March 2018 Every summer during college, I drove from Decorah, Iowa to my hometown of Irvine, California, a trip which usually took about 36 hours of non-stop driving to complete (let’s not do the math and just assume I spent a lot of that time speeding). I’d come out on I-80 through Nebraska, cut through Colorado on I-76 and I-70 over the Rocky Mountains, underneath the spectacular night sky of deserted Utah, which I usually crossed in the middle of the night, south on I-15 through a corner of Arizona and Las Vegas, Nevada, and finally into the California desert, until finally I would cross over Cajon pass and the air would change from dry desert heat to cool ocean breezes, and it was as if a rind that had crusted to me over the brutal winter and stiflingly humid summer would just dissolve and fall away. That sigh of relaxation was always the moment when I knew I was home. At the time I had no idea how much more that dividing line would come to feel like home, for it’s at Cajon Pass that the PCT comes down from the mountains and crosses under Interstate 15. I’m currently north of Cajon pass, 112 miles by trail at the town of Agua Dulce, and it feels just as much like home. This winding line that stretches from Mexico to Canada is where I feel most relaxed, most alive. I turn down the road and park my car next to Hiker Heaven, that sanctuary provided by trail angels Donna and Jeff Saufley, and memories come flooding in. A hiker comes out through the gate and walks down the road toward the town. It’s March—too early for a thru-hiker to be this far north. He’ll be at the Sierras in a week, ten days if he really takes his time, and then he’ll have to wait two months for the snows to melt off. Maybe he’s just hiking a section, like me. I go in the gate to track down one of the Saufleys and ask if it’s okay to park my car here for a week. There are five dogs in the yard, all of whom are running around me and barking wildly, and I call out through the open garage, but no one seems to be around. I could wait, but I’m eager to get hiking. I’m sure it will be fine. I leave the way I came. The hike out of Agua Dulce starts with a long road walk, and it quickly reminds me how much I hate road walking. It makes me feel like I can’t walk quite right, and my heavy pack rubs against me uncomfortably. Maybe it's not the road, I worry. Has my body forgotten how to hike? Soon enough I’m on a dirt road, and then a single track turns off at a PCT emblem. From here, I’m headed about sixty miles north to Hikertown, a property just south of the LA Aqueduct and the Tehachapi mountains. This is one of the sections I had to skip in 2016, first because of an extreme heat wave, and later, when I flipped back to make it up, because of the Sand Fire. It has been almost two years since my hike, and though I’ve been on several other backpacking trips in that time, this is my first time back on the PCT. I start through a valley that quickly reminds me how much of California is blessedly undeveloped. My first climb is through classic desert chapparal. The mountains are dry and sandy, barely held together by yucca plants, shrubs, and small grasses. It’s not a textbook definition of wilderness, but it’ll do. Already I can feel myself slipping out of my daily problems and into the bigger picture. The past two years have been a struggle, no denying it. Any beliefs I had that the PCT would change my life were quickly put to rest by reality. My first week back it became clear that my slower pace couldn’t keep up with life around me. As much as I tried to be deliberate and mindful with everything I did, I often found myself in an uncomfortable rush. At a choir rehearsal, I tried to make smalltalk with the people around me, but was surprised at how uncomfortable people became when I paused to consider what they said and how to respond thoughtfully. They would usually find some excuse to turn their attention elsewhere. I found myself surprised by how often people avoided eye contact. When I mentioned that I had just hiked from Mexico to Canada, I was greeted with bored stares. Crowds were the absolute worst. We went to Disneyland for a surprise birthday party for one of my wife’s friends less than a month after I returned home, and at the end of the first hour I was so overstimulated and drained that I nearly broke down. What finally saved me was the open sky and the trees. I spent much of the rest of the day gazing at clouds and watching the trees sway in the wind, and that allowed me to filter out the constant earworms and chatter of a society afraid of its own thoughts. The first crest gives me a view back toward Agua Dulce and the northern reaches of the San Gabriel mountains. I love these little towns, surrounded by wild lands on all sides. It reminds me that civilization is the exception, not the rule, and that I usually don’t have to travel far to be away from it all. The top of this ridge is a little greener, and has a few big cottonwoods for a shade break, where I stop to eat lunch. The other side of the ridge has a little more shade and I make the descent easily, then climb to another ridge and descend again to cross a road. It is a warm day, but not overly so. I am in the desert in March, after all. It’s only afternoon, but I’ve already made my mileage for the day, so I better stop soon. I find a sandy campsite tucked away from the trail by bushy chapparal that provides some shade. I set up camp, then sit and read for a long while. My mind is jumpy, but I manage to get in a few chapters of The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. It’s about a sanitorium in the Swiss Alps where rich Europeans are being treated for tuberculosis (but one gets the feeling that many of the patients, the main character included, do not actually have the disease). The novel is a satiric parable that calls attention to the rot and moral corruption of bourgeois society, but also seems to scold the main character for his cowardly avoidance of the world. In the morning I sleep in as late as I can stand it. It feels good to sleep outside again. I can already feel my mind slowing down, taking in details that I wasn’t able to notice yesterday, like the shape of the breeze and the thickness of the sunlight. My watch says 7:30. I need to take my time; I gave myself 5 days to hike only 63 miles. I linger around camp until 10, when I can’t stand it anymore and pack up to start hiking. When I first came home from the trail, avoidance was my modus operandi. I mourned the trail as if it were a deceased friend, and I wanted nothing more than to find a way to live outside full-time. I looked for a job, but nothing interested me. I refused to go back to teaching and the few outdoor jobs I could find were low-paying and required experience I didn’t have. Switching careers is difficult, I learned—the best paying jobs nearly always require education, training, and experience, and I was trying to move from a career in which I had built up a track record into a career where I was short on all three. To effectively make the switch, I would have to either pay for the education and training, or accept an entry-level job to get the experience. Easy for someone in their early twenties, perhaps, but the tradeoffs I would have to make in my late thirties were too dear. My wife and I had already put off having kids, and we felt woefully behind in saving for retirement. Could I add new debts and another five years before having kids? Some decisions were made easier: shortly after I started my job search, our landlords told us they wanted to move back into the house; we had 60 days to vacate. We already wanted to move back to the SF Bay Area, so we moved in with Lindsey’s parents while I continued my job search. I eventually accepted a job offer to be the executive director of a symphony orchestra in the south bay. It was a part-time position that didn’t come with a lot of money, but it would allow me more freedom. We found a small apartment in Fremont that we could just barely afford and moved in. The first day on the job, I worked with the bookkeeper to get an understanding of our finances, and I was appalled to find that we had $3000 in the bank and a $35,000 payroll coming up in two weeks. I was way over my head. The next, much bigger hit came just a few days after our move, when my dog of 8 years suddenly became sick. We spent a long night at the Animal ER waiting for test results. The veterinarian told us it was a ruptured spleen due to a cluster of tumors. I held my beloved dog and sobbed as we put him down. For the next several months, I had no interest in being part of the world. I did what I could to keep the symphony alive and set them on a better path, but I could see it wasn’t sustainable without major changes, and the board wasn’t ready to make them. I started looking for another job, but my heart wasn’t in it. My heart wasn’t in anything. I binge-watched episodes of The Office and surfed the internet mindlessly. I drank too much and ate garbage. Anything to distract me from the pain and the claustrophobia of my apartment walls. All I wanted was to get back out into the wild. The only time I felt okay was on the short backpacking trips I was able to wrest away from the world’s hold on me, but from the second I got back in the car, I would dread the return to civilization. Something has to change, I told myself again and again. I can’t continue to live like this. Today’s hike is much the same as yesterday, lots of brush and chapparal, hot weather, sandy trail. But it feels good to walk. Somehow, I can face these memories a little easier with open sky above me and dirt below. I have a view of the Bouquet Reservoir to my left, and an isolated canyon to walk through on my right. I’m all alone out here, with no walls to bind me and no people to conform with. Just me and miles of beautiful trail. In the afternoon I cross a road and stop at the Green Valley Fire Station to refill my water. I sit at a picnic table in a nearby gazebo and eat a late lunch. Casa de Luna, a trail angel’s home and a famous stop for PCT hikers, is just a couple miles down the road in the town of Green Valley. I briefly consider making the side trip since I missed it the first time, but I’d rather be outside. Besides, it’s early season, they might not be set up to take hikers yet, and there probably wouldn’t be any other hikers there anyway. It’s a hot, hard climb up to the ridge after lunch. At the top, there’s cell service, so I call my wife and give her an update. I’ll probably set up camp soon, I tell her. I’ve already done twelve miles. As it turns out, there’s not much in the way of a good campsite for a long while, and I end up hiking into the dark. It’s fine. I can always take my time tomorrow, maybe even take a nap in the shade. I enter a burned area, every tree and bush completely destroyed and only a handful of small plants beginning to regrow. The Powerhouse fire. In 2016, this area was closed, and the PCT diverted along a 12-mile road walk. Temperatures were supposed to reach 115, and possibly even 120 along the road and the water report was reporting a rapidly diminishing trickle among the widely dispersed sources. I had planned to come back a few weeks later when the temperature dropped back to a more reasonable 100 degrees, but then the enormous Sand Fire ruined those plans. The moon is just a few days before full and casts a silver sheen on the crumbly white granite. Black husks stick out of the ground like tombstones, a graveyard memorialized by the bodies of the deceased themselves. A rock turns underfoot and my knee gives a painful twinge. As much as I enjoy hiking long miles, my body is no longer adapted to it—it’s time to find a place to camp. At the bottom of the hill I cross another road and make a short climb to a hilltop. I scan the ground for scorpions with my headlamp, then stretch out my groundcloth and sleeping bag for a nice rest with nothing between me and the stars. I haven’t slept this well in ages. It’s not a continuous sleep, but I wake up rested and free from the general fogginess that has started every day that I woke in a bed. Since I don’t have a tent to climb out of, I decide to stay in my sleeping bag while I make breakfast. From my perch on this hill I can see down to the road and much of the trail. A man and a woman are hiking up without any daypacks, probably locals just out for their morning exercise. They have a border collie with them who comes to say hello and sniff the nearby bushes. Before they get to me there’s a moment where I wonder how they’ll perceive me. Man of the earth or dirtbag? Adventurer or hobo? Their choice will say more about them