Trans Catalina Trail (TCT) – Day 3 and 4

Welcome back to the blog!

My apologies for the delay in releasing the final post for this adventure.  I broke my ankle in April so I had some free time to lay back and write posts but now I’m getting busy again.  Anyways, we left off in the last post with a late night trek to our Two Harbors campsite and a view of the city lights across the Pacific Ocean, so begins day 3 of the Trans Catalina Trail backpacking trip.  In fact I’m going to combine the last two days into a single post, mainly because not much happened on either day.

I make a point not to start a story by saying, “I woke up and…”  because that is how every day has started for every man since the dawn of time.  That being said we rose early, ate a REAL breakfast (thank you Lord, seriously) packed up and headed back into town.  We did make sure to stop at the general store again to pick up some small items, like milk and drink mix for the nasty water.  Oh milk how I missed you these past few days….  ahem, I digress.  As we prepared to hit the trail again I bandaged up the multiple blisters on my feet as well as I could given the items at my disposal.  I will spare you the pictures of my badly damaged feet, haha.

I took the time to prepare a few water bottles using some Hawaiian punch mix sticks.  As I have mentioned multiple times now, the water available on the trail is just plain nasty.  It just like straight chemicals and leaves a residue in bottles.  I was assured that it’s safe to drink but I wasn’t going to torture myself.  This was going to be our shortest day at 9 miles.  Considering the condition of our feet we opted to take the flat service road as opposed the the mountain climb that the trail normally involves.  I guess you could say that we didn’t truly do the whole trail, but the distance is the same if not a little longer when you take the road so it evens out.  Overall this day was pretty uneventful, but we did get to take in some pretty awesome views.  Here is one of Two Harbors, the water is so clear you can see the shadow of the boats on the ocean floor:

We passed by Emerald Bay and many other small destinations.  Including an old abandoned mine shaft!

And Emerald Bay definitely lives up to its name, even the picture doesn’t do it justice.  The water truly is emerald green in color:

We hiked and hiked and hiked.  About halfway there my feet decided that they just couldn’t take it any longer.  I had to stop and take a look.  Well it turns out that my comfy road runner shoe inserts had broken down and were actually causing blisters!  So I ditched those things and we started off again.  When we arrived at Parson’s Landing there was already a package of firewood and a few gallons of water with our name on it.  Setting up camp was quick and easy leaving plenty of time to enjoy the water and view, both were quite spectacular.  Our neighbors kayaked from Two Harbors with all of their gear, that sounds like a fun adventure for another trip…

Starting a fire was much easier this time because someone had taken the time to construct a wind break at our site:

That was pretty much it for day 3.  We ate real food again and my cousin captured one of my favorite sunset pictures of all time:

 

Overall Parson’s Landing was probably my favorite camping spot to date, it was amazing to say the least.  However our morning was not very peaceful as you will see.  Entertaining, yes.  Peaceful, no.  We rose kind of late on day 4, probably because we were both running on empty.  It didn’t start out too bad but then my cousin happened to look at the bottom of his water bottle.  This is what he found:

So he’s not sure if he had a roommate all night, or if it crawled in sometime that morning when he cracked his tent open…  Either way it was pretty disconcerting especially since the bottle was next to his head all night.  It may not look that big but it was at least as large as my thumb.  After my cousin coerced it out we started to pack up.  This is when I started getting a little too much attention from some yellow jackets.  I did my best not to annoy them but I’m pretty sure I placed my tent over their hive because they were not happy.  I tried packing everything correctly but ended up just shoving things into my pack and booking it off of the beach, haha.  So we entered day 4 with some excitement and no breakfast.

When we began walking my feet started letting me know that no pad meant no happiness.  Near the end I had to stop about every half mile or so to rest.  It may sound like I’m just complaining or wimping out, but one of my toes literally went numb and didn’t return to normal for over a month.  This wasn’t good either because we had to be back in Two Harbor’s by 9:30 AM to catch the Safari bus back to Avalon!  That didn’t happen, but it actually worked to our advantage.  I say that because when we started talking to the Safari Bus coordinator he asked us, “Why don’t you just switch your ferry reservation to the one that drops you off in San Pedro, and then catch an Uber back to Dana Point?” so that’s exactly what we did.  This meant that we were actually ahead of schedule and therefore had time for a big lunch!  I didn’t take many photos from this point forward because I was tired and sore.  We charged our phones at the restaurant and hopped on the ferry back to the mainland.  It stopped at Avalon on the way and then made a beeline for San Pedro.

We arrived on schedule, got our Uber ride back to the parking garage and that’s that.  Overall this trip was amazing.  There were some challenges but it wouldn’t have been an adventure without them.  This was definitely my longest thru-hike at roughly 50 miles and it was worth every inch.  The only things I would do different next time would be to start in Two Harbors and to stretch it out over another day or two.  If we had taken those extra couple of days we could have truly completed the trail.  Because technically you are supposed to hike out to Starlight Beach which is 5 miles past Parson’s Landing, we were just too tired to pull it off.  Well that’s a wrap!  This is Greg, over and out.