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.
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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. October 3, 2016 Mile 2432.1-2453.4 (+3) 24.3 Miles It’s only six miles to Cascading Creek, a distance I cover easily before breakfast. It’s a drizzly morning, somewhat of a regularity in Washington, it appears. Roadside woke at the same time as me, but I outpaced him within a few minutes and I’m left with my thoughts. This morning I’m back to thinking about ego. Well, first I start with my morning meditation routine as I walk. A hundred breaths, counted with as much awareness and focus as I can muster, then metta for all the important people in my life, extending outward to encompass all beings, then Thich Nhat Hanh’s mantra from Every Step is Peace: “Breathing in I calm my mind, breathing out I smile. Dwelling in the present moment, I know that this is a wonderful moment.” My mind wanders like a child during all of this, but when I reach the mantra, I stop trying to lead it back to focus so often. And that’s how I find my way to thinking about ego, via concerns about career and status and money. It is different to think this way, removed from the constant inputs of society, freed from the constant inputs of a busy mind. It allows me to see the repetition of my thoughts, the obsessiveness with which I revisit the same subjects again and again. Almost out of sheer boredom, I find myself digging deeper, looking for the root causes behind what I feel and believe. And this is what gets me to ego, that gushing oil well that both motivates and stains everything I do. I’ve seen it in each of the areas of my life. In my relationships, a fear of looking or feeling powerless; in my career, the need for esteem; in society, a need to show certain markers of class—a house, stylish clothing, a haircut that others feel is appropriate; a need to look productive; a need to fit in; a need to feel attractive. Four months free of showers, haircuts, and even most relationships has stripped me of the most basic delusions around ego. It’s not that they’ve disappeared, it’s just that I’ve learned what life is like when I don’t feed it. And I’ve discovered that life is a little better with less. What, I wonder, would a life free of ego look like? I doubt that I could master it entirely, but maybe if I can imagine a life without ego, I can live a little closer to that ideal and live a more genuine life. What if I could keep my ego appropriately tamed and channeled in directions that are meaningful to me? What do I value, not for the status it gives me, but intrinsically? What would still be important? I am surprised to find that mastery is still important. I thoroughly enjoy the learning process, regardless of whether it leads to status or not. Studying a musical score and unearthing its secrets and interconnections is a source of great joy, even if I never have the opportunity to conduct the piece with an ensemble, and no one ever hears what I have discovered. I play with the idea of mastery for a while and it slowly dawns on me that it doesn’t seem to matter what I am learning and mastering, it’s the process itself that gives me joy. Next I turn my attention to relationships. I perceive all the ways we play with power in relationships: fearing to give too much and lose status, seeking out people who increase our status, avoiding others who deplete our status. People who only associate with beautiful people are odious; people who make a point to love everyone are beautiful. I think of a friend in Flagstaff who had an easy rapport with the homeless in that town, who greeted them by name as they came by his front yard, invited them in and held long conversations, not as an act of charity, but in honest friendship. How much more I held him in esteem for that. I think of the ways I have been unwilling to give up power in my relationships, to be vulnerable. What if I dropped my need for any power at all? Would I be subsumed? Would I still be respected? It’s a more difficult question, and perhaps it’s one that can’t be answered without making the attempt. Perhaps the results would be different with each friend and family member. I look closely at my marriage through this new lens, and I am glad to see that it is not based in ego but in love and mutual growth. I look at the trappings of civilized life and wonder about alternatives. Could I forego a job and live the live of a hobo? Perhaps if I were on my own, found challenges worthy of mastery, and relationships to pursue. But I care about the relationships I have now, I enjoy challenges of an intellectual type, and I doubt that my wife or my friends would be willing to join me on such a journey. No, that’s not for me. Other ideas seem more attractive: perhaps we could work remotely, live out of a camper van, keep our expenses low and spend more time outside; maybe we could get a tiny house, simplify, get rid of the TV and spend more time reading. One thing is clear: I’m sick of working myself to death in order to keep up with the Joneses, running faster and faster just to stay in the same place, like Alice and the Red Queen. That game is rigged, and