than about me, but that doesn’t mean I don’t care. It just means that I see the sickness in a society that relegates some people to a less human status. They greet me with a hearty good morning and stop to chat. Definitely an adventurer, then. “Are you thru-hiking?” “Not exactly,” I say. “I’m making up a section that I had to skip when I did my thru-hike a couple years ago.” There’s sometimes a mindset that section hiking is inferior thru-hiking. I don’t believe that, but for some reason I feel the need to qualify myself as a thru-hiker in case its a belief that they have. Status and ego, my oldest friends. You’re never quite gone, are you? The hikers are friendly and interested, and when they leave I find myself enlivened. I just sit and take in the scorched desert for a while, feeling balanced between solitude and society. Even stripped bare, the landscape has a beauty. It will return. Parting ways with temporary friends was once painful. It felt like something was wrong with me, a reminder of loneliness. It’s almost a surprise when I realize that these temporary friendships now enrich my solitude, as my natural solitude enriches my friendships. All friendships are temporary, like everything else in this world, like the fire scars around me, as well as the shrubs and grasses that will eventually cover over these scars. All I can do is enjoy what is here, now, and let it inform what comes next. Time to hit the trail. The morning climb is barren, with little washboard ripples in the dirt where unfettered erosion has begun to take hold. Given time, these ripples will turn to furrows and trenches and dump big volumes of mud and debris below. In the San Gabriel mountains, fires like these have led to the periodic mudslides that destroy parts of Los Angeles every decade or so, but these mountains empty into sparser areas, so even a massive mudslide is unlikely to cause much outcry. The climb brings me up over 5000 ft of elevation and past the burn zone. Creosote, mesquite, and oak provide a brushy landscape, but it’s a dry, exposed hike and the sun is merciless. I stop at the 500-mile marker. Guthooks tells me I’m at mile 501.8. Huh. There’s something that feels good about collecting this mile marker that I missed the first time. More ego? I still haven’t finished the trail up to here, though. There’s that fire closure between Whitewater and Big Bear. Sometime soon. I carry on through a winding labyrinth of shoulder-high brush. What finally got me out of my post-trail depression was a long daily walk. There was a big lake near our house, and when the apartment started to feel too small and my job too overwhelming and all the screens too soul-sucking, I’d go walk around it for an hour or two. There were ducks, Canadian geese, spoonbills, all sorts of birds. And there were trees. Some days I’d just sit on a bench and watch the trees sway in the wind for an hour or more. On my walk back home, I noticed the trees close to my house, and one day I thought, there’s wilderness here too. I had simply failed to notice. There was a dog park, too, and it made me happy to see all those dogs as I walked by. All that love that I had for my dog now had somewhere to go, and that gave me some peace. At first I went out every few days, but when my wife noticed how different it made me, she convinced me it needed to be part of my daily routine. Day by day, I grew to reclaim my sense of control. I can hear people yelling a little ways down the mountain. I stop to see if they’re okay, but it appears they’re just bushwhacking and calling back and forth to one another. I take a break in the shade of a tree and read my book for a long while. My knee is bothering me today. Another backpacker comes by; I think it’s the same guy that was leaving Hiker Heaven when I arrived. We talk for a bit about the upcoming water cisterns and he asks me if I’ve seen another hiker who left Casa de Luna before him. I haven’t, so he pushes on to try to catch up. Shortly after, I follow him down the trail. Temporary friends. I wonder how Roadside is doing. We texted back and forth a few times in the weeks after the trail, but just sort of stopped. He never ended up going to Vegas, he told me, just fell back into old habits sitting at home. It’s so easy to do. I texted him on holidays for a couple of years, and at first he would always text back, but eventually even that stopped. I wonder how he’s doing. I catch up to the other backpacker at the cistern. He’s found his friend, and after I get some water, we all hike to an empty campground nearby. We set up our tents and gather together to eat dinner and get to know one another. Even though I know I’ll never see them after tonight, it’s good to have company. There’s nothing wrong with temporary. It’s all temporary. When I awake, there are two flat spots in the grass where my new friends had been camped. I make breakfast and read my book, just passing the time. The last two days I’ve blown my planned mileage away, unable to sit still for more than an hour or two. Still, an hour or two of sitting gives me time to see the restlessness of my mind: the cravings, the aversions, the delusions and fantasies. The roots of all suffering. Sitting allows me to see them, to recognize them and name them, but it’s the walking that stills them. When I walk, I feel sufficient. I pack up and walk. It seems to me that there’s no reason to force myself to sit longer or walk slower than what feels right. I’ll finish this section a day early, but three days of the right pace is better than four days of the wrong one. The freedom to choose what is most right for me is part of why I come out here, away from the pressures of society. In a way, I realize, backpacking is my meditation practice. I find my stillness, that core of who I am and what I value, by separating myself from society for a time. But the real practice is whether I can hold onto that and live it when I return to the civilized world. It’s not a matter of stubbornly clinging to my freedoms, but of recognizing the freedom in my choice of responsibilities. For much of my life I felt resentment at many of the little jobs that collect as a result of these responsibilities. My thru-hike allowed me to escape from all those little jobs, and the return to society brought them all crashing back. I was unprepared, and it felt like I had lost my freedom. I was serious about bringing that sense of wilderness back into the world, but I found it difficult amongst all of the expectations and daily pressures that built up: emails, meetings, cleaning the house. I saw all of these as independent and separate from the joy-bringing aspects of life: the chance to make a difference in the world, the opportunities to experience the world, the connections to be made with other people (whether short-term temporary friends or long-term temporary friends, because we’re all temporary). During my walks around the lake, I started to notice how all these things are connected. The emails and meetings were intertwined with making a difference in the world. A certain level of cleanliness in the house was intertwined with my mental health, and therefore with my relationships with my wife and other people. The jobs were part of the choice, and therefore, part of the freedom. And here was the best part: I could choose at what level I wanted to engage. I got out of teaching because the high school band director job took up an overwhelming amount of time, but I enjoyed teaching, and I loved the students. I didn’t enjoy my job at the symphony because I felt like the difference I was making was too small compared to the grief of working with people I didn’t like. So I started looking for a job teaching middle school, and pretty soon I found one. A position opened up in the middle of the school year in Napa, and I took it. It was a perfect location: close to Lindsey’s parents; close enough to San Francisco that we could into the city for the culture and the food, but in a small enough community that we weren’t surrounded by track homes or high rises. The job was difficult, but for the first time I felt like the difference I made was commensurate with the time spent. And now I was on spring break, hiking in the desert. That sort of free time, while it wasn’t what attracted me to teaching, was a perk that I had missed over the past year and certainly made it easier to come back. I had returned to a similar job to what I had before the PCT, in a similar community, and yet everything has changed. I feel in control of my life, for the first time. The trail starts a steep descent, and my knee flares up with a sharp pain. I take a long break with my book under some huge Live Oak trees, then try again. It’s still bad, but smaller steps seem to help. Joseph Campbell, the mythology scholar, points out a difference between Japanese and Chinese concepts of freedom. In Chinese, the ideogram represents freedom from social strictures. That is what I was seeking, and yet I was unwilling to destroy the social bonds from which those structures arise. The trail was a reprieve, but like everything in this world, it was only temporary. The Japanese ideogram, on the other hand, represents freedom within the social structure. Given the necessity and inevitability of human interrelatedness, the Japanese ideal of freedom asks us to choose the responsibilities and strictures with our whole heart, in service of those around us. It’s a balancing act I have yet to master, but one that has begun to allow me some freedom from the suffering I have so long felt in society’s clutches. At the same time, it is clear that society is sick. A focus on economic growth and corporate profits above human and environmental well-being is not sustainable. We cannot crack open the crust of the earth for oil and expect that we won’t pay consequences. Even a simple subway sandwich is full of consequences, as I realized in Chester when I tried to think it through from beginning to end. If we pretend that the ingredients appear without human labor and chemical fertilizer, or that the plastics and paper napkins disappear after we are done, we are living in delusion, and we are bound to suffer for it. And so I also live with that responsibility, and try to remember the source and ultimate end of what passes through my hands. I may no longer have freedom in the Chinese sense of the word, but in the Japanese sense perhaps I am freer than ever, for I choose those responsibilities whole-heartedly, free of resentment, free of guilt, and free of delusion. The landscape finally begins to level out onto a flat plain. The Tehachapi mountains loom to the North, and I remember the heat and fatigue I felt when I climbed them two years ago with blister-laden feet. And night-hiking along the LA aqueduct in the basin before it, when I almost got hit by that truck, and the bulls that snorted and stared me down in the night. All that fear, all that pain. It was all so temporary, and now I’m almost surprised to find that I remember it fondly. Maybe not so surprised. Even at the time, I knew it would make a good story some day. As I hike down the last bit of road to my finish line at Hikertown, I give one last look to the field of wild grasses where I once watched a coyote in the sunset and she watched me. I’m filled with a sense of loss, but also a deep love for the moment and the memory. These moments are fleeting, ever-changing, and impossible to hold onto, but if we stay present and pay attention, they are magic. They’re only magic if we pay attention. Afterword I eventually finished the remaining sections of the trail: Seiad Valley to Callahan’s Lodge in the summer of 2018, and Whitewater to Big Bear with my friends James and Konstantin the following January. Eventually I even finished the eight-mile section in Washington between Tunnel Falls and Stevens Pass, where Roadside and I took a side trail. I’m not a purist by any means, I just wanted to see what I had missed. I still send Roadside a Christmas card every year, but I have no idea whether he gets them. Since he lives in Canada, the card doesn’t get returned if he’s moved. I hope he’s doing well. Maybe we’ll connect again some day, but even if we don’t, I’m grateful for his friendship and quiet steadfastness on the trail. In 2019, my wife and I had a beautiful baby girl. I can’t prove it, but I think I am a better parent than I would have been if I had never hiked the PCT. I hope someday she has the opportunity to read this and get to know her father a little better. And Paige, if you want to hike the PCT someday, I would be proud to be your hiking partner. No pressure, though. Thanks for reading, everyone! This is the end.
