Day 26 6/10 27.5mi.

Todays theme was detours, we spent almost the whole day walking along dirt roads and old paved roads.

After walking about a mile in the morning we came across about 20 high school kids from L.A. who were volunteering their weekend to repairing the trail where a huge fire had come through and made it impassable a couple years ago. They were eating breakfast when we came upon them so we got a fresh orange and talked to the organizer of the trip, who was from the PCTA, about what exactly they were doing. That was the beginning of our first detour which was about 4.5 miles long.

Next we came up on a fire station as the detour was ending, where we stopped to get water. We met 6 guys who had just bicycled up the mountain and stopped there for a break and some water. We had descended quite a bit to get to that point and they had climbed up for almost all of the 25 miles they'd ridden that morning. They were really interested in our trip and one of them even gave us each an energy shot thing made by the cliff bar company.

The next detour we took was a 10 mile road walk to avoid poodle dog bush. This walk was really hot as we did it from about 10am-2pm and it was on a black paved road with no shade around. As we walked along the road everything in the area was burned, we came across a spot with two crosses where two firefighters had given their lives fighting the fire in 2009. The picure of the burnt up car was in an area with tons of buildings that were completely destroyed by the fire, our maps said that the building complex was an L.A. county fire camp, I believe where fire fighters trained.

After finally making it back on the trail we ran into a ton of poodle dog bush overgrowing the trail. It took us an hour and a half to go 1.5 miles because we had to climb off the trail ,on very sandy and steep terrain, to get around the plant without touching it. After. That 1.5 miles we found a road on the map that sort of paralleled the trail for the next five miles and took that to a ranger station where it met back up with the trail.

We got water and cooked dinner at the ranger stationand then continued on for another couple miles in the dark and found a tiny campstite, I was sleeping half on the trail.