Birthday hike

Today's blogger: Jaana

So we decided to celebrate my birthday today by taking the arial tramway up to the San Jaquinto mountains, 31 years old and at the top. Basically, you go from 42 degrees of desert heat to over 3000m above sea level and an alpine climate. In order to set out onto the trails, you have to fill out a registration form at the ranger station, and keep the carbon copy. When you return, you return the copy in a mailbox back at the ranger station. So when the rangers check the mailbox at the end of the day, and they do not find the copy, I guess they start a search for you on the trails that you have specified on the form. The tramway stops running at 8pm, and I would not like to spend the night up there with the mountain lions and coyotes!

The hike was quite steep, and also being unused to the sudden change of altitude, I had to make frequent breaks to sit down and rehydrate. I even noticed that my fingers swelled up a little, I guess that this was also due to the change in air pressure. Henrik seemed not to notice any difference though, and steadily continued upwards on the trail.

After a couple of hours, we reached "Wellman's divide". A quite thick haze was covering Palm Spring and the other resort locations on the desert floor, but the peaks in the distance were beautifully outlined in our view.

Another few hours, and our 7 mile hike came to an end. We remembered to leave the carbon copy with the rangers, and headed back to the tramway station to wait for the next descent. At this point, we were both quite exhausted, and as soon as we got down we took off to the nearest Mexican restaurant for dinner and a biiig margharita.

Tomorrow we will heal our beaten body parts by soaking in the natural mineral waters of Palm Springs, and maybe even have time for a treatment or two.