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October 12, 2016 Mile 2638.7-2650.1 (+9) 20.4 miles “Hey Roadside!” It’s 3:15am, and I haven’t slept for hours. Roadside stopped snoring a few minutes ago and I’ve heard him groan a couple times, so I think he’s probably awake. “Hey!” louder now. “Roadside!” He doesn’t answer. Damn. I was hoping we could start hiking now. I’m not going to be able to sleep anymore. I try to lie on my front, with my arms folded in front of me to try to use the heat of my body to warm them up. I can feel the frozen ground through my sleeping pad, and the down sleeping bag isn’t keeping me warm above either. I roll back onto my side and curl into a ball, but it’s no use. I’ve tried this position several times already and I might as well try to sleep on a slab of ice—every time I relieve one part of my body, another part suffers. Two hours later the alarm goes off and we race as fast as we can to get the blood moving before the icy air can penetrate too deep. I finish first, and as I stamp my feet and blow on my hands I see something moving on the ground. “What is that?” Roadside asks. Each time we move our lights towards it, it scurries off. There is more than one, in fact. Finally he catches a three of them in the beam of his headlamp for a second. Mice! It seems impossible that mice could still be alive and about in this cold, but there they are. In fact, these are the first mice I’ve seen on trail, which is sort of crazy—all of the trail journals I read before I got out here complained about mice from Oregon all the way up to the Canadian border. There were stories of mice climbing up tent strings, running across people’s faces all night, chewing their way through tent walls and sleeping bags to get to food. In some ways, mice were a bigger fear for me than bears, if only because they seemed a more likely and persistent problem, but I never once had to deal with them. It’s like the trail is sending us one last reminder of how varied it can be. “And don’t forget the mice!” Oh well, I’m just grateful they weren't running across my face in the middle of the night. The climb to the pass is fast. At the top we have to tread carefully, as there are layers of smooth ice running across the trail and a long drop into a deep valley right beside us. In a couple weeks when I learn that Sherpa has gone missing in northern Washington, this is the moment I will remember—a simple, unexpected danger that could easily sweep one from the trail. The hike along the ridge is more spectacular for being our last. The starlight that reflects off the ice and snow is so pure that I want to bottle it up and drink it as an elixir. I am hyperaware of every crunch of the trail, every tree and rock, every line and contour of the landscape, the interplay of light and dark, the cut of the air as it moves into my lungs, the heat and cloud of condensation as I expel it back out, the burning and aching in my muscles, the presence of and connection with Roadside, our smallness in the wilderness, on the planet, in the universe. In the early light, white-capped mountains glow against the still-dark western skies. From this ridge I can see the breadth of the cascades spread around us in nearly every direction. The sun rises silver and piercing in a cloudless purple sky. The last sunrise, and somehow we’ve timed it perfectly for the last big view of the trail. The s’mores-flavored pop tart I shove in my mouth for fuel almost doesn’t disgust me. We drop down off the ridge toward and pass Hopkins lake, the final lake before Canada. Sunlight glints off the surface and from a halo of snow and ice around the shore. Impossibly, the lake isn’t frozen over yet. The temperature seems to be dropping precipitously again, dangerously low like it did two days ago. The trail continues down into a valley, and I’m almost jogging now, as much from eagerness as from a desire to get warm. Roadside falls behind and I open up a long stride on the level trail. A few trees lay across the path, just a minor inconvenience to hop or climb over, and then several more at angles across the slope, enough to slow me. It seems like I should be at the border by now. Where is it? I reach some descending switchbacks, and at the first one I can hear people whooping and hollering down below. That has to be the terminus! I didn’t realize that I could hike any faster without running, but I do. Two more switchbacks, and I see PIF, Superstar, and the other two hikers they were with all gathered around the border monument taking photos. “Is that Zigzag?” PIF says when he sees me, “I thought you quit!” “Yeah, I just needed a warm, dry night. There’s no way I could quit that close to the end.” “That’s awesome. You made it!” Roadside shows up a minute later, and we do our own whooping and hollering. Someone hands me the trail register and I try to think of something to write. It’s filled with inspirational quotes and trail reflections, but I can think of nothing to sum up the totality of my experience, so I just write “Zigzag was here.” It’s difficult to move my hand steadily, I’m beginning to shiver so hard. As an afterthought I add “It was cold,” then pass it on to Roadside. Roadside and I each take photos of each other at the monument, and then ask PIF to take some of us together. Roadside stands next to the Canadian flag and I stand next to the American flag, and we try to hold still in the freezing cold while PIF takes several photos. Afro-man and another hiker I haven’t seen come from the north. They tell us they crossed the border yesterday afternoon and now they’re headed back to Hart’s Pass, or maybe even Rainy Pass, to hitch a ride back to Seattle. The rest of us are headed to the Manning Park, nine miles ahead, where there’s a restaurant, lodge, and a free beer for thru-hikers (as well as the nearest road). Nine miles would normally take a little over three hours. I wonder how much faster I can go. We all book it out of there at the same time. I pass everyone in the other group on the uphill, but Superstar passes me as soon as we start the long downhill. I turn a corner onto a dirt road, and I can see a quarter of a mile or more, but she’s already out of sight. Now I know why they call her Superstar. I break into a jog on the downhill, since there’s no reason to save any energy for later. These last nine miles are a strange combination of victory lap and extraneous mileage. I’ve already finished the trail, now I just want to get there already! There’s also an undercurrent of dread—once I finish these last miles, I’m going to have to figure what’s next. Lots of food and hot showers, of course, but then what? I’m scared that I’ll lose what I’ve gained on the trail: stillness, independence, awareness, focus, presence, interconnection, and egolessness, among others. Will I regain the ability to sleep in a bed? Do I even want that? I’m looking forward to watching movies and being around my friends and family again, but I know there will be a tradeoff—in sunsets and sunrises; in bracing cold air and searing sunshine that each ring a bell and say “Wake up! You are alive!”; in the tender soles and blisters and mosquito bites that hone the discipline of mind over body; in the unknown sounds in the night that make me fear for my life and remind me how improbable it is that we are alive at all; in the camaraderie and stolid silence of Roadside, my friend; in the freedom of no goals, no expectations; in the curiosity of “what’s around that turn?”; in the smell of pine and clay and pure water; in the simple repetition of one foot in front of the other and keep going until you’ve crossed an entire country for no other purpose than simply to see it, to be on the earth and be a witness to the land and the trees and the water and the weather. Fuck, I’m gonna miss this. In a clearing on the side of the road, someone has arranged rocks to say “Yay PCTers! You rock!” I’m overcome with goosebumps as it becomes real. I’ve finished. The path levels and widens out and frozen ponds appear on either side. I’m close now, I can feel it. Someone is on the trail ahead—it’s Brian! He meets me and congratulates me, then offers to carry my pack the rest of the way. He tells me Superstar just passed through here a few minutes ago. Roadside gets to the restaurant just a few minutes after us, and PIF’s group a few minutes after that, and we all sit together at a long wood table and drink our beer while we wait for our food to come. There’s no one else in the restaurant except the bartender, and somehow that feels right for us. We celebrate in a subdued, personal manner, talking quietly about our favorite places and our plans for our first meal at home. So many thru-hikers have come through here, and there will be so many more after us, but right now it’s just us, in a sort of halfway house between the trail and civilization, trying to get our bearings and decide what’s next. The Greyhound bus comes in the middle of the night, headed for Vancouver and then Seattle. Roadside is headed toward Alberta, in the opposite direction. I wished him farewell earlier in the evening and promised to stay in touch, but it feels like something is missing without him here. As we climb aboard and settle into the seats I notice an old familiar feeling as I wonder about my life ahead and ask myself “What’s around the next corner?” This is not quite the end! Over the past four years I've completed all of the sections I had to skip due to fire closure. I should have those up soon. If you'd like to be updated when they come out, you can head over to my new (incomplete) website to sign up for my email list. I send one email per week, usually on Saturdays. October 11, 2016 Mile 2619.5-2638.7 19.2 Miles We’re in a car with a nice old gentleman who just left the dentist’s office. When I woke up this morning, I knew I had to get back out here. A good night’s sleep, dry clothes, and a good meal was all it took. At breakfast, Roadside asked “Are you sure you want to quit? We’re so close to the end,” and when I told him no, I didn’t want to quit, it felt like I had narrowly missed a death sentence. Well, not quite. We still have a storm coming in tomorrow, and we still have to find a ride to a remote trailhead up a narrow dirt road on a Tuesday. The nice old gentleman has promised us a ride to the turnoff, no farther. “I can’t take you all the way,” he says. He doesn’t want to take this car up the dirt road. He calls his wife to tell her he’s giving some hikers a ride. “I’m only taking them to the turnoff,” he says, “they’ll have to find a ride or walk up from there.” I’m hopeful we can find a ride. The road was long and will add a lot of miles onto our trip. At Mazama we pick up another hiker. “I can’t take you all the way,” the old man says, “I’m only going to the turnoff.” As an afterthought he asks “how’s the condition of the road, anyway?” All three of us agree that it was clear, just a few small rocks here and there. “Well, I can’t take you all the way,” he repeats. He takes us all the way. The top of the mountain is still freezing cold. But I’ve rested, eaten, my clothes are all dry, and I’ve had coffee. I’m unstoppable now. And I’m so, so glad to be back. The path is level despite the huge variations in elevation around us. It clings to the side of a steep slope—mountain on the right, valley on the left—and very gradually works its way uphill as it cuts around the mountain. In the Sierra or the Trinity Alps, protrusions of the granite batholith would force a sudden uphill or downhill. Unexpected variations in topography and scenery are part of what makes those mountains exciting. Here, though, it seems there are no rocky knobs or granite cliffs to interrupt the steady climb, only grasses, trees, and sweeping views. I hadn’t noticed until now, but even the huckleberry bushes are gone. In a human being, I would associate this steady, dignified terrain with maturity, and the variegated jumble of the Sierra with youth. In mountains, it’s hard to know which is older. Perhaps the steady, persistent rain and snow has worn the rock down to soil here and mostly left it, whereas sudden and sporadic storms washed the Sierra down to the rock and left it intact. Or maybe more recent and regular volcanic activity in the north has covered the mountainsides in smooth layers of ash. I would have to ask a geologist, or google, but neither is available right now and I’m sort of glad for it. My only choice is to wonder, to stay with my curiosity and uncertainty. There’s something to that, I realize. I have been so focused on trying to get everything right—What career am I going to take on when I get back from the trail? When’s the best time to start a family? Should my money go toward saving for a house or saving for retirement? Will my next job even make me enough money to save?