September 7, 2016 Mile 1836.7-1841.2 plus Crater Lake Rim Trail 12.5 Miles I had trouble sleeping last night because my sleeping bag wasn’t keeping me warm enough. It could be that the nights are just getting colder, but I’m hopeful that we’re just in a cold air sink. That’s not the sort of thing I ever would have thought about before, but I’ve definitely noticed how terrain affects a campsite: cold air runs downhill at night, so a chilly wet breeze flows like a river through the bottoms of valleys. Meadows collect dew, and my tent and sleeping bag collect condensation. The very tops of mountain ridges often lead to windy nights. The warmest places to camp are usually up the side of a valley, below the wind but above the cold air, with a tree above to collect condensation. The Mazama Village campground is a man-made meadow, a manicured lawn subdivided by asphalt. It also happens to lie downhill from the enormous crater of Crater Lake, which expels tons of water vapor. It wasn’t the coldest night I’ve ever had, but it’s definitely in the top ten. I slept so poorly last night that I decide to sleep in a little this morning. We get up around 7:30, probably the latest I’ve slept in months, and head over to breakfast. Next, we go to the village store to resupply. There are several hikers outside, some of them drinking beer even though it’s only 9am. I can’t really see a reason why not. One of them lights a pipe and I catch the cloying scent of pot. It’s recently legal in Oregon, but Crater Lake is a national park so we’re under federal jurisdiction. I’ve heard of a couple hikers getting tickets here for being a little too free with their pipes and joints. Roadside and I collect supplies and beer and join the hikers at the picnic tables out front. A park ranger is talking to the guy who had the pot pipe, but it’s tucked away somewhere and the conversation appears friendly. It’s good to see so many northbound hikers here; it makes me feel like I’m not as far behind schedule. We sit and enjoy each other’s company for a while, with nowhere in particular to be. Bubble boy, Puma, and Snooze Button are here—their hitch from Fish Lake Lodge cut about 40 miles of trail, but Roadside and I have already caught up. I can’t help but admit that feels good. The trolley to the rim comes by, and a few hikers get on. Several of us stick around. Roadside and I are still debating whether to hike the 4-mile uphill or to take the trolley. We’re on a side trail (so we’ve already decided not to be purists), all the other hikers are taking the trolley, and we’re both on our second beer—I know how this is going to turn out. When the next trolley comes by a half hour later, we get on, along with seven other thru-hikers. I immediately feel bad for the family that’s on here with us. Sitting in a confined space with a group of smelly thru-hikers is not a fate I would wish on anyone. The trolley drops us off close to the rim, and the hikers scatter. Roadside and I stick together and walk over with our packs to see the view. A thru-hiker is accustomed to big, expansive scenery. Walking ridges nearly every day, we get to see for miles in every direction. But the scope and scale of Crater Lake is astounding. Precipitous walls surround the lake, framing a mass of water so intensely blue that it almost hurts to look at. The light is electric, buzzing like neon. Details on the opposite walls of the crater come across in crystalline resolution and provide bold, almost painful relief to the uniform mass of impossible color. Roadside and I stare, speechless. It draws me in. These walls, this lake, are mythical. They make me want to throw myself over, consummate with oblivion and transmigrate into godhood. This is an entry to the underworld, the smoking remnant of Dante’s mountain of Purgatory exploded outward from the pits of hell. This doesn’t belong in the humdrum world we work and live in. It’s moments like this that make the whole hike seem larger than life. All in all, it’s just walking. There’s nothing particularly glamorous about putting one foot in front of the other. But the sheer persistence of it, of just keeping at this slow, straightforward task, allows me to string together a series of moments like this one. I also know, from the hurried pace and short attention spans of the tourists around me, that there’s something different in the experience for us hikers. It’s not that we’re special, we’re just immersed in the experience in a way that someone who drove in cannot be. To them, Crater lake is a special vacation from their lives, and they still have the memories of yesterday and the worries of tomorrow on their mind. Someone can tell them to be present all they want, but the flow of daily anxieties is still there like white noise in the background. The lake of the mind still has ripples from all the churning. For me and the other thru-hikers, this is the very nature of our lives right now. Yesterday, my chief concerns were my physical body, the terrain, and the weather. Tomorrow, it will be the same. The sky, the view, the temperature, the feel of the air—these don’t take any effort for me to notice, because they are what I’ve practiced noticing for months. The churning in my mind is settled and I am completely here. I can’t help but believe that the same would be true for anyone who had walked here over several months. I wonder if this is how nomads experience life, or if there are different anxieties from traveling with a group. Perhaps it has more to do with solitude than travel. When we finally leave the rim, it’s more from a feeling that we should be doing something than from any feeling that we have finished absorbing the view. Hikers hike, and that’s what we need to do if we’re ever going to get to Canada. But first, lunch. We get sandwiches at the cafe and I write a postcard to my adopted brother for his upcoming birthday. We make one last stop for the luxury of flushing toilets and running water, and then we’re off, around the rim trail. It’s sandy and filled with steep ups and downs, but we’re rested and we move fast. We stop for pictures several times, trying to capture the feeling of this breathtaking view, but failing every time. Around one turn, we pass a schoolbus pulled over in a turnout. It’s decorated with longhorns on the front and beaded garlands along the windows. Nearby, a man with long bushy hair and a brown and grey beard is playing the guitar. A woman plays the flute facing the lake and dances between phrases. I pause to enjoy the music and the weirdness of it all; somewhere along this hike I’ve realized that I tend to avoid unusual and unpredictable situations, and I’m trying to stay more open to those. Unpredictability is the nature of the world, and many of my favorite experiences have come out of chance encounters. I don’t want to close myself off to the strange synchronicities that are available to me. Besides that, people similar to me will have similar paradigms. If I really want a fuller understanding of the world, I need to seek out different paradigms, which means interacting with different types of people. The man sees me listening and comes over to talk to me. The woman keeps dancing and twirling and playing her flute. “Love the music!” I tell him “Thanks man. This is a magical place. You can just feel the energy!” I’m not generally the type to talk about energies, but I feel something like that. “Yeah, it’s beautiful here,” I say. Roadside catches up a minute later, and the man tells us about a place near here that was sacred to Native Americans. “We camped there for three days,” he says. “My wife was channeling spirits.” Normally this would be too strange for me, but I decide to suspend my skepticism. We listen as he tells us that she was speaking in tongues and communicating with the dead, and the spirits told them to come up here. He has no self-consciousness as he tells us this. Some people learn to play the guitar, some people are good with numbers, some people channel spirits. I half-expect Roadside to be smirking or skeptical, but he looks sincere in his interest. The man wishes us happy travels, and we continue on our way around the rim. On the north side of the lake, the rim trail ends and rejoins the PCT. I check my map while I wait at the junction for Roadside. The barren area to the northeast is called the Pumice Desert. I pick up a fist-sized rock. It’s surprisingly light, like styrofoam. I chuck it just for fun, and it curves in the wind. This is a strange world we live in. We hike downhill and enter a bizarre forest, like something from an alien planet. The trees are uniformly baseball-bat skinny and telephone-pole tall, with no needles or branches until five feet from the top. They are spread out at a great distance, with large expanses of beige pumice gravel in between, and virtually no shade anywhere, but despite a long line of sight, the forest goes far enough in all directions that it is impossible to see beyond the trees. There is something unsettling about it. I imagine a hiker—myself, of course—walking into the midst of it and getting terribly turned around, left to wander endlessly through a desolate nowhere.