I can never win. I have crossed a couple more creeks by now, but it’s been chilly and wet and I didn’t want to sit in the drizzle so I kept hiking, back up a long climb. I’m starving now, it’s after nine, and I haven’t had breakfast yet, so I need to stop soon. At the top of the hill is a wide trail junction with some tree cover. I lean against a tree while I make my breakfast. The cold seeps up through my insulated pad and I burn my mouth on the oatmeal in my impatience to get something warm into me. After breakfast, no Roadside. I wander off to use the restroom, come back, no Roadside. I make a cup of coffee. No Roadside. I’m shivering. Time to go. He’ll catch up later, I assure myself. He always catches up. I plug into an audiobook and try not to give the cold more than its due. I focus on the strange beauty around me—rocks that glow with bright lichen; dark trees, ghostlike in the mist; the feeling of being outside of time and space, directionless and preternatural. If there are other worlds close to this one, surely this is a place and time where the veil between them is thinnest. Perhaps I need only step off the trail and wander off into the woods to find myself in an entirely new land. Perhaps, perhaps. The momentum of my feet carries me along the thin line, and the moment passes. In the late morning I am descending switchbacks in a valley of rockslides, zoned out on an audiobook, when I’m startled by a shout. I pull out my earbud. “Zigzag!” It’s Roadside’s voice, but I can’t see him. It sounds like he’s way off to the side. “Roadside? Where are you?” “Down here!” I’m able to make him out, a small dark figure in a sea of wheelbarrow-sized rocks. It looks like he’s climbing straight down a rockslide with no trail. “I’ll meet you at the bottom.” I reach the bottom first, though he has the head start and the direct route. My switchbacks are easy compared to his boulder hopping. “How did you get over there?” I ask when he gets to the bottom. “How did you get ahead of me?” “I took a wrong turn on some other trail,” he says. “I thought you’d be way ahead by now.” It was pure luck that the other trail was shorter and came close to the PCT right here in this valley. We stop for a late lunch an hour later in the day’s first patch of sun. A small creek forms a tarnlike pond next to the trail, and we rest on warm, glacially-smoothed granite. The lulling waters and sunshine have me feeling lethargic. While we eat, we check the maps. We have about ten miles left until the road. By then, it will probably be too dark to hitch into town. Or, we could cut off about 8 miles by taking a side trail out to the road. I’m not thrilled about cutting off miles of the trail, but Roadside says he’s pretty miserable in all this rain and really wants to sleep in a bed tonight. It hasn’t rained in a couple hours, but I understand what he means. I’m not a footpath purist, and I’d kind of like a good meal, so I agree. “I’m packing up my rain gear now,” I tell Roadside, “I bet it’ll start raining in a second.” It’s mostly away when he laughs “Look at the pond.” Small circles spread on the surface from the new raindrops. I take off at speed, try to keep my feet on the muddy trail, open up my breath and my awareness to the cool, rain-scented air, and watch the world stream by. This part of Washington is like a garden, filled with small ponds, putting-green-sized meadows, low bushes and tall trees. This part of Washington is like a labyrinth that creates distance and protection from troubles and worries with each twist and turn of the narrow and singular path. This part of Washington is like an island, isolated and surrounded by a sea of wilderness, cut off from civilization and all of the concerns of society. The Southbound hikers seem to have disappeared, and I am all alone in this garden, this labyrinth, this island, until I’m not. A large group emerges from the garden ahead and each member carries large tools and implements to move earth. A trail crew. This trail is in bad need. Again and again it forms muddy chutes, dangerously slick, and the surrounding vegetation is trampled down with the impact of all the hikers who have sought the safety of a sure footstep. I greet the trail workers as we pass each other. I pass their camp after a mile or two. It’s a collection of small teepees and lightweight backpacking tents collected into a small city between the trees. A part of me aches for the sense of community that I see in this collection. Another mile and I encounter another platoon of trail workers. They are digging out one of the mud chutes and I have to step around them on the vegetation to climb up the hill. A guy in his forties—who must be a supervisor since everyone else is in their twenties—says “We’re fixing that.” I pass a junction and don’t think much about it until a couple hundred yards later when I remember that I’m supposed to be looking for a junction. I head back to see if it’s the right one, and it turns out I’m lucky that I stopped. The sign reads “tunnel creek trail”. It is a steep downhill into a side valley held together by exposed roots and faith. I descend a couple hundred more yards before I think “What if Roadside misses the junction?” The climb back up is far more difficult and my lungs burn to the top. “What if he already passed by?” I think as I sit on a wet log and wait. But no, he’s only a few minutes behind and he’s thankful that I waited—he says he probably would have missed it. We both fall more than once on the muddy, rooty descent. When Roadside emerges onto the dirt road at the bottom, he tells me he hurt his shoulder on one of those falls.
