Desert Mountain Hiking Adventure

Sonja and I met in Palm Springs last night to have a good time on the town last night and then to do a day hike in the desert today.

Last night went without incident, which is to say that we got home safe. Then today we drive out into the brilliant, blinding desert, which by the way no one in their right minds does, it being about 110 degrees F there on an average summer day. Sonja and I being vain and all, we decide to make the most of the sun by dressing skimpily so as not to create unnecessary tan lines. We pull off to the side of this winding mountain road and leap off into the desert for our adventure. Before we've hiked very far, we realize we could actually do the rest of the hike topless, as we are the only people near and wide. So we strip down to the bare essentials, specifically our shoes and panties. The rest of our clothing we put next to the tree.

We then proceed to hike up this mountain. Our tan plan is working fabulously, the only bummer being the cuts and holes we have all over our bodies from the trained attack-cactii all over the place. The inevitable scabbing will be bound to create an uneven tan, but oh well, one must suffer to be beautiful.

We get near the top of the mountain and our bodies are WORKED. We are huffing and panting and dirty and thirsty, our heads seem to have expanded and our water has run out. We are miles away from anything. We are wild, native Wise Women in touch with ourselves and nature, surrounded by yucca and rocks. We survey the valley from whence we hiked, which from this more remote viewpoint we notice is DOTTED with trees.

Oh, shit. Where the hell are our clothes? This could be a problem.

We make it back down most of the mountain and realize we have NO IDEA where our clothes are parked. The car is on the other side of the highway, so if we don't find our clothes we will have no choice but to literally bound naked through the valley next to the highway (and fully visible form the highway) and then across the highway, dodging traffic and hopefully not causing an accident.

We opt for Plan B. Sonja is going to "follow her gut". She decides she can just KNOW her way back to our lost pile of clothing. She takes a random trek across rocky terrain and next thing we know, we are LOST. We don't even know where our car is, let alone our clothes. Additionally, she is babbling non-sequitur half-sentences and her face looks like it's about to burst, which makes me realize she's actually on the verge of heat exhaustion and borderline delusional. Her gut is leading us to a slow, certain (and naked) death.

Time for Plan C. We decide to find where our car is first, and then backtrack from there to the general vicinity of where we left our clothes. As we skivvy round yet another cliff, she from one side and I from the other, I see a man's head surface from the other side of the hill. Oh great. We are not alone. It's two males, for all we know Mexican illegals who just got across the border (never mind that Mexico is a few hundred miles away, we don't even know where our car is, and it's totally feasible to us that Mexico could be within walking distance) -- and they're probably crazed by the heat and they'll see us and rape us and kill us. Fuck.

Go to Plan D, which is called Hide From the Crazed Mexicans. They keep encroaching on us, and we keep hiding from them, until we finally evade them on one side of a rocky outcropping, with them on the other side. Finally we're safe from them. Only problem is, our bare asses are LITERALLY hanging over the highway at this point. We are so close to the male hikers that we can hear them speak -- German.

Those Germans are everywhere.

So they actually finish their hike and leave the area, and then Sonja and I, in a final desperate bid for survival, separate to find our goddamned clothes. To make a long story short, I finally did find the tree with our clothes, and it was nowhere near Sonja's gut. But we did make it back across the highway with no private parts showing, although my head almost exploded from all the heat it absorbed during our mountain adventure.