We hike through it for over an hour, and I search the trees for signs of differences. There are individual knobs and scarring, but nothing I can see that could be used to navigate or judge forward progress. I’m just beginning to wonder if it will ever end when the trail turns slightly and I can see beyond it to an open meadow. We cross the meadow and enter a different type of forest, with normal, earthly pine trees. We find a nice-looking campsite and decide to stop a little earlier than normal. We enjoy a leisurely dinner, talk about the guitar player and his wife, do a little reading, and go to bed shortly after sundown, before it’s fully dark.
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September 6, 2016 Mile 1787.0-1818.4 (+1.2) 32.6 Miles Roadside and I talked last night about the closing window before winter hits. I told him I need to start getting up early every day in order to have a chance of making it. He’s on board. From here on out, unless we’re in a town and need to wait for breakfast or a resupply, we’re waking at 5:30am. The morning hike is an obstacle course. In the first hour alone, I count over a hundred fallen trees that we have to climb over, hike around, or duck under. In many cases we have to climb up on one tree, then walk across it to climb over another, then find another place to hop down. It’s a tangled mess, and a couple times we lose the trail altogether. After the first hour we start to climb, so the forest thins a little and the fallen trees get farther apart. It’s still a mess, but at least we’re making a little more progress. Judging by the use trails around some of these trees, they’ve been down awhile. Or perhaps it’s a function of the high usage along the PCT. As I think about it, I realize that it wouldn’t take long to make a use trail with close to a hundred people passing by every day. I feel some solidarity with the hundreds of hikers who have come before me and have had to deal with the same trees. After the biggest uphill since we started Oregon, we find ourselves on a ridge. The sun is barely up. There’s not much color in the sky, but the trees are dyed copper and I’m grateful for the warmth of the direct sunlight. We seem to be in a jumble of mountains that cut a general line to the north, with low farmland and lakes just past a ridge to the east. The trail cuts that way—I can make out the next few miles of it, bobbing up and down between ridges and drainages, first working its way to the eastern ridge, then turning north again. I can even see a couple other hikers on the trail, working their way towards us. It’s a cold morning, and as we work our way toward and then along the eastern ridge, the sky thickens imperceptibly with clouds. By the time we stop for breakfast, the sky is so overcast that I start to doubt my memory of a sunny morning. We’re on the east side of the eastern ridge, looking down on a few foothills and enormous lakes far below. The hot oatmeal warms my belly, but the heat doesn’t extend far from there. I make a mocha—Carnation instant breakfast with a Starbucks Via packet—in the hope that I can get a little more warmth. While I’m waiting for the water to boil again, I’m raiding my snack foods. I’ve been devouring them much faster the past few days. I finish my formerly giant bag of peanut M&Ms—the rest of the day is going to suck without those—and then polish off my dried fruit and tear into a kind bar. Sitting here atop this ridge, I’m freezing my ass off, but the cold doesn’t take anything away from the beauty of this view. It might even add to it, as it helps me be present in the moment in a way that warm comfort might not. And yet, even though it makes me happier to be outside, if I had the opportunity to be warm and indoors, looking out at this view through a window, I would probably take it. We humans are poor custodians of our own happiness. I wonder whether it’s something innate, or if it’s simply a habit developed in us by our culture. I don’t have an answer. My mocha is ready, and it’s every bit as warming as I hoped it would be. I call Lindsey while I drink it. We talk for about 15 minutes, but then the service drops and I can’t get through again. I really miss her. We continue on along the ridge for a couple hours, hiking near enough to talk, although our conversation is sparse and widely spaced. The trail dips down, and the deadfall starts up again. We make a stop for water at Honeymoon creek. Dead yellow wood is everywhere, cut up and crushed. Except for the absence of sawdust, the detritus looks like a sawmill floor. The creek is small, but with clear, sweet water, and we fill up our bottles. The next section is supposed to be devoid of water, although that seems hard to believe for how lush and thick the forest has been. We descend farther, to what seems like the floor of Oregon, and pump out long, easy miles. Or at least they would be easy, if not for the fact that every few hundred yards, we’re clambering over and around more fallen trees. We pass mile 1800. Only 850 miles to go! It does seem that the miles are going faster now, though I’m not sure whether I’m hiking faster, or if it’s just my perception telescoping the days together. These months on trail have been some of the richest days of my life, but now that I’ve been out here for so long and seen so much of nature, are the days starting to run together? Is it only variety that allows us to fully appreciate the time we spend on this earth, or do we have other options to wring more life out of our life? It’s not just philosophizing; it goes to the heart of what we do with our time. If repetition leads us to be mindless, then it is a form of death. We may only have a limited number of minutes to live, but some of those minutes are fuller than others. Choices like careers, who we spend our time with, what we do in the evening on a random Wednesday when we’re exhausted, how we engage with the people around us—these are the basic material of life. A certain amount of repetition is to be expected, but I can’t be sure whether that’s something to be eschewed or embraced. Mindful attention helps me suck more juice out of life, but I can’t sustain it indefinitely. Thoughtful rituals help me to move through time deliberately. Journaling helps me hold on to time that has already passed through my fingers. Strangely, slowing down seems to give me more time. Why does that work? My guess is that the little pauses between activities helps me encode experience into awareness. Even when I pack up my gear, I enjoy myself more when I work with one piece at a time. Trying to grab two or three things at a time leaves me stressed out and confused, and even seems to take up more time. It’s like I can see my thoughts rapidly switching attention between the different objects and tasks, expending energy wastefully and making little progress. Back to the matter at hand, though. How can I squeeze the most out of these last 850 miles? I’m not ready to be done with this trail, not by a long shot. I vow to practice mindful awareness with even more fervor than before, trying to take in every leaf, rock, and tree trunk. Taking in the forest is easy for me, but taking in the individual trees, that’s where the real challenge lies. It’s become overcast and stayed cold, and the only way to keep warmer is to hike faster. We cross a small stream that’s not listed on the maps or the water report. It’s sort of a puddle in the trail, but it’s a picturesque puddle. There are stepping stones across a glassy surface, and some of the plants around it are getting a little autumn coloring.
