Personal Narrative: The San Gorgonio Wilderness

There is nothing more rewarding than sitting around a campfire in the mountains, after a day of backpacking, especially in the San Gorgonio Wilderness, drinking coffee and telling or listening to stories about all of our adventures we have had together. Yearly we got together to set our monthly backpacking schedule into the local mountains, and then a week in the Sierra, with our teenagers. Which of course, always includes The San Gorgonio Wilderness in the spring. It is rare to find so much compatibility in a group like ours, and most important there is always safety in numbers, which we all recognized, as we shall see. We adults always talked through all decisions we encountered. We all live in Costa Mesa and all the daughters and eventually the teenagers knew each other from Middle School and High School. When in the mountains expect the unexpected. San Gorgonio 11,503 feet and San Jacinto 10,834 feet, stand guard as the gateway to Los Angeles, flanking Interstate 10 (the San Gorgonio pass) facing eastward ten miles northwest of Palm Springs. All flights into LAX (Los Angeles International Airport) must fly over these …show more content…
As we headed for the fork in the trail, we encountered a man sitting by himself. He had been with a Boy Scout Troop, and he could not keep up with the boys. At this height we were sure it was the altitude, he was settling in for them to return the next day. We invited him to join us at our campsite. By turning us down, he was going to have a long, lonely night. He should have accepted our invitation, because the next morning we had a breakfast (prepared on Friday night, by Gale and Tim) of scrambled eggs, sausage and bacon. These were placed in plastic baggies, and heated up in boiling water on our backpack stoves. Now that was good