—that I haven’t left space for curiosity and uncertainty. Yesterday, it seemed like I had only one decision: try to finish my hike or quit. I made the safe choice, and the finality of it was a blow. But it wasn’t final. There was another possibility that I didn’t even see, which was that I could return to the trail. Here I am. If I had closed myself off to curiosity and uncertainty, Roadside and I would never have put ourselves on the curb with our thumbs out to see if we could find a ride. It was so improbable. If we had waited for a driver who said he could take us all the way, we might still be waiting. I remember the nervousness I felt about hitchhiking before the start of this hike. What if I don’t get a ride? What if I get kidnapped and murdered? If I had required certainty, I might not have ever begun. The truth is, we all deal with a range of uncertainty in our everyday activities. We can try to narrow that range, and that can give us more confidence in the outcome, but it closes off possibility. Opening ourselves to possibility also opens us to risk, but we can mitigate risk if we can learn to improvise, and that only happens by putting ourselves in the way of manageable risks on a regular basis. It’s like a muscle that we have to flex or it atrophies. My hike has been filled with surprises, and each of them has allowed me to learn the shape of my limits. Southern California taught me about heat and my capacity for pain; the Sierra taught me endurance and patience; Northern California taught me loneliness; Oregon taught me hunger; Washington, it seems, is here to teach me about cold. I’ve also learned about solitude (which is different than loneliness), and stillness, and fear, and the enormous human capacity for generosity, and ego and status and community. I’ve looked at the systems that shape our world and it appears that many of them—the economic and political systems in particular—are there to remove uncertainty. They come from a mindset of scarcity: If I don’t develop this, harvest this, mine this, then someone else will. But I see possibilities that I couldn’t have seen before this hike. I see possibilities for a world where we live with less impact and more connection, where we live with less control but more responsibility, where we open ourselves to new ways of thinking and behaving so that our descendants have access to these magnificent lands, intact and thriving. I stop for lunch at a pass between two valleys. One of my snack bars is frozen so hard that it nearly pulls out my teeth. Roadside is only a minute behind. I’m happy he’s here with me. “I sure am gonna miss this,” I say. “What, the cold?” “No, the cold can go to hell,” I laugh. “The mountains, the valleys, the open space. When I get home I’m going to have to get a job, and I’ll probably have to spend most of my time inside. Maybe I’ll try to get a job outside.” I will try. Most of them will pay too little for me to seriously consider. We keep our lunch short—it’s too cold to go sitting around for long. In the afternoon we pass streams dripping with icicles, patches of ice running across the trail, and a single Yurt, unattached to any road. The hiker who rode up with us told us that this was put up by some skiers who get airdropped here in the winter and spend a few days at a time. We pass from valley to valley, a series of drainages that must all drain to the sea, but seem as jumbled and directionless as a funnelcake. By early evening we come across a campsite in a copse of trees and although we aren’t stopping, it occurs to me that this will be our last night on trail. I am completely ready to be done with the cold, but also completely unprepared to go back to civilized life. I have two choices now: I can start to prepare myself for civilized life by planning and thinking about something that is essentially unknowable, or I can spend my last hours on the trail immersing myself in the beauty of the Northern Cascades. It’s an easy choice, and yet it’s one that the old me would have had trouble achieving the type of presence that allows me to choose it. For months I’ve been practicing: stay here, in the moment. Focus on the grand peaks, the smell of cold earth, the unrelenting rhythmic pressure on the soles of your feet, the stir of the grasses.
We climb up over a pass into another grand basin. Switchbacks cut down, the trail passes underneath the cliff of a peak on our left, then switchbacks back up. We are coming near the end of our day, and it’s time to look for a campsite. One has two hikers huddled around a campfire. The next is empty, but the map tells us there’s one more right under the pass, a quarter mile ahead. Up there will have a better view, and we won’t have to climb as far in the morning. We reach it just as the sun drops, and find that a hiker and his one tent have taken the two spots. He offers to move over for us, but it’s too small to fit both of us. We go to the top of the pass to see if there are more sites on the other side, but the trail hugs a cliff for as far as we can see. We drop back down to the lower site and set up camp in the dusk. It’s a simple dusk, bereft of clouds but filled with subtle shades of blue. It’s a truth known to those who spend long stretches of days outside that no two dusks are the same, and all are spectacular. A mundane dusk is really just a mind that is insufficiently still. A sky has tone and timbre, and divulges information beyond rational understanding. It’s a simple dusk, but it’s sublime, and it’s ours. Dinner is so hot it burns my tongue, and cold again before I’ve finished half of it. Cleanup takes forever. My hands are aching. It doesn’t matter. Every bite, every scrape of the pot, every moment of pain is sacred. This is the last night. This is the last night. When we climb into our tents for the last time, the stars are blurry in my eyes. Whatever sadness I feel is overmatched by gratitude. 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. October 9, 2016 Mile 2577.2-2592.4 15.2 Miles The rain continues in waves all morning, but the breaks get longer. By 5:30am when the alarm goes off, we’ve even gotten a couple of forty-minute rests. But it’s raining when the alarm goes off, and I decide we’re going to sleep for another hour. When it gets light around 6:30 I wake the others. We have to get moving now. “My stuff’s all wet,” Brian objects. “Mine too,” I say. “We’ll stop and dry it out when we get some sun.” If we wait until conditions are better, we’ll never finish this trail. And now it’s time to put my cold, wet clothes back on. I yelp and whoop and howl as I put on my sodden, mildewy, and ice-cold shirt. I can’t help it. With Roadside and Brian making similar noises, we sound like a pack of hyenas. We pack up under dripping trees, grateful for the break in the rain but still miserable. We try to force cold, stiff muscles into action, but all they want to do is shiver. My hands and feet throb with pain. Eventually we get everything packed up and set off through the dripping trees. I try to stay back with Brian and Roadside—Brian has traveled from Southern California to hike with us—but I can’t get warm and I have to hike at my own pace. I’ll wait for them when I can find some sun. I pass the couple that rode the shuttle with us. They must have stayed at the other campsite and left early. A half hour later I arrive at a river roaring down a steep slope on the left. It calms just before it meets the trail, but it’s wide and I can see no way to cross it without getting my feet wet. There are rocks protruding, though, so maybe I can find a way. I look and look for almost ten minutes, to no avail, when the couple catches up. Now the three of us are looking for a way across. I still can’t find anything, so I decide to just get my feet wet again. I briefly consider taking off my shoes and socks, but I know that’ll be painfully cold and one step on a sharp rock could spill me into the river, causing much bigger problems. Besides, my wool socks can trap the cold water and warm it up like a wetsuit, right? I leave my shoes on and plunge in to mid-calf. The water is even colder than I expected. By the time I’ve taken five steps, I’m worried about frostbite, but there’s nothing for it now, I’m committed. I keep walking, fifteen, twenty steps. The cold pain seeps into my feet further than I could have imagined. It’s so bad that it’s causing a headache. It’s about forty steps across the wide ford, and then I’m out with relief. I look back to see the couple taking off their shoes and Roadside and Brian come around the corner. I wave across at them, but I can’t stop now, I need to get blood back into my feet. I know Roadside won’t take it personally, but I hope Brian doesn’t feel like I’m ditching him. The first steps on dry land are unimaginably painful. Every step sends steel spikes through my feet. I stifle a shout, hold back tears. As the blood comes back into my tissues and warms them, they start to feel better. But they are still cold and wet. I wonder if it would have been better if I had taken off my shoes. A little while later I find a small patch of sun. It’s not enough to dry out gear, but it’s enough to warm myself and wait for Brian and Roadside. I yank off my pack and dig out my bag of pastries. I peer inside. Just a cinnamon roll. I peel the plastic wrap back halfway. Just halfway, I think, just half today. I sink my teeth deep into the sticky, doughy goodness. Oh god. This is so delicious. The sour taste of bread, the gooey glops and crunchy crusts of spiced sugar that sates that fathomless and piercing hunger. Chew slowly, I think, eat mindfully. Try to savor the moment and enjoy it fully but oh god it’s so good. Oh god it’s so good and I just need another bite and another and I’m swallowing big hunks of it before I can even finish chewing. Wait. Wait! Don’t eat it all. Let’s save some for tomorrow. Half. Half today, half tomorrow. It will be so good tomorrow, but one more bite first. One more bite and then I’ll be done and one more bite again because I’m still so goddamn hungry and there’s no way it could be this good tomorrow and why not? Why not just eat the whole thing it might be stale tomorrow and it’s so good today and there’s only what— three?—two? more bites and then it’s gone. Gone. I should have bought two. With a sigh I ball up the plastic wrap. Then—with a self-conscious look back up the trail—I unwrap it again and lick the remnant icing clean. I stand around for a long stretch. Ten, fifteen minutes? It’s hard to tell in the stillness. Where the hell are they? I’m getting cold again despite the sunlight. Everything is still damp, except for my feet which are full-out wet, and I’m antsy. There’s a road crossing a few miles ahead. I’ll wait for them there. I cross a log bridge and then the trail turns west, parallel to a highway. A side trail goes out to the highway and a parking lot, but my trail continues west for another mile and a half to a different parking lot. Someone has left an unopened can of Mountain Dew near a bulletin board, but more sugar right now would probably cause me to spontaneously combust. I leave it for another hiker. Hand-scrawled notes to different hikers are posted on the board: you’re almost there, congrats on your accomplishment, we’ll meet you at the pass. I turn and stride uphill toward Rainy Pass. The pass is marked by two parking lots, one on each side of the road. I cross to the northern side and an asian family in a van stops me to ask if I’ve seen an asian hiker. I haven’t, not anytime recently. They thank me for the information and give me an orange. Clouds hang low over the pass, but the parking lot itself is in sunlight. I sit next to a low wall, unpack all of my damp gear, and stretch it all out like meat for curing. The sun comes and goes, but it’s never strong. I’m especially worried about my thermals, which I put on while I was still damp last night. If they don’t dry out now, I will have another cold night. I eat lunch, and then I wait. I wait for an hour and a half. I wait until I can’t stand it anymore, and I finally walk down to the other end of the parking lot, down near the road. Maybe they’re taking a lunch break too, and just didn’t come this far. A couple of day-hikers come from that direction, returning to their cars. I ask them if they’ve seen any hikers coming that way, but they haven’t. I go back to my pack to wait some more. A minute later a car drives up. “Hey, your friends are at the other lot!” It’s the dayhikers I just met. I thank them and then jog down and across the street. Roadside is there, but not Brian. He’s drying some of his stuff, but he packs up and we walk back up to where my stuff is. “Have you seen Brian?” “Yeah, he was just a little ways behind me. He was having trouble with his belt. I’m sure he’ll be here in a few minutes.” Roadside unpacks his stuff next to mine. Between the two of us, we’ve covered as much open space as half a basketball court. The sun is still spotty, but some of my gear has started to dry out. We wait for another hour with no sign of Brian. “I’m gonna go back and look for him. Can you wait with the stuff?” “Yeah, sure.” “Where did you last see him?” “At that log bridge.” Crap, that’s like three miles back. That shouldn’t have taken him much more than an hour. “I hope he’s not injured.” I’m worried that he’s badly injured. Even if he had a sprained ankle, he would have likely hobbled his way to a parking lot by now or let another hiker know. Without my pack, it’s really easy to move. I jog down the trail and cover the distance to the junction with the bulletin board in less than a half hour. No sign of him. I decide to go check the other trailhead. If he was injured, he might have gone out there to look for a ride. No luck. I jog back, then down the rest of the way to the bridge. Still no luck. He’s gone, without a trace. On the way back, I stop to scan the bulletin board. If he bailed here, maybe he left a note. I don’t see anything new at first, but then in the top corner of one of the handwritten notes, I find a small message with three stars around it. “pls tell zigzag that I had to bail. will meet at final terminus. -Brian” Relief. At least I know he’s safe, although I still don’t know whether he’s injured. I decide to go back up along the road. A young man with a bobble-head Jesus on his dash picks me up almost immediately and drives me back up to Roadside. I tell him about the note. I’m bummed that Brian won’t be able to finish with us, but it’s a relief in a way; he wasn’t prepared for the weather or the pace.
