These were my reasons for hiking the Trans Catalina Trail: warm in December, has bison, accessible without a car, hard to die on, and – important at the time – not currently on fire.
There are bison on Catalina because a film company brought them over in the 1920s and then just slipped quietly away afterwards without them. When I bring bison somewhere, I take them away again; I think that's just common bison courtesy. And the bison were given a pass when various authorities were ruthlessly wiping out other non-native species. They don't even cull the herd anymore; they keep it at about 150 through some sort of bison contraception. The island gets tourists and the bison get a predator-free habitat and free family planning ("I would like to sire a mighty herd under whose hooves the earth will sing." / "You can maybe have a baby in a few years if enough of you die first. How does that sound?")
The Catalina bison gore people from time to time, most recently in February of this year. Being on a small island with 150 of them was probably much more dangerous than being in an Ontario park with a few timid black bears, but I don't have any irrational anxieties about bison. Anyway, my research indicated that they won't bother you as long as you beat one up on your first day.
The way to the TCT is long and complicated. There was the flight to LA, and then, to get to Long Beach, the Flyaway, a small shuttle without much suspension that bounced down the freeway like a cartoon bus, probably scattering nuts and bolts out the back, and possibly whistling a happy tune. Then a city bus to San Pedro, the commercial port of Los Angeles, and a night in a hotel that was hosting a seminar called 'Big Money from Small Apartments'. If you're not there to make quick money in real estate, the staff assume you're there to stay the night before your cruise leaves; there isn't that much else in San Pedro. Then the Catalina Express, past a WWII battleship (the USS Iowa), which you pass so slowly I was almost able to steal its wifi, and then a fast run across the open water, smashing a deep, greasy swell into a wall of foam half the height of the boat.
The ferry goes to Avalon, a tourist town whose attraction for me was that it has a hardware store (Chet's) that sells canister fuel for camping stoves. Here, there was a decision to make about the route. There are two variants of the TCT's first section: a long one via Pebbly Beach (formerly the official route), and a short one via Hermit Gulch. It was hard to decide between the short version and an outright cheat I'd researched earlier. Taking the shortcut proved the right decision, because I wouldn't have made it to camp before dark otherwise. The winter ferry gets in after 10AM, and then there's your business with Chet, trying to check in for the campgrounds at a closed kiosk, buying a map at the Conservancy office, and so on, so that it's almost 11 when you're actually leaving town. Sunset in early December is around 5, and even with the shortcut it's a rugged 15km hike to Black Jack, the first campground.
The shortcut via Stage Road is a steep one-hour road walk that doesn't feel nearly as gratifying as cheating should be. I joined the TCT proper just before Haypress Reservoir by ducking through an opening in a chain-link fence and walking along a dirt road. This intersects the trail just before a high bison fence, where you let yourself through a gate into a desolate field of sun-blackened bison droppings, like the site of some disgusting battle. Before the reservoir, there's a water faucet and, for some reason, a children's playground. This is the last water source until Black Jack, and the last swing set until Two Harbors. The playground was full of women in their early 20s laughing and playing on the equipment. I hoped the trail would break their spirit before Black Jack, or it would be a noisy night; but in fact, they were heading back towards Avalon. I was misled because they were a lot jollier and fresher than I was feeling (and they'd probably been on the trail for 4 days instead of my 2 hours).
The first bison encounter: coming over a rise, a gigantic shaggy brown thing appeared across a small ravine. What happens in these situations is that you stop and stare at the bison, and it stands up and glares back like a hairy garage that wants to kill you. And then you edge carefully past, grateful for the ravine. An indecisive round in the eternal contest between man and bison.
The Catalina interior is desert hillsides covered in bristly grass, cacti, and thirsty-looking shrubs. The hike became a bit of a sprint as the sun got lower. The trail was steeper than I'd hoped (some people look at contours, some visualize the trail they'd like to exist) and, like a tiresome guide, it kept taking me up hills to see views I no longer cared about. GPS consultations were consistently depressing. I was thrilled to finally spot a row of porta potties just after 4PM, and also pleased to find that the place was empty except for one couple. Talked with them a little; they (and this would prove to be a pattern) had planned things more intelligently than I, and had done the full trail with plenty of time to spare by spending a night in Avalon before starting.
