Day Seventeen: Journey To The Center Of PQ

7/02/15, 10:12 PM PDT

Today, Angela, Kayla, Nick, and I decided to experience the lives of our hunter-gatherer ancestors through a good old hiking trip through the Los Penasquitos Canyon Trail.

I haven't gone hiking in a long time, but when I asked my parents if I could go, they gave me horror story about horror stories about these bastards:

No badgers or mushrooms in sight, thankfully.
(via oddastic.com)

And these bastards:

"As soon as you step foot on the trail, a thousand of these thigns will
come after you." - Dad
(via washingtontimes.com)

And especially this bastard:

Circles. I've been scared of these things ever since we had to do
proofs in geometry.
(via thesun.co.uk)

So, fearing snakes, sun, and biblical plague-size hordes of insects, I came massively massively overprepared.

Me, looking for a woman to finally love me for me
the next great adventure!

I brought a headless golf club to swat away snakes, white sweatpants to prevent insect bites, a first aid kit for any accidents that happen on the trail, and my dad convinced me at the last minute to bring a hat with a nice frilly back to protect me from the sun. The soccer shirt actually serves two purposes. One, to allow for more air to flow through my body, and two, to attract females that I see along the trail by giving them the illusion that I'm more athletic than I actually am.

We first grouped up at Angela's house. Nick and I got there (relatively) on time, so while we waited for Kayla to wake up from her hibernation, we played on her WiiU.

I tried to make a Mii from Nintendo's automatic Mii Generator. Here was the result:

Not bad, Nintendo. Not bad at all.

We also played Mario Party. Thanks to a combination of Angela's witchcraft and the fact that RNGesus has forsaken me, I lost. Terribly.

See that spike in Angela's graph near the flag thing? We had to fight for
half of our stars there. You can probably guess who won.

After Kayla finally came and we cooled down from the most intense Mario Party game ever, we were on our way.

Hello, hello.

The last time you ever saw any of us ever again.

Having never really gone seriously hiking before, I was pretty amazed at how pretty the place looked.

Looks like something straight out of a Smucker's commercial.

If you ignore the thousands of rattlesnakes hiding in every single bush in
this trail, it's actually very nice.

We first stopped at the creek, about two miles or so away from the entrance.

Man, this drought hit us hard. The creek's so dry it looks like a dirt road.

Look at it, in all of its HDR beauty.

Uhh....

Yeah, my camera doesn't really do it justice, since I take all my pictures with a crappy iPhone 4. But as always, here's Kayla and Angela to save the day with their much more impressive image resolutions.

Actually, this isn't the creek, this is actually Unreal Engine 4.

There it is... Terabithia.
(via Angela)

We took some obligatory squad riverside pictures.

Even though absolutely none of us were going to Riverside.
(via Angela)

That stick wasn't planted by Nick, it kinda just rose from the ground
and Nick, out of impulse, just started stroking it.
(via Angela)

Angela proved to us just how much she trusted us.

Either that or we killed her and are in the middle of disposing her body.
(via Angela)

She also found the darkness in her inner self.

This pic isn't upside down, Angela's
just evil.
(via Kayla)

See this next pic?

(via Kayla)

Kayla goes in deep to get pictures like this, so it deserves at least a little shoutout.

Good job Kayteal.

Next stop, we hiked to the waterfall. I was really surprised at how sparse the landscape was from here on out.

Here we see Nick the bushwhacker, roaming the savannah.

Kinda reminds me of the blight from Interstellar.

We eventually made it to the waterfall. And holy CRAP was it amazing.

The view we got as soon as we walked in.
(via Angela)

You can see just how relieved we were to finally arrive after two hours of hiking.

Here, I try to fish for dinner, Angela prays to the sun god, and Kayla
amazingly still has reception in the wilderness.
(via Angela)

We explored the waterfall/lake area and got a few interesting pictures.

"Hello my name is Angela and welcome to my crib."

At one point, Angela and Kayla decided to bring back the lost art of planking.

Either that or they're in some sort of weird new photosynthesizing cult.

Kayla also got her thinking cap on.

The machinations of her mind are an enigma.

If you've never been to the falls, I highly suggest that you do, it is AMAZING. There really isn't anything like the feeling of trekking through a few miles of desert with a few friends under the heat of the sun and to finally reach the nice, cool water of a gentle, isolated river.

Of course my camera doesn't do it justice, so here again is Angela to save the day.

(Actually, technically, Nick took all of these pictures, but it was with Angela's camera. And on this blog, credit follows the camera, not the hand. But Nick deserves a shoutout anyway.)

This would make a really awesome cover photo.
(via Kayla)

Sea foam from the waterfalls!
(via Angela)

Honestly, pictures will not do this place justice at all. Seriously, if you can make the trip, visit this place yourself. It's only a two-hour hike from the very easily accessible Camino Ruiz park, and it is BEAUTIFUL. Just uhh... bring a stick to ward off rattlesnakes.

We eventually ended up climbing all the way to the bottom of the waterfall/stream. We couldn't find our original way back to the trail, so we ended up just rock climbing our way out from the very bottom of the waterfall. And it was awesome.

Impressively, Kayla did the entire thing while holding our hiking stick.
Good on her.

Nick and I did most of the trail setting while Angela and Kayla followed behind. Here we see Nick looking shamefully down at the stragglers.

In Angela and Kayla's defense, that next rock that they're about to climb had
some disgustingly textured moss on it.

You can see Angela's reluctance to touch that rock.
(via Angela)

We eventually rock climbed to the very top of the waterfall and back down again to return to the trail. After an exhausting two hour hike back, we finally made it back to the park, where we all pretty much all but died on the park picnic tables.

Kayla got the worst of it. Her tiny, twig-like legs just couldn't take that steep home stretch of tiles we had to climb up.

She's dead.

Meanwhile, Nick and Angela are (relatively) fine. Here, Angela shows us that her legs are still fully functional.

"Oh no, my left leg's actually gone completely limp. Nbd."

Nick, easily the most athletic of the four of us, looked like he wasn't even sweating.

"That was a pretty good warmup hike, ready for potato chip rock?"

Meanwhile, Kayla sweated literally an ENTIRE CONTINENT.

It's Africa, complete with Madagascar and
the Nile River!

So to make sure our Kayla didn't die from starvation, we went to an emergency trip to Vallarta's to buy us some burritos.

Look at the behemoth Angela and Nick ordered.

I think they called it a "Wet Burrito" but I might just be thinking of what
Urban Dictionary calls your toilet after you finish eating this thing.

Sorry if this entry wasn't super heavy on text or funny stuff. I kinda just wanna get this entry over with since I'm still feeling kinda depressed and I want to move on to other stuff that I want to do. Today was a great, great day, but as of writing this (7/3/15), I'm feeling pretty down so this entry won't be super fantastic even though the day itself was fantastic. Does that sort of make sense? Hopefully it does. But yeah, I'll get better soon, don't worry about me!

RFotD: We heard a grand total of 15,000 different rattlesnakes in this hiking trip. Nick's greatest regret in the four or so hour hike we took was that he never got to see one.