It’s another mile or more to the main road, where we try to hitch. It’ll be dark in another hour or so. The road is highway 2, a 4-lane freeway with a center divider and railings to keep cars from plunging into the canyon of the Skykomish River below. The highway comes down a steep hill and makes a big turn, both before and after us. This is a terrible place to hitch a ride. After a half hour of waiting, I get the idea to duct tape “Hikers to Town” onto a spare trash compactor bag that I have on hand to replace the one I’m using as a pack liner. It takes about ten minutes to complete, and only about ten minutes after that to get a ride. In town the hotel is locked up, but there’s a phone number. Thirty minutes later someone shows up to check us in and gives us keys. We unload our stuff and head next door to the bar for some food and beer. The townsfolk glance our direction, but they are used to hikers here and they quickly ignore us. While we eat our food and drink our beer, another hiker named Squatch shows up and joins us, followed by his friend Saltlick, who offers us a ride back to trail tomorrow. Back in the hotel, I talk to Lindsey and my friend Brian before I go to bed. Brian is supposed to join us in Stehekin in a few days and hike the last eighty miles. I’m concerned that he won’t be able to keep up, but he assures me he has been training. I guess we’ll see. October 2, 2016 Miles 9.2-26.4 of alternate, 2425.2-2432.1 of PCT 24.1 Miles “Hey Blackout, wake up!” … “Blackout, you awake?” “grmmm…” he mumbles, “yeah.” Roadside and I pack up noisily, but Blackout is silent and his tent stays dark. Just before we leave I try one more time, but he doesn’t even stir, so we start to hike. We encounter big deadfall less than 50 feet from camp. It requires some tricky climbing, so I turn and wait in case Roadside needs a hand, and I see Blackout’s headlamp back at camp. He’s awake, and quick as he is I expect he’ll catch up in no time. But I won’t see him again until almost a year later when we meet in Zion National Park for a couple of hikes. We come to a rushing creek. I can’t see it in the dark, but it sounds like a big volume of water rushing quickly downhill over a rocky bed. There’s a log across it, so I balance-beam my way across. I’m about a third of the way when my headlamp glints on the rapids below—it’s a twenty-foot drop! There’s nothing to do but keep going. I make it to the other side without incident, and so does Roadside. “Did you see the drop?” he asks. “Yeah. I’m sorta glad it was dark, I’m not sure I would have had the nerve if I had seen it in advance.” Our next obstacle is a tangle of deadfall that throws us off the trail. It takes us a minute to realize that we’re on a game trail that is rapidly disappearing. We check the map and backtrack. It’s light enough to see now, and there is a river beside us, the Snoqualmie, with a rocky bed that is much wider than the water. The banks are eroded with a ten-foot drop to the rocks below. I can’t see any place for the trail between here and the river. I check the map, and it looks like we’re supposed to cross. I look in disbelief at a huge log. It’s obviously not the intended crossing point, but I can’t see any other options. Honestly, there’s not even a good place to descend to the riverbed. The log appears to be our only hope. The problem is, there’s a large gap and a drop between the bank and the roots of the log. We’ll have to jump across the gap, land on the knot of roots, and keep our balance so we don’t fall another 8 feet onto uneven rocks that would surely break a leg. Then, one we cross the log, we’ll have to jump down onto another log. That junction is directly above the river, which could have worse consequences if we miss. We search back and forth for another option for ten minutes, but eventually we come back and stare at the gap some more. The second jump doesn’t look so bad. Nerve-racking, sure, but I feel confident that I can make that. It’s the first jump that worries me. I go first. I get a running start and then leap, backpack and all, into the air. How did I get here, I wonder? How did my walk in the woods turn into such a risky obstacle course? And just as quickly I know the answer: I love this shit. I’m never more alive than when I’m facing a challenge right at the edge of my abilities. It puts me in a flow state, lets me lose myself. An adventurous hike mixes beauty, freedom, and challenge, and reminds me that life is for living. In civilization I ping-pong back and forth between making other people happy and running from boredom. Out here, I’m not concerned with either. Whether I make this jump or not, I’m as happy as I have ever been right now. My right foot hits the bottom of the trunk, right in the gap in the