Black Jack is a dirt patch in a ring of scrubby hills. Someone did make an effort: stones were arranged in decorative patterns, and some kind of large rusty barrel had been installed as an ornament. At night, it was cold, much colder than I'd expected. I'd decided at the last minute to bring a puffy jacket, and had been wondering whether it would be necessary. The weather norms and forecasts for the towns had made me think the answer would be "no, idiot, of course not"; in fact, it was "God, yes". The jet lag, though, worked out beautifully, because I could go to sleep at 9PM and get up at 4. In my home time zone, I would have punched anyone who suggested this. Even so, December means long nights, even on Catalina. In the morning, it was a long wait for the vague redness in the east to turn into something useful.
A dirt road led out of camp, and around the first corner was a herd of 12 bison, 3 of them on the road itself, none showing any sign of politely moving aside. I climbed up a little slope to skip the whole stretch and paused to watch the bison from a safe distance. Warnings about bison always want to impart three facts: that they weigh a lot, that they can run at 35mph, and that they can leap 6' in the air, as though the problem is their intimidating vertical. None of them did anything athletic, but their bulk is enough to convince most people to give them space. Anyway, this meant only 138 bison unaccounted for.
The first stop on Day 2 of the TCT is an airport: Catalina's Airport in the Sky, which has a single airstrip, a single hangar, and a restaurant, which makes it extremely interesting to hikers. The stereo was playing hits of the 1950s and the staff was decorating the place for Christmas, a surreal desert 1950s Christmas. I guess most of the people in the world who celebrate Christmas have no reason to associate it with snow and cold, but for a Canadian it's a surprising scene. Had an excellent breakfast on a paper plate (a sign seen much later in a bathroom actually encouraged their use on the island as a way of saving water), bought some of their cookies, and moved on.
Dirt roads led to a red track rubbed bare along a series of ridges. The slopes fall steeply away towards identical desert valleys, and you are filled with a sense of awe at what a bad place it would be to meet a bison. At least one of the existing blogs about the TCT (now thoroughly superseded by this one, obviously) mentions being charged by a bison the author was trying, insanely, to hustle off the trail. Places like this almost make you understand: there's nowhere to go, and if the bison decided to have a snooze, you wouldn't have a lot of good options (though going back to the last campground would still be better than picking a fight with a cranky, 800kg animal). Ground squirrels who pop up for a look around, decide they don't like the look of you, and disappear. A drinking hole of green water and bison saliva, the edges churned-up mud. Bright sunlight that makes phone pictures look like shots sent back by lander missions to Venus.
I stopped along here and was overtaken by the couple I'd met in Black Jack. We exchanged notes about bison and agreed that there should be more long-distance trails with restaurants. I stopped again in a wooden shelter and lay down for a while, a single huge fly buzzing curiously around me: maybe a bison fly, like the bison themselves bigger and hairier than their relatives. A major point in favour of Catalina, incidentally, is that there were, as far as I could tell, no biting insects at all.
At 2PM, I climbed down into Little Harbor, a surprising little oasis of palm trees and green grass, where my site was just above the beach. A pleasantly short day after the march to Black Jack. Some people don't bother stopping here at all, but instead walk straight on to Two Harbors, but why? Admittedly, a drawback to pulling in to camp so early is that there isn't a huge amount to do; there are links to other trails here, but hiking-based entertainment wasn't convenient for me at the time, because my legs felt like they'd been beaten with tire irons. I loafed around the beach. Around dusk, there were bison silhouetted on the surrounding ridges, seemingly keeping us under surveillance.
Another early morning, much warmer and damper than at Black Jack, another long wait for dawn. The trail here, once found, began switchbacking up a steep rise towards one of the ridges where I'd seen bison the night before. And there one was, just at the top of the hill, just close enough to the trail to be unsettling. The whole of the prairies must once have been like this, before trains and rifles reduced the bison from vast obstructive herds to a few inconvenient handfuls. A little way further on, another one, this one almost insultingly uninterested in me, possibly because it was the size of a bus and hadn't found much in life to trouble it so far. Or maybe it was haughty because of its connection to the movie business, it's impossible to say.
