Wrightwood, CA is an S-tier trail town on the Pacific Crest Trail which had the most warm, friendly, and helpful people I encountered on the entire 1100 miles of trail I hiked between Mexico and South Lake Tahoe. This says a lot! I passed through lots of great towns and encountered people in almost every town who were far more accommodating than I think was really warranted by the circumstances. Like, I wasn't doing anything particularly noble, I was just on vacation.

As an example, when I got to where the trail crosses the highway, about 6 miles outside of town, I crossed the road, and spent about two minutes reading the signs/flyers posted by the parking lot to see if there was any info about transportation into town. I was about to go stand by the road to try to hitchhike into town when a car pulled into the lot to drop off another hiker. The driver asked me if I was trying to get into town and I said yes, and she offered me a ride. On the way into town, she apologized because I might have had to wait a while to get a ride. Then she drove me on a little tour of the center of town, showing me where I could get resupply, find a place to sleep, pick up mail, eat a huge meal, etc. I asked her if I could help her pay for gas, and she adamantly refused.

My entire ~48 hour stay in Wrightwood was like this. My worst experience was probably the hotel I stayed in, where they were only like 75th percentile accommodating, instead of 98th percentile. I'm not so naive that I don't see the financial incentives to be helpful to hikers, but I think for a lot of residents there, helping and hanging out with hikers is a major feature of living there, not just a source of revenue for local businesses. (Also, I don't think PCT hikers are all that big a fraction of the tourist market there, especially on an annual basis. By and large, hikers don't have that much money to spend, and they're only a couple thousand people per year.)

Unfortunately, the town is getting hit by a wildfire this week. I find this pretty heartbreaking, because people are losing their homes, the local ski area is getting damaged, the forest is burning, and the trail will probably be pretty seriously damaged in places come Spring. It's clearly a pretty tight-knit community with lots of people who told me they moved there because it's awesome and they want to spend the rest of their lives there.

Anyway, the reason I found out about this is because one of the Wrightwood trail angels (the hiker name for people who help you out just to help you out) posted in a Facebook for the PCT saying they can't get back into the town yet, but she thinks most of the town will still be standing when they do, and she wants to know what they can do to improve the experience of hikers making their way through the burned sections of trail next season.

I'm not even sure how to react to this. Part of me wants to answer the question directly, but part of me wishes I could just give her a hug and say "Please just take care of yourself, we don't deserve this". We're doing this for fun, not because the world needs people to hike this trail.

Anyway, assuming the town survives, I highly recommend it if you're into super friendly towns in the mountains of southern California.