Trans Catalina Trail (TCT) – Day 1
Welcome back fellow outdoorsmen!
Once again I took forever to get another post up. Life has been busy to say the least, not all work, just busy. For instance there is this whole backpacking trip that I went on in 2015. The one that traversed the Trans Catalina Trail. By the way that is a pain to type over and over again, so from now on I’m going to refer to it as the TCT. This was a 4 day trip with lots of events to share so Im going to break this story up by the day. So here goes Day 1.
Part 1 – Preparation
This is a trip that I had been planning for almost a year and, for once, it finally came to fruition. You see in the past I haven’t had a very good track record for following through with trips, usually due to weather or schedule conflicts. But this one I paid for 6 months in advance to force myself to make it. It also helped that my cousin wanted to go and he was totally committed to making it as well.
I got the idea for the trip after stumbling upon a post by a fellow blogger, Jeff Hester, of http://socalhiker.net/. I really wanted to hit the trail so I had started looking for decent sized backpacking trails in SOUTHERN California. I capitalized that because there are actually quite a few trails in NorCal, but not nearly as many in SoCal. Anyways I came across Jeff’s article on backpacking the TCT.
Now I had been to Catalina once before quite a number of years ago. But that trip was mainly spent on a boat in the Avalon Harbor, so I was unable to explore the majority of the island. I basically stayed on the boat and occasionally visited the town for food or shopping. I certainly had no idea that there was a trail that went from one end of the island to the other. It starts in Avalon and ends at Starlight Beach or vice versa. I’ve heard it both ways, lol. But the “official” way is to start in Avalon… Anyways the trail is roughly 50 miles and includes about 10,000 feet of elevation change.
So I took the entire 6 months leading up to the trip and started slowly building up my endurance and strength… or I could have waited until just under 1 month before departure and started hiking up hills like a mad man. Yeah I tend to procrastinate when it comes to things of this nature. So here are a few snapshots from my Strava training log.
This is before I realized how out of shape I was:
And then after I realized:
Part 2 – Departure
But even after all of this I was not prepared for the first day of hiking. The night before our departure I couldn’t sleep at all. I don’t think that I even achieved 10 minutes of sleep. Due to a last minute scheduling issue we had to be on the road at 3:00 AM, so needless to say I filled my coffee mug for this drive.
We made our way from Temecula to Dana Point in order to catch a ride on the Catalina Express. We arrived with plenty of time to spare so we grabbed some breakfast from the onsite café. This is where the first snafu in my careful planning happened. As we started to board the boat, they had us stop in order to perform a routine bag check and to ask us a few questions. The guy asks if we have any camping stove fuel, which we of course had. Come to find out you can’t take fuel canisters on the ferry under threat of arrest. So we had to surrender our fuel for retrieval upon our return. The security employee says, “Don’t worry, you can buy fuel at the hardware store in Avalon when you get there”. So we put our packs back together and hop on the boat. Due to my extreme exhaustion I forgot to snap a picture of the ferry before we boarded… sorry about that.
The ferry ride is roughly an hour so I tried to take a quick nap. Thankfully I was able to close my eyes for about 45 minutes or so. As we approached the island I took a quick little video:
This is where things got interesting. After we made landfall the marine layer started to wear off, that is when I noticed that I had forgotten my sunglasses back at the car. So we made a quick excursion to the drug store and purchased a pair. From there we made our way to the Atwater Hotel to pick up our campsite reservations. Unfortunately the clerk that handled the campsites would not be in for roughly 30 minutes. So with this little bit of time we decided to go buy our fuel. However when we arrived Chet’s Hardware and were unsuccessful in locating the fuel, the store clerk informed us that they did not carry any kind of camping fuel other than a small alcohol stove that weighed at least 1 lbs. Thanks Catalina Express employee, I appreciate that. 1 lbs might not seem like much, but carrying it on your back over the course of 50 miles makes it so.
Our only choice was to buy this heavy little stove. With the it purchased and packed we made our way back to the hotel and picked up our reservations. That’s when we discovered that the trail head was actually a couple of miles up a steep winding road. Like I said, this day got interesting fast. This forced us to pay for a taxi because we were already running so late. After a quick taxi ride we were finally on the trail.
We started climbing, and we climbed and climbed and climbed some more. That is one of the reasons that some people decide to do the trail backwards, because the first day is pretty much all uphill with very little available water.
So like I said, we climbed for a long time. I actually started to get worried because I was drinking more water than I anticipated and we had a 13 mile day ahead of us with the possibility of no water along the way. That definitely made me a little anxious, especially since it was starting to get hot. But thankfully we arrived at the first rest stop and, lo and behold, there was water! It trickled out so slow it was almost a drip and it tasted awful, but we weren’t going to die of thirst! We also saw the Catalina bison for the first time as well:
It was funny because there is a tour bus that goes along that road, they call it the Safari Bus. It just so happened to be passing by while we were chilling in the shade drinking water. The driver starts announcing the presence of bison and everyone looks out and sees these magnificent creatures. They’re staring all google eyed at them and then they notice us. The expressions on there faces were hilarious. It was kind of like, “wait… what the heck?? Why are those dudes just sitting there 20 yards away, are they insane?!”.
After we got back on the trail we really started to enter the interior of the island. It turns out that it looks an awful lot like the hillside trails of Temecula. It was covered in dry brush and cactus, beautiful but unexpected. However we did return to the outer edge a couple of times:
Many miles later we arrived at the Blackjack campground. I was so tired and hungry that I didn’t take any pictures until after we were packed up the next morning. Thankfully the campground had running water and restroom facilities, but it turned out that our little alcohol stove couldn’t even boil water. So we ended up eating not entirely rehydrated lasagna along with some trail mix. It refueled us, but it was far from pleasant. We sat by the fire until it went out and then called it a night.
Well that concludes day 1, stay tuned for the rest of the adventure!