The trail here goes along some beautiful ridges. It seemed to have rained recently, which meant the ground was firm and the climbs and descents easy. A ruined wire fence ran alongside for a while; what purpose someone once thought it would serve was a mystery. In the distance, a thin red line along what looked like the knife edge of a high spur. I was trying to convince myself that that couldn't possibly be the trail, and then I was on it. It probably had glorious views, but I have no way of knowing; I looked down and picked my way along very carefully (it was, thankfully, wider than it looked at a distance). At the top, another wooden shelter, and then the trail turns into a dirt road, which seemed encouraging, because if it's passable by vehicles it surely can't be that bad. But it immediately began plunging steeply down and climbing steeply up, with a sheer drop off one side. Anyone who actually drives these roads is superhuman or tired of life.
From the last height coming into Two Harbors, the barking of distant seals, like sarcastic applause. Had to descend slowly, because, whatever muscles are used for walking downhill, I didn't seem to have ever used them before. It's unfair to have to painfully give back all that hard-won altitude; you should be able to spend it in some fun way, like a zipline or a soapbox racer. Maybe I can use the blog to pressure the authorities on this; they have no way of knowing its readership would fit comfortably in a Toyota Yaris.
On the very last stretch before town, a mostly-defleshed deer skull lies in the middle of the road, whether in any official capacity as a greeter I don't know. Then there's another bison gate, this one secured by a knot in a string, which I unpicked and retied into a cheerful bow. This bookends the bison-filled part of the island. From here on, there are only a few wily ones, who seem unlikely to break cover just to trample one hiker.
The town is very odd, at first. Higher up, there are what look like some rusty agricultural efforts; down by the water, a clean, theme park-like tourist village. Catalina's a sort of lopsided hourglass, and this is its waist, where there are harbours on each coast separated by a short, sandy walk. This is Two Harbors, a charming place with a mysterious name whose origins are lost to mortal memory. The seals can't easily be seen on their rock out in the water, but there's a chorus of barking all day, dwindling to a few concluding remarks in the late evening. At night, a row of fishing boats cruises the harbour lit up with banks of powerful lights, looking very like a fleet of UFOs.
The campground here is a short, steep walk from the centre of town. My site has a faucet beside it, one of the strange Catalina faucets that stand alone on the open ground like cacti, and, beside that, an open-air shower stall of cracked brown planks. The ground was dried mud that came up in sections like broken pottery.
The campground here is raided nightly by Catalina Island Foxes, a cute, endangered, and piratical species that's eased into the niche raccoons occupy elsewhere. During the day, you see them occasionally, blinking and trotting lazily by on mysterious fox errands. At night, they come boiling out of the darkness like the orcs of Moria. I went to dinner in town with the couple I'd been seeing every day on the trail, who'd turned out to be an extremely nice pair of biologists from BC named Tim and Sherry. When we came back towards their site, light from our headlamps reflected from three pairs of eyes. The foxes had climbed the shelter where their packs were hung and were making off with some of the food. There were corn nuts scattered around; Tim and Sherry tried to collect them all, but were haunted by crunching sounds through the night.
There were three more nosing around in my pack, but the Opsak I was using seemed to work; they were just fooling with the Ziploc bag I'd been storing lunches in. (I'd deliberately left the backpack unfastened and in the tent vestibule; Tim and Sherry had met a pair of hikers who had had the foxes chew a hole in their tent to get at food stored inside.)
The morning was gray and rainy. This raised another question about the route. The trail proper goes high up into the interior and sees the steepest parts of the entire TCT. The return route, after a night in Parsons Landing, is by the flat and winding coastal road. The road sounded boring, but I didn't altogether like the idea of steep, muddy descents. Also, someone had said something about a 'rain event', and I didn't know whether they were trying to be fancy or whether more than an ordinary shower was coming. The road seemed better. I checked in with Tim and Sherry, and was glad that they were thinking along the same lines, because they seemed to have a much clearer idea of what they were doing than I did. The visitors' office didn't have a forecast, but one was posted on the wharf: heavy rain. A gruff sailor or fisherman, passing by, said something about thunderstorms.