roots. It is polished smooth, probably from the soles of other shoes, but it is dry and the traction holds. I hit hard, and the next few steps are fraught as I pull my speed under control and wobble on the hard wood. I catch my balance, then move down the log to make room for Roadside. His leap is about the same as mine, except that his pack threatens to throw him off balance for a minute. He wobbles, steadies, and then we look at each other. “Made it.” I grin. He looks shell-shocked. “Yeah.” The next log is a simple hop down in comparison, but the fact that it’s above a fast-moving river and there’s nothing to balance against or hold on to makes it perilous. I focus with all of my attention and hop down onto the smooth log. There is more traction than first appeared, and I’m able to land and cross without incident. Roadside follows. We pass the turnoff to Goldmyer Hot Springs. A sign tells us that it’s private property and costs $20. As much as I’d love to soak in a hot tub, we need to make miles, and I get the feeling that a couple of hours in the tubs would slow us down for the rest of the day. We continue on. A sprinkler sprays hot water over a small tub, accompanied by the heavy smell of hydrogen sulfide. A short ways up from there, a showerhead is installed on a tree, eternally showering water onto a stump below. I stick my hand under and feel the tepid warmth run over it. It will smell like boiled eggs for the rest of the day. The trail climbs uphill for a long way, then joins a dirt road and climbs up some more. We’re headed toward Dutch Miller gap, and we can see it for a long time. The trail breaks away from the road again and follows a brook running through silver granite. Ferns, flowers, and the occasional fall foliage adorn the brook. It is peaceful. We haven’t seen another soul all day. Over the gap, we descend toward a small lake in a hanging valley. Another brook begins and the trail follows it. A pool forms in the depression between two humps of granite, the far one with a trickling waterfall, the near one embellished with red leaves, and in the bottom of the crystalline pool, a collection of silver stones cast with a blue tint from the clear water. It strikes me as the most beautiful scene I have ever seen. I snap a picture, but a picture can’t capture the tinkle of the falling water or the loamy scent of the muddy earth. There’s no substitute for the present moment; we can’t take anything with us without giving up something in return. I put my phone away and just stand there to take it all in. After the lake, the descent into this new valley is muddy and steep, and I slip several times, once falling hard on my side. Eventually I find my way down the switchbacks and emerge back onto the PCT.
Roadside catches up just as I finish lunch next to a bridge. While he finishes his, I watch a chipmunk run back and forth across the bridge collecting nuts and seeds. It’s a good reminder that winter is close. The afternoon is a long climb—3000ft over 10 miles. We only do seven of the miles before we stop to camp. At the end of dinner, some deer visit and we watch them quietly munch on leaves. Even now, after all the deer I’ve seen, there is still magic in the appearance of these peaceful creatures. October 1, 2016 Mile 2390.6-?? (alternate trail) 13.2 Miles It’s three forty-five in the morning. I have been awake for close to an hour. I can’t open the window more than a crack and I am being slowly suffocated. I finally decide to sit up and watch TED talks on my phone. My eyes hurt and I feel like I have a hangover, but I only drank two beers last night with dinner. I wasn’t feeling that great at dinner, either. Roadside and I each did our own thing, and I ended up reading 1984 in a busy restaurant while I nursed my beers, slurped a tomato bisque and nibbled at a grilled cheese. I could barely finish the sandwich. I hope I’m not getting sick. Please don’t let me get sick. After an hour of TED talks I finally feel tired enough to get back to sleep. I wake again at 7:30, send Roadside a text—breakfast?—and he knocks on my door a minute later. On our way to the Pancake house next door, we encounter Blackout. He’s stuffing things into his pack in the lobby. He’s on his way out, he says, wants to get an early start. After breakfast we see him again, doing the same thing in another part of the lobby. So much for an early start. I need to find some hiking poles. Again. Two days ago one of them broke and I had to borrow one of Roadside’s so I could pitch my tent. Yesterday, the other one broke. What is this, my fourth pair of poles? The closest thing to an outdoor store doesn’t have any. We walk together to the far end of town, but the only shops seem to be restaurants, real estate offices, and a couple of convenience stores. The ski shops are all shuttered for the summer. Walking across town takes time, and by the time we’ve checked three shops and returned it’s already eleven. We decide to pack up and get lunch. We go to the Aardvark cafe, a little outdoor restaurant operated out of a trailer in front of the Chevron where we collected our resupply boxes. The owner is a trail angel, and we ask her if there’s anywhere to get hiking