The End of the Beginning

At Mile: 652

We are in the home stretch of the desert right now. There are only 47 more miles until we hit Kennedy Meadows and the start of the Sierra Nevadas. It will be a great relief to see some new scenery and have more water sources. We had to switch from the Desert map to the Sierra map on our navigation app recently and it inspired us to crunch some numbers related to this first leg of our hike.

Mileage

We have been keeping track of where we stay every night and have used these numbers to figure out how many miles per day we are averaging. The simple way is divide total miles by total days on the trail.

Miles/day: 652.1/40=16.3

But we don't hike all day every day. We have taken two zeroes and a bunch of days where we only hiked half days, either into or out of town. For that we added up the miles hiked on full hiking days and divided by the number of full hiking days.

Miles/full hiking day: 556.4/27=20.6

A Day By Day Breakdown Of Our Miles

Day 1: 20
Day 2: 16.1
Day 3: 19.8
Day 4: 14.9
Day 5: 13.7 (Into and out of Stagecoach)
Day 6: 20.5
Day 7: 10.4 (Into and out of Warner Springs)
Day 8: 22.9
Day 9: 17.6
Day 10: 17.4
Day 11: 9.4 (Into Idyllwild)
Day 12: 3.9 (Plus 2.4 to get back up to the PCT on the Devils Slide Trail. Out of Idyllwild)
Day 13: 26.2
Day 14: 19.5
Day 15: 24.1
Day 16: 13 (Into Big Bear Lake)
Day 17: Zero Day (Big Bear Lake)
Day 18: 19.5
Day 19: 23.6
Day 20: 18.9
Day 21: 13.8
Day 23: 19.8
Day 24: 7.6 (Into Wrightwood)
Day 25: 19.9
Day 26: 22.5
Day 27: 24.4
Day 28: 18.4 (Into Agua Dulce)
Day 29: 4.5 (Out of Agua Dulce)
Day 30: 23.5
Day 31: 25.6
Day 32: 21.2
Day 33: 24.6
Day 34: 12.6 (Into Tehachapi)
Day 35: Zero Day (Tehachapi)
Day 36: 8.6 (Out of Tehachapi)
Day 37: 21.4
Day 38: 23.3
Day 39: 20.2
Day 40: 12 (Into Ridgecrest)

Food

Ever since our hiker hunger kicked in, we have been curious about how much energy we are eating and burning every day. So the last time we went shopping, I added up all the calories that went into my food bag. And I ate all of it. Servings are as listed below (no judgements, I know this is a garbage diet):

Food Purchased

Beef jerky 2x210
Almond fiber bars 7×170
Peanuts 1x460
Tuna 3x90
Burrito 2x260
Candy 1x700
Candy 1x780
Sunflower kernels 1x700
Cookies 1x1700
Cheetos 9x160
Water flavors 14x10
Ramen 1x400
Apple's 2x100

Food I Found

Corn chips 1x160
Pepsi 1x150

Food Donated To David

Estimated 400 calories

So that was for a total of 85 trail miles, but to make it easier, I am going to disregard the eight miles out of Tehachapi and the 12 miles into Ridgecrest and just concentrate on the three full hiking days in between. Here is my Fitbit data for those days:

The Math

Total caloric input: 8830
Total caloric output: 13958
Calorie deficit: 5128

No wonder I'm starving all of the time! That doesn't even include what I burned during those 20 hiking miles in and out of town. It is a good thing we are in town often enough to make up for this deficit!

Thats all for now. The next time we post it will be from the High Sierras and hopefully some cooler weather!