The coastal road is a flat, 13km slog that winds tediously around a long series of coves, every one of them occupied by some sort of private holiday camp or cult compound. Before Parsons Landing, you turn onto a trail again for a while, with the last stretch a series of wet clay slopes I poled up and down like a clumsy skier. All around, high yellow hills that reminded me strongly of Scotland, especially considering the rain and the amount of whisky I intended to drink.
Parsons Landing itself is a beautiful beach with a gravel band along the upper parts where low and not-very-stable rock walls have been mounded up around tent sites. There are looming cliffs at both ends, and a vast boulder in the center, in the lee of which a flock of gulls were sulking. They later fled entirely, leaving a single raven to croak ominously at us, as though it wasn't obvious what sort of evening it was going to be. On a rise above the beach, there is – and this turned out to be very important – a solid outhouse on a concrete foundation. I was looking over the sites when Tim and Sherry appeared, having, as usual, made much better time than me. Tim found a set of horseshoes (where?), but the rain intensified and instead we stood under the outhouse awning and talked about the beach and joked hopelessly that it seemed to be clearing up.
The night in the tent became interesting. The rain and waves, independently loud, were deafening together. The tent bowed with the wind, and a few times I found myself trying to brace it with my hands. The canopy (I was using a single-walled tent, a Tarptent Double Rainbow) began to drip condensation. At 3 or 4 in the morning, I put a hand down and the floor was like a waterbed: the tent was in a pool. I shone my headlamp around, and saw brown water beginning to come in at the corners.
I sat and thought hard for a few seconds, then started stuffing my sleeping bag into my food bag and throwing everything that felt dry into my pack liner. I climbed out, threw the liner bag over my shoulder, and splashed ridiculously off into the darkness and blinding rain in nothing but a raincoat and a headlamp. I made the slippery climb to the outhouse, sat down to think things over, and then reluctantly went back for everything else: pulled down the flooded tent, threw everything into it, and went padding back with the whole slippery mess. I can't prove that this was the most awkward burden ever carried, but I think it has a strong case. The job of taking the tent down in these conditions was worse than I expected. Tent manufacturers should have to shoot their setup/takedown videos in rainstorms. Also, they should only get one take, and if the tent wraps around their face and they run into a tree, that's their setup video.
In the luxury of the outhouse, I hung up some wet things, fired up the stove, and made a cup of coffee. Tim and Sherry, having sensibly picked a high clear spot up off the beach, came back cheerful and neatly packed. We had a bit of breakfast and hiked back together, jumping a few new streams, skirting some vast orange puddles, and telling travel stories. Back in town, I went straight to the visitors' office to see if there were any hotels in town that wouldn't mind sheltering someone who looked like a freshly-excavated bog person, and the freckled angel of mercy there transferred my reservation from the campground to a bare but dry room in an odd housing compound behind the restaurant.
I took a shower in a dank and pungent communal washroom (suddenly, nothing was good enough for the man who'd made coffee in an outhouse that morning). A long shower, because I couldn't think of a single reason to stop. Back in the room, I blasted the heater, hung things up to dry, looked over the filthy gear, and fantasized about just quietly stuffing it into a garbage somewhere and starting over. Or I could leave it in an airport, and they'd blow it up for me.
Tim and Sherry's plan had been to take the shuttle back to Avalon and catch the ferry to Long Beach; but the roads were washed out, so they were stuck in a room near mine. We wrapped up the trail with dinner and drinks and talked about the field work biologists do: counting things from helicopters (drawback: vomiting) and long trips on foot through the wilderness (drawback: being stalked by grizzlies). A busload of people suddenly filed in, signaling that the road was again open, and the bartender started lining up plastic cups and making vodka Red Bulls in batches. Catalina might be a drag on summer weekends.
We took the ferry back, parted at the terminal, and I went back to the hotel nearby, where the real estate conference was over, and the new banners were for an elementary school holiday party. I lay down at 8PM and time lurched forwards 9 hours. In the morning, a little bit of bracing L.A. weirdness on public transit, and the long flight home.
