July 3, 2016 Mile 962.8-987.4 24.6 miles I wake up to Earthcake’s footsteps as she leaves camp. Goat is packing, but it looks like he’ll be a while yet. I check the time: 5:30am. I can see bright blue patches of sky, but there’s enough tree cover that it feels overcast. I depart a little while before Goat and face the first of three big climbs for the day. Benson pass is the first, and I am already struggling up the switchbacks. The top of the pass is three-tiered: granite over bare dirt over meadows. A few remaining patches of snow melt in the sunlight. It’s striking, the barren openness of this pass after all that forest below. This isn’t a particularly high pass compared to the landscape around, and the views aren’t all that spacious, but what views I do have make me feel like a castaway. It’s not a feeling I’m used to, or with which I am entirely comfortable. Dropped almost anywhere, I can sense where a road or a town should be. Where there’s a large enough depression or a steady enough slope, humans always seem to find a way to stake their claim or cut a road. Here, the mountains themselves feel tangled and inhospitable. Whatever logic the planning of human structures follows, that logic is lost here. It feels as if this is the first truly wild place I have found. Civilization isn’t simply absent, it no longer exists. We have breakfast near the top of the pass. I can’t eat enough to replenish my depleted energy. We descend back into the trees and increasing amounts of water. The creeks are faster and louder now, and finding places to cross is more difficult. We reach a creek with no dry crossing point, only a broad, flat ford. Goat and I find a spot where we might be able to jump across, but it’s quite a leap across a dangerous torrent. On the other side is a near-vertical surface of granite with only a few small edges for our feet to get purchase. It looks sketchy, but I’m fairly confident that I can make the leap and get a foothold on the other side. Goat and I eye it together while Earthcake is looking for another spot to cross. “What do you think?” I ask. “Looks doable.” “Yeah, might be our best bet.” I fail to consider just getting my damn feet wet at a safer spot and start to line up the jump. I take my first running step when I realize that the foothold is higher than the ground I am leaping from. There’s a moment when I think I’ve misjudged it—misjudged the weight of my pack and the force it takes to shove myself out across the furiously churning water, misjudged the power of my muscles and the flexibility of my tendons and my ability to stretch that leg out and catch a hold, misjudged the depth of my fatigue. But my momentum is too much to stop now, and all I can do is jump, hard. My right hip cries out in pain as it stretches too far on the pushoff and I am out over the water and reaching for a ledge that seems smaller, smoother, and wetter than it did before I left the ground. The tendon in my left hip doesn’t want to move that far, but it does, and I catch the ledge with the ball of my foot, toes smashed up against the impossible angle of the granite. My sole finds purchase, and I spring up, over the top of the rock where I crash into the bushes behind. Goat comes next, and makes it look easy with his praying mantis legs. Earthcake has shorter legs, and can’t come to terms with the jump. Goat positions himself to grab her arm and pull her across as she jumps, but from my angle it looks like he is more in her way than anything. She tries to work herself up to it twice, but finally decides it’s too much risk for her. She crosses at the ford, soaking her feet. While we’re waiting for her, I start to notice how much my hips hurt. In my desire to avoid wet feet, I realize, I may have just caused myself an injury. We catch up to a couple hiking in the same direction, and after another creek crossing, all five of us lose the trail. I check my phone’s GPS, and although it says we’re right on the path, we can’t see any trace of it. After a few minutes of looking, we start to cut up a shallow basin to where the map shows the trail will cut across, and where we’re sure to run into it. A few steps later, the guy in the couple finds it. Apparently I’ve walked right over it without noticing. Great outdoorsmanship. We start our second big climb, and it’s hard but it’s over before I know it, and we’re back in the land of the hole-punched sky again. At Small Lake, a group of hikers is jumping in from the far side and we decide to go join them. Camaraderie! Getting there takes some climbing over the boulders, but we find our way to a little grassy notch on the lake’s shore. Goat and Earthcake both jump off one of the high rocks into the water, but I’m more cautious and jump in from the grassy edge. The water is ice-cube cold and knocks the wind out of me. I tread water for a minute, then decide I’ve had enough and get out. Maybe I’ll go in again before we leave. A garter snake starts to swim toward me on the surface of the water and I decide that I won’t. I make lunch and decide I’m sick of my trail food. One of the other hikers swims out to a small island in the middle of the lake. I wonder how he can take the cold. The group isn’t really talking to us, and we aren’t really talking to each other. Jumping in lakes with other hikers sounded like so much fun, but now I feel so isolated. It’s not a new feeling but somehow I expected the trail to be different, and it hurts worse. A couple more hikers go skinny dipping on the far side of the lake. They look like they’re having more fun, but I realize that I would probably feel just as isolated over there. Earthcake leaves first and Goat and I are not too long after her, but she’s out of sight almost immediately. On our way out, we find a pair of trekking poles that look like hers, so I grab them. 20 minutes later, Goat realizes that they’re not hers. They probably belonged to someone from the other group. I feel bad. I set them in the middle of the trail knowing that they’ll be right behind us. The rest of the day is exhausting. Eventually I can’t keep up and Goat disappears ahead of me. On the final climb I bonk out. It feels like I’m hiking uphill through molasses. I’m left alone with my thoughts, which mostly revolve around whether or not I can continue to hike with my new friends. It doesn’t look hopeful, and I am so lonely I am eventually rescued from the downward cycle of my thoughts by thick clouds of mosquitoes. Fucking hell. I turn a corner and they are there, everywhere. I pass five or six lakes like this, trying to outpace them, trying to breathe through my nose, trying to make my legs faster than the leaden weights they seem to have become. I cross a river and begin to look for a campsite among the buzzing clouds. We had agreed to camp here, but I wonder if they decided to press on because the mosquitoes were so bad. I’m not sure I can go any farther. I’m passing tents on the left, then Earthcake calls out to me from the right. I somehow missed their tents and almost passed them by. I set up in a frenzy, trying to get inside before the last of my blood is sucked from me. When I am finally in, Goat is audibly wondering whether he should eat his Toblerone bar. This is in addition to the other two chocolate bars he’s just eaten, and it’s the last of his chocolate. Earthcake is trying to convince him to be rational and save it. I am laughing hysterically because it feels like the conversations I have with myself every day on this trail. And I know what choice Goat is about to make, despite his better judgment. Because I know it’s the only possible choice right now. The Toblerone bar is gone seconds later. I am with friends. I feel okay again.
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Nick is a teacher, writer, and amateur adventurer. Archives
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