{"id":6954,"date":"2023-10-26T16:11:57","date_gmt":"2023-10-26T16:11:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.whitethaiger.net\/hikers\/?p=6954"},"modified":"2023-10-26T16:11:57","modified_gmt":"2023-10-26T16:11:57","slug":"puff-and-moan-benchmarks-october-2023","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.whitethaiger.net\/hikers\/2023\/10\/26\/puff-and-moan-benchmarks-october-2023\/","title":{"rendered":"Puff and Moan Benchmarks, October 2023"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Frank and I successfully ascended Puff and Moan, however, not without some adventure and frustration…  <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

The first lesson learned….not all download tracks are good ones.  Second, what you see on your laptop doesn’t always translate to the cell phone’s GPS.  Third, Peak Finder and GAIA do not list benchmark names.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We were not without fault to begin our hike.\u00a0 Left early, a 2.5-hour drive to the trailhead.\u00a0 Temps were in the high 60’s and windy.\u00a0 Perfect conditions.\u00a0 We started…assuming the track took us in the dry stream bed for a mile or so before we should begin looking for a turn.\u00a0 Oops, we missed the first turn and did some extra soft sand slogging that we didn’t really need to do then cross country back to the track losing some time.\u00a0 We kept looking for the track to take us up into the rock-strewn mountains but it didn’t.\u00a0 We got back on the track and followed it to the Carrizo Railroad.\u00a0 We hiked miles along the railroad marveling at the power of erosion the desert imposed upon the railroad.\u00a0 No wonder so many RR companies failed to successfully repair and operate that RR.\u00a0 With the RR hewn into the side of those steep slopes, it was inevitable that landslides would come down.\u00a0 Huge boulders inflicted significant damage on many sections of RR.\u00a0 Attempts to build bridges were not very successful either.\u00a0 The slides, if they cleared the RR, inflicted damage to the underlying support structure.\u00a0 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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There were also many tunnels that can be a welcome sight in the heat of the summer.\u00a0 We didn’t suffer any heat and maybe should have used our lights to make passage but didn’t.\u00a0 No harm, no foul, we passed just fine.\u00a0Five miles or so into the hike we came to the Goat Trestle.\u00a0 We didn’t actually arrive at the Trestle as the track turned us up the side of the mountain a few hundred yards short.\u00a0 The tunnel feeding the Trestle collapsed but a pathway was beaten around a point to the tunnel.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

We did seem to upset some bees as they attacked us as we passed by.\u00a0 Fortunately, neither of us was stung.\u00a0 We had to climb almost straight up to get onto the ridgeline then made our way through very difficult cactus and rocks eventually arriving at Puff BM.\u00a0 I remember Uwe saying there would be significant rock hopping between Puff and Moan but we looked up to the top of the ridge and decided not to go that way.\u00a0 We turned around and retraced our steps back to the RR.\u00a0 We had passed a turn identified by the track that we figured would take us to Moan and decided to return to that point.\u00a0 That climb used to be a road 100 years ago but sustained erosion reduced it to a difficult rock hopping experience with some parts almost hanging out over the edge.\u00a0 Not a fun feeling.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Near the top of the first ridgeline, we came across a bunch of old cans.\u00a0 As we turned the corner, there were stacks of these rusted old cans.\u00a0 Turns out they had once contained blasting power I assume was used to make the tunnels.\u00a0 Looked like there were hundreds of them…again reinforcing our thoughts that we had negotiated an old road.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Everything turned south (bad) from that point on.  The track took us meandering around rock outcroppings.  At no point was BM Moan identified.  There were so many possibilities.  Each time we walked 50 steps we were off track and forced to either press forward (bad idea) or retrace steps back to the track.  Trying to regain the track by continuing upward towards the track put us in nasty rock formations very difficult to navigate.  Plus, one element of the track just ended!!!  We had to backtrack and start over.  We had intermittent signal and because we couldn’t tell which pile of rocks was BM Moan, I downloaded another track and found where they intersected.  We determined that was Moan and we were right.  Thus, after repeated attempts and over 3 hours of scrambling, we finally found Moan.  We had been atop Puff at noon and Moan at 15:15.  We wasted no time on Moan as we had a choice of returning to the RR tracks or rock hopping over and down to near Indian Hill.  Some of the comments on Peakbagger were…DO NOT FOLLOW THIS TRACK DOWN!  Too rough I guess. We went back down and took the RR tracks back to the car.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We looked in the registers and determined that only two other hikers made those BMs this year…or at least signed in.  All’s well that ends well and we were in the car headed home by 18:20.  We had a few cactus puncture wounds and rock scrapes but nothing unusual.  That is #93 and #94 on the San Diego 100 List.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Frank and I successfully ascended Puff and Moan, however, not without some adventure and frustration… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":6967,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-hiking","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.whitethaiger.net\/hikers\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/photo_2023-10-25_07-20-39.jpg?fit=1280%2C960&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9x9nh-1Oa","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.whitethaiger.net\/hikers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6954","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.whitethaiger.net\/hikers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.whitethaiger.net\/hikers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.whitethaiger.net\/hikers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.whitethaiger.net\/hikers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6954"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.whitethaiger.net\/hikers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6954\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6974,"href":"https:\/\/www.whitethaiger.net\/hikers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6954\/revisions\/6974"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.whitethaiger.net\/hikers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6967"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.whitethaiger.net\/hikers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.whitethaiger.net\/hikers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.whitethaiger.net\/hikers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}