June 30, 2016 10 miles (off PCT mile 831) Although I was right against the easternmost ridge of the Sierra, the Inconsolable range stood tall and blocked the morning sun from my campground. What a great name for a range of mountains: Inconsolable. The angle of the ridge and deep crags means that direct sunlight rarely hits the face. Juxtaposed against the shining white granite of the surrounding mountains, the darkness resembles nothing so much as the dark belly of a thundercloud. I woke with the first diffused light. The condensation on my tent drained the heat from my hands as I packed it up, leaving them achy and difficult to move. Difficult to make breakfast. It was later, climbing up the moderate final slope to Bishop Pass, that finally warmed them. The pass was made of broken rocks, possibly a moraine. I passed a snow-measuring station and a few grazing deer along the way. I crested the top and looked down on Bishop lake and Long Lake, in a deep valley carved out of the granite. The three lakes sparkled in the morning light, gold inlaid over topaz. I regretted that I hadn’t spent more time on the eastern side of the Sierra before this. Years of missed beauty. I started down a well-constructed trail of broken, carefully arranged rock shards. Parts were obscured by patches of snow. It was steep and unlike any trail I had hiked up to this point: part staircase and part labyrinth. I scuttled down quickly, eager to get to town, to get to food. Quickly, but still at a walking pace. When I hurry in civilization, my mind speeds from one thing to the next, never settling on the current moment unless I rein it in and force it to pay attention. After days of walking, though, I find it easy to stay focused on life as it happens, in the moment. I sped by Bishop Lake, Long Lake, and South Lake as quickly as my feet would take me (and probably startled the many day hikers and their dogs as I came around blind turns at full speed), and still found I was able to sink my mind fully into their serene beauty. Nonetheless, ten miles was over in a flash, and I found myself at the parking lot by 10am. Despite all the day hikers I had seen, almost no one was on their way down the mountain. I asked an older couple for a ride, but they were headed to another lake after this, in a different direction. A small group of old ladies were up to take a gentle walk around the side of South Lake, and were on their way out, but they didn’t have room in their car. A ranger came by, cleaning out old food from bear boxes. He told me he would have given me a ride, but he wasn’t allowed to (an unexpected hitch from a police officer a few weeks later would make me wonder if he was being honest). With no other people around, I decided to read my book on a rock by the trailhead.
The sun had lifted itself above the mountains and was baking me as I sat. The nearby pit toilet was starting to reek. I considered finding some shade, but realized that it would be difficult to be seen if I tried to flag down a moving car. I decided to stay put. A half hour went by, then forty-five minutes. No cars. What if I can’t find a ride? What if I have to stay up here another day and still can’t find a ride? This is my fear every time I have to hitch. It feels like being single all over again. No matter how short the wait has been, it feels like it might never end. Around 11, a silver Land Rover pulled up and let out two clean hikers, male and female. I asked them what they were going to hike. To my surprise, they were thru-hikers as well. I hadn’t expected other PCTers to take this out-of-the-way resupply route. Indeed, the only reason I had was because my wife was supposed to join me here for a week-long trip through the heart of the John Muir Trail, and I was a week early. To my relief, the driver agreed to drive me down the hill. He was probably in his late fifties. He seemed grumpy at first, but I quickly realized that it was just a tough exterior he was putting up. “Thanks for picking me up. I was getting worried I wouldn’t be able to find a ride.” “Yeah, sure.” “Do you pick up a lot of hikers?” “Sometimes. Those hikers paid me $90 to drive them up there.” Was he expecting payment? I wasn’t carrying much cash. “Oh, do you do this for a living?” “Mostly I drive tours through Death Valley.” We talked about that for a short while, then he asked me what I did for a living. I told him I was a music teacher, and it was like a small crack in his facade burst wide open, revealing a shining light inside. He was suddenly animated, telling me all about his love of Russian Orchestral Music: Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakoff, Stravinsky, Mussorgsky. He told me all about bi-yearly trips to Moscow, where he would buy 5 or 6 tickets to see the different symphony orchestras perform over a period of two weeks. He was a man on fire, and I was happy to fan the flames. It seemed like a strange coincidence that I would find a ride with someone whose interests so closely aligned with my own, but then I realized that I just have a lot of interests. I probably would have felt just as lucky to find that I was being picked up by a fellow teacher, or a serious reader of books. When you add all of a person’s interests up, it’s probably rare to find two people who don’t have anything in common. Sometimes it just takes some deeper digging. When we arrived in the small town of Bishop, I hesitantly asked him if I could give him any money for his troubles. He told me not to worry about it. He dropped me at a cheap motel and wished me well on my journey. After I settled into my room, I walked down the street and promptly devoured a whole pizza. My most pressing need satisfied, it was time for town chores. Laundry, shower, resupply at a grocery store, pay my credit cards, check my email, figure out the bus schedule to Tuolomne Meadows where I would hike my next leg, and who knows what else I hadn’t thought of. It was overwhelming. I couldn’t figure out what to do first. My decision muscles were out of practice and I was so in tune with my body that the slightest rise in my cortisol felt as if I were in mortal danger. I eventually decided to start with a shower, then laundry. That meant wearing my rain gear in one-hundred degree weather, which turned into a sweaty mess. At the grocery store, I bought every snack that appealed to my hiker hunger, which meant almost every snack I laid eyes on, and gorged myself in the hotel room while I called Lindsey and then tried to tackle my email, bills, and the bus schedule. I discovered that Jim and Danielle, the couple who I had met before Kennedy Meadows and enjoyed chatting with, were also in Bishop. They were a few days behind me on the trail now, but they had hitched north from Independence to take a zero day and resupply in a bigger town. We met for dinner at a small mexican food place. I had gorged myself all day, so I was only able to eat about a third of my burrito, then we all went next door to the movie theater to watch one of the two movies playing: Independence Day: Resurgence. It was a cliched, stupid movie, just like the original Independence Day, but it was a good relief from all the trail chores I still had to do. At some point in the middle of the movie, it occurred to me that I was on a real quest, not just living vicariously through entertainment, and I was filled with gratitude and awe at what my life had become. And that’s how I became the only person to ever cry during Independence Day: Resurgence. After the movie, I walked back to my hotel room alone, took another shower (I still couldn’t get the dirt off of my feet), and restlessly tried to sleep, suffocating in blankets and stuffy air. It surprised me, but I realized I preferred sleeping outside on the ground.
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Nick is a teacher, writer, and amateur adventurer. Archives
June 2020
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