There are bison on Catalina because a film company brought them over in the 1920s and then just slipped quietly away afterwards without them. When I bring bison somewhere, I take them away again; I think that's just common bison courtesy. And the bison were given a pass when various authorities were ruthlessly wiping out other non-native species. They don't even cull the herd anymore; they keep it at about 150 through some sort of bison contraception. The island gets tourists and the bison get a predator-free habitat and free family planning ("I would like to sire a mighty herd under whose hooves the earth will sing." / "You can maybe have a baby in a few years if enough of you die first. How does that sound?")
The Catalina bison gore people from time to time, most recently in February of this year. Being on a small island with 150 of them was probably much more dangerous than being in an Ontario park with a few timid black bears, but I don't have any irrational anxieties about bison. Anyway, my research indicated that they won't bother you as long as you beat one up on your first day.
The way to the TCT is long and complicated. There was the flight to LA, and then, to get to Long Beach, the Flyaway, a small shuttle without much suspension that bounced down the freeway like a cartoon bus, probably scattering nuts and bolts out the back, and possibly whistling a happy tune. Then a city bus to San Pedro, the commercial port of Los Angeles, and a night in a hotel that was hosting a seminar called 'Big Money from Small Apartments'. If you're not there to make quick money in real estate, the staff assume you're there to stay the night before your cruise leaves; there isn't that much else in San Pedro. Then the Catalina Express, past a WWII battleship (the USS Iowa), which you pass so slowly I was almost able to steal its wifi, and then a fast run across the open water, smashing a deep, greasy swell into a wall of foam half the height of the boat.
The ferry goes to Avalon, a tourist town whose attraction for me was that it has a hardware store (Chet's) that sells canister fuel for camping stoves. Here, there was a decision to make about the route. There are two variants of the TCT's first section: a long one via Pebbly Beach (formerly the official route), and a short one via Hermit Gulch. It was hard to decide between the short version and an outright cheat I'd researched earlier. Taking the shortcut proved the right decision, because I wouldn't have made it to camp before dark otherwise. The winter ferry gets in after 10AM, and then there's your business with Chet, trying to check in for the campgrounds at a closed kiosk, buying a map at the Conservancy office, and so on, so that it's almost 11 when you're actually leaving town. Sunset in early December is around 5, and even with the shortcut it's a rugged 15km hike to Black Jack, the first campground.
The shortcut via Stage Road is a steep one-hour road walk that doesn't feel nearly as gratifying as cheating should be. I joined the TCT proper just before Haypress Reservoir by ducking through an opening in a chain-link fence and walking along a dirt road. This intersects the trail just before a high bison fence, where you let yourself through a gate into a desolate field of sun-blackened bison droppings, like the site of some disgusting battle. Before the reservoir, there's a water faucet and, for some reason, a children's playground. This is the last water source until Black Jack, and the last swing set until Two Harbors. The playground was full of women in their early 20s laughing and playing on the equipment. I hoped the trail would break their spirit before Black Jack, or it would be a noisy night; but in fact, they were heading back towards Avalon. I was misled because they were a lot jollier and fresher than I was feeling (and they'd probably been on the trail for 4 days instead of my 2 hours).
The first bison encounter: coming over a rise, a gigantic shaggy brown thing appeared across a small ravine. What happens in these situations is that you stop and stare at the bison, and it stands up and glares back like a hairy garage that wants to kill you. And then you edge carefully past, grateful for the ravine. An indecisive round in the eternal contest between man and bison.
The Catalina interior is desert hillsides covered in bristly grass, cacti, and thirsty-looking shrubs. The hike became a bit of a sprint as the sun got lower. The trail was steeper than I'd hoped (some people look at contours, some visualize the trail they'd like to exist) and, like a tiresome guide, it kept taking me up hills to see views I no longer cared about. GPS consultations were consistently depressing. I was thrilled to finally spot a row of porta potties just after 4PM, and also pleased to find that the place was empty except for one couple. Talked with them a little; they (and this would prove to be a pattern) had planned things more intelligently than I, and had done the full trail with plenty of time to spare by spending a night in Avalon before starting.