poles. “Oh, I’ve got plenty of hiking poles. Hikers leave them here all the time. They’re all at home, though. Can you wait for a bit? I’ll call my boyfriend and tell him to pick them up before he comes over. He gets off work in an hour.” We’re happy to wait. We eat our lunch in the little courtyard and look out at the ski slopes and dramatic mountains around us. On and off a light rain falls, but we’re under a canopy. I have a couple more cups of coffee while we wait. It’s funny, the mountains didn’t seem this dramatic while we were hiking in them. The poles arrive around 1pm. I am so grateful. “It’s nothing,” the trail angel says, “have a good hike.” We set out on our road walk. There’s a popular alternate trail that goes by some hot springs and cuts a few miles off the main route. We plan to take it. Once we get past town, I notice another hiker behind, slowly closing the distance. “Is that Blackout?” He catches up a little before the trailhead. “I thought you were leaving hours ago,” I say. “Yeah, I was planning to, but I wasn’t feeling well this morning. I think I ate something bad last night.” The trailhead is swarming with people. We make one last stop at the restrooms. People are eyeing us like we’re wild animals. I see one father point us out to his kids. I imagine their conversation. “See those guys? They hiked here all the way from the bottom of California.” “Wow really? That must have taken them forever. How far is that?” “I don’t know. Probably at least five hundred miles.” It makes me feel good to be an object of attention, even though the conversation was probably more like this: “Daddy, something smells.” “See those men over there? They’re hippies. Hippies don’t take showers. Don’t ever become a hippie, son.” We start up the trail, which resembles an airport escalator: steep, constant, and full of people. I take the lead and charge up the rocky trail. As I start to get going, the caffeine begins to surge. Before I know it I’m nearly running up the slope. I pass day-hikers one after another. One lady says “nice pace!” and even though I’m starting to flag, I push through—I don’t want to let her down. It starts to rain. I stop to take out my raincoat and Blackout flies by at much the same pace. He’s gone before I can hoist my pack. I catch up to him again at the pass above Snow Lake, where he looks at his phone. The rain is light. “What does your map say?” he asks. “Mine says the trail is supposed to cut down here, but there’s no trail.” “Your GPS is probably just off a little. I’m sure you’re not supposed to cut down that.” My map is no help. We’re looking down a steep, rocky slope toward the lake. He looks uncertain. I tend to trust the trail on the ground more than any map, so I continue on. To be honest, I rarely even check my maps at junctions anymore, the PCT is usually so obvious. I’m sure he’ll figure it out. He follows. A minute later the the trail cuts downhill as expected. Now that we’re at the lake, the people are gone. It’s quite a dramatic change. We cut around the eastern side. The rain picks up to a steady shower. At a junction above a deep valley view, I take a break to snack a little and wait. Blackout arrives quickly, then Roadside a minute later. We rest for a minute, then continue around the lake. The surface changes from pale blue to dark grey and back, depending on the rain and the angle. Sharp, craggy granite surrounds the opposite shore, and mists hang over all. We cross a log bridge over the lake’s outlet, and I can see the rocky bottom as through glass, a story or more below. Climbing, winding. Each turn in the trail feels like a discovery, another small kingdom with tree-trunk colonnades and granite crenellations. A few backpackers are camped here and there near cliffs overlooking the lake, and the way one of them looks at me—like he’s surprised to see me way out here—makes me doubt myself. If we’re still going the right way, PCT hikers should be coming through here several times an hour. I’ve been avoiding it, but I wrestle with zippers and pull my phone from an inside pocket, taking care to keep it out of the rain. It takes a second for the GPS to find me, and then… “Fuck.” I’m going the wrong way. For close to an hour now. Over muddy, rocky terrain. Remember that junction where I stopped to wait for Blackout and Roadside? We were supposed to take the other path. I turn back and tell Roadside and Blackout. They take it in stride, but I feel like an ass. Another hour and we’re back at the junction, looking at the same deep valley that greeted us before, but this time with new eyes now that we know we have to descend into it. The rain lightens to a pitter-patter. We start a brutal downhill of switchbacks, deadfall logs whose diameter comes up to my shoulders, and rock-filled slopes. One of the fallen trees is on a steep slope; a fall here would be a major injury. Someone has tried to cut two footholds into it, but all they’ve really done is remove the bark. The wood underneath is smooth and slick from the rain, as I learn when I fall hard against the trunk. I make an awkward, painful climb over to the other side and then wait for Blackout and Roadside to pass their packs over and make