We’re flying now; there’s no time for talking, just hiking to beat the cold. It feels like winter is literally chasing us. The terrain changes rapidly, from low bushes with scattered trees to burned forest, to thick forest, then to open forest as we climb. At the top of a mountain, the trail then loops back on itself so closely that I have to wonder why the trail designer didn’t just cut off the last loop. Strange. It starts to mist and sprinkle on us, and I hike even faster, as if I can outrun the weather. I stop for lunch around 2. It’s still cold and wet, but I have to eat. Roadside is nowhere to be seen. In fact, I haven’t seen him in a couple hours and I’m not sure when I lost him. I’m sure he’ll catch up soon. At least I think he will. I remember back to Hoot and Chocolate Milk, who were much faster than me but who never caught up. By the time I have my lunch unpacked, I’m shivering. Exercise heats the body, heat leads to sweat, sweat cools the body. It was fine while I continued to exercise, but now my sweat has gone clammy, sucking away vital bodyheat, and I have no fat reserves left to help keep me warm. I’ve been in calorie deficit for months but it never mattered much in the warm California sunshine. Borders are mostly man-made legal fictions, but whoever chose the California-Oregon border hit on something. Lunch is a miserable affair. Alone, my focus goes to my hands, which have been cold for hours and are starting to ache. The sparker on my stove doesn’t work, so I have to use a lighter, which is painful on my thumb and takes several tries to light. The only hot lunch food I have left is instant mashed potatoes, which I tend to avoid for as long as I can. Sometimes I think that I get more miles done because if I can get to the next town in time, I won’t have to eat my mashed potatoes. Roadside arrives just as my potatoes are getting cold. I scrape the bottom and clean the pot while he wolfs down a cold lunch, then we set off again. It looks like we might be able to get to Mazama Village before the restaurant closes. If we hurry. PCT Day 94 September 5, 2016 Mile 1764.7-1787.0 22.3 miles (+2 mile roadwalk) In Ashland, I considered sending some of my cold weather gear home. I hadn’t used my sleeping bag liner or my gloves on this entire trip—the sleeping bag kept me plenty warm, and hiking all day kept my blood hot in my hands. In fact, my body continued pumping hot blood throughout the night, and I usually ended up leaving my sleeping bag unzipped. Right now, at 4am, I’m really glad I didn’t do that. Oregon has been frigid the past two nights. I woke up two hours ago from the cold, and about an hour ago I pulled the sleeping bag liner out of my pack and wrapped it around me before climbing back into the bag. I’m gradually warming up, but my feet, always the last to warm, are still frozen solid. I doze two more uncomfortable, unsatisfying hours, and then wake to hear Roadside packing up. I rouse myself and hurry to catch up, and we finish about the same time. Bubble Boy is still asleep across the trail. The trail is a bold streak of meticulously fine red gravel bisecting a jumble of chunky, slate-gray lava rock. Some trail crew has earned a place in the engineering hall of fame with this masterwork. It cuts in and out of forests for miles, and occasionally we get a glimpse of a lone peak up ahead; the map tells me it’s Mt. McLoughlin, the first of a whole series of Oregon volcanoes. After six miles of hiking we hit a road. Two miles west at Fish Lake Lodge is food. Puma and Snooze Button are still in their tents in a clearing just beyond the road, and we stop and chat for a bit. “Sleeping in?” I ask. “A ranger gave us hot chocolate this morning,” Puma says. “Nothing better than hot chocolate in your sleeping bag.” Roadside and I start toward Fish Lake Lodge, planning to hitch a ride, but no ride comes. We end up road-walking the whole two miles. A thru-hiker coming the other direction introduces herself as Pathfinder and tells us the food is excellent. The lodge is a combination country store and somebody’s living room, with a few tables scattered about. One part is a game room, complete with board games. A waiter tells us to take a seat anywhere, and we choose the game room. The waiter looks over at us every once in a while as if he’s thinking “oh yeah, I need to go get their order.” After twenty minutes, he still hasn’t come over. Roadside goes to get us some coffee, and carries it back himself. It takes another ten minutes after that to order, and after another ten minutes I have to get up myself to refill my coffee. Somewhere around then, Puma, Snooze, Hunter, and Bubble Boy come in and grab a table in the other room. It’s another twenty minutes at least before we get our food, and it’s good. I have a full plate of eggs, veggies, and cheese, plus an additional plate of French toast. When we’re done, I’m full, but we decide to stick around a little longer for a beer and to buy some snacks from the store. The other hikers tell us they’re planning on hitching around the next section to Crater Lake, and Bubble Boy says he might quit the trail after that. I’m sad to hear that. I automatically assume that every other hiker has poured as much of their heart and soul into this hike as I have, and the idea of quitting is heart-wrenching. Perhaps it’s not as big a deal to him, but in some small way it feels like it’s me that quitting and I want to encourage him to get back out there and maybe it’ll get a little better. But it’s not my hike. Roadside and I get a hitch back to the trail in the back of a pickup truck. At the trailhead, a guy comes out of an RV to tell us he’s looking for a southbound hiker with curly hair—have we seen him? Apparently this guy lost his phone on a dayhike north of here. The hiker with the curly hair found it and told all the northbound hikers to pass the word that he had it and was headed south. This guy is hoping not to miss him when he passes. We haven’t seen him, but we’ll keep an eye out. We start up the trail with speed. The coffee buzz is back, the lava rock is gone, and five miles of incline on loamy soil feels like hiking on a sofa. The forest is close and completely blocks out the sun. It’s a cool shady hike all the way to the top. We stop for lunch at a wide clearing with enough room for twenty tents. Something has left massive tracks on the trail, and Roadside and I speculate what it could be. It’s not the right shape for a bear, it’s too big for a mountain lion. It sort of resembles a horse, but horse prints are U-shaped and these are round. Besides, I’ve never seen a horseshoe print that big. We ponder while we try to keep up with our never-ending hunger. I shouldn’t be hungry again this soon after that enormous breakfast, but I’m starving. I just can’t get enough calories. The other side of the mountain is a pretty green valley. We’ve been in trees most of the day, and they still surround us but they’ve opened enough to give us an acre or more of view at a time. We’re walking along the side of a slope when we see a lady on horseback coming south. Roadside and I climb up the slope to let the horse pass—horses often spook around hikers, especially if we’re using hiking poles. The lady pulls alongside us and offers us Kind bars and Colby Jack cheese packets. We ask her about her horse’s enormous feet—this is the animal that was making those tracks. She tells us it’s part Clydesdale. A couple miles later the forest opens up and we get our first real sunshine of the day. It feels like I haven’t seen the sun in weeks. We come around a corner to see Pathfinder talking with another hiker and we pull up to share in the conversation. Roadside doesn’t say anything until we’re all getting ready to leave. “Did you pick up a phone?” That’s when I notice the hiker has curly hair. “Yeah,” he says. “The owner is looking for you.” Roadside tells him about the RV at the trailhead and the south-bounder says he’s looking forward to getting it back to his owner. He jokes about getting rid of the extra weight. We laugh, but there’s some truth behind it. You can always trust a thru-hiker not to steal from you, if only because they wouldn’t want to carry any extra weight. We come up over a rise and get a great view of 4-Mile Lake. It’s a beautiful wiggle of a lake, set in a basin that is completely covered in thick trees all the way down to a fifty-yard border of bare dirt where the water has receded. In California, the mountain slopes dropped away precipitously. It often feels like you could slip, fall off the trail, and hit the bottom of a canyon. Here in Oregon, they draw down slowly over miles. This makes the views less dramatic, but the hiking is oh so much easier. Some hikers do crazy things in Oregon, like hike 40- and 50-mile days, or try to hike the whole state in under two weeks, a feat that requires consistent 35-mile days. I’ve done a few thirties, even in California terrain, but I always feel destroyed the next day. Maybe I’d feel less destroyed on this terrain, but the idea of getting up and doing it again the next day, and then again the day after that, sounds like a way to completely destroy all semblance of enjoyment and appreciation.
