[pct-l] Desert Night hiking

[Diane Soini of Santa Barbara Hikes]

On Sep 7, 2011, at 9:57 PM, Nathaniel Morse wrote:
>
>  Isn't about 700 miles, desert?  And I guess weather and temp  
> depends on the
> year...

A trip to San Jacinto last spring during thru-hiker season (May):
http://tinyurl.com/4y548ky

I took pictures around Big Bear a few weeks later (also in May) but I  
guess I never posted them online. It was snowing. There were big pine  
trees. It was delightful around Deep Creek.

Hiking the trail near Wrightwood in 2008 during thru-hiker season I  
was stuck in Wrightwood for 3 days waiting for the blizzard to stop:
http://tinyurl.com/44hn5wm

Here we are at the Cottonwood bridge in the middle of the Antelope  
Valley/Mojave desert section resting in the freezing hot sun:
http://tinyurl.com/3og7s8l

It's only desert some of the time. I always get a laugh when I  
remember this one lady from 2010 telling me how much she loved the  
desert while she was standing in the pine trees on Mt. Laguna. Looked  
just like the pine trees around Old Station. Which reminds me, I was  
dying of heat prostration around Northern California and Oregon. You  
want hot? Try Northern California!

You'll have some hot days in So Cal and there won't be a lot of water  
along the trail. Prepare for single-digit humidity and a wide range  
of temperatures, sometimes hot, sometimes cold, sometimes snowing or  
freezing rain, but mostly perfect but windy. It cools off every night  
instantly as soon as the sun goes behind a mountain. Then it stays  
cool for most of the morning. Get up early to take advantage of the  
cool morning hours. Take a break in the middle of the day if it's too  
hot for you. It'll probably be in the 80s to mid-90s. Then hike on  
into the evening when it's comfortable again. Some people hike into  
the night but very few people find it necessary to hike in the middle  
of the night. Besides, you need to sleep and nothing could be more  
awful than trying to sleep when it's hot and sunny and there's  
nowhere to lay yourself but under a chamise bush where ants and flies  
will have their way with you.

And to answer your first question, sure it's safe to hike at night  
but it's not necessary. I'd save it for a full moon.