Buck30 - Other Trail Journal - 2022

WTH Summary Entry - 2024 Hike #2

I hiked the WTH a second time from October 22, 2024 to December 6, 2024. My first hike was about the same number of days in 2022.

Given that this hike was very similar to my 2022 hike, I didn't keep a journal for the 2024 hike, but wanted to lay down a few new thoughts or changes. So read my previous more extensive 2022 summary entry and then below i just compare the 2 hikes. Most of the categories are " no change".

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One key point, the TLDR is that I would highly recommend not hiking the WTH in the Fall unless it was an unusually wet Summer/Fall like 2022. Hike it in the Winter when it was meant to be hiked. See "Water" below.

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Overall - No change here, still an awesome hike, easily the best USA winter hike.

Difficulty - No change here, I'd still give this a solid "moderate" rating for an experienced hiker. I would consider this very difficult for an inexperienced hiker.

Terrain - No change here. The route changed a bit here and there from 2022 to 2024. Maybe 10% overall, but the changes were usually like circle around this thing to the north instead of the south, not many "wholesale" changes. The route was already pretty well done and vetted by 2022.

Where to Start and Finish - No change here. In 2024 I just hiked the core WTH with the exception of starting along the new low route option in Desert Hot Springs. Personally I think it's very worthwhile to do the full traverse of Joshua Tree National Park and not just finish on the eastern/central side.

Should I Hike This Route? - No change here. Make sure you like the low desert!

Water - In hindsight my 2022 hike was a ridiculous outlier. There was so much rain in the Summer and Fall 2022 in both California and Arizona that my hike was a complete anomaly. Under this kind of rain scenario I think a Fall hike is fantastic. But it's not the norm. 2024 was an average rain year in California which is to say there was almost no rain since the end of March. Arizona mostly had a below average monsoon season and there had been almost no rain since the end of August. I knew all this before I decided to hike and mostly just decided to see if it still could be done. I typically only work January - March so I can't hike the WTH when it was meant to be hiked. And I wanted to squeeze one last hike into 2024. Frankly I wanted something easier like the PCT SoCal or the AZT but both had multiple fire issues/closures.

The real question was going to be California. California doesn't get much of a monsoon season and it really had barely rained at all since the end of March. Those quail guzzlers are not that big. What were the odds that there was still water in them over 6 months later? Studying the route I determined I could do some standard caching of water in Sections 8 and 7 and get by ok with long water carries, Section 6 was a huge issue as there is nowhere to cache for like 80 miles without a 4WD high clearance vehicle. Overall it worked out, but it wasn't super easy and I didn't have some amazing stroke of luck like I was hoping and all the guzzlers had water and made it so a Fall hike was always possible. Most of the guzzlers were dry, it was especially disappointing in the Mojave National Preserve which had gotten a slight bit of rain. But then there was the occasional guzzler with water which just seemed like an insane miracle, like how did this water survive for so many months and the water that came out was actually pretty good. Pinto #1, a guzzler in the Sheepholes, one in the Mojave. But this wasn't enough to really do a Fall hike enjoyably. Section 6 was still a big issue and with the guzzlers being incredibly unreliable I took a giant alternate that allowed me to do 2 almost 50 mile water carries while passing through the town of Lake Havasu. Long carries but doable on easier terrain (as opposed to the WTH with like an 80 mile carry with a lot of guzzlers but no guarantee of water and then a 45 mile carry through the very strenuous Whipple's which almost certainly were dry). Not suggested, I missed most of Section 6 which is really a great section. My route was fine, but just not as nice. So my conclusion was that in a normal year, it's just not worth trying to hike California in the Fall. Kinda a failure but also a success as the main point was to see what it was like. Now I know.

Arizona is a bit of a different story. Arizona gets a monsoon season and it had rained decently (although below average) in the Summer. And as Brett taught me, you don't need a crazy amount of rain to fill these guzzlers. At a certain point they just fill and more and more rain doesn't do anything. I guess occasional rain does help to top them off but you don't need inches and inches of rain. Also, the guzzlers in Arizona are the big game guzzlers which usually have large underground storage tanks versus the California quail guzzlers which have a much smaller holding capacity. I decided not to cache in Arizona and it worked out fine. I didn't have a single guzzler dry (except the first one heading WeBo ironically which seems semi-broken), although most guzzlers had the main trough dry and the secondary trough with 2'-3' of water. Given the way we think these work, that was about all the water that remained (there probably is at least a few inches in the main unseen holding tank which does represent a decent amount of water). Also given that it had been sitting there for months, a number of the guzzlers had water that was quite green and had a strong algae taste. But hey, it was water. The cattle tanks/troughs were mostly good too, being the first person through in 8 months was always a bit of a risk, things can change so that had me carrying a bit more water than normal. But overall it was fine and it was doable. The water was nowhere near as good as a normal winter, but I had just enough to get by fairly easily. So basically it seems that you can typically hike Arizona in the Fall, even in a lower than average monsoon season like I had in 2024. With a normal monsoon season I bet the guzzlers would have had more and higher quality water.

Overall conclusion? I wouldn't do the WTH again in the Fall in a normal (dry) year. The WTH is a spectacular hike. It's not worth suffering through the dry Fall when you could be swimming in the guzzlers in a normal winter. I would do it again in the Fall if there were significant California rains in Summer/Fall. I'm still glad I hiked in 2024, part of the point was just to see if it could be done so I'd know for future years. I usually have this awkward time in Oct/Nov when I still want to hike and there aren't a lot of choices.

