Condor Trail: Prologue
May 9th, 2025
The Condor Trail starts long before the first step. Today, the journey begins on the 5 Freeway, heading north. Two hikers, two separate cars, and four five-gallon buckets of food and supplies.
The road north is wide and fast, mostly semis barreling through the guts of California. I’ve left the lush hills of Los Angeles behind—Mediterranean plants, bright bougainvillea, plump yellow loquats, and the layered chaos of the city. Now, I’m in the Central Valley. Stark. Stripped. Dry. Agricultural.
Everything out here is beige and the air smells like manure, wet, rank, and sour. At times, the stench gets nauseating, the byproducts of factory farming thick in the air. I drive with the windows up, breath held.
The land is carved up by fencing, oil rigs, solar panels, and endless rows of farmland. It’s an industrial wilderness, built to produce, not inspire.
As I drive, a discomfort settles in my chest. Part of it is logistical—just the sheer number of tasks spinning in my life right now. There’s never enough time, and carving out space to drive hundreds of miles to bury food feels absurdly complicated. The other part is heavier. It’s the suffocating nature of this particular stretch of the 5.
The industrial sprawl. The flat, monotonous landscape. And the privilege of it all, as I pass farm workers bent over crops in 102-degree heat, likely working through exhaustion. The news has been full of stories about ICE raids in the Central Valley. Are these workers going through their day with the constant fear of deportation in the back of their minds? What does it feel like to work, day after day, knowing that at any moment your world could be upended?
Just north of Lost Hills, the landscape splits in two. On one side of the highway, dry yellow grass stretches out, brittle and sun-bleached. On the other, a flush of green: maybe fruit trees, maybe something else. I can’t quite tell. The symmetry is unsettling. Nothing looks natural.
I emerge from the 5 and merge onto Highway 1. The transition is fast and abrupt. One moment it's farmland and feedlots, the next I’m climbing into coastal cliffs. The Pacific Ocean appears suddenly, wide and blue, almost blinding after all that dust. White waves crash onto sandy beaches. People pull over on the side of the road to take pictures.
The landscape is greener, the trees are taller—there are trees! Wildflowers line the roadside. There are more twists and turns, more cars, and more tourists. Mostly white, and judging by the prices at the resorts and restaurants perched along the cliffs, I'd guess predominantly wealthy too.
We park Cosmo’s car at Big Sur Station and check in with a park ranger who’s kind and genuinely excited about our journey. He helps us find a spot where Cosmo’s car can stay safe until we return on foot in about four weeks.
Cosmo hops into my car and we head south to drop off our resupply. That night, we set up camp in a dirt pull off along the side of a road. We blow up the car camping mattress and lay it on a tarp outside. It feels kind of luxurious, all things considered.
The next day, we drive to the second resupply spot and then climb Fox Mountain. The temperature is in the high 90s, and although the climb is no more than five miles round trip, the lack of shade and water makes it feel much more exhausting. There are small sections of bushwhacking, a few (avoidable) patches of poison oak, and by the time I reach the summit, I’m already feeling the heat. But it’s not until we’re back in the car, sitting down to cool off, that I spot a tick on my thigh. It’s on its back, flailing its legs like a beetle that's been turned over , panicking, trying to right itself. I yank it off, frantically, tossing it outside. Acting instinctively, we both jump out of the car, strip down, and do a thorough tick check. Luckily, no one else is around. Cosmo finds two more ticks, and once we’re satisfied that we’re tick-free, we get back in the car.
We drive home, running through gear questions as the reality of the trail starts to sink in. Do we trade our shorts for pants? Pack more bug spray? What about poison oak? The heat? We don’t have many answers yet.
By the time we get to Los Angeles, we're more focused on dinner than logistics. We drive to Echo Park, order a big fat burrito, and let the details fade—for now.
The trail’s still out there. And soon, we will be too.