[Aaron] After an even harder effort this year, we came up empty handed again. Made it to the same bail-out point at the end of Center Flats Road. We had an awesome start at 1am, made really good time to HQ where we stopped for breakfast and watched the sunrise, and kept up the pace until the Bear Mountain Climb around 10am, when the heat of the day really started to get to us. Our momentary saving grace was Mississippi Lake, where we stopped for the most rejuvenating swim I've ever had. At this point, we were 5 hours ahead of record pace, and thought we had it in the bag. Quick blast down to Pacheco Camp (the pricklies weren't nearly as bad this year!). We could not find phoneline trail AT ALL - spent half an hour going back and forth, and finally just bushwhacked our way down to Coit Rd. Not sure if it was more overgrown this year, or if we were just looking in the wrong place, but I can't understand how we found it in the dark last year and couldn't find it this year! The next few climbs in the burning sun proved to be our undoing. When we finally got down Dutch's, we were totally spent, walking every climb, and Garret was showing signs of mild heat stroke. Due to a GPS malfunction (it kept telling us we were on course when we weren't), we missed the turnoff to Kaiser Aetna Rd, and instead got on a singletrack going up the creek and eventually straight hike-a-bike up the mountain. By the time I realized we missed our turn, we were far enough along the new trail that we decided to just take it all the way up to the visitor's center. Pretty nice trail actually, but it was brutal. Got to the visitor's center around 4:45pm, and Garret was definitely in the throes of heat stroke, so we decided to just chill, soak ourselves with the hose, and get his body temp back down before we headed back to the car. Stayed there for a couple hours while he recovered. Burra burra at sunset was absolutely beautiful, Center Flats was awful as always, and we were back at the cars around 8pm.
Even though I was in much better shape this year, it was WAY harder than last year because of the heat. Temps were definitely in the 90s, much higher than expected (forecast was in the 70s!). Hopefully they come down a bit for you guys in a couple weeks. The trails were in great shape, except there were a large number of downed trees all over the course - nothing dangerous or anything though.
I can do a full writeup at some point if you'd like, and I also took a ton of video, so I'll throw something together.
Now I have even more respect for this route, and want to finish it more than ever!! Definitely not anytime soon though!