Season - No big change here really. Personally I still think winter is cold! But it still makes sense to hike in winter and probably be hit by 1 or 2 short lived storms and possibly have to take refuge in a town that you probably can't easily get to!

My Fall 2024 was markedly different than my Fall 2022 hike in that I had basically no rain. In 2022 I had 3 short storms pass through of a couple days each, including absolutely record rainfalls and flooding near AZ City which was super cool to see the desert flowing like a river. In 2024 I literally had like 12 seconds of sprinkles one evening. That's it. My days were mostly sunny with highs in the 70s. I had a weird week around Buckeye with thick clouds but no rain. My first week on trail across Joshua Tree caught the last heat wave of the summer/Fall and I had brutally high temps given how much water I also needed to carry. Not fun but that would never happen in Winter. I also had less wind than in 2022. I had one 5 day stretch early on in 2024 where it was wickedly windy and impossible to set up a tent, I cowboy camped each night being blasted by wind and suffered a bit too during the day. But that was it, the rest of my hike was oddly not windy much at all. Seemed a bit unusually not windy.

Number of Days - No change here, took me almost the exact same number of days, 46 in 2024 for the core WTH.

Resupply - No big changes here, the resupply towns still mostly suck! There seems to be more Ubers around Buckeye which is helpful to get in and out. One place I went that was new, was early on after JTree and the Pinto's you cross Hwy 62 and can hitch into Twentynine Palms. I was at the tail end of a big heatwave and a zero day allowed me to wait for a 25 degree drop in temps. It's a quiet and remote spot to hitch, I got lucky and got a ride in 20 minutes, but on the Desert Trail it took us almost 3 hours. You can usually get an Uber back to the trail, they pop into town every so often. My last observation is Hwy 60 and Salome. Personally I'd roll the dice with a hitch on this high speed 2 lane highway rather than walk all those extra miles on the town alternate which still requires you to hitch from Wenden to Salome if you want a motel. I don't disagree that it's a rough hitch, but it's still just a 2 lane road and you can hitch for hours until you reach an equivalent amount of time it would take you to walk to Wenden and then hitch to Salome. I had a food cache so I didn't try, but that's my take.

Caches - No changes here, I still wouldn't recommend caching, the water is still really solid in the winter, but I've noticed that some hikers still choose to cache which is fine. It does help cut down on some longer food carries and some of the towns have pretty poor resupply so if you have any interest in eating decent food then caching (or mail drops) are probably nice for some hikers.

Maps/GPS/Navigation - Bit of a change here. First off, the route is now in Avenza. No one seems to really love Avenza.. I find the maps to be harder to read zoomed in, but these maps looks nice to me. Maybe I should have used it, but I never did. Give it a try! I used Caltopo the entire trip.

The other big change is that there is no longer a continuous track offered. The "track" are now dots on the map spaced 1/4 mile apart plus a lot of small sections where navigation is a bit trickier and the short track is provided. Not really ideal, but it helps make sure the materials/GPS track don't get passed around the Internet (primarily via making a mistake by leaving it public on Caltopo Or Gaia). This will make you pay attention a lot more to your surroundings and probably make your hike a bit more challenging but rewarding.

Camping - No change here. I had a stretch of wind that made me cowboy camp each night. Otherwise camping is still super easy.

Dangers - I had no migrant issues in 2024 unlike the 2 odd instances I had in 2022. I can imagine in the upcoming political environment there will be fewer migrants making it this far up in the future. I took note this year of a few areas where I saw heavier signs of migrant passage for anyone interested:

Section 2, mile 55, around I-8. Just a ton of trash and discarded items that look like migrants probably get picked up here.

Section 2, mile 30 area. Rounding Table Top mountain fair amount of discarded migrant stuff.

Section 1, mile 50 and beyond area in the Silverbell mountains. Lots of footprints and discarded items.

Gear - No changes. I only got 2 holes in my Neoair this time vs 5 in 2022. I should have taken my own advice and not brought my umbrella. It was useless after the first week which was super hot (and no one will have 90 degree heat in the winter). I also should have taken my own advice and gotten a 2nd pair of shoes at some point. My Merrill Moab's usually last 1000 miles. By 400 miles on the WTH they were really getting beat up, by 600 miles the treads were almost gone and I was getting cholla spikes through the bottom. I felt every rock I stepped on for the last 400 miles, oh well. Such is life on the rocky WTH.

Wildlife - No change here really, I did see a large herd of Bighorn which was awesome and 1 rattlesnake.

Bugs - No changes, no bugs at all.

Cell Service - No changes, lots of cell reception.

Permits - No changes, no permits really. I should have previously mentioned you should have an AZ State Land permit. It's like $ 15. Unlikely to ever meet someone to check it but it's worth having.

Lastly, the requirements for getting the WTH materials have changed a bit. The first requirement is the same, to have hiked another of Brett's route of at least 400 miles. There's a second requirement now to have also provided meaningful feedback while having hiked that/those trails. I'm not speaking for Brett here, this is my opinion. I think this is mainly to just help keep the WTH numbers reasonable/low and to encourage people to update the WTH water report. It seems like a lot of hikers are hiking the GET or other routes and not paying it forward by updating the water chart or providing any other meaningful feedback. And taking it a step further, maybe a hiker who is so lazy that they won't update the critical water report (having used it themselves) is also the type of hiker who will act like an asshole on the trail. There's a long discussion about this requirement in the WTH blog post, I'd suggest reading that carefully. Nobody likes a freeloading hiker!

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