Family Backpacking Weekend on Mount San Jacinto

We made plans. The wind made edits.

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We drove east on Interstate 10 through that wide valley where thousands of enormous white turbines stand spinning across the desert, and we did what everyone does the first time, we admired them. “Look at those, aren’t they impressive,” I said, pointing at these giant elegant things turning in perfect slow motion, silently harvesting the one resource that valley apparently has in absurd abundance: wind.

Our plan was almost perfect: ride the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway up, hike two and a half miles to Round Valley Campground, set up camp there for two nights, and spend the days hiking around with light daypacks: visit Hidden Lake on day one, and tag the summit on day two. Two nights, one basecamp, lots of altitude.

We weren’t out to conquer anything. We had exactly one question we wanted answered before our family attempted a higher altitude trail next spring, and that question was simply: how do we actually do at altitude, hiking it, and more importantly, sleeping in it? Mount San Jacinto, with its tramway that lifts you to over 8,500 feet in about ten minutes, seemed like the perfect way to find out.

We arrived in Cathedral City on Friday afternoon into a wall of heat, around 95°F, or 35°C, and checked into a hotel that was, for the record, lovely. Swimming pool, jacuzzi, a balcony with an actual outdoor fireplace. We admired it, silently wondering who on earth would ever use it in the middle of the desert. We had a beautiful dinner at the hotel restaurant (their chef, I will say now and repeat later, was genuinely wonderful), and we went to bed early because we wanted to catch one of the first trams up the mountain in the morning.

Just a little wind at this point (selfie by author’s husband)

And then we didn’t sleep. The wind howled around that building all night long, gust after gust after gust, loud enough to yank my husband and I out of sleep on a rotating schedule. We lay there in that beautiful room feeling our nervous systems tense up, hours before we’d even gone up the mountain, wondering if the wind would shut down the tramway and decide for us that camping was not happening.

The next morning almost made up for the sleepless night, because the hotel put out a magnificent breakfast buffet: eggs however you wanted them, bacon, potatoes, oatmeal, fresh fruit, yogurt, waffles, cereal, pastries, fruit juice, coffee, tea… if there was ever a morning for backpackers to responsibly carb-load before walking into the mountains, the backpacker gods had just served it to us. We ate like people who suspected that the next couple of meals might be… freeze-dried.

Well fed and cautiously optimistic, we drove over to the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway, and the tram was running, which apparently meant the mountain was open and everything was fine, so up we went.

“Just don’t set up your tent under a widowmaker”

At the ranger station up top where I signed in, I asked about the weather, hoping to be reassured. The ranger smiled at me and said: “Winds tomorrow will reach 35mph gusts.” I must have looked genuinely horrified, because he immediately softened it with, “Oh, that’s after tonight when they reach about fifty miles per hour, but don’t worry, it’ll be fun.” And then, he simply added, “Just don’t set up your tent under a widowmaker.”

Beautiful forest and a few potential widowmakers (photos by author')

For anyone who hasn’t spent time around backpackers, a widowmaker is a dead tree, or a big dead branch still hanging up in a live one, waiting for exactly one strong gust to come down on whatever happens to be underneath. So the ranger’s complete safety briefing, delivered with a warm and genuinely reassuring smile, was essentially: fifty-mile-an-hour winds, have fun, do not sleep beneath the falling trees. Type 2 fun, I thought, taking a deep, oxygen-deprived breath.

The map was more of a suggestion

The hike was everything we’d hoped for, uphill but short, rocky and gorgeous, exactly the kind of walking you want when the whole point is altitude and not misery. We made it to the campground fairly easily, found the campground map and stared at it for… a little longer than expected. The map was a loose approximation of where things might generally be, and finding an actual campsite turned out to be a confusing riddle. The ranger had told us we could set up about twenty-five feet from a campsite marker post, which is simple enough advice right up until you discover you cannot find a campsite post.

Campsite map (photo by author)

So we picked a spot that looked reasonably sheltered between some rocks, set up our tents, and then walked back to the campground registration board and wrote our name where we believed we were. A little while later, my son set out to find the water and informed us with a shivering voice through the walkie talkie that he had found it (we had walked right by it on our way in) and that it was icy cold. As he couldn’t locate the bathrooms, I set out to wander around the campground and started to realize the size of it. I found three outhouses, all either locked or surrounded by “caution tape,” and had to use my GPS to get back to my tent. After lunch and an attempt of a nap, to make up for some of the missed sleep from the previous night, the wind decided it still wasn’t going to give me my well-deserved sleep. So I took out the camping permit I had received by snail mail from the Idyllwild ranger station. It clearly stated we had to be within 25ft of our 4by4 camp site post. We kept looking and eventually we came back to the campsite map on site, only to find that someone had erased our name and written theirs, because, apparently, they had found the actual marker post, and we, of course, had pitched our home in an imaginary campsite. At this point we still figured their map wasn’t clear and we had done our best.

