Lykken Trail

I read a newspaper headline while I was at Del Taco in Palm Desert, where there are no drive throughs, and I ordered two hard shell bean tacos and a green burrito and read the story of how two hikers' bodies were found on the Lykken Trail just above Palm Springs, they both went out mid-afternoon last Saturday when it was about 115 degrees and super humid, it happens every year. Why don't the trailheads out here have severe heat warnings? You can't even fly an airplane when it's this hot. Extreme heat can, and does, ground flights here. There's a big disconnect between landing here in a new car with hella A/C, and stepping out....

Having been hospitalized several times for dehydration in recent years myself, and that with drinking mega-water and gatorade and doing all the right things (stay in shade, wear heat and sunscreen) and STILL getting way messed up, well, yeah, it's hotter than hell, and that's a concrete statement emblazoned in melting roads. Us and Death Valley sharing the nation's top temps last weekend. Even in the middle of the night. There is zero shade on these desert hiking trails. Barely even a bush. Shade is THE essential desert survival tool, that, and water. Lots of it, carry at least a gallon, not in plastic because the heat leaches poisons out, maybe a virgin gas can, in the car wherever you drive. More water, more water in a place with virtually none than most people can imagine drinking in their entire lives.

The weirdest thing is you can look right down onto Palm Springs, a thumbprint away, just below all those trails looping across the mountain flanks, so this adds to the sense of very false security. But the town is its own artifice, its own temporary erection on the waves of heat on its sand-scraped surface, so buying into any of it as real is a fallacy. A distortion of light on sand. Bending the mind. That's why people come here to drink and play, do things they would never dream of doing anywhere else - you've heard of what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas?

To begin to attempt an articulation of the dishonesty of this place: how about the covered naked bridge (how oxymoronic can it get?) above Indian Canyon Blvd, arching from one nude hot springs resort to another.....and, the fact that my daughter went to school with a young man whose parents own the resort....I've long gone to nudist-flying Deep Creek Hot Springs, on the naked high desert backside of the San Bernardino Mountains, so it was no shock to either of us. Over the top is an understatement for this place. Anyway, it's a lot better, but less interesting for sure, than an all-expenses-paid three day trip to the small town of Muscoy, wedged between Rialto-at the edge of Frisbee Park - and the murder-capital-of-the-U.S. west side of San Bernardino. I heard that one of my former poetry professors from CSUSB was murdered with a baseball bat in downtown Muscoy some years ago.

Maybe people are trying too hard. To get the the top of Mt. San Jacinto and back down in a day, and various folks have died attempting that one in both summer (120) and winter (ice), Cactus to Clouds is not recommended for the weak. A friend of mine, Jack, who is highly educated, from Vermont, and looks just like a young Richard Burton, has invited me to go, but, uh, well, maybe the Bump n'Grind, another hike down here, is more my style now, only 4 miles not twenty, and a mere 1,000 foot elevation gain and drop, not 10,000. Growing up in the remote desert, like I did, the only thing to do is drive way on dirt powerline roads and hike in the desert during the nicer months of the year; almost-frozen beer is for summer.

Well, what happens in Palm Springs doesn't even happen in Vegas. And those hikers may looked down and thought they were hallucinating, before they succumbed to the psychotic horrors of quick heatstroke and death, which probably set in within a few hours or less from when they handily started their hikes, the nursing home where my stalker's father died a few years ago in a blizzard of 120 + degree days, it's on Ramon Road near Kirk Douglas Drive and the waterfall at the Palm Springs Airport. Superglide.