Black Jack is a dirt patch in a ring of scrubby hills. Someone did make an effort: stones were arranged in decorative patterns, and some kind of large rusty barrel had been installed as an ornament. At night, it was cold, much colder than I'd expected. I'd decided at the last minute to bring a puffy jacket, and had been wondering whether it would be necessary. The weather norms and forecasts for the towns had made me think the answer would be "no, idiot, of course not"; in fact, it was "God, yes". The jet lag, though, worked out beautifully, because I could go to sleep at 9PM and get up at 4. In my home time zone, I would have punched anyone who suggested this. Even so, December means long nights, even on Catalina. In the morning, it was a long wait for the vague redness in the east to turn into something useful.
A dirt road led out of camp, and around the first corner was a herd of 12 bison, 3 of them on the road itself, none showing any sign of politely moving aside. I climbed up a little slope to skip the whole stretch and paused to watch the bison from a safe distance. Warnings about bison always want to impart three facts: that they weigh a lot, that they can run at 35mph, and that they can leap 6' in the air, as though the problem is their intimidating vertical. None of them did anything athletic, but their bulk is enough to convince most people to give them space. Anyway, this meant only 138 bison unaccounted for.
The first stop on Day 2 of the TCT is an airport: Catalina's Airport in the Sky, which has a single airstrip, a single hangar, and a restaurant, which makes it extremely interesting to hikers. The stereo was playing hits of the 1950s and the staff was decorating the place for Christmas, a surreal desert 1950s Christmas. I guess most of the people in the world who celebrate Christmas have no reason to associate it with snow and cold, but for a Canadian it's a surprising scene. Had an excellent breakfast on a paper plate (a sign seen much later in a bathroom actually encouraged their use on the island as a way of saving water), bought some of their cookies, and moved on.
Dirt roads led to a red track rubbed bare along a series of ridges. The slopes fall steeply away towards identical desert valleys, and you are filled with a sense of awe at what a bad place it would be to meet a bison. At least one of the existing blogs about the TCT (now thoroughly superseded by this one, obviously) mentions being charged by a bison the author was trying, insanely, to hustle off the trail. Places like this almost make you understand: there's nowhere to go, and if the bison decided to have a snooze, you wouldn't have a lot of good options (though going back to the last campground would still be better than picking a fight with a cranky, 800kg animal). Ground squirrels who pop up for a look around, decide they don't like the look of you, and disappear. A drinking hole of green water and bison saliva, the edges churned-up mud. Bright sunlight that makes phone pictures look like shots sent back by lander missions to Venus.
I stopped along here and was overtaken by the couple I'd met in Black Jack. We exchanged notes about bison and agreed that there should be more long-distance trails with restaurants. I stopped again in a wooden shelter and lay down for a while, a single huge fly buzzing curiously around me: maybe a bison fly, like the bison themselves bigger and hairier than their relatives. A major point in favour of Catalina, incidentally, is that there were, as far as I could tell, no biting insects at all.
At 2PM, I climbed down into Little Harbor, a surprising little oasis of palm trees and green grass, where my site was just above the beach. A pleasantly short day after the march to Black Jack. Some people don't bother stopping here at all, but instead walk straight on to Two Harbors, but why? Admittedly, a drawback to pulling in to camp so early is that there isn't a huge amount to do; there are links to other trails here, but hiking-based entertainment wasn't convenient for me at the time, because my legs felt like they'd been beaten with tire irons. I loafed around the beach. Around dusk, there were bison silhouetted on the surrounding ridges, seemingly keeping us under surveillance.
Another early morning, much warmer and damper than at Black Jack, another long wait for dawn. The trail here, once found, began switchbacking up a steep rise towards one of the ridges where I'd seen bison the night before. And there one was, just at the top of the hill, just close enough to the trail to be unsettling. The whole of the prairies must once have been like this, before trains and rifles reduced the bison from vast obstructive herds to a few inconvenient handfuls. A little way further on, another one, this one almost insultingly uninterested in me, possibly because it was the size of a bus and hadn't found much in life to trouble it so far. Or maybe it was haughty because of its connection to the movie business, it's impossible to say.
