Early morning June 14th I left Yosemite and headed towards LA to pick up Veronique the next day.
Along the way I spend quite some time shopping for food for my 15 day JMT hike. About 15kg of food, almost 400$! The cost of energy bars starts to add up when you need the equivalent of a 150 of them.
Preparing 15 JMT breakfasts: 800 Cal worth of oatmeal, sugar, nuts, fruits and expresso beans.
The next day, I picked Veronique up from LAX and we headed to an AirBnB spot in Venice where we were spending the next two nights. Since Vero needed a sleeping bag and some other camping gear, we walked to Santa Monica the next morning and sponsored REI a bit. Along the way, we got to do some slacklining and saw a seal annoying fishermen by scaring away all the fish :).
Happily walking around Venice. Or maybe we are just a couple of retards...
In your waters, stealing your fish.
Huge 6k cal gummy bear. Maybe I should just take these with me on the JMT :)?
Lots of Venice stores have super nice graffiti walls.
June 17th, day 109, it was time to leave LA and go visit some parks. We decided to head to Joshua Tree first. Our campground for the night, Black Rock, was first-come first-serve and there were no more envelopes to pay camping fees, so we got to spend the night for free. Hurray!
The food portions at Walmart are quite... interesting.
Crazy looking spider at the Black Rocks campground.
We woke up to an amazing sky, which looked as if it was on fire. Apparently there was a big fire at the nearby Big Bear lake and the smoke would block out the sun for almost the whole day. Really, really beautiful!
Super beautiful morning sky in Joshua Tree.
We spend the day visiting lots of places in Joshua Tree: Split Rock, Skull Rock, Hidden Valley… It was ridiculously hot, so we only did a couple of short hikes and left the longer ones for another time. In the evening, we had to fight of an invasion of bees while cooking and ended up eating our dinner in the car. Later on, a huge coyote paid our camping spot a visit, super cool! It didn’t even seem scared and spend the better part of a minute staring at me from 30m away.
Lots of pretty lizards in Joshua Tree.
Some take an afternoon nap, others prepare 45 100g packages of trailmix for the JMT :p.
Thousands of cacti in the Chola cactus gardens.
The huge coyote that visited our campsite at dusk.