A trail angel brought Roadside a bag of bananas, oranges, and cokes while he waited. It’s way too much for the two of us, but we drink a couple cokes and have a couple pieces of fruit each before we go. Roadside wants to take it easy this afternoon and I agree even though I’m dying to bite off more miles. We start our climb away from Rainy Pass, up toward Cutthroat Pass. Though there have been tons of dayhikers passing through here all day, they’ve mostly gone home. The few hikers we see are on their way back down. We climb up into a large basin and find a place to camp among the huckleberry bushes near a brook. The mountains create a frosted bowl all around us. Tomorrow, we’ll climb over those. We set out our gear to try to dry it out, but it’s too cold and my longjohns are frozen stiff by the time I climb into them. I get my hands wet pumping water and it takes all of dinner to warm them up again. It starts to rain, and we climb into our tents before dark. Tomorrow, we’ll climb over those mountains. Only a few more days of this cold. God, I hope it doesn’t storm again before then. October 8, 2016 Mile 2569.4-2577.2 7.8 Miles I wake to the patter of rain on my tent. While I wait for the others to wake, I read my book. Eventually I hear some stirring, and Roadside and Afro-Man talking to one another. They’re still in their tents. A third voice speaks up, from the unknown tent, but I can’t understand what he says. Then Roadside says “Zigzag? Yeah, he’s here.” I can’t believe it. I look out of my tent and see Brian’s head sticking out of the other tent. “Hey buddy,” he grins. I can’t believe it. In this big campground, we camped in the same site as Brian. I’m curious why he didn’t hear us talking last night and say something. The answer, it turns out, is that he wasn’t here. He met Hat Trick’s dad last night, and stayed up late partying in their room with a group of PCT hikers who I haven’t met yet. The four of us head to breakfast and leave our packs in our tents. The rain has been a steady pour all morning. The restaurant is warm, dry, and nearly full. We pile into a booth at the back and order coffee. Everyone except Brian orders two full breakfasts, but the waitress doesn’t blink an eye. Brian tells us about some of the other hikers. He can’t remember all of their names, but he tells me Superstar reminds me of Lindsey, my wife (when he points her out walking in front of the restaurant later, I don’t see much resemblance, but I guess there are enough similarities there that I can see why he does). Then he says one of the other names was PIF. Roadside and I both perk up. We haven’t seen PIF since Oregon! After breakfast we pack up and find the laundry machines in a small room with concrete walls painted yellow. Afro-Man heads off somewhere else, so it’s just the three of us. We climb into our rain gear and throw our clothes into the wash. It’s freezing outside, so Roadside and I want the door closed. We probably smell terrible, and it’s warm in the room, so Brian wants the door open. Roadside and I have gotten so used to being cold by this point that we relent and let him keep the door open.
Brian seems stir-crazy. He keeps walking outside to look around and coming back in to see if we’ve made any progress. I can see the drive toward action that hasn’t released yet, and it reminds me of how much slower life moves on the trail. Roadside and I aren’t really talking. We’re both in our own thoughts. For a while I stand in the corner and read my book, but mostly I just let my mind wander freely. Eventually the laundry gets done, and then we have a walk to the Post Office to pick up my resupply. The postal clerk is a young lady, and it strikes me that nearly everyone we’ve interacted with in the town so far has been a young lady. A young lady at the visitor’s center gave us directions to the campground last night, a young lady served us breakfast this morning, and now a young lady is working in the post office. They’ve also been unfailingly kind and pleasant. I’ve seen men and older women around, but I think they’ve all been tourists. Roadside didn’t send himself a resupply here, so we head back over to the store, which is close to where the shuttle will pick us up. Unfortunately, there isn’t much food left in the store. The clerk—also a young woman—explains to us that they usually clear out their inventory at the end of September because they don't have many hikers coming through after that. Roadside grabs what little he can and we head off to the shuttle. It turns out this shuttle doesn’t usually stop at the bakery, but the driver (a male!) has no problem stopping for us. The bakery is famous along the PCT. We stop and fill big paper bags with pastries, giant cinnamon rolls, slices of pizza and pie, tarts, bars, and sweet concoctions that don’t seem to fit any category of food. This is part lunch, part resupply. By the time we have everything and exit the bakery, it’s pouring rain. We hurry back on the shuttle bus and gorge ourselves. I am a skeleton. Where Roadside’s large shirt used to cover his belly, it now hangs nearly to his knees. Inside me, the food hits a vacuum and dissipates without an effect. “Fatties,” says Brian. The rain rolls down the windows in thick branches. The drops aren’t large, there just isn’t any space between them. It sounds as if someone is pouring an endless supply of rice onto the roof. The low points on either side of the road have already formed pools and streams. We get out our rain gear and prepare. Brian’s jacket doesn’t look waterproof or even water resistant. It has baffles like a down puffy, though I suspect it’s a synthetic fill. It looks porous, not like the slicks that Roadside and I are wearing. I’m seriously worried that he isn’t prepared for this hike. I think back to a phone conversation we had a few weeks ago. “We’re hiking fast now,” I said, “Make sure you’re in shape for it.” “I’ve been out for a couple hikes. I did fifteen miles last weekend.” “We’re doing 25 to 30 miles a day now. It’s almost winter. We can’t slow down and wait for you.” “Yeah.” “If it’s raining, we’ll have to keep going.” When we hiked the John Muir Trail together eight years ago, Brian wanted to stop every time it rained. “Yeah, I know.” That was a long time ago, I thought. Maybe he’s become more comfortable with rain. Now, though, I’m less worried about his comfort and more worried about his safety. In this cold weather, rain is no joke. I’m worried about his other preparations, too. At breakfast this morning, he told me that he forgot his tent poles, so he had to buy a new tent. They didn’t have one in Stehekin, so they had to order one from a store on the other end of the lake in Chelan and fly it in by seaplane. The plane was already coming out, but still, I don’t want to know how much that cost him. It turned out to be a child-sized tent, too small for him to fully extend his legs. That’s the tent that he has to sleep in for the next few days. There’s something else that worries me, too. If he can’t keep up and I have to leave him behind, will he understand? I wouldn’t leave him in danger, of course, but I might have to tell him to bail at a road crossing, or he might have to turn around and go back on his own. Maybe I’m just worrying too much. Maybe his jacket really is waterproof, maybe he’s ready to do thirty-mile days, maybe the tent poles were just a fluke. The shuttle arrives and we step out into the pouring rain. Another couple steps out with their backpacks and heads up the dirt road. I pull on my hood and lead the way to the trail. We pass by the green ranger house. A short climb brings us to a lake, fuzzy with rain and partially obscured in mists. This view is something I would never have seen if we had waited for the rain to stop. How much do we miss by protecting ourselves from discomfort? As we hike through the forest, I think about other discomforts that I avoid, and what opportunities I might have lost from that habit. Difficult conversations that could lead to greater understanding; emotional risks that could lead to new friendships or roles. If suffering is a universal human condition, willingness to suffer for larger benefits is where our human wisdom lays. Water starts to run down my back. I’m not sure if it’s a leak in my rain jacket or if it’s just so persistent that it’s getting in through the front of the hood. After a minute it becomes clear that it’s a leak; the rain is rolling off the top of my backpack, straight into my jacket somewhere. The trail is just a stream now. In some places water is pouring down hillsides where there is no channel for it. It looks like creeks have spilled their banks and are just flowing willy-nilly down the sides of the mountains. One of these streamless rapids comes crashing through the trees on the right, making a whitewater channel out of the trail. I step up and around it onto a muddy embankment on the left, and my foot goes out from under me. I fall back into the channel, catch my foot on the bottom, crash to my knee and spin sideways into the water. I’m up almost as fast, but it’s too late. The water has rushed in through my rain pants, through the sleeve and waistband of my jacket, and I’m soaked through. Luckily, the water isn’t too cold and it warms up quickly as I hike on. There’s not much I can do about it, so I dwell on it as little as possible. All my clothes are synthetics, so they will continue to insulate. After the initial shock and fear for my safety are over, I actually come to enjoy the adventure of it all. We come to a campground with a lot of tents, but it’s too early to camp. The next site is three miles ahead—the forest here is too thick to camp anywhere besides the established campsites, and there are strict rules about that here. I wait for Roadside and Brian, who aren’t far behind, then we hike together out of the campground and into the woods. The rain doesn’t let up for a second. We stay together for a while, but with my head down and the noise of the rain, I eventually get ahead again. A small bridge lets me know that I’ve reached the turnoff to the second campsite. This is where we had planned to camp, but a paper sign in a plastic protector says that there has been recent bear activity here. When Brian and Roadside show up, I explain our options. We can camp here and hope for the best, or we can hike six more miles in the rain to the next campsite, which would force us to set up after dark. I point out that there’s no guarantee that the next campsite won’t have the same sign posted. They don’t seem happy with either option, but nobody wants to keep hiking in the rain. We’re all soaked, but Brian looks particularly miserable. We climb the small hill to the campsite. Two tiers, each with barely enough room for three tents, are stacked on the hillside next to a swollen creek. Roadside and Brian are both complaining about the quality of the sites—they’re sloped and wet—and it starts to sound like they blame me for choosing a shitty site. “What do you want to do?” I snap. “Do you want to keep going?” I’m not thrilled about the situation either, but I don’t see what else we can do. “No,” Roadside mumbles. We set up close together on the bottom tier: Me, Brian, Roadside. We eat cold dinners (it’s too wet to cook outside, too dangerous to cook inside the tent). I change into my only dry