The end of the day is easy hiking through the forest. It’s a little more open in the evening, and the thick low vegetation combined with the dappled sunlight gives the trail an idyllic feel. I lose track of time and just seep into the forest, trickling downhill like water from a spring. We stop just before sunset, when the light gives the trees a golden sheen and everything is tinted like an antique photograph. It’s been a good day. Mile 1737.4-1764.7 27.3 Miles I decide to sleep in a little so that there’s a chance for Roadside to catch up. Trying to be a good rational Buddhist means accepting things as they are, but that also means accepting the emotions I feel. I feel lonely. Trying to pretend I don’t will just make it worse. In the Buddha’s Discourse on the Second Arrow, he says that the stories we tell ourselves about a suffering are themselves a form of suffering. A buddhist who is trained in mindfulness, when shot by an arrow, will only feel the physical pain. Someone not trained in mindfulness will tell themselves a story about how unfair it is that they were shot, or worry that they will die. That causes emotional suffering, which is the second arrow, shot by the person at themselves. I think there are more arrows we can fire, and I sometimes make myself a pincushion of arrows—I tell myself stories about my stories. I have failed to remove emotion from myself, and therefore I am a bad buddhist, I am a failure at mindfulness, I am bad at life, and on and on. It’s better, I think, to just notice that I’ve already fired the second arrow and accept it. I am lonely. When I pay attention to the loneliness, it doesn’t even seem that bad. It’s uncomfortable, but not particularly painful. It seemed worse when I was trying to pretend to myself that I wasn’t lonely. At 5:40 I get up and start moving. It’s a cold morning. Much colder than it’s been since the Sierras. One of the guidebooks (Yogi’s, I think) said something about sudden cooler temps after the Oregon border. I wonder if this is a new normal. Before I’ve gone a mile, I pass a dirt road filled with RVs, and then a tent that looks an awful lot like Roadside’s. I consider stopping to check if it’s him, but it’s 6am and if it’s not him then I would feel bad waking some random stranger. The coffee yesterday is taking its toll today. I feel sluggish and bored, and none of my food seems to give me any energy. I take a lot of breaks, including a breakfast that takes me most of an hour because I can’t stop eating my snack food. If I keep this up, I won’t have enough food to make it to my next resupply. But if I don’t eat the food now, I might not have the energy to make it to my next resupply. I stuff my face with peanut M&Ms, about the only snack food that still tastes good. I’ll worry about rationing later. I’m strolling through pines, firs, and grassy rolling hills. It would be an easy hike if I weren’t so tired. Off to my left two tall lanky hikers come over a grassy rise, not following any trail. We greet each other, and I recognize Puma right away. I met him way back in the Sierra when I was hiking with Sprinkler! This whole hike I have only met two black thruhikers, so it’s not difficult to remember him. He’s hiking with Snooze Button, a hiker who I’ve never met. We hike together for a bit. They are as fast as Hoot and Chocolate Milk and I have trouble keeping up in my state of caffeine withdrawal. I finally lose them when have to stop to use the bathroom. I wonder why there are so few black thruhikers. Few non-caucasian hikers generally. It seems like escape from a sick society would be beneficial and desirable, but I wonder if a general anxiety about safety as a black person among white strangers would be exacerbated when they leave family and friends behind. Or perhaps the outdoor industry just hasn’t reached out to them in the same way it has to white people. It makes me a little sick to think that I might be out here because an industry has had better success reaching out to me. What does seem likely, though, is that culture plays a role. I enjoy nature because my parents took me to national parks and taught us to enjoy and care for the natural world. They did that because their parents taught them that way, and who knows how many generations that goes back. People of other races have been fighting for their place in society for all of U.S. history, and it seems likely that they haven’t had the bandwidth for this type of leisure. To leave home and quit job, and to know that you’re likely to find another job when you return, is a mark of privilege. To put yourself in the way of discomfort and consciously strip away luxuries is less desirable when you don’t have comfort and luxuries to begin with. I think about what Roadside said a few days ago about his difficulty hitchhiking, and I feel like an idiot for not realizing the extent of what he hinted at. My privilege permeates this hike, as it permeates everything in my life. In that light, my great adventure appears to be nothing but an extended vacation. That’s not quite right, though. It’s more accurate to say that it’s an opportunity for self-actualization. On Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, I have the opportunity to focus on improving myself and my thinking because my other basic needs, including safety, are being met. And yet, don’t I owe it to society to self-actualize? Doesn’t this fuller realization of cultural illness and privilege help heal the culture? Yes, I think. It’s more productive to see the illness and be part of the change than to hide and pretend I don’t have this privilege. I pass a small dam made of black concrete with water flowing over the top. It looks like the edge of infinity pool, but it turns into a creek and flows under a bridge that I cross. The dam is just high enough, maybe ten feet or so, that I can’t see over the top to the other side. A little later I come across Puma and Snooze Button at another bridge. They are chatting with another hiker I haven’t met, and I stop to join the conversation and snack a bit. It seems like there have been more hikers today, and I’m glad. It makes me feel more relaxed about finishing the trail, knowing that they are just as behind as I am. The weather doesn’t care, of course. It will snow on a hundred late thru-hikers just as easily as it will snow on one. Still, it’s nice to know we’re in it together and I can’t really push myself any faster today, and the weather is so warm right now that it doesn’t seem like snow will ever arrive. In the afternoon I cross a meadow with wildflowers splattered across it like a Jackson Pollock canvas. A side trail to a spring crosses a dirt road and then follows a platform of wood planks over the marshy meadow. The spring is in a copse of aspens, and there are three hikers getting water. Two of them depart as I arrive, but the third one is still filling up. I introduce myself, and he tells me his trail name is Bubble Boy. I know that name! Bubble Boy is one of the people that Mr. Tea—Ed—mentioned hiking with for a short time. He got his trail name from a series of mishaps and injuries on trail. Things like tripping over a root and face-planting, spraining an ankle… I think there was even a broken bone in there somewhere. He’s not around long enough to ask him about his story, or at least I don’t feel comfortable asking him about it this soon. He finishes getting his water and I’m left alone in this pretty spot. I fill up water and pull out lunch and my book. I’m reading The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. It’s about a butler at Darlington Hall in England who reflects back on his life during a long car ride. The reader gradually becomes aware that his life was not as well-lived as he thinks it was, and perhaps he realizes it too but is still in denial. It’s an engaging book, and I’m tired today, and it’s a warm day and it’s so pretty here—butterflies are flitting in and out of the shadows between the aspens, the spring is burbling quietly, every other sound is muted and distant… I just laze about and read, and read some more. I’m there for an hour or more, dabbing my attention into the book and out into this natural pergola like a handkerchief blotting at sweat, alternating between engagement with the story and thinking about what makes a life well-lived. The book and I come to no conclusions, though we agree that some things don’t work. The main character does his best work, but never takes moral responsibility or judges the purpose of that work, as he serves an odious man. It reminds me of Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience, where he argues that no one is exempt from the responsibility to their own conscience. Our work is where we are most prone to ignoring our own conscience. There was a time when I worked for a large bank and watched as the wealthy had their fees forgiven, but the poor were not given the same treatment. I didn’t have the courage to speak out about it, and made excuses to myself that I needed the job. I wonder whether I would have the courage now. Eventually the pull of the trail overwhelms the feeling of torpor, and I rouse myself to action. I take a final look around at this magical spot—the flitting butterflies, the silent aspens, the murmuring spring—and depart with a feeling of gratitude. When I get back to the junction, an older couple asks me my trail name. “Zigzag,” I reply. “Oh, there’s a hiker just ahead looking for you.” Could it be? I thank them and wish them a good hike and then hurry ahead. Not a quarter mile past, I see him stopped by the side of the trail pulling something out of his pack. “Roadside!” I shout. He grins back at me in his understated way. “Hey Zigzag.” We take a minute to catch up on how we missed each other yesterday. The best we can figure out is that he must have passed while I was setting up my tent or talking to the car camper. The tent I passed this morning was his. This conversation is creating an unspoken agreement that we have become hiking partners. We’re not quite able to say it directly—to make it explicit would seem both needy and restrictive. We both still have to hike our own hike, and if either of us can’t keep up, this agreement will have to end, but for now it’s nice to finally have a friend. We start a long downhill and chat along the way. He’s keeping up a good pace. Near the bottom we topped at a cabin with a big farm-style water pump. There’s a whole group of hikers here, including Bubble Boy and a few day-hikers that have a bunch of questions about thru-hikers. One of them is a dad, and you can tell he’s just itching to get out for a thru-hike of his own. I don’t know any of these other thru-hikers, but we all have the same answers and similar stories. His questions and his envy make the rest of us feel a brotherhood.