The trail here goes along some beautiful ridges. It seemed to have rained recently, which meant the ground was firm and the climbs and descents easy. A ruined wire fence ran alongside for a while; what purpose someone once thought it would serve was a mystery. In the distance, a thin red line along what looked like the knife edge of a high spur. I was trying to convince myself that that couldn't possibly be the trail, and then I was on it. It probably had glorious views, but I have no way of knowing; I looked down and picked my way along very carefully (it was, thankfully, wider than it looked at a distance). At the top, another wooden shelter, and then the trail turns into a dirt road, which seemed encouraging, because if it's passable by vehicles it surely can't be that bad. But it immediately began plunging steeply down and climbing steeply up, with a sheer drop off one side. Anyone who actually drives these roads is superhuman or tired of life.
From the last height coming into Two Harbors, the barking of distant seals, like sarcastic applause. Had to descend slowly, because, whatever muscles are used for walking downhill, I didn't seem to have ever used them before. It's unfair to have to painfully give back all that hard-won altitude; you should be able to spend it in some fun way, like a zipline or a soapbox racer. Maybe I can use the blog to pressure the authorities on this; they have no way of knowing its readership would fit comfortably in a Toyota Yaris.
On the very last stretch before town, a mostly-defleshed deer skull lies in the middle of the road, whether in any official capacity as a greeter I don't know. Then there's another bison gate, this one secured by a knot in a string, which I unpicked and retied into a cheerful bow. This bookends the bison-filled part of the island. From here on, there are only a few wily ones, who seem unlikely to break cover just to trample one hiker.
The town is very odd, at first. Higher up, there are what look like some rusty agricultural efforts; down by the water, a clean, theme park-like tourist village. Catalina's a sort of lopsided hourglass, and this is its waist, where there are harbours on each coast separated by a short, sandy walk. This is Two Harbors, a charming place with a mysterious name whose origins are lost to mortal memory. The seals can't easily be seen on their rock out in the water, but there's a chorus of barking all day, dwindling to a few concluding remarks in the late evening. At night, a row of fishing boats cruises the harbour lit up with banks of powerful lights, looking very like a fleet of UFOs.
The campground here is a short, steep walk from the centre of town. My site has a faucet beside it, one of the strange Catalina faucets that stand alone on the open ground like cacti, and, beside that, an open-air shower stall of cracked brown planks. The ground was dried mud that came up in sections like broken pottery.
The campground here is raided nightly by Catalina Island Foxes, a cute, endangered, and piratical species that's eased into the niche raccoons occupy elsewhere. During the day, you see them occasionally, blinking and trotting lazily by on mysterious fox errands. At night, they come boiling out of the darkness like the orcs of Moria. I went to dinner in town with the couple I'd been seeing every day on the trail, who'd turned out to be an extremely nice pair of biologists from BC named Tim and Sherry. When we came back towards their site, light from our headlamps reflected from three pairs of eyes. The foxes had climbed the shelter where their packs were hung and were making off with some of the food. There were corn nuts scattered around; Tim and Sherry tried to collect them all, but were haunted by crunching sounds through the night.
There were three more nosing around in my pack, but the Opsak I was using seemed to work; they were just fooling with the Ziploc bag I'd been storing lunches in. (I'd deliberately left the backpack unfastened and in the tent vestibule; Tim and Sherry had met a pair of hikers who had had the foxes chew a hole in their tent to get at food stored inside.)
The morning was gray and rainy. This raised another question about the route. The trail proper goes high up into the interior and sees the steepest parts of the entire TCT. The return route, after a night in Parsons Landing, is by the flat and winding coastal road. The road sounded boring, but I didn't altogether like the idea of steep, muddy descents. Also, someone had said something about a 'rain event', and I didn't know whether they were trying to be fancy or whether more than an ordinary shower was coming. The road seemed better. I checked in with Tim and Sherry, and was glad that they were thinking along the same lines, because they seemed to have a much clearer idea of what they were doing than I did. The visitors' office didn't have a forecast, but one was posted on the wharf: heavy rain. A gruff sailor or fisherman, passing by, said something about thunderstorms.