clothes—my thermals and my short-sleeve shirt, and shiver in my sleeping bag. The rain hits so hard that it splashes up under my tent flaps and spritzes me in the face. Every noise sounds like a bear, come for our food. Around 11pm, there’s a break in the rain. I finally drift into sleep. Twenty minutes later, a deluge pounds down and wakes us. It lasts for about twenty minutes, then passes on. I fall back asleep, only to be woken again twenty minutes later by another deluge. The pattern continues for the rest of the night. I cannot get warm. October 7, 2016 Mile 2540.7-2569.4 28.7 miles 5:30am comes too soon. A headache and achy muscles hit my snooze button for me before I can muster the will to argue. Maybe it’ll give Roadside a chance to catch up. Ten minutes later I have to get moving. Twenty-nine miles left until Stehekin, food, maybe a warm bed. This is a lot of big days in a row, but these rainstorms are going to turn to snowstorms soon. I’d rather be at the border before that happens. The trail follows the river east for a mile or so, then turns north again to follow Miner’s Creek. It’s still dark, and I’m disappointed I never got to see the Suiattle River. Another spot I’ll have to come visit again. The sun comes up, but before long a fog sets in again. The ground is dusted with fresh snow in places. It has stuck to the vegetation on either side of the trail, but the trail itself is clear. I stop for breakfast earlier than usual; I’m still beat from yesterday. Before I’ve finished taking out my stuff, Roadside shows up. “You caught up!” “I thought you were long gone.” “I was going to hike through the night and try to get to Stehekin, but then I got too tired. Where did you camp?” “I thought you might do that. About a mile after the bridge. I kept calling out to you along the way. I was afraid I might pass you.” “You must’ve been within a quarter mile of me. I’m surprised I didn’t hear you.” I pause, and realize that he needs to know I wasn’t trying to ditch him. “Well I’m glad you’re here. I was a little afraid you’d camp early and not be able to make it to town today.” We start off again into dramatic landscapes: tall, rock-walled basins dusted with snow and partly obscured with fog and mists. I pull ahead again, into a lush valley. The weather warms up a bit but the constant drizzle continues on and off. In the afternoon I meet a hiker named Hat Trick who offers me some pot. I decline. I don’t want to slow down and miss the shuttle into Stehekin. It only comes two times a day this late in the season: once at 7am and once at 7pm. And the road isn’t connected to any other roads, so it’s extremely unlikely that anyone else would come through. If I get there even 5 minutes late, I’ll have to wait until the next morning, and then I won’t be able to get out again until the next night. I can’t afford to add a day to my trip right now. I come to a wide creek. I don’t want to get my feet wet in this cold, so I look for a good place to cross. The best I can see from here is a narrow fallen tree just downstream. I have to climb some boulders to get on top of it, and it bows and bounces under every step, but I make it safely across. I pull off my rain gloves to check my map and see if I still have a chance to make it to the shuttle stop in time. Still too close to call. It’s stopped raining, so I shove the gloves in a pocket. A quarter mile later it starts to rain lightly again. I go to pull on my rain gloves, but one of them is missing. I’ve got to turn around. It might make me late for the shuttle, but judging by Washington’s weather so far, I’m going to need them. If my hands get soaked on a day with cold like yesterday, I’m in real trouble. I find it sitting on the ground right where I stopped. Less than a mile later I run into my friends Jim and Danielle—now Slick and River Pants—stopped by the side of the trail. I can’t believe I’ve caught up to them! Last time I saw them was back in Kennedy Meadows South, when we spent the day drinking beer in front of the general store. That was before I skipped back to hike the Mojave desert and before the ten-day stretch when my wife joined me in the Sierra and we only did 10-15 miles a day, and before I took a whole week off from the trail. I didn’t figure there was any chance I would see them again. I was in a hurry just a minute ago, but now I have to stop and talk. I ask them about their hike. It seems like maybe I’ve stumbled in at a bad time, because they both seem like their minds are somewhere else. Roadside comes up a minute later, and I introduce them. They are polite and cordial, but it seems like they’re in the middle of trying to solve a big problem and are having trouble switching their focus back to the present. I feel the press of time, so I ask them whether they are going into Stehekin—maybe we can meet up and talk more there. They aren’t. They plan to continue one more day’s hike to Rainy Pass and hitch into Mazama to resupply. I tell them I hope I run into them again between here and the border. I won’t. Roadside and I have to continue on and try to get into town tonight. I’m flying as fast as I can the last few miles to the shuttle stop. It doesn’t matter. I arrive fifteen minutes too late.
Hat Trick catches up just as I reach the dirt road. He has vitality, an audaciousness that seems to say “you’re my friend now, but it has absolutely nothing to do with you.” We go the wrong way first, to a little campground area about a hundred yards away. I’m going to set up camp and wait for Roadside there, but Hat Trick goes the other direction to check at the shuttle stop. A minute later I hear him whooping and hollering from down the hill. I can’t make out what he’s saying, but I grab my gear and head down there, hopeful the shuttle is waiting for us. He’s standing in the rain with two other hikers next to a shuttered, pale green house that serves as the ranger station. There’s no shuttle. Hat Trick says his dad left him a note—he’s coming to pick him up later. I try not to let myself get excited—there are four of us, plus Roadside if he shows up soon, and the chances of us all squeezing into a car are slim. Roadside does show up, and a couple minutes later a pickup truck arrives with Hat Trick’s dad riding shotgun. The reunion of dad and son is full of enthusiastic whooping and shouting, like southern frat boys at a party. It’s fun and infectious, and we all pile into the bed of the truck feeling like we’ve just joined the party. Even the rain can’t dampen our spirits. The road to Stehekin is seven miles long and as I mentioned before, unconnected to other roads. The town is at the north end of Lake Chelan, a narrow, fifty-mile lake, and can only be accessed by foot, pack animal, plane, or ferry. The ride back to town is full of colorful language, mostly from Hat Trick—“I would suck a dog dick for a good meal right now.”—and Afro-man—“I’d lick a cat’s nipples and swallow the hair.” They keep trying to top each other with bad taste and we’re all laughing as we fly down the narrow road. The wind and rain are painfully cold, but the promise of town is just too good. We stop once, to pick up a section hiker who was hiking into town. He’s in his fifties and wants to know everything about our trip. It makes us feel like celebrities, and we’re all throwing in our two cents and nodding agreement at each other. We’re filled with a sense of celebrity, appreciated for this hard thing that we’re doing. Hat Trick and Afro Man make no attempt to tone down the shock factor, and at first the man is surprised but he quickly falls under their spell and laughs along. We arrive in town in the dark and pile out as friends. The lodge is full, the restaurant is closed. Those who had reservations depart from those of us who do not, and Roadside, Afro-Man, and I make our way up to the campground. With no cell service, I don’t have much hope of finding Brian tonight, though I’m sure he’s around here somewhere. The first campsite we find is spacious and has only one tent; no one answers when we call out, so we set up a short distance away and hope they won’t mind. During dinner, Afro-Man regales us with detailed descriptions of his bowel movements over the last several months. “Dude, we’re eating!” I laugh. He laughs too, and then amps up the detail. A nearby campsite has a pop-up canopy, bright lights, and a small party of women talking and laughing. We briefly talk about going up to see if we can join in the fun, but I’m exhausted from the constant cold and rain and all I want to do is climb into my dry longjohns and go to bed. Roadside and Afro-Man come to the same conclusion. October 6, 2016 Mile 2508.1-2540.7 32.6 miles White Chuck, Baekus, Chetwot, Sitkum, Kennedy, Glacier, Pumice: the named creeks and rivers stack their wild beauty one against the other until I am at maximum capacity and can hold no more. When I reach Fire Creek, I have to search for a while to find a place where I can cross without getting my feet wet. Wet feet in this freezing cold would be dangerous. I stop for breakfast after a big climb up Fire Creek Pass, at a campsite protected on the downslope side by a thick boscage of conifers. The wind slices through anyway, gently but persistently cutting to the bone. By the time I’ve pulled my breakfast out of my pack I’m already shivering. The sparker on my Jetboil won’t light, and my thumb is too cold to flick the lighter. I do, eventually, and the oatmeal, when it’s ready, is a hot sugary glop that tastes like paste but warms me up a little at first. I drop some Peanut M&Ms in to give it some variety. By the time I’m halfway through, it’s already gone cold from that merciless slow wind. It cuts through my gloves, it cuts through my shoes and socks. It can’t get through my down jacket, but it knows exactly where the baffles end, and it meets me there. My hand clutches the spoon with a dumb fist, unable to clench or unclench. My feet throb with an almost incapacitating pain. Roadside shows up as I’m finishing breakfast. He waits for me to pack up, but doesn’t want to stop for breakfast himself. It’s too damn cold, he says. He’ll just eat some bars. As I start to move, I have a moment of overwhelming pain as blood comes back to my feet—it feels like a stubbed toe, but all over the foot up to the ankle—then relief. My hands stay cold. We descend to Milk Creek. A light drizzle begins. I’m actually in disbelief that it’s still warm enough for rain. The trail, already muddy, becomes slick and difficult to climb. Roadside has disappeared from sight somewhere behind me again, and now I’m scrambling along a slope that seems like it must have been neglected for years, it is in such poor condition. I’ve lost the trail. After climbing over piles of logs, somehow I ended up on a game trail. Other hikers did the same thing—I can see their footprints in the mud, which only makes it more like a human trail—but I’m quite sure now that this isn’t the real trail. It’s flat against the slope and petering out. There’s a copse of trees just ahead where I can stop and check my maps. I scramble over the slope to more level ground. Uh oh. The GPS isn’t working. This happened once before, deep in a canyon in the Sierras where my phone couldn’t find a GPS satellite. It was fine then, because I was still on the trail. Now, I’m lost in the wilderness without a map. My