naked in front of me. I had read that these hot springs were clothing optional, but it was still quite unexpected to see a grown man’s full penis just feet from my face at a cool 8 am on a Tuesday morning. Not what I expected, but hey, that’s life! I decided, “f it“, took off my clothes too, and joined him naked in the hot spring.
Needless to say, the hot springs were super cool, and I definitely wanna return one day with more friends.
Smooth sailing for the next 10 miles, until I had a chance encounter with a bearded dragon lizard. It was standing in the middle of the trail, and I prodded it with my trekking pole so that it’d move out my way. However, it didn’t move out my way, and just stared me down and puffed up. The balls on this dude. Bro, move out my way, I’m not trying to have a staring contest right now. I’m just trying to walk another 25 miles to McDonald’s.
The first 250 miles of this hike were pretty much directly north, but now that we crossed the I-10 and made it up to Big Bear, the trail has pivoted to being entirely west for the entire Transverse Range before heading back up north when we get to Tehachapi. What this means is that all day I’ve been walking with the San Gabriel mountains on the horizon and slowly, but surely they’ve been getting bigger. The goal is to reach the McDonald’s at the foot of these mountains by the end of the day and, and hopefully camp there before having a big push up the mountain range tomorrow morning. I must also add that these mountains look reeeeeeeeally tall. Slightly concerned, but hey I signed up for this.
Later on in the day, it started sprinkling from some big mountain thunderstorms around 1 pm, which turned into an outright downpour around 1:30 pm and resulted in me getting completely soaked. Fortunately, I actually quite liked this, as it cooled me down substantially, and I didn’t mind too much because my backpack is waterproof and nothing inside got wet. Plus, I was much too lazy to get my rain jacket out from the bottom of my bag.
At 3 pm, I finally made it to the picnic tables at the end of Silverwood Lake, where there were three other hikers, laying on their sleeping pads underneath a shade structure and hiding from the rain. They were all sleeping, so after eating lunch, I decided to join them in the whole laying-down idea and set out my sleeping pad, too. My feet were killing me, my thighs and calves were ready to explode, and McDonald’s was still 14 miles away. Ohhhhh brother. And then two hours later, I wake up in a daze from an unexpected nap, which Brooke would call a “classic Dennis move“.
After my two-hour nap at the park bench, I just set off again. Surprisingly, the body felt quite good and not too sore, despite having walked ~30 miles by then. It was a long climb out of the picnic area, so I called Ariv, listened to a Lex Fridman podcast, and generally locked back in. I was cruising again, and feeling absolutely tremendous. Saw a rainbow, watched the sunset, and carried on in high spirits.
At around 10 pm, I reached the ultimate highlight of the day — McDonald’s at Cajun Pass. There’s a famous trail sign that indicates the fast food shop is 0.4 miles off the trail, and I’d been looking forward to seeing it for weeks now and eating there, all day. Took a selfie there with the sign in the pitch black darkness, found a size Large geocache, and headed over to order some DELICIOUS nugs and a massive Coke.
The unfortunate thing was, the inside seating area of the McDonald’s was closed, so I had to walk through the drive-thru to order. lol. I almost broke the window from knocking so hard to get the attendant‘a attention, put down some crazy calories while sitting against a random building, and continued on through Cajun Pass.
It was about 5 more miles for me that night, all in darkness with my flashlight with amazing battery life. Walked through some cool tunnels, saw a cool train heading downhill, and stayed cool in the nice fog. Huge shoutout to the reflective trail signs that kept me sane and on track all night — I didn’t get lost even once! Saw a ton of animals too, including some toads and kangaroo rats. Very neat.
And at 1 am, after 50 miles, 90000 steps, and 21 hours of hiking, I finally made it to camp. Set up my sleeping pad real quick, devoured some cold-soaked ramen, and entered dreamland in an instant. What a day.
Day 24, 6/4:
Today was 19 miles of hiking with 6000 feet of elevation gain. By far the most mentally brutal day on the trail so far, it was absolutely terrible.
After my huge push on the trail the day before and hiking an epic 50 miles, I set up camp near a trail Angel water cache, and simply slept on the floor again. When I woke up in the morning, I saw bubbles and Drew, our Japanese and American friends that we had met at the Big Bear Highway 18 crossing a week before. Started off the morning having a lovely chat with them.
I was very excited to finish the hike today, because after I was done today, I would be in Wrightwood where I would finally see Brooke again, and more importantly, eat a delicious pizza. Unfortunately, after my long day yesterday of hiking west towards the San Gabriel mountains, today was the day I actually had to go up them. Oof! The hike started off at around 7 am and it was 15 miles of straight uphill with a total of 6000 feet of elevation gain. I stocked up at water where I camped, and was off early in the morning.
The first 5 miles were chill and a breeze — I was feeling very good. The sun wasn’t too hot yet and it was a very nice fog over going Cajun pass, making for some very pretty views. The next 5 miles were a lot more brutal, because it was the same steepness but higher elevation, and it was already getting a lot hotter.
The last 5 miles uphill were absolutely horrific. I was completely exhausted and running very low on water, and probably had a mild case of heat exhaustion. Even worse, the forest turned completely burnt from the big Bridge Fire that happened last year and I knew that there was a fire closure up ahead and it was just miserable to have to walk through a burnt forest for 3 miles. Every step that I take would send ash and soot up into the air, which I would then breathe get a super dry mouth and sip a tiny sip of quickly dwindling water supply. I was quite concerned about making it to town alive.
Finally, after a long, six hours of hiking, I finally made it to the summit of the ridge, and it was downhill from there. The forest was still completely charred at this point, but fortunately it was an easy descent down the Acorn Trail off the main PCT into Wrightwood. I booked it down this trail, and skipped pretty much every single switch rack - anytime it was possible to shortcut or go straight downhill, I did, and I was running down most of the mountain. I could not wait to get into Wrightwood and drink some deliciously cold water. At some point, I had completely lost the Acorn Trail and joined some other random game trail that dropped me off right into the middle of the residential neighborhood. I could see the swimming pool full of kids, splashing in the afternoon sun and wanted to join them, but then decided against it because the water would’ve turned black as soon as I got in.
And finally, at 3 pm, after a crazy three day push of going 90 miles to catch Brooke, I finally walked into the house that we had rented a room in and plopped onto the couch in celebration. I helped myself to a huge glass of ice cold water from the fridge, ate the entire place of delicious oatmeal cookies that were baked for the PCT hikers, and fell onto the couch in a stupor of relaxation and celebration. I did it!
After a good 15 minutes of sitting there and doing absolutely nothing, I called Brooke to tell her the good news that I’d made it into town. Brooke was very surprised, because she had expected that I’d come much later into the afternoon and wouldn’t be there until dark. She was actually at her friend Zoe‘s house, and chilling with all the other PCT hiker friends that she had made over the last few days.
They had actually even bet on when I would arrive into town, and the earliest time was guested at 7:30 pm. I was there at 3 pm. Boom. Looks like I won the bet!
Brooke came over in about an hour with an ice, cold Gatorade, goldfish, and a hotdog that she had gotten for free at the gas station. This was the most delicious hotdog I’ve ever eaten. After taking a shower and resting for the rest of the afternoon, Brooke and I got a huge pizza for dinner (which I was so excited about and had been salivating over for days), watched a bit of Red Notice, rated the hiker box that was on the front porch, dressed up in our fancy pajamas that we got for free, and went to bed. What an epic saga. What an epic life!
I’m so glad you could get that super important pizza as a reward for hiking 50 miles 💕