October 10, 2016 Mile 2592..4-2619.5 27.1 miles I wake early in the night to a sharp tapping on the walls of my tent, like rain, but harder. Sleet maybe? I ignore it and drift back to sleep. I wake again to something cold pressed against my forehead. It’s the tent wall, heavy with snow. I strike it with my hand and send the snow flying and sliding, which also showers frozen crystals of condensation onto my face and wets my hand. I wake again. The tent walls are pressing in and I’m worried they will pull up the stakes that hold my tent up. I sit up and give my tent a solid thrashing to clear off all the snow. A fine spray of ice explodes off the inside and shocks me fully awake on contact with my skin. Nor is this the last time. Every half hour or hour, as the snow accumulates and draws in the walls of my tent, I wake over and over again to fight against the suffocating weight of winter. Sometimes I hear the distant thwaps of Roadside’s tent when I wake, and sometimes I hear nothing but the white hiss of sleet and a fine hail. When the alarm goes off, I’m not at all rested, but I don’t have a choice—every hour of mileage counts now. It could mean the difference between finishing and not, or even between life and death. As it is, I’m not sure we’ll be able to continue; the night’s sleet, freezing rain, and snow might force us to turn around and end our hike. I emerge from my tent to take in the damage. It’s not as bad as I feared—the snow only sits a few inches deep, and it’s not as cold as I expected. The trail is covered with snow, but it’s not hard to follow, even by headlamp. It climbs to a ridge, passes over, and holds elevation on a line just below a wall of rock. As a gray light comes up, we can see that the trees are covered in a thin layer of crystalline ice. Thick, low clouds obscure the trail ahead, but seem to lift as we hike higher, as if clearing the way before us. A half foot of snow blankets the top of Cutthroat Pass, spills over the tops of our shoes, and sticks around our ankles. It’s terribly cold, but now the sun is rising in a gap between the clouds and the horizon, a pink and golden glow that lights up the long, glacier-carved canyons below us and makes the trees sparkle. Those trees, so beautiful now, so baroque, crystals and icicles spinning off their branches like living fractal sculptures, overwhelm any discomfort I might feel. Roadside and I don’t even comment on the beauty aside from a gasp and a knowing look. To think that I could be sitting warm in a house somewhere, comfortable and bored, and missed this! No! I wouldn’t trade this gnawing cold, this stretching hunger, this burning fatigue for a warm fire and a bed and a meal. Except that I know that I would. If I were sitting in a lodge right now and someone told me “let’s go for a hike, I’ll bet it’s pretty after that big storm,” I’d choose to stay in the lodge, I know I would. The beauty would be too abstract an idea, the cold and snow too real. It’s only because I put myself out here and started the day in it that I get to experience this unique moment in time and place. Roadside and I stay together most of the morning. We pass cliffside chandeliers of frozen waterfalls and descend below snow line, pass the 2600-mile marker, take breakfast at a creek, and work our way through a maze of valleys. Eventually we begin another climb up exposed switchbacks and back into the snow. The clouds break up, and even though it’s sunny now, it’s still cold enough to keep the ice intact on the trees and the snow crunching hard underfoot. If anything, it seems colder than before. After a quick lunch at the top, we follow a long sweeping curve around the top of a valley toward a low mountain. The temperature plummets. I thought the sunlight would warm things up, but it seems that the clouds were holding some warmth in and now the lid is off and what small heat there was has now escaped into the upper atmosphere. I try to pick up the pace for warmth, but I’ve been hiking at top speed most of the day and I’m feeling exhausted. I round the north side of the mountain and enter its shadow. I need a break, but it feels dangerously cold now. I go to take a drink of water and Orange Crush flavoring and find that the waterbottle is lined with orange ice. The water is freezing as I walk! Finally I have to stop and break. I don’t feel well, and I think it’s because I’ve been hiking all-out for so long and I haven’t eaten or drunk enough today. Eat a bar, drink my orange slushy, stand and rest. I have to stomp my feet and shake my hands to keep warm, and eventually I realize that I’m expending almost as much energy as I would be while hiking, so I continue on. This is too cold. I have reached my limit. My sleeping bag hasn’t been been able to keep me warm the last few nights, and it has been nowhere near this cold. If it gets much colder tonight than it is now, I’m not sure I’ll be able to survive it. Not to mention the storm that’s supposed to arrive the day after tomorrow. If we get caught in that, we’re done for.