The afternoon we hiked nowhere

Our plan for the afternoon was a lovely little hike out to Hidden Lake. We headed out from our imaginary campsite with our big but light backpacks. After half a mile we started to understand the size of this place, as we finally found the first open bathrooms, and next to it, a post indicating the direction to a campsite. We checked it out, and there it was, the first campsite marker we encountered, and the site was still unoccupied. We claimed it for its enormous advantage, its proximity to the only pit toilets with doors that actually opened. The only problem was, the doors wouldn’t stay closed, because… the wind. Still, I considered these little wooden cabins a positive thing, despite broken toilet seats and doors floating in the wind. We looked at each other, thought of our fully assembled campsite half a mile away, and hiked back to pack the entire thing back up and carry it down the trail: tents, sleeping gear, clothes, the whole household… relocated. Of course, the water source was back near where we’d started, so we hiked that same half mile again to fill up, and back again to camp. By the time we’d finished ferrying our lives back and forth across that stretch of trail, we’d walked a couple of miles without ever once going anywhere, and we were genuinely tired from moving, from setting up, from taking down, from setting up again, from lack of sleep and oxygen and excess wind. We agreed, unanimously and with great relief, that this counted as our afternoon hike. Hidden Lake stayed exactly as hidden as its name promised.

The wind never actually stopped talking

By late afternoon the campground had most likely filled up, but we didn’t really know as we never saw any other campsites. The only thing we saw were people, just like us, hiking mile after mile, back and forth between the bathrooms and the water source. Tired from the adventures of the day, we had an early freeze dried backpacking dinner while dreaming of a far away but beautiful breakfast buffet, then crawled into our tents and called it a wonderful day. The tent itself didn’t move much at night, but high above us the enormous pines swayed and roared, and the wind wasn’t so much whipping through the camp as it was racing through the tops of the entire forest, with huge ocean-like sounds building and building overhead. It was overwhelmingly loud and scary, and every big gust brought the ranger’s cheerful little widowmaker comment floating right back into my head.

Looking around the forest, it was obvious the ranger hadn’t invented those mystical creatures at all. Dead widowmakers (aka fallen trees) lay scattered along the trails, while their still-standing relatives watched us from above, and the wind kept howling through the treetops, loudly insisting it had absolutely nothing to do with any of it.

The good news for me was that this wind-tormented forest was exactly the atmosphere I’d been hunting all weekend with my camera. I was hoping to find the perfect book cover for the novel I’m writing, and I was convinced I would find it somewhere up here. But that was my mission during daytime. For now, the mission was to sleep. It was… more or less successless. Several times that night the gusts came through so violently that I lay there shaking, while the boys, of course, slept like happy stones.

By morning the wind had backed off a bit, enough so that you could actually hold the bathroom door closed with a stick from the inside, that is, after putting the toilet seat back in its place. It had fallen off, not sure if it was due to old age or a gust of wind or both.

The morning we actually hiked

After a second nerve-racking, windblowingly sleepless night I was ready to get off this mountain, but we were here for a reason: hiking in altitude, not resisting wind.

So, we set off toward the summit as planned, because after all, this was the point of the weekend: the altitude experiment. And here’s the good news, the answer to our actual question: on the trail, everything felt fine. We were slower, sure, and breathing took a bit more deliberate effort, but the hiking itself was manageable, the views were spectacular, and we climbed to around 10,000 feet feeling like a family that could, in fact, do this.

Wellmans Divide on peak trail to Mt San Jacinto (photo by nice hiker on the trail)

We got to within about one mile of the summit. And that’s where we stopped, not because we couldn’t keep going, but because of… the wind. Reaching the top meant very probably spending a third sleepless night listening to the wind audition tree branches over our heads. Somewhere in that calculation, the summit quietly stopped mattering. The far more appealing summit, suddenly, was a quiet room with a bed in it, a dinner that hadn’t first been reduced to powder and resurrected with boiling water, and an awesome breakfast buffet prepared by backpacker gods (aka that wonderful chef I mentioned before). So we turned around one mile short, making sure we would have time and energy to get back to camp, tear it down, and make our way back to the tramway safely.

In which we forgive the hotel

Hiking out, we were all motivated by the thought of a real ceiling that didn’t sway even if we could hear wind gusts through the walls. A solid building sure felt like a huge upgrade. So back we went, to the same place. It was heaven. After the dry desert winds the pool looked… irresistibly wet. The jacuzzi felt incredible. The little fireplace on the balcony felt magical. And the real luxury after two nights of living inside a wind tunnel was simply… silence. Aaahhh… finally!

Friday night, before the mountain, we’d had that lovely dinner at the hotel restaurant and did not finish our huge plates. We had eaten like civilized, unhurried, reasonable people. Sunday night we walked back into the same restaurant and ordered the same food. But this time, we were starving as though we hadn’t eaten in a week. Every plate was scraped clean. Then came dessert. Then cold smoothies. By the end there was not a crumb, not a smear, not a survivor left anywhere on that table. We sent our compliments to the chef.

We made plans. The wind made edits.

So — we never reached the summit. We never found Hidden Lake. We spent more of the weekend relocating our campsite than actually hiking anywhere. And we learned a truly staggering amount about wind. But the question we came to answer got answered, clearly and generously: yes, we can hike at altitude. We go a little slower, we breathe a little harder, but we can do it. And as for me, the real challenge was not so much the climbing, it was sleeping. That third night, at the hotel, I finally slept. Though maybe by then I would have slept anywhere. The story doesn’t answer that question.

The wind rewrote our itinerary from the very first mile of I-10 to the last bite of Sunday’s dessert. Every plan we made, it answered the same way — oh, you had plans? — let me change them for you.