[pct-l] Two Hikers Rescued on San Jacinto

[Diane Soini of Santa Barbara Hikes]

 From all the conversations I have had with people (and you all know  
my post count here is pretty high, now add in off-list emails and  
whiteblaze and bp light -- sheesh get a life!), the number one reason  
people keep pushing the start date earlier isn't kickoff and it isn't  
Ned. It's an irrational fear of the desert.

The vast majority of people I've talked to fear the desert heat and  
the long waterless sections more than anything. They fear it so much  
they are willing to risk their lives on San Jacinto. I'd say the vast  
majority of people who fear the desert live in places that get snow  
in winter. They know snow, even if they only know about shoveling and  
driving in it. They don't fear it. They don't know the desert so they  
fear it completely irrationally. They cannot even comprehend it when  
I tell them that mostly you are going to be cold in the desert.

Most people, when you say the word "desert" have an image in their  
head of Wile-E Coyote and saguaro cactuses and people crawling under  
a sun with little wavy lines around it going "water water" with maybe  
a skeleton of a horse nearby and some mountains way out in the  
distance. The PCT is not like that!

What the entire So Cal PCT is like is about 4 days of anything  
similar to a cactus walk with mountains in the distance and the rest  
of it is in the mountains climbing up into the pines or climbing down  
from the pines, hiking in the transitional zones where the manzanita  
and chamise, juniper and pinyon pines live.

So my point is that people may want to blame kickoff or Ned's scary  
snow tales but the reality is that anybody here who has perpetuated  
the idea of So Cal as being one big long 6 weeks of desert hiking is  
far more responsible for scaring people into early start times.

I suggest people replace the phrase "So Cal desert section" with "So  
Cal mountain section."

On May 3, 2011, at 10:00 AM, pct-l-request at backcountry.net wrote:

> Two Hikers Rescued on San Jacinto