the treacherous climb. We have two more trees like this to cross, then a couple more switchbacks bring us to a steep rockfall. The trail has been constructed out of its boulders, but a section is simply gone, replaced with an empty scar that slices down the slope. I am glad that I was not here for this landslide filled with heavy boulders. I find the trail on the other side and trace it with my eyes to where it switches back and crosses the empty space again. While I’ve paused, Roadside and Blackout have caught up. It’s steep, but the rocks are rough and have plenty of traction, so I’m not all that worried about falling. What concerns me more is the potential for a loose boulder to come unstuck and crush a leg or a ribcage. “What do you think?” I ask. “Climb down?” They survey the trail. “Better than twice across,” Blackout says. “Yeah,” says Roadside. Difficult terrain, especially on long hikes, has a momentum of its own. Each obstacle you cross commits you a little bit more to your present course, since turning back would require you to negotiate every obstacle again. Since you don’t know what’s around the next corner, this obstacle could very well be the last one, and it could be smooth and easy the rest of the way. Or, things could get worse, one obstacle at a time. If we continue, this could be the last obstacle. Or it could continue to get worse. If we turn back, we know for a fact that we’ll have to cross the same obstacles again, cover all the miles back to Snoqualmie pass, then face an unknown number of obstacles when we take the other trail. It makes more sense to keep going, even if each obstacle is a little more dangerous than the last. Adventurers of all stripes are advised against goal-fixation (the blind pursuit of the goal despite dangers), but I think it’s often a more rational avoidance of the known dangers of turning back that leads people into the unknown challenges that turn out to be beyond their skills. This fear is with me as I start my descent—if the trail ahead continues to get worse, will I have to climb back up this later? And then climb those giant logs again?
I get down to the next switchback without incident, then watch as Blackout and Roadside negotiate the risky scramble. I take a deep breath and unclench my buttocks. I’m pleased with myself, with all of us. I just hope that’s the last of it. The trail plunges back into the trees. We cross a few more giant logs, but the slope is less extreme now and instant death is less of a danger. Eventually we make it to the valley floor, a dark forest covered with smaller deadfall. It’s getting dark and we’re completely exhausted. The mental challenges of the obstacles have been every bit as great as the physical. We find a clearing to set up camp. We cook dinner and talk easily. Blackout adds a lot to our group, and I’m glad he’s here. I hope he continues to hike with us. Halfway through dinner, apropos of nothing, he says “I think we’re in Grizzly country now.” Roadside looks up from his dinner, eyes widened. I’m sure mine are, too, because I feel instantly more aware of our surroundings. As if he’s sensed our anxiety, Blackout hedges. “But I’ve heard there are only like eight in the entire state, and this is right on the South edge of their range.” That might be more comforting if we weren’t headed North. After dinner, I learn that Blackout was a behavioral interventionist before the trail. My sister works the same job, helping kids with Autism to learn the skills they need to function in society. Her son, my nephew, has an autism diagnosis. My wife is an administrator for a behavior health care company, and I’ve taught plenty of kids with autism, so we have plenty to talk about. Roadside goes to bed while Blackout and I work our way through that and other subjects. Eventually we turn in, too. “We usually get up at 5:30,” I tell him. “Want me to wake you up?” “Yeah, I’ll get up with you guys.” September 30, 2016 Mile 2370.4-2390.6 20.2 Miles Town day. Cold weather. A good night’s sleep. All things that conspire to speed my steps. I hit the trail at full speed, flying up hills like a dirtbike. Roadside is left in the dust. At first light I come up on Blackout packing his groundcloth. “I couldn’t find a spot until after dark,” he says. “I just cowboy camped in the first flat spot I found.” He’s apologizing, I think, for the fact that he camped on vegetation. The flattened grass already shows signs of springing back, though, so I think it counts as a durable surface. He’s far enough away from the trail, too. Leave No Trace principles haven’t been violated here. Still, the fact that he’s concerned makes me appreciate him all the more. In a world of give-no-fucks arrogance, it’s nice to know that someone still has a few to give. A little while later I take a break to eat breakfast and give Roadside a chance to show up. I stir boiling water into my oatmeal and contemplate how I can bring a piece of the wilderness back into civilization with me. It’s not all black and white, I think. I don’t have to choose between subsistence farming and a corporate job. I’ll have to find some sort of job, it’s true, but maybe I can do something more on my terms. Teaching