Mile 617.1. - 637.0

Wow, what a day. Water alert! Water alert! It is getting very dangerous with the lack of water on this section of trail. Every hiker is talking water. Where's the next water source? How many miles is it? Is it a spring, a stream, or a cache? All good questions, but with such a dry year, who knows the answer until you get there. Then it's too late.

We owe a huge thank you to our hiking friend Sizzler. We had a camp site meeting last night about the upcoming lack of water for today's section. Here was the scenario, there was a spring about 5 miles from our camp. Perfect right? Well, not really. Willow Spring is 2 miles off the PCT on a side trail. That mean a 4 mile detour for water. No one really wanted to do that. The next source is a water cache about 8 miles passed Willow Spring. Never rely on a cache right? Hikers rule number one. 

Sizzler told us that we are going to the spring and filling up to maximum capacity, and not rely on the cache. So we went with Sizzler to the spring and filled our bellies with as much water as possible and headed to the cache 8 very hot miles away. 

When we arrived at the cache it was completely empty. 120 empty gallons of water. Thank goodness we listened to Sizzler. We still had 4 liters each and were able to hike on after taking a long break in the shade. Many hikers, didn't go to the off route spring and walked into the cache empty and were in big trouble. The next water after the cache was 20 miles away. Many hikers had to backtrack to the spring 8 miles backwards to fill up. You can't hike 20 miles with next to no water. No way, not safe. It's 100 degrees here and almost no shade. Can't wait to get out of this desert. 

A very scary sight! I'm not kidding, water is nothing to joke about in the desert. No water out here equals a quick death. It is serious and we are taking it seriously. The caches are great but NEVER rely on them. I'm so happy we didn't today. Thank you Sizzler! 

A bad sight. More so for the hikers who came with no water hoping to fill up. Not today, scary! They had to backtrack to the last off route Willow Spring.

Just after the empty cache at Kelso Road. No water in the cache and a 3 mile 1800' climb in 90 degree heat. Luckily we each had 4 liters of water to move forward and camp for the night.

We climbed to the top of this in late afternoon, hoping we had enough water to make it 20 more miles to the next source by tomorrow.