21 miles today, and they felt pretty smooth. The highlight of today was the ford of the south fork of the San Joaquin River, required since the bridge is out.
This ford has been built up in my head over the last like hundred miles. There were handwritten signs from rangers 90 miles back warning about it, and the official PCTA route is routed around it. But about 80% of the comments in the navigation app I use were from folks who said they just went ahead and forded the river, and maybe 90% of the folks I talked to said the same thing.
There were different recommendations on where to ford the river. As of a month ago, most folks seemed to be using an “up and over” route that required some serious orienteering with map and compass and took maybe 4 hours. More recently, folks had started going downstream instead to varying distances. .4 miles downstream sounded like the safest ford but required a scramble over some rocks that was consistently described as “sketchy.” .2 or .1 south of the bridge was a bit tougher crossing the river but a piece of cake to get to. I figured I would take a look when I got close and decide then if I was gonna just go for it on a harder crossing or do the extra rock scramble.
The only problem was as I got about a quarter mile away a storm kicked up. It was coming down pretty hard, I had to toss my rain jacket and pack cover on immediately. Then I was faced with an interesting choice – cross the pretty sizeable river with active lightning, or wait it out and ford a river that may be swollen from the rain.
I decided just to go for it at the .1 mile distance south. The water was pretty quick, and at its deepest came up above my knee. It wasn’t too slippery though, and by using my hiking poles was able to keep three points of contact at all times. All in all, it wasn’t too risky of a crossing and I was glad I got to see some of the gorgeous terrain of the last 20 miles instead of doing the reroute.
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