I pass a hiker, and then a couple more, and then I come to the Hart’s Pass campground and ranger station. The last road before Canada. A big fire is blazing in one of the campsites, and I go over to see if I can get warm. As it turns out, the campers are the Koreans who gave me fruit and asked me about another hiker yesterday. They are part of a documentary crew following a few Korean hikers. No matter how close I get to the fire, I can’t get warm. I get my longjohns out of my pack and try to dry them with the fire, but in the hour and a half that I wait for Roadside, I mostly just burn my hands and breathe in a bunch of smoke. And somehow my longjohns still won’t dry, not completely. I feel broken. This cold has broken me. I’ve dealt with heat, dehydration, snow, sleet, hail, rain, loneliness, hunger, and terror. I’ve even had a bear charge me, for God’s sake! None of that made me want to quit. Only the loneliness came close. This cold is something different, though. It’s beyond what I can handle, and I need to get out of it. With the storm on its way, I won’t get another chance to finish, I know that. It doesn’t matter. The cold is too much for me. I decide to quit the trail. It feels like complete failure, but it also feels like the wisest choice. All the mental work that I’ve done with ego and status, tells me now that the completed thru-hike is just another accomplishment. I can always come back and hike the last 40 miles another day if I really want to see it. It won’t be a fun story to tell, how I bailed so close to the end of the trail, but it’ll keep me alive. PIF, Superstar, and a couple other thruhikers whom I don’t know join us at the fire. They tell me that Roadside is just a little ways behind. One of the guys is wearing bike shorts and his legs are bright pink, and it makes me feel for a moment like I’m just being a wimp about the cold, but everyone is shivering, even those who are wearing nearly every layer they own. I tell them about my decision to leave the trail. They all look at me with sadness and surprise, but I get the feeling they understand, even if they aren’t ready to call it quits. I just hope I can find a ride down the hill—there are only three cars up here, and one of them belongs to the Koreans, who plan to stay up here overnight. Roadside shows up a little while later, as promised. When I tell him my plan to quit the trail he says he wants to get off the mountain too. That makes me feel a little better. One of the hikers I passed earlier, a guy in his twenties, comes by in his car and asks us if we want any food. “Actually, could we get a ride in to town?” I ask. He’s surprised, but agrees. Roadside and I pile in and wish the others good luck. On the ride down the mountain, all I can think about is whether I’ve made the right decision. It feels like someone I love has just died. By the time we get down the mountain, it’s dark. The place that’s closest, Mazama, is shut down for the night, so our driver takes us all the way to Winthrop. It’s another kindness that goes above and beyond—he is from Seattle, and Winthrop is a half hour in the opposite direction. We find a hotel with two open rooms and a laundry machine. We dump our packs in the rooms, throw our stuff in the laundry, and go across the street to a pizza place in our rain gear. One side of the place is a bar, which is fairly busy, and the other is a bunch of empty booths. We slide into one and order two beers and two pizzas. Roadside wanders off to find a cash machine so he can pay me back for a couple of hotel rooms that didn’t accept his Canadian credit card. While he’s gone I parse my decision to quit into a thousand jagged pieces. Was this the right decision? Maybe it wasn’t as cold as it felt. Maybe I wasn’t actually in danger of hypothermia or frostbite, I was just uncomfortable. Maybe the trail would have come down off the ridge and one of the valleys would have been warmer. Maybe once I was in my sleeping bag it would have been fine—cold, perhaps, but fine. When Roadside gets back our pizzas have just arrived. He pays me back the two-hundred-something dollars he owes me and I feel bad that I ever worried about it. This friendship, silent though it has been, has meant far more to me than the cash, and I feel like I betrayed it with my lack of trust. We finish our pizzas and head back to the hotel.
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
Author
Nick is a teacher, writer, and amateur adventurer. Archives
June 2020
Categories |