The morning is pure comfort. We wake on soft ground, warm in our bags, cool air in our nostrils, rested and ready to explore the next turns in the trail. We pack quickly and after breakfast we exchange a few words with our neighbors, three girls on a test run for the full PCT who are turning back today, and a guy who met them on trail yesterday and is continuing a section hike. The guy seems primed to get moving but not impatient—a trait I would later recognize as one mark of an experienced long-distance hiker. We start in the other direction, into the town of Mt. Laguna, and within a few steps Lindsey is hobbling in pain. It’s bad, and it looks like she won’t be able to hike any further. I start to work through plans in my head—people I can contact who might be able to give her a ride back to our car, potential solutions. The problem is her right foot, which is in severe pain with every step. I ask her if it’s a problem with her boots, and she doesn’t think so, she says it feels like she has injured the foot itself, the top of the arch. Nonetheless, we decide to try the outfitters store in town. If it’s open. Today is Easter Sunday. We have to wait a bit, but they do open. The store is a shoebox, but they carry a better selection of gear—and more of it—than I’ve ever seen anywhere. We squeeze between floor-to-ceiling racks of outdoor clothing and stacks of assorted tools, some of which I’ve never seen before. An outdoorsy young lady assists us, and quickly sizes up the problem: Lindsey’s boots are a full size too small for her feet. She gets her into a set of trail runners that fit, and like magic, the pain is gone. We purchase the shoes, box up her boots and pay to ship them home, and we are quickly back on the road, headed to the visitor’s center for water. At the visitor’s center, an octogenarian volunteer who walks us out to the faucet on the side of the building and regales us with stories of PCT hikers he’s seen carrying bizarre objects. One of his favorites is a hiker who was training with 50 pounds of barbell weights attached to his pack. The stories are well-worn and the punchlines are timed, but he’s a kindly old man and we are a willing audience. The water makes our packs heavy again, and we walk down the road in search of the trail. Lindsey is amazed at the difference in her foot pain, and I am relieved. A short time later, we are back amidst the trees and I am contemplating erosion patterns. They have long been my favorite metaphor for learning: small branches of information, when developed, run downhill and connect into larger structures of thought and concepts. As you pass over information again, you deepen the knowledge and new branches of inquiry open up naturally. All branches eventually combine into large rivers of knowledge. Yeah, this is the sort of nerdy idea that gets me excited. The view opens up, and we can see several miles of trail wrap around a large chasm. Mt. Laguna is on our right. And then it’s not. As the ridge line comes down to meet the trail, there is a sudden drop-off of several thousand feet. We can see a tiny ranch below, just a few trailers and some hedges. We stop for a snack and yell things to hear the distant echo, but stop sheepishly as a couple of joggers appear on the trail. A long hot exposed section loops around the chasm. It takes hours. A passing southbound hiker stops to complain about his girlfriend and talk about his voracious "hiker hunger". A group of loudmouths passes by and reminds me why I dislike civilization. We hike right past a water source without realizing it. When we get to the next water source, we are running low. It is a circle of cement filled with a sludge of algae and water, at a 60-40 ratio. It’s intended for horses. Disgusting, but it’ll have to do. We fill a cloth bucket that I’ve brought for this purpose, pour from the bucket into my filter bag, and start squeezing clean water into our bottles. The algae is so thick that we have to stop every 2 to 3 fills and clear out the filter. We’re next to a parking lot, so there are plenty of people hiking by in the other direction. They give us strange looks. I figure it’s because they don’t see many PCT hikers and don’t realize that filtering from troughs is part of the experience. It takes us about 40 minutes, but we get 5 liters each of clean water. As I hoist my pack, take a few steps and turn around to wait for Lindsey, I see the reason for the strange looks. Just around the curve of the trough, clearly visible to any hiker coming from the other direction, is a cache of unopened water bottles. The drop-off to the right of the trail has now gotten dangerously steep. We step carefully and brace ourselves against the strong wind that has come up out of nowhere. The trail has become a dirt road along a cliffside, and several memorials cause me to wonder if this is a popular site for suicides. Hiking feels so good, there is so much beauty in the world, that suicide seems impossible to understand today. I promise myself that I can always come back outdoors. We start a gradual downhill section of meandering trail with large boulders scattered about. The drop-off to the right is less pronounced, and layers of mountains replace the desert floor. We look for a campsite that is marked on the map, and meet a hiker named Matt camped there. He shows us a few other campsites that are nearby, but they are all exposed to the wind, so he invites us to camp next to him in the lee of a large rock formation. The three of us shout over the wind while we eat dinner together. There is a wind advisory tonight, he tells us: gusts up to 70mph. He tightens the guy-lines on his tarp (no tent—hardcore!), and we climb into our tent, which whips violently back and forth, to settle in for a scary night.
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Nick is a teacher, writer, and amateur adventurer. Archives
June 2020
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