We slowly peel off one and two at a time as each of us finishes getting water. Roadside and I are among the last to leave. We move a little slower now, in part because I’m feeling strain in my right heel and achilles tendon. I also have a blister for the first time in weeks. Two zeroes in a row was enough to turn my rock hard foot flesh into a soft pulpy mess. The last hours of the day are hiked over big chunks of gray volcanic rock. They have been arranged carefully by trail crews to create an evenly sloped line of trail through long fields of these rocks, but the makeup of the rocks themselves is so uneven that they are treacherous to the ankles. We find our campsites shortly before sunset in a clearing a couple hundred feet from the trail. Bubble Boy arrives shortly after, and we invite him to join us at a space nearby, but he decides to set up on the other side of the trail and he keeps mostly to himself for the rest of the evening. September 3, 2016 Mile 1716.7-1737.4 20.7 Miles For the past year before I started this trail, I read trail journals. Other hikers often took zeroes. Some even took double zeroes. Never, in any of the journals I read, did I ever see a triple zero. And this morning, I understand why. I feel like I’ve been confined inside for the past two days, or like my senses have been stifled. I need to be outside, moving and breathing clean air, rocks and roots under my feet, smelling dirt and pine tree. Being inside this motel room makes me want to retch. Roadside joins me for breakfast at Morning Glory again, then it’s time to pack up and go. Packing takes about 5 times as long as it should, because I can’t remember how everything fits in my pack. Finally I make it work, and join Roadside outside. We walk a mile or so out to the freeway and try to hitchhike. Someone has left a cardboard sign lying near the onramp. It says “Hiker to Pacific Crest Trail.” We decide to use it and see if it helps. Twenty minutes later, nobody has stopped. That’s not unusual, hitchhiking sometimes takes a while, but Roadside is impatient this morning. “Let’s just get a cab,” he says. “I’ll pay for it.” While we wait we take turns getting junk food from the gas station while the other person stays with the backpacks. When the cab arrives I’m relieved that we don’t to have to wait for a hitch, but I feel like a bit of a fraud. Isn’t hitching part of the adventure? I’ve already hitched a bunch of times, but after two days in a town, and having to skip a section, I don’t feel like a great adventurer anymore. I’m just faking my way through this trail. We get back to the trail about noon. We hike together for a little bit, but before long I’m way ahead of him. I was afraid of that. Another temporary hiking friend. It was fun while it lasted. Coffee is a magical hiking drug. It doesn’t matter that I’ve started the day late, I know I’m going to make at least twenty miles. I have to be doing three and a half or even four miles an hour. And the terrain is so easy! The slopes are gentle, even the trail seems smooth, absent of the rocks and roots that I usually need to navigate. The mountains are gently sloped, but I’m up fairly high. At one point I can see southeast to Shasta, and all the land in between. At another I can see southwest to the fire above Seiad valley. Smoke hemorrhages into the sky like blood in water. It’s painful to watch. After ten miles or so, I decide to take a small side trail to a lookout. I decide to leave Roadside a note in the trail so he doesn’t pass me, just in the hope that he’s not too far behind. I scrawl a quick message, tear the page from my notebook, and weigh it down with a rock in the middle of the trail. It’s not much of a lookout, really just a broad sunny patch with bushes that block the view all around. There’s a dayhiker here. He’s carrying a daypack and a mandolin, and says he brought some beers out for thruhikers. Lucky me. He hands me one and breaks out his mandolin to play a song without words. Roadside arrives at the end of the first song. He saw my note, and I can tell he’s grateful that I didn’t just take off without thinking of him. I’m glad to see him, even if it seems clear we won’t be able to hike together over the long run. We drink our beers through two more songs, but then we have to keep moving. The dayhiker seems a little sad, but I’m sure there will be more thruhikers coming through here In the afternoon Roadside and I hike together for an hour. Then he has to stop for water at a lake. I still have plenty, so I head on. I don’t see him again all afternoon or evening.
Coffee is a magical hiking drug, but everything has its cost. The price of coffee seems to be an inability to pay attention to the larger picture. I’m so focused on my goal and making mileage that I stop looking around and my vision constricts to the path in front of my feet. Hours go by this way and I’m hardly aware that it’s happening. I come out of my stupor and start looking for a place to camp as it’s getting dark. There are a few cars pulled off to the side of dirt roads, nestled in between trees. I find a tent that doesn’t have a car and set up nearby. A white honda pulls up and the driver gets out. Suddenly self-conscious, I ask him if he’s okay with me camping so close to him. I thought I was camping near a thru-hiker—they usually want the company, but car campers are often looking for solitude. “You can camp wherever the hell you want,” he says gruffly, and climbs into his tent. I decide to stay put and eat my dinner. The map says I’ve hiked twenty miles today, but it feels like I’ve hardly gone five. The forest has remained mostly the same, my body isn’t fatigued like it should be. I don’t even have any clear memory of the last few hours. I keep my eyes peeled for Roadside, but he never shows. Temporary friends, temporary life. All is change. Anicca. September 2, 2016
0 Miles I’m up early, for civilized life. For hiking life, I’ve had a luxurious sleep-in. It’s already light out, and—surprise, surprise—I’m starving. I tap on Roadside’s door. “Roadside, you awake?” “Yeah.” His gruff baritone cuts through the door as if it isn’t there. “I’m gonna get some breakfast, you want to come?” “Yeah, give me a minute.” I stand at the railing and gaze across the roofline of southern Ashland. The town drops away to the east, into a wide valley contained by rolling mountains. Somewhere on the other side of those mountains is the trail, and I’m already curious to see what it looks like over there. A valley this wide has been a fairly common sight on trail, but the houses offer a different perspective of distance. They shrink into pixels before they get even halfway across the valley, and then it’s just untrammeled land all across the other side. All of our infrastructure and architecture is just a small patch of land in the wider picture, and yet we keep ourselves surrounded by it so completely that we often fail to see the wider wilderness we are a part of. It feels healthy to see this patch of land as an exception rather than the rule. The enormity of the landscape gives perspective to the sky, too, and reminds me that I’m on a planet in a much bigger universe. It’s hard to stress about anything when my little human existence is scaled like this. Roadside joins me in the dewy air and we walk to the Morning Glory cafe, right next to the motel. When I asked friends online for restaurant recommendations in Ashland, this one came up several times (many of my friends, who are also music teachers, got their master’s degrees from American Band College, which is hosted here at Oregon State University). They don’t open until 7am, so we have to wait. We watch a deer on the lawn of the university. There’s nowhere to be, no program to follow, no feeling of wasted time. We’re just here, taking in a moment. When they open the door, there’s a line of about 20 people waiting. We take a booth and order coffee, which comes in mismatched mugs. There are brightly colored murals on the walls and trim painted in purple, blue, and green pastels. Breakfast is even better than my friends led me to expect. The pancakes are delivered with house-made marionberry jam and the omelettes have unusual ingredients like gorgonzola cheese and artichokes. I don’t remember when I’ve had a better meal. We join up again for lunch at the Standing Stone brewery—Roadside is as much a fan of good beer as I am. There are a couple errands after lunch—outdoor supply stores, a head shop—and then we go to the movie theater and watch “Hell or High Water.” It’s the first movie I’ve seen in a month, and only the second since I started the trail. After the movie, we discover that there’s a bus that will take us back to the motel for a dollar, which saves us the 2-mile walk back. On the ride back I have two thoughts in close succession: The first is how strange it felt to be entertained for two hours. For months I have spent almost all of my time alone with my thoughts, and to suddenly be distracted from them feels unnatural. What a contrast that is from the life of constant distraction and entertainment I was living before the trail. The second thought is a realization about Roadside. We’ve spent most of the last two days together, talking and running errands together, and yet I still feel like I know less about him than I would after