gut tells me the trail is uphill. If it were below me, I would have seen it on the open slope. Above me there were trees for a trail to hide in. I decide to give that a shot before I backtrack. I scramble a little ways uphill, climb over a fallen log, and there it is, my heavily trampled, muddy path. I wonder whether Roadside will have the same trouble. A series of muddy switchbacks begin down a steep canyon slope. At the third switchback, the trail is interrupted by a gap of open space fifteen feet across. It looks like the canyon wall simply collapsed and took the trail with it. A frayed yellow rope hangs down from a tree trunk above the gap. Did someone put that there so we can swing across?! I doubt that it could hold my weight, even if I could reach it. I decide to backtrack. These are switchbacks, so I might be able to find a place to climb down from above the other side of the gap. Sure enough, there’s a section of heavily trafficked muddy ledges leading from the switchback above to the switchback below. They look super slippery, so I cautiously lower myself to the first step, then the second. I find a secure third step, still about 8 feet above the lower switchback, and then my feet start to slide. They move at a snail’s pace, and I hope for a moment that the mud will congeal in the treads of my shoes and stop. They don’t. I stab my poles hard into the ground. My feet keep sliding. There is plenty of time to reach out and grab something, but there is nothing to grab. I look down at the long drop to the trail, then to the canyon slope below it. There is nothing I can do to stop this fall. I sure hope I stop at the trail. I sure hope I don’t break a bone on the way down. “Whelp,” I say out loud, “here we go.” My feet slide off the ledge. My poles twist in the mud and one of them hits me in the face. I land painfully on my tailbone and my right arm twists tightly against the pole, still stuck in the mud behind me. I strike the next ledge with my hip, slide against the abrasive pebbles and roots, and land hard upon the trail, all tangled up with my backpack and poles. My tailbone and hip are bruised, my wrist and shoulder are tweaked, but nothing is broken or dislocated. Miraculously, I am mostly just shaken and muddy. I untangle myself and slowly stand up. I look around to see if anything has fallen out of my pack. Nothing I can see. I get ready to hike and realize that one of my hiking poles is shorter than the other. Dammit, that’s the fifth pair of poles I’ve broken on this trip! I can still see it sticking out where I stabbed it into the mud. These poles telescope, and at full extension the broken pole is just long enough to still be usable. The rain clears. A pair of hikers, male and female, has their gear spread on the ground. “You’ve almost got some sun,” I say. The clouds have thinned enough to brighten the slope a little. “Yeah, this is more than we’ve had in four days,” says the guy. “Gotta try to dry this stuff out.” I’m not sure anything is going to dry, but it reminds me that I should take a break while it’s a little warmer out. I’ve been pushing myself hard all day and it’s been too cold to stop. My goal for today is the Suiattle River, but all the mud and the deeply rutted trail has forced me to slow my steps, but it has been no less difficult for that. I am falling further and further behind. We chat a little more and they tell me they plan to camp near the Suiattle, too, a piece of information I store away in case Roadside doesn’t catch up; I haven’t seen him since breakfast, and I prefer to camp near other humans when I can. Then I move on to a brook just ahead and stop for a snack. I keep it fairly short—the clouds close up again within minutes and the drizzle returns, then the couple passes me with a wave and a smile—and then I continue on, wearily, down to Milk Creek, then back up more switchbacks. Washington has a steep, hard rhythm. Drop 3000, cross a creek, back up 3000. Up and down on a ridge for a while, then back down, back up again. It seems like the last few days have each had over 10,000 ft of ascent, all told. I’m impressed I can keep it up, but it takes its toll. The rain continues late into the day, and I slip and slide down chutes that barely even look like trail anymore. I am a muddy mess from all the slips and falls I’ve taken, but at least it’s just on the outside of my rain gear. The clouds lift a little, and I can see a maze of peaks in every direction, many of them capped and dusted with snow.
I start the last plunge of the evening, down the switchbacks that will take me to the Suiattle River. Good thing, too, because dusk is falling to darkness quickly. I pass the couple, and then they pass me a while later when I have to stop for water again, and then I don’t see them again. These switchbacks are endless. I pull out my headlamp, and by the time I reach the bottom it’s fully dark. The trail opens up to sidewalk width as I walk west, which is a comfort in the total darkness. It makes me feel like I am close to a trailhead and other hikers might be near. I don’t know if that’s true, though. It’s warmer here in the river valley. I check my map and see that I am walking parallel to the river, which I can hear faintly off to the right. The trail swings wide to the west, then back to the east, adding several miles to cross at a bridge. There are comments on the map that say it can be crossed here, but I’m not about to attempt that in the dark. I follow the trail. Soon I’m in an old grove of giant Cedars. They are as thick across as Sequoias, and probably as tall, although my headlamp only pierces a dozen feet or so above my head. It is a great cathedral, dark and majestic, and I walk carefully so as not to disturb the hallowed silence. The trees themselves have personalities, imposing, stern, and compassionate like enormous silent monks. I’m still hoping to see the couple or some other hikers and camp near humans, but I can’t even find a decent campsite. The map tells me I am passing plenty, but I can’t see them in the dark. Finally I come to the bridge. There should be four more campsites here, but I can’t even see a side trail leading out to them. There are four more sites on the other side; maybe someone is camped there. I decide to cross. I start up one side of the bridge in the pitch black. It’s a long ramp made entirely of wood planks, with a railing on both sides. I can hear the water rushing farther below than I would have expected. I try to peer through the railing to see the water below, but the beam from my headlamp disappears into a void. I get a crazy idea in my head: what if I just hiked all night? I could get to Stehekin sometime tomorrow morning and just wait for Roadside there. I doubt he’s still hiking anyway; I’ve been hiking in the dark for a couple hours now. And wouldn’t that be a story, to say that I hiked through the night? The bridge just keeps going. At first I think that it means the river is wide, but then I realize that the bridge is probably made high and wide so it doesn’t get washed out in spring surges. I reach the other side, climb uphill to a junction, and turn right along the PCT. The trail gets rocky. It’s tiring on my ankles. Big, golden leaves fall from the trees and spin down to the ground. In my headlamp, they dance with a fairy-like elegance. I continue like this for a few miles, all the time telling myself that I’m going to hike all night, until finally I decide that I’m just too tired. I check my watch. It’s 10pm. I find a campsite among hardwood trees next to the bluffs, set up camp, and climb into my tent. I wonder where Roadside is. It’s my last thought as my head hits my inflatable pillow. October 5, 2016 Mile 2477.6-2508.1 30.5 miles I find it difficult to sleep all night. My sleeping pad insulates me from the cold ground, but any time I turn over or stretch out, the cold is there, lying in wait for me, ready to attack through the down baffles. I’m not cold enough to be in any danger, but it makes the night uncomfortable. When the alarm goes off at 5:30, I’m almost eager to be up and moving around again. I decide to hike in my longjohns, at least through the morning. We start our downhill hike in the dark among the huckleberry bushes. I’ve mentioned that I generally don’t eat breakfast until later, but that’s not to say I don’t eat anything. I usually carry a pack of Pop Tarts in my pocket and eat pieces of it as I go. I’ve come to dread it. A deep, loathing dread that is only overpowered by the force of my hunger. There is only one flavor that I can stomach anymore, and I’m delighted when I open the unlabeled foil wrapper this morning and discover a pair of S’mores Pop Tarts. I don’t understand why this cloying flavor is bearable when simpler flavors like strawberry and brown sugar have become repugnant. As the sky lightens, it appears mostly clear with a few wooly clumps of clouds near the horizon. I am hoping for some sunshine and warmth. The bushes are gold and crimson, and trees are few and scattered. Along the ridges and high slopes, even the tundra has assumed the colors of autumn. A brook runs across the trail between thick bushes. A small city of tents is camped on a large patch of grass with a group of hikers in various states of disorder. Some are cooking breakfast, some are organizing their packs, some are doing both. I greet them and then turn to the brook. The water is so cold it stiffens my fingers so I can barely hold onto my water bag. I try to ignore the ache. They campers are all thru-hikers, and from the sounds of it, they have been hiking together for quite a while. “You gonna sleep all day?” This comes from a guy who is struggling to untangle the guy-lines on his wet tent. Every so often he drops the tent and tries to shake some warmth into his hands. “It’s soo cooold,” a girl whines back from her open tent. “Where’s the sun?” She is still in her sleeping bag. It’s fully light out, but the thin lines of clouds I saw this morning have somehow covered most of the sky. I take a seat at the edge of their camp, make my oatmeal, and greet each member of the camp with a good morning as they each pass by me every few minutes to fill up their waterbottles. When they dip their filter bags into the water and get their hands wet, expletives related to the cold explode out of every one of them. I sit there and watch them, an outsider, an observer. I’m envious of their easy rapport, the relaxed start to the morning, the way they alternate silence with quips at each others expense. It becomes clear that they’ve been hiking since April, that their mileage has been low, that several towns were “vortexes” and caught them up for days at a time. “Hope you guys catch up,” says one of the guys, the first to set off. “Last one to the border wins,” says the girl who’s still in her sleeping bag. Roadside shows up, gets water, starts breakfast. I’m the only one who says hello to him. The other hikers are starting to peel off, one by one, and only when it’s clear that the last of her group is close to leaving does the girl in the sleeping bag start to pack up. We leave right after the girl. By now our teeth are chattering and we’re hiking as fast as we can just to get the blood flowing again, to loosen up the muscles that have been clenched for warmth ever since we first sat down. I pass the girl, and