Victorville, CA to Wrightwood, CA
Today was finally a short day, but there was a lot of climbing. We started the day with a Starbucks break and met a few characters. First there was a guy who worked with at-risk youth and asked for a picture with us to show his students that people their age are doing things with their lives other than drugs and alcohol. The next woman told us about how here daughter had run off in the middle of the night with the car, no shoes or phone, and her mom's wallet. She was asking us to look out for her if we saw her or the black truck she was driving. It was an interesting interaction to say the least. By lunch we'd already climbed quite a bit, but nothing like what was ahead.
Switchbacking up the mountain with Casey, we finally made it to the town of Wrightwood.
It is a very touristy mountain town with lots of cute cabins and shops. Everyone was exploring the town for most of the day since there was another really large climb to the campsite we were spending the night at.
Eventually a group of us decided we would take on the climb that we'd been dreading all day. Luckily I was with a good group of people that helped pass the time with fun games.
About 3 miles from the campsite, Shane greeted us with his new Bike & Build flag and told us about the trecherous climb we were about to encounter. It seemed like all of a sudden we turned a corner and we were going straight up. It was worse than Mountain Road in Massachusets. But this time I made it all the way up without stopping once! I was in the middle between David and Sean and we switchbacked up the mountain the whole way up. Slowly but surely we made it all the way to the top--it was the BEST feeling in the world. To make it even better, the campsite overlook was amazing.
Unfortunately, just after we had set up the tents for everyone, the van came up to tell us that the group down in the town had figured out a church camp that we could stay at instead that had showers, a kitchen, and cabins with bunk beds where we could sleep. So we packed up everything and headed back down the mountain. The place we were staying was awesome, but it was pretty defeating to have climbed all that way just to be brought back down. During and after dinner we discussed all 16 grant applications that our group was responsible for this summer. There were a lot of great applications with innovative ideas and youth involvement. It's definitely going to be hard to choose which applications to allocate our money to.
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