a ten-minute conversation with most people. He’s not cagey or suspicious, he just doesn’t offer information about himself in the same way that most people do. I wonder why. Whatever the reason, I enjoy his company and hope that we’ll be able to hike together, even if only for a few days. Back at the motel, I eat a whole package of chocolate donuts I bought at the store for dinner and stay up until actual midnight watching TV. It’s an indulgence that would make me feel like garbage at home, but it actually feels like I’m doing the right thing for body and mind right now. I desperately need calories, and my mind needs a break from itself before I conquer Oregon and Washington. September 1, 2016 0 Miles I wake about 6am with a gnawing hunger and walk over to the restaurant for breakfast. It’s closed, but the wifi is on, so I sit on a bench out front and check to see if there’s any more luck about a ride. The guy from the PCT facebook group says he came through last night looking for us, but didn’t see us anywhere. We were camped so close to the highway that the two semis that came through nearly nipped my pillow. My friend from college is still offering a ride from Yreka, provided by a friend of his aunt. I tell him I’ll let him know the second we have a ride to Yreka. Just as I start to dread sitting on the highway thumbing for a ride, the owner of the restaurant and store comes out. “Hey, I’m headin’ into Yreka this mornin’,” he says. “If you boys still need a ride, I’ll take ya. I’m leavin’ about 7.” “That would be great, thank you.” “Sure thing. You’ll miss breakfast, but they might be closin’ the highway this mornin’, so it’ll be near impossible to get out after that.” I’m so grateful for the people along the PCT. We’re saved from potential hours of waiting, maybe even days. Roadside comes by a few minutes later, also seeking breakfast. I tell him, and we go back and pack up our stuff. When we come back, the cook/waitress invites us into the closed restaurant. “I’m not set up for breakfast yet,” she says, “but I can make you guys some coffee for the road.” We sit at the bar and chat with her. There is a spatula that looks like it should be attached to a tractor and pictures on the wall of people trying to eat pancakes the size of tectonic plates. I feel hungry and painfully full at the same time. The owner comes by, gets a cup of coffee for himself and says “You ready to go?” We climb into the cab of his truck, Roadside in the back seat. On the way out of town, I ask about the “No Monument” signs. “It’s the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument. The government is trying to make this whole area a national monument,” he says. “What does that mean for the town?” I ask. “Well, it means we can’t sell our property anymore. If I wanted to give the store to my daughter, I couldn’t. I’d have to sell it to the government, and they’d probably pay me a whole lot less than it’s worth.” I tend to like protection of wild places, but I can see why that would be infuriating for someone, especially in a small town with generations of history. There are loads more questions I could ask—what’s the government’s plan for the land? Will they kick people off the land if they don’t sell?—but I’m wary of opening a pandora’s box of political invective. It shows up anyway. “What’s are the two X’s for on the State of Jefferson flag?” I ask naively. I know a little bit about Jefferson. It’s a plan to divide California into two states, of which Jefferson would be the northern of the two. I had some inkling that it was about water rights. “It means the politicians always double-cross us.” He tosses this out easily, like it doesn’t affect him personally. I act like I’m chewing on this information, but really I’m avoiding the obvious question (“how have they double-crossed you?”), fearful of what it will turn into. It doesn’t matter. He starts to tell us about the ways that politicians ignore the northern part of the state. He’s vague, but it sounds like it mostly has to do with general dissatisfaction over being a conservative county in a state that votes overwhelmingly liberal. I’ll look into it later and discover that it goes all the way back to 1941, when a group of young men from the rural northern counties of California and southern counties of Oregon stopped traffic on state route 99 and passed out pamphlets that included a declaration of independence. It said that they would secede “every Thursday until further notice.” They were angry about the lack of road development in the region, which they said was needed in order to mine and log the area, and later they complained about planned water development in the area, which would mostly go toward agricultural irrigation in the central valley and urban use in Los Angeles. The movement hit a snag almost immediately when the bombing of Pearl Harbor brought the US into World War II. But it has held on and even finds increasing support among the more conservative rural counties, as they continue to feel disconnected and ignored by the state’s liberal politics. As we get going, the restaurant owner talks briefly about the presidential election. He doesn’t say what he thinks of Trump, but he thinks Hillary Clinton should be in jail. I think he’s been misled by conservative radio, but I’m not about to get into a political debate with him. He has been generous to give us a ride, and I don’t want to spoil my gratitude or make him regret his generosity by starting an argument. It’s not like either of us would change our mind anyway. We’re just products of different cultures. Roadside is quiet through all of it. The best part of his conversation is that it distracts me from my growing hunger. That distraction ends when we get to the road closure. Hotshot fire crews are everywhere, mostly standing around and waiting for instructions. The restaurant owner tells us that they are prisoners who join the fire crews for a chance to get out of prison for a while and make a little money. It’s far less than minimum wage, but it can help them get a job as a firefighter when they get out of prison. Our driver gets out and wanders around to talk to some of the other local people he knows. Roadside and I stay in the truck. We talk occasionally, but mostly I just watch the prisoners interact and I try to ignore my hunger. It’s a strange limbo. There’s no rush except my hunger, nowhere I need to be anytime soon. I’m detached from all goals except my basic human needs, dependent upon the kindness of strangers, lost somewhere between society and wilderness. It takes over an hour, but we’re finally allowed through. The restaurant owner asks where we want to get dropped off. FOOD, my belly screams. “Is there a good diner somewhere close to the highway?” “Sure, I know a good place.” At the diner, I get in touch with my friend’s aunt’s friend, Jim, who says he can get here in about an hour. Roadside and I devour two breakfasts each and then go sit curbside. I ask him how he got his trail name. He says a couple people picked him up hitching, and when he didn’t already have a trail name, that’s what they told him it should be. Mr. Tea was right, trail names are a little contrived when they don’t come with a funny story or a distinctive characteristic. Jim picks us up and takes us toward Ashland. He’s a kind, older man who has an easygoing attitude and a warm smile. If he’s bothered by the way we smell, we can’t tell. We roll down our windows anyway. He takes a side road at the Oregon Border to show us where the PCT picks back up. As we’re heading back toward the highway, we pass three hikers and I could swear that one of them is Bad Santa, whom I met way back at Lake Tahoe. It’s still crazy to me the way we all slide down this trail like beads on a string, passing each other in the mornings or in towns and not seeing each other for weeks at a time, but randomly bumping into each other. I wonder how many hikers I’ve passed because they stepped off the trail for ten minutes to go to the bathroom and I never knew they were there. Or how many have passed me for the same reasons. Jim drops us off at the Ashland Motel, just across from the Oregon State campus, where we get rooms on the second floor. I do my laundry, take a shower, and then walk into town for lunch. It’s a couple miles, and along the way I see that school is in session again. It reminds me of how stressed I used to be as a teacher, and how relaxed I feel now. Was it the job, or would I have felt the same in any job? I get a giant plate of Nachos and an 8-beer sampler at the Standing Stone brewery and dive into Intruder in the Dust, by William Faulkner. It’s been a year or two since I’ve read Faulkner. It’s like coming home to an old friend. This one is filled with epically long sentences, usually several pages per sentence. Yet it’s not difficult to parse. I wonder whether I would have the focus for this if I were at home, distracted by thoughts about my job and the concerns of my household. After lunch, I pick up more fuel for my camp stove—so glad it lasted—and wander back to the motel. In the evening, Roadside and I get dinner together at a restaurant called Loft. The food is great, the wine is great, and we are completely out of place in our tattered hiking clothes. I wonder what the other patrons must think of us.