high school marching band left time for almost nothing else. Particularly in the fall, that prime hiking season, my evenings and weekends were so full I barely had time to reflect on how much I was missing. I chose high school in part because I could make better music, but also partly because it was flashy and public. It was a reflection of ego. What if I let go of that? Could I teach middle school instead? Done by the afternoon, no evenings or weekends. Time to spend with Lindsey, time to take weekend trips. I once observed a teacher whose middle school bands sounded better than my high school bands. Maybe, if I wasn’t always focused on the next football game or competition, I could build that type of program. I have two more packets of oatmeal and Roadside hasn’t shown up yet, so I decide to make them. I take in the scene—a couple of sharp but low peaks nearby, and forest that has all the same trees as any other forest that I’ve seen so far in Washington, except that it’s this forest, in this unique arrangement, in this unique place, and I am here right now. That gives it a beauty and immediacy that is hard to beat. It occurs to me that I’ve found something else of the wilderness to bring back with me. Not the forest, but the experience of uniqueness and immediacy. Walking near my house, I can gaze at the trees sashaying in the wind, feel my smallness under the cloud-speckled sky, notice the subtle slope of the land, pay attention to the bird calls. It will take more effort, certainly. It will lack the interconnected ecology and the overawing grandness of the forests and mountains, but civilization is not entirely lacking in natural magic, as long as I take the time to pay attention. Where the hell is Roadside? I’ve eaten two cups of oatmeal, and two cups of granola. I decide to make that rare treat, a cup of coffee. The culture seems designed to keep us from paying attention. Much of television is a Roman Circus, your job and everyone else’s is trending toward bureaucracy and repetition, you better fill up your commute with radio and podcasts, and don’t miss out on social media! You’re allowed politics, but only if you focus on the horse race and not what the government is actually doing. Just enough to make you think you have some control. God forbid you look at the underlying systems or question the economy. Growth, growth, growth! Or else you’re a goddamn commie bastard. There’s no one orchestrating this, of course. It’s a natural outgrowth of the systems themselves. The reason it’s easier to focus on national politics than on local politics is because the TV can reach more viewers that way. The reason they want more viewers is so they can make more money. Even if they decided they didn’t want more money, it doesn’t matter—if another station can make more money, they can buy them out or outspend them on marketing. In the economy, survival of the fittest will always mean the company that makes more money. A business with any other focus will always lose. It might be a little better with the rise of the internet, but attention is still scarce and the big internet companies are entrenched in the same basic system. The biggest difference now is that instead of trying to reach the greatest number of people with the same content, now the media platforms try to reach each person with the content most likely to grab attention. The memes that create fear or anger or excitement spread fastest. Those tend to be the ideas that are black and white, and the subtle complexities that help us understand the world are lost in the clamor. I realize that I’ve stumbled on something else that I need to bring back from the wilderness: quiet and mental space. I will need to eschew the loud, simplifying voices and reject incitements to outrage and disbelief, to seek out the thoughtful voices that appreciate the complexity in the world. It will take eternal vigilance, but I have a feeling that my time in the wilderness has ingrained a love of quiet that will help me keep my wits in the information feeding frenzy of civilization. Roadside still hasn’t appeared. That’s worrying. I doubt he’s injured, but he could have taken a wrong turn. I’m comforted by the fact that there are many others on the trail, both thru-hikers and, increasingly, day-hikers. It’s also not the first time we’ve lost each other for a few hours at a time. I decide to push on toward town. Dayhikers appear in droves. Dogs, too. The dogs make me smile. They are so happy here in all the open space. It reminds me how lucky I am to be free of walls and responsibilities. They make me miss my dog, Deuce. I’m glad he and Lindsey have each other’s company. Cars line a dirt road. It must be a weekend, there are so many of them. The trail cuts across and continues its long descent toward Snoqualmie pass. I can see the highway first, then the small town, tucked away in a deep valley between the mountains. I cut across a broad, treeless slope. A ski lift gives a hint to why the trees have disappeared.
The manager at the one motel in town allows me to hold an additional room for Roadside on my credit card. I unpack, start some laundry in a broom closet at the end of the hall. I sit on a chair