sooner than I thought, several others of her group. We hike along the top of a low ridge between two valleys. The right one is hidden behind trees, but sensed by the slope of the land; the left falls away into clouds and mist. Across a basin, sunlight. We race to arrive there, and when we do it feels glorious, that penetrating warmth, that radiant fire, those streaming golden beams. The relief is palpable and makes me want to cry. Momentum and the chill air keep my feet moving, though, and soon the clouds obscure the sun again. These clouds are hanging low, but not so low that we can’t see the enormous depth of these valleys below us, or the massive mountains to the west. We can see long streamers of rain descending thousands of feet and curling in the winds. We can see huge ink-blots of shadow on the mountains and in the valleys, blazing columns of light that pierce through cracks in the clouds and illuminate auburn and rust-colored slopes like corroded gold bullion shipwrecked under an unimaginable depth of sea. This, this is what makes my soul sing out. This enormous and spacious world, endlessly unique, endlessly beautiful, always changing, full of life. Full of death, too, but somehow that seems inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. And I can see now that life does not end with the dissolution of this body, this mind. This embodiment, as unspeakably cool as it is, is only temporary, is only one step along the way in the great flow of life. I feel the patterns, the ideas, the memes that make up my beliefs and identities and actions, and I know that they were there long before me. They have come into this body, and bounce off of one another and transmute each other inside this mind, and then they are sent out, into the world to replicate and transmute other patterns and ideas and memes in other minds. And ego and status and tribe and identity and loving and hating and living and dying are all a part of it, but the life of the world, the stuff of existence, flows on, connected and interdependent and breathing—yes, breathing and throbbing and vibrating with life. And I know that ego and status and all of that stuff will still be there, and I can set it aside for a time or not, but my life will always be there, independent of me, flowing through time and the world like a river, calm and serene at times and turbulent at others; spreading out and intermingling with other lives like ripples on a lake; joining up with other lives and forming into powerful forces like tides or waves in great oceans; or permeating the culture, unseen and unrealized but ever-present, like vapors; all of it water, all of it life. I eventually come back in to myself, humbled by this body and its need for warmth, food, rest. I break at Pear lake—striking as much for the totality with which autumn has claimed its surrounding vegetation as for its natural beauty. There are short evergreen trees, dark gray granite ribs, and white talus running down to the lake, but the tundra is uniformly red, and some deep, primeval part of me hears the strike of a bell announcing that winter is here. I feel the urgency, keep my break short, and hurry my steps. Another ridge walk, dip down to Pass Creek, and back up to a different ridge. The meandering of the trail seems truly erratic—what unusual geology has swirled and stirred these mountains so? I begin to pass the group of hikers from this morning, now spread out in ones and twos. The trail turns west along a long steep slope that falls away steeply to a river thousands of feet below. Some of the group has fallen behind, some are still ahead, but right here I am all alone. A junction splits off and leads down away from the main trail, and like it has at nearly every junction I’ve seen, a piece of me goes with it to imagine where it might go. All of these junctions, all of these choices available in a great web of trails and roads that stretches from coast to coast and opens the entire continent before me, and yet momentum and commitment keeps me on this single path. What might happen, what might I discover, if I were to follow this other path? It occurs to me that I have more than two choices—the first is to simply to follow the momentum I have built up and continue along the main trail, and the second is to follow the new trail simply to do something different and prove that I have a choice. But I can also choose either path with intention—I can continue on and complete what I have set out to do because it is still valuable to me, or I can go somewhere new, not out of a reaction to momentum, not simply to break something, but to seek out a new goal consciously, with foresight and knowledge. Those choices are only available to me when I choose them mindfully. Directly past the junction, the numbers 2500 are spelled out in rocks along the slope. 150 miles until Canada, and only 9 miles beyond that until I return to my old life and immerse myself back into civilization. I have mixed feelings about it. I can’t wait to see my wife, to eat good food and get enough calories, even to sit on a couch and watch a movie. But I dread the distracted, busy momentum of the civilized world, the constant ping of requests for attention, the shackles of jobs and houses and please can you respond to my email, you should you shouldn’t you need to everyone else does cut your hair wear these clothes shower every day show up on time eat these foods drink these drinks buy these cars because if you don’t you’re not as good as him or her and all of the fucking rules that just make me want to scream until it seems like there’s no choice except to reject it all and sell everything, move out to the desert and live alone in a trailer or maybe a tent and pass the time by drinking too much and yelling at the moon. But now I see it, now I see the lie. There is another choice there: I can walk with intention. I can stare society in the face and say “this is for me, but that isn’t.” It will be a force of will, and exhausting at times, and at times I will have to follow certain paths in order to get where I want to go, but as long as I keep the end in mind, I can follow those paths without fear of losing myself. The key is mindful intent: never accept the status quo blindly, but never reject the status quo blindly either. I continue up, along the main PCT, mulling over these thoughts, when I turn a corner to find a dozen or more hikers scattered lazily in a large patch of sunlight on the shoulder of the mountain, just above the trail. Some of them are the hikers I met this morning, and I soak up a few small dabs of conversation, but mostly we are all quiet, enjoying the first warmth of the day. Roadside is close behind and is as surprised to find so many people here as I am. We make a small climb after lunch and cross a small pass into a beautiful, secluded alpine valley. It feels like we have stepped into a secret nestled here among the mountaintops. My pack feels lighter than ever and we descend at a trot. The trail follows the valley in a leftward curve and the headwaters quickly become a roaring creek. Switchbacks plunge us into a tight, dark forest, hugging a series of small waterfalls that cascade into a green chasm. Boughs of fir and pine are freshly cut along the sides of the trail; trail workers have been here recently. It is a long, beautiful descent filled with the sounds of rushing water, the smell of fresh-cut pine, and the lightness of my newly untethered soul. At the bottom, I cross the White Chuck river and a series of small streams on footbridges. It’s a long walk through a dark valley, but it passes quickly and before I know it dusk is closing in. I find a campsite in the woods just past a footbridge right as it’s getting dark. It’s a large area segmented into ten or more sites by fallen trees, but I am the only one here until Roadside catches up a few minutes later. I set up my tent, and now it’s fully dark, but I need water, so I cross back over the footbridge, climb down the embankment, and lean far over the water to fill up. I’m certain I’m going to fall in, but I don’t. We make dinner in the dark, chatting easily over the beauty of the day and the small miles remaining, then turn in quickly to bed.
October 4, 2016
Mile 2461.5-2477.6 16.1 Miles Another 2:30am wakeup. In the future, people will sometimes tell me that they have trouble sleeping on the ground and wonder how I did it for four and a half months. The truth is, I sleep much better outside than I do inside. I wake up in the middle of the night about the same number of times, but when I’m outside I quickly fall back asleep, whereas when I’m inside… This morning when I wake at 2:30, I am too hungry to sleep. Like insanely hungry. Of course, nothing is open at this time, so I raid my snack bag instead. Goldfish crackers, peanut M&Ms, dried mango. I continue reading 1984 for about an hour, until I finally feel like I can fall asleep. When I wake again, it’s 7:30. The post office doesn’t open until 11am, so there’s plenty of time and I move slowly enough to need it all. I shower in the bathroom at the end of the hall. My hiking clothes cause me dread every time I have to climb back into them. My shirt has started to rot from the constant damp; my pants are stiff with dirt and dried sweat. I knock on Roadside’s door. He’s just woken and wants to take a shower before breakfast, so I walk down and pick up more snacks at the convenience store. A grocery bag full of them. They’re ostensibly for the trail, but I can’t stop myself from eating a 4-pack of Oreos and a bag of donuts as soon as I exit the store. On the way back I check the restaurant’s sign—they aren’t open until 10! I hope I can last that long. I do all the little chores I never think of—my mustache and nails have gotten a little out of control, so I trim them. I patch the small holes that have shown up on my pack liner. Two hours are used up in a flash. Saltlick and Squatch join us for breakfast, then we’re off to the post office, where we pack our resupply in the lobby, and then Saltlick drives us all back to the trail. As he drops us off, he gives each of us a couple of hardboiled eggs. It’s another thoughtful gesture from someone who has already given much of his day to us. There are a couple more hikers here, and five of us set off along the trail in single-file. It appears to have been an evenly-graded dirt road at one point, but vegetation has taken over. I’m out in front, and it doesn’t take long before I’m alone. Coffee and food have enlivened me. Even the rain is no damper on my spirits. The cold is severe, unforgiving. I hike to keep warm. The first big climb leads me to Lake Valhalla. A spire of rock juts into the sky behind the lake, majestic and mythical in the mist. I add it to the list of places to return. The trail climbs around the back and over a lip, then winds through a couple of drainages. The huckleberry bushes are all gold and red now, and give the landscape a toasted look. Next is Lake Janus, then a big climb, and then Glasses Lake. The cold pierces, penetrates through my layers. No time to stop and look around. If I hike faster, maybe I can outrun the winter. |
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Nick is a teacher, writer, and amateur adventurer. Archives
June 2020
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