Roadside is an interesting character. He’s quiet, even for a thru-hiker. When I ask him questions about himself he answers, but it’s always a little less information than I expect, and he doesn’t volunteer anything on his own. “What time do you think you’ll head back to the trail tomorrow?” I ask him. “I’m gonna take another zero,” he says. A double zero. Two days in a row of not hiking? That sounds really good to me, actually. I like this town a lot, and I’m losing weight. It would be good to have another day to stuff myself with food, do some more reading, lay on a bed, sit in a chair, and just take a vacation from my vacation. It’s already September, and we still have a lot of miles to go before we reach Canada, but I haven’t taken a double zero yet, and really, what’s one more day? By the time we get back to the motel, I’ve convinced myself that this is a good idea. August 31, 2016 Mile 1629.9-1657.5 27.6 Miles 4am. Nothing woke me up, I just can’t sleep anymore. I could get up and hike, I guess. Or I could just lie here. I think I’ll just lie here. My mind wanders over all the usual subjects—what should I do with my life after I get back from the trail? What habits do I want to change, and how? What’s on my bucket list? How can I keep from falling back into mindless consumption, stuck-insideness, and the busy trap? What makes me me? There are no real conclusions, but the wandering isn’t unpleasant. My sleeping bag is cozy and soft, and the air is just cool enough to make me grateful for how warmly I’m wrapped up. When my alarm goes off at 5, I’m ready. I pack up as quietly as I can—which isn’t all that quiet—so I won’t disturb Roadside, who is snoring happily in his red and grey tent. Just as I’m finishing up, my headlamp goes out. So now I have to dig back through my pack to find the drybag that has the spare batteries. An eternity and a million noisy rustles later, I finally pull out the right drybag. I find the batteries—two CR2032s, each about the size of a quarter. They are sealed inside hard, tight plastic, and neither fingers nor teeth can find any purchase to tear them asunder. Roadside isn’t snoring anymore, and I’m self-conscious about the noise I’m making, so I decide to just hike in the dark, at least until I’m far enough away to dig through my pack again for my pocketknife without disturbing Roadside any more than I already have. I hike a short ways, then—finally—find my knife and cut into the package to retrieve the batteries. It’s a matter of trial and error before I get them in the right way, and by this time it’s almost light enough to hike without the headlamp. Note to self: work out a better system for replacing batteries. There are a few more short uphills left along this ridge, but then it’s a long steady downhill. I practice my hundred mindful breaths several times in a row, and it feels like I’m floating down a river. The light is ambient when it begins to filter in through a gauzy green canopy. There are still conifers here, but the dominant lighteater in this forest is the broad leaf. I recognize poison oak among the rest of the lettuce here, and I give it a wide berth. Though still twenty miles away, the Klamath river already has me in its lazy grasp; it just feels like a river valley here. I begin to encounter southbounders every half mile or so. Each of them has a different story about the fire ahead. One tells me they’re getting ready to close the trail north of town, another that it’s been closed since yesterday, a third says that they’re recommending hikers don’t go through, but that we can make our own choice. This last hiker adds that it’s pretty damn smoky up there. It’s hard to know which story to believe. I don’t want to be goal-blind, but I also really want to finish California. I’ve been looking forward to the California/Oregon border for a while, both for the pride of finishing the state, and less nobly, for the pride of posting a selfie with the border sign and the accolades that will come when I post it to instagram. I hate to admit such base motives to myself, but I’m a gold-star junkie and I know it. Miles and miles of downhill, all in lazy luminous green. It continues endlessly without the slightest indication of forward progress. At least it’s a pleasant purgatory. I’ve given up any expectation of change when I am spilled out of the forest onto a dirt road. A woman calls down to me from her garden on a hill to tell me her version of the upcoming fire. Abandon all hope, she suggests. She’s so adamant, in fact, that I get the feeling that she would only be happy if I were to sit down in the dirt right there, perhaps to cry and gnash my teeth. I thank her for the information and plod onward. The town of Seiad Valley is right there, across the river. The map tells me I need to cut east for a few miles, cross a bridge, and then back west for a few more miles. 6.4 miles total. But I can see the town. It’s. Right. There. As I walk toward the Klamath River, I scan for a place to cross. It’s a wide river, but it doesn’t look particularly deep. I’m hoping there will be a shortcut down this bank and up the other. If there’s a use trail, I’ll probably take it. The problem is, I don’t see one. Which means that either the river is too deep to cross here or I’d be crossing private property on one side of the river or the other. A few too many hikers do that, and townspeople are going to be pissed at all of us, just like that hotel manager almost didn’t give me a room because of other hikers who left a mess. The towns and trail angels have been kind to me because of hikers who came before, and I won’t be the one to break that chain of trust. No use trail appears, so I follow the road to the east. I really hate road walking. I can hike 25 miles on a trail and feel nothing but a little tired at the end of it, but if I have to walk a quarter mile on asphalt, everything starts to ache, from the soles of my feet through my knees and hips up to my neck and shoulders. We think of our bodies as a collection of distinct parts, and forget how interconnected it is until something goes wrong. A tension in one part of the body expresses itself everywhere in subtle changes. Even more common is to forget the interconnection between our mental systems and our physical systems. We notice the big overlaps, like the way hunger or alcohol affect our mind, but we rarely notice the more subtle distinctions, such as the way that the speed of our body affects our stress levels. The road walk gives me a dull headache and puts a sharp edge on my hunger. I cross over the Klamath on a truss bridge and work my way back west up a main highway. There’s not a lot of space along the side of the road here, but the cars are few and far between. Later I’ll learn that they’ve closed off a part of the highway. Many of the properties have cardboard and wood signs that say “No Monument” or “Stop the Cascade-Siskiyou Monument.” I arrive at the town of Seiad Valley, which is really just a pit stop. There’s a small campground that can fit about ten trailers or RVs (PCT hikers, camp on the lawn), and a building that serves as general store and restaurant. There’s another “No Monument” sign in the window of the store, and the restaurant advertises “Home of the Seiad Challenge”—if I can finish 5 of their giant pancakes, my meal is free. I’m certain I won’t be able to finish, but I’m looking forward to stuffing myself in the morning. Inside the store, a man is talking to the cashier, a woman, in a manner that makes me thing that he is probably the owner of the place. I look around while I wait for them to finish their conversation. It’s not like most convenience stores that have every space crammed with consumer goods and brightly displayed. The store is dimly lit, with bare cement floors and a lot of empty space, even in the coolers. A poster inside the front door encourages people to snitch on pot growers, and clothing racks and displays sell official “State of Jefferson” merchandise in solid green with two large “X”s emblazoned across them. I pick up a bag of Salt and Vinegar potato chips, a pint of Blue Bunny black walnut ice cream, and a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. Lunch. I should eat better, I suppose, but what’s the fun of hiking 25 miles a day if you can’t eat some junk food? The owner—I’m sure he’s the owner now—and the cashier finish their conversation and I ask for my resupply and check out. The cashier gives me the wifi password and tells me there’s a picnic table and bathroom around the side for hikers. On my way outside, a man in a uniform is posting something on the door. “You hiking the PCT?” he asks. “Yeah.” “Toward Oregon?” “Yeah.” “We just had to close it for the fires. You should try to hitch out today, they might close the road, too.” “Well, shit. Okay, thanks for the info.” As I carry my junk food to the picnic table I start to think about what to do next, but then I decide I can stress about it after lunch. First, I have some calories to consume. In the second hour, we only see two cars, and neither of them stops. Roadside and I talk like thru-hikers do, short bursts of conversation surrounded by long, easy silences. He complains about the difficulties he’s had with hitching. Sometimes it’s easy, he says, but mostly people don’t want to stop because his skin is dark. I had assumed he was latino, but he tells me he’s a Native American from Alberta, Canada. I am white, and have rarely had trouble finding a hitch before now. It’s a side of white privilege that I hadn’t considered before.
