Mt Laguna PCT Hike Fail

We were exhausted and feeling a bit down after a tough week at work and home and so we decided to have some natural therapy by hitting the PCT near Garnet Peak. What ensued was hardly therapeutic.

It really did seem like a great idea Jess had to go hiking – I was grumpy and tired and Gabriel had been on the boob non-stop for the whole week. What better than a stroll in the woods? And especially this particular stroll, which is only four miles from the trailhead and covers a beautiful area of the PCT, all while being a measly 1.5 hour drive from our place?

Well it was a good idea in theory but in practice Gabriel was relentlessly demanding more ‘boobin’ from the back seat, further irritating me and straining Jess as she tried to drive, making the normally achievable trip a heinous nightmare until we got to the formerly pristine Mt. Laguna Recreation Area.

As we turned into the Area I just happened to notice that we needed a permit to park the car. Major bummer dudes, but not too major because there was a visitor center nearby where we could pick one up. It was quite a lovely little shop with displays and such and so forth so I suggested Gabriel take a break from the beebin and come check it out – big mistake! He became fixated on the fan and was very upset when we finally had to leave. No problem on a normal day, but I was just getting more and more irritated.

When we finally made it to the trailhead it was clear that the mountain was in no condition to be hiked – it turns out that two weeks prior to our arrival the hillside had burned in a massive wildfire similar to the nearby Mountain Fire reported on this very journal.

Still we proceeded ahead, but Gabriel really wanted more beebun and made it known in a constant refrain: ‘want some beebin, want some booben, etc etc repeat ad infinitum’. It was windy too, causing a chain reaction of disaster – Gabriel’s hat flew off down a black charred hillside, Jess ran after it causing her own hat to blow away,  and then she tripped over the umbrella putting a hole in it. The hats were recovered but my foul mood was complete. We stopped about half a mile into the hike, ate our delicious picnic lunch, turned around and went home!

We’ve had hiking failures before, and will probably have them again, so I’m OK with this suckage. We will just have to return to that beautiful area (maybe a part of the park which wasn’t burned) sometime in a better frame of mind or a different phase of toddlerhood.