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JOURNAL
LOCAL INTELLIGENCE
Do the real shopping before you start climbing. Hemet and Banning both sit near the base of the routes up, with full supermarkets and ordinary prices, and stopping costs you a short detour on the way in. Once the road begins switchbacking, selection narrows quickly and it does not widen again until you come back down.
This is the single most common thing visitors get wrong here. People arrive intending to sort food out after they have had a look at the village, discover that the village is two blocks, and then face a drive down the mountain and back that eats a real piece of the day in each direction. Nobody makes that trip twice in one stay.
So buy for the whole visit, and buy on the assumption that you will not want to leave the house again. Coffee you actually like and more of it than seems reasonable. Breakfast, because morning is when you will least want to get in a car. Firewood if the house burns it and the season allows it.
There is a market in the village and it is good at exactly one job: the thing you forgot. Ice, eggs, milk, butter, the ingredient the recipe assumed you had. Treat it as the backstop rather than the plan and it will never let you down. Treat it as the week's shop and you will be disappointed in a way that is nobody's fault.
The winter version of this has an extra step. Storms close the roads up the hill, sometimes for more than a day, and chain requirements can appear with very little notice. If you are coming up between late autumn and spring, shop as though you might not be driving anywhere for a couple of days. It rarely turns out that way and it costs almost nothing to be ready for it.
One last thing before you buy charcoal for the deck. Fire and grilling rules on this mountain change through the year and get strict once the forest dries out, and they can tighten fast. Your local manager will know where the restriction sits that week, which is a better source than a sign that may have been posted in a different season.