The third hour is a little better, but the two cars that stop are both going somewhere else. Eventually it’s dark, and we’re tired of sitting on the asphalt, so we set up our tents on the campground lawn and chat for a while over beers. The lawn is springy. It feels like a mattress compared to the hard dirt and rocks I’ve been sitting and sleeping on for months. We stay up talking and drinking beeer past hiker midnight (9pm) and finally climb in to our tents a little drunk. August 30, 2016 Mile 1604.7-1629.9 25.2 Miles Cub Bear Spring is a pretty spot. I hiked late enough into the night to justify a later sleep this morning, and now it’s light out. I’m in a spacious area contained by healthy trees and bushes. The burbling water adds additional peace to an already serene area. I fill up my bottles, and then, because I’m so thirsty that I drink almost everything in them, I fill up again. My hope is to hustle today, but I can tell it will be a bit of a struggle. 33 miles takes a toll on the body, even after three months of daily hiking. Hiking the last 10 without any water probably didn’t do my muscles any favors either. It’s a quick jaunt down to the trail, where I can see the valley that I couldn’t see in the dark last night. It’s a deep valley, green and pastoral. It calls me to sit awhile and enjoy it, but I’m racing winter and there’s no time. I settle for a couple long breaths to take it all in, then I turn and start to hike. The trail stays high near the top of the valley, climbing like a railroad cut that doesn’t want to gain altitude too quickly. Ooh yeah, my muscles are sore today. The mountains turn rust red for a while. I inspect some of the rocks as I go. It really does look like a light sheen of rust, like these rocks have oxidized. I wonder if they have a high iron content? I know almost nothing about geology, but I’d like to someday. When the rocks are covered in silver flakes a little later, my curiosity deepens. What happened here? My dad tried to get me interested in geology when I was a kid. He was always trying to give us some natural knowledge. When it came to tide pools, I found it fascinating, but all the birds’ names them were totally boring. I always loved watching nature and exploring it; learning all the names seemed beside the point. Geology seemed to fit into that category: identifying the names of rocks. Today, though, it seems far more interesting. I have a burning desire to know: what makes one rock red, and another silver? Why does granite exist in some places but not others? Why are these mountains here, and why do these valleys look so different than the valleys of 200 miles ago? I also notice the trees look different. I still recognize Douglas firs and other conifers, but it seems like they have more diversity here. I wonder if that’s somehow related to the unusual rocks, or if it’s just a coincidence. All these questions will have to wait. I can’t visit a library or find an expert to ask. Hell, I can’t even look things up on my phone. I’m surrounded by the most interesting geology classroom in the world without a teacher. Later, I’ll learn that my hunch is correct—this is indeed an unusual geological formation. Whereas most of California is the result of collisions between the Pacific and North American plates, the mountains here were formed from remnants of the Farallon plate. And the trees are indeed different here because of the abundance of serpentine, an oily-looking greenish-gray rock that makes it difficult for many trees to grow. I pass Fisher Lake early, then a spring spilling down from the rocks where I stop to get more water. It’s so idyllic. Just a week ago I was struggling to keep hiking—I felt like I was going to quit almost every day, and I was enjoying myself rarely, if at all. Now it feels like a walk in the park. I’m doing more miles now, and my body is as tired as ever, yet somehow I’m having more fun. I know it’s the mountains. They are more interesting now, more varied. My curiosity about what’s around the next corner is heightened. A week ago, what was usually around the next corner was more of the tunnel of trees. Here, the view changes, there are lakes and water spilling down rocks, the mountains are made of different materials every hour, the trees are diverse, even the rocks underfoot feel different from minute to minute. Oh, and there’s bountiful sunlight. I can’t ever forget how much of a difference sunlight makes. If a change in the land and sunlight can affect my mood and perseverance so much, I wonder, what does it do to me to be in a city all the time? To be inside, with dead walls and restricted sunlight (or in many rooms, no sunlight at all), cut off from rough bark and dancing branches and thin mountain air that wafts the scent of hot clay cooking in the sunlight? If a tunnel of Douglas firs was enough to make me feel that cut off and isolated from the world, how must it stifle and constrict my spirit to live on concrete all day every day, passing from closed-off building to sealed car and back to building again? I’m out here now, however, and I’m grateful for the sound of this little babbling spillway with its clear, cold water. A little while later I’m atop a pass where I stop to text Lindsey and send her a couple pictures. Then it’s down, down, down, and suddenly up, up again, next to a little blue lake skirted by talus on three sides. The terrain has changed again, and I’m no longer following the upper rims of valleys. In fact, the long furrows and ridges have been replaced by a choppier, lumpier type of mountain, as if some great wooden spoon had stirred the mountains roughly and left them to set in this jumble. It’s a beautiful, disorganized mess of mountain. It also means the hiking is slower, as altitude changes come fast and hard. From the top side I can see a tight, dense cloud of smoke to the north. This is the third or fourth day in a row that I’ve seen it, but it looks a lot bigger now. It’s a tragedy regardless, but I really hope it’s not near the trail. It looks to be about where I’m headed. In the afternoon, I pass an abandoned cabin. I think about exploring it, but while I waffle I’m still hiking, and I’m long past it before I ever think about coming to a decision. A couple of hikers approach from the north. They’re thru-hikers, southbounders, and they tell me there’s a fire just past the town of Seiad Valley, which I’ll get to tomorrow. They were able to get through, but the smoke on trail was pretty bad. They think the trail is likely to be closed by the time I get there. I thank them for the info and wish them luck with their hike. I consider my options. I could turn around and hitch into Etna, then up to Ashland. That’s an awful lot of trail to miss. Seiad Valley is still about 40 miles away, and by tomorrow they could have the fire out. Or it could be worse. I press on. Maybe it’s not so bad, I think. Thirty minutes later I turn over a ridge and look straight into a mushroom cloud. I take my dinner at a pass covered in brown gabbros that exclude much in the way of flora. There are patches of seasonal grass and a little yellow flower that pops up in clumps, and a single fir tree. The smoke is all blowing to the east, and it smears across the sky and the landscape like a fog, blurring the ridge lines and erasing layers like LA smog in the summertime.
After dinner I get a second wind and crush out a couple more miles in the golden hour. I reach my campsite, high on the ridge with huge unobstructed views to the west, just as the sun is receding into a pinprick. There’s another tent here already, but there’s plenty of space out here. Ziiiiiiiiip goes the tent. A rustle from inside, then a dark head emerges in the dim light and looks around. “Hey. Do you mind if I camp here?” “Yeah, sure. Is that Zigzag?” “Yeah, who’s that?” I can only make out a dark mass, no features. “Roadside.” I only met him briefly, four or five days ago, but there aren’t that many people out here so northbounders are easy to remember. He was the guy I ate breakfast with the day after my bear experience, who had his own bear story. “Oh hey Roadside, good to see you!” I’m grateful for the company. Just in the past week I finally feel comfortable camping alone, but it’s still nicer to have other people around. After I lie down, I wonder how he got ahead of me. He didn’t seem like a particularly fast hiker, and I’ve been doing some big days recently. But if he’s able to keep the mileage that high, maybe we can keep pace with each other. I don’t hold high expectations, though. Experience has taught me I’m likely to keep hiking this thing alone. Little do I know that Roadside and I will hike together all the way to Canada. |
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Nick is a teacher, writer, and amateur adventurer. Archives
June 2020
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