Distance hiked today: 31.2 miles / 50.2 km
Today was another iconic trail day: Hiker Town and the LA Aqueduct walk.
We did 15.2 miles (24.5 km) into Hiker Town in the morning, arriving around 12:30pm. It's not actually a town, just a property owned by a retired film producer set up for hikers. It has tiny buildings that look like an old town labeled with "Sheriff", "Post Office", "Hotel" and "Feed Store". It really is the wild west here - no one seems to be in charge, and hikers just wander in, and share the scoop among each other on where the amenities are.
I met another type 1 diabetic hiker named Dan - what are the odds that's there's 3 of us in one area, when there's probably only a handful hiking the trail at all. It was great to chat. It's already incredibly challenging to manage blood sugar off trail, and on trail there are so many more variables and factors to consider. It's hard to find patterns and trends to understand what is affecting your blood sugar when every day is different in terms of elevation, heat, what you're eating, how much you slept, (etc etc).
The next section is the Aqueduct, that runs from the mountains to LA. It's most common to hike this section at night, since it's long, flat, has little to no shade, and no water (ironically). We set off at 6pm, hiking next to the open water channel at first, then walking on the big pipe, and then it became like a paved road where the pipe goes underground. I had applied my normal war paint of sunscreen prior to leaving, expecting the sun would still be strong for a few hours. But it set quickly and then it was just me, wearing sunscreen at night.
Tomorrow night there's a lunar eclipse, so it was essentially a full moon tonight and we never even pulled our headlamps out of our bags, the moon was bright enough to light our way.
We hiked another 16 miles until about midnight before calling it. My feet were in a lot of pain, my shoes are beat out and the pavement is hard. I was exhausted, having already been hiking since 6am and I wasn't able to sleep at hiker town as there wasn't enough shade. We cowboy camped on one of the concrete platforms, 6 of us all together.
Total trail mileage: 533.6 miles / 858.6km