The coastal road is a flat, 13km slog that winds tediously around a long series of coves, every one of them occupied by some sort of private holiday camp or cult compound. Before Parsons Landing, you turn onto a trail again for a while, with the last stretch a series of wet clay slopes I poled up and down like a clumsy skier. All around, high yellow hills that reminded me strongly of Scotland, especially considering the rain and the amount of whisky I intended to drink.
Parsons Landing itself is a beautiful beach with a gravel band along the upper parts where low and not-very-stable rock walls have been mounded up around tent sites. There are looming cliffs at both ends, and a vast boulder in the center, in the lee of which a flock of gulls were sulking. They later fled entirely, leaving a single raven to croak ominously at us, as though it wasn't obvious what sort of evening it was going to be. On a rise above the beach, there is – and this turned out to be very important – a solid outhouse on a concrete foundation. I was looking over the sites when Tim and Sherry appeared, having, as usual, made much better time than me. Tim found a set of horseshoes (where?), but the rain intensified and instead we stood under the outhouse awning and talked about the beach and joked hopelessly that it seemed to be clearing up.
The night in the tent became interesting. The rain and waves, independently loud, were deafening together. The tent bowed with the wind, and a few times I found myself trying to brace it with my hands. The canopy (I was using a single-walled tent, a Tarptent Double Rainbow) began to drip condensation. At 3 or 4 in the morning, I put a hand down and the floor was like a waterbed: the tent was in a pool. I shone my headlamp around, and saw brown water beginning to come in at the corners.
I sat and thought hard for a few seconds, then started stuffing my sleeping bag into my food bag and throwing everything that felt dry into my pack liner. I climbed out, threw the liner bag over my shoulder, and splashed ridiculously off into the darkness and blinding rain in nothing but a raincoat and a headlamp. I made the slippery climb to the outhouse, sat down to think things over, and then reluctantly went back for everything else: pulled down the flooded tent, threw everything into it, and went padding back with the whole slippery mess. I can't prove that this was the most awkward burden ever carried, but I think it has a strong case. The job of taking the tent down in these conditions was worse than I expected. Tent manufacturers should have to shoot their setup/takedown videos in rainstorms. Also, they should only get one take, and if the tent wraps around their face and they run into a tree, that's their setup video.
In the luxury of the outhouse, I hung up some wet things, fired up the stove, and made a cup of coffee. Tim and Sherry, having sensibly picked a high clear spot up off the beach, came back cheerful and neatly packed. We had a bit of breakfast and hiked back together, jumping a few new streams, skirting some vast orange puddles, and telling travel stories. Back in town, I went straight to the visitors' office to see if there were any hotels in town that wouldn't mind sheltering someone who looked like a freshly-excavated bog person, and the freckled angel of mercy there transferred my reservation from the campground to a bare but dry room in an odd housing compound behind the restaurant.
I took a shower in a dank and pungent communal washroom (suddenly, nothing was good enough for the man who'd made coffee in an outhouse that morning). A long shower, because I couldn't think of a single reason to stop. Back in the room, I blasted the heater, hung things up to dry, looked over the filthy gear, and fantasized about just quietly stuffing it into a garbage somewhere and starting over. Or I could leave it in an airport, and they'd blow it up for me.
Tim and Sherry's plan had been to take the shuttle back to Avalon and catch the ferry to Long Beach; but the roads were washed out, so they were stuck in a room near mine. We wrapped up the trail with dinner and drinks and talked about the field work biologists do: counting things from helicopters (drawback: vomiting) and long trips on foot through the wilderness (drawback: being stalked by grizzlies). A busload of people suddenly filed in, signaling that the road was again open, and the bartender started lining up plastic cups and making vodka Red Bulls in batches. Catalina might be a drag on summer weekends.
We took the ferry back, parted at the terminal, and I went back to the hotel nearby, where the real estate conference was over, and the new banners were for an elementary school holiday party. I lay down at 8PM and time lurched forwards 9 hours. In the morning, a little bit of bracing L.A. weirdness on public transit, and the long flight home.
