Cracking the top ten worst nights of my life.

I'm always interested in exploring local spots--urban, suburban, or rural--so I jumped at the chance to do a little impromptu backpacking with my brother and a church friend. My friend planned a route, we rented packs (none of us had completed an overnight trip before), bought some food, woke up at 5, and headed up to Mt. Baldy in the San Gabriel mountains. 

2 days, 1 hellish night, 18.2 miles, and about 8500 vertical feet later, and I'm absolutely wasted. From the hike, I mean. I'm in good shape, but looking back, I think the route we took was something we probably should have trained for. We each had about 50 lbs, on our back, and the first leg the hike involved 6.2 miles and roughly a 5800 feet elevation change. There were some beautiful spots, but towards the end of day one, I was almost falling asleep when we took a break. 

Which brings me possibly the worst night of my life. We had to pitch tents at the only flat spot in the vicinity when darkness was falling, and it seemed like a fairly decent (albeit rocky), flat spot overlooking the backside of baldy. As soon as we lay down, our little flat spot transformed into a wind tunnel, and both our tents began a flapping session that would basically continue throughout the night. Oh yeah, and the inside of my sleeping bag was wet (one of my back up water reservoirs leaked). So I was damp (not cold--the body heat turned my bag into more of a tropical climate) and for the life of me, I could not sleep because of that stupid wind. I duct taped the jangling zippers, and at one point, I even duct taped my ears. When that didn't work, I rolled up the used duct tape into an ear plug. That sucked too. For 2 1/2 hours I just lay there praying that God would make the wind stop. Looking back, I can see that was a bit selfish, seeing as there are hundreds of windmills in Palm Springs that rely on the wind to harness earth-saving energy. When I finally fell asleep, I awoke to my brother making strange smacking noises with his mouth. We were both thirsty, and he was too scared to get out of the tent (I wasn't feeling to hot about it either), so I crept out, scanned for hostile wildlife, and retrieved a Gatorade. All in all, I managed to catch about 5 combined hours of sleep, which is pretty lame considering we went to bed at 8:30. 

Up at 5:30, I caught a nice sunrise, and we were back on the trail an hour later.

 11:18 we finished up. We absolutely killed the last section of the hike, and only on 5 hours of sleep at that, was pretty stoked on finishing. 

On a trivial note, my church friend consumed only 6 chewy granola bars for the entire trip. I consumed 3 Cliff protein bars, three egg/chicken burritos, three hard boiled eggs, 3 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, a huge bag of trail mix, a big bag of beef jerky, 2 Snickers bars, a large baggy of raw oats, and a protein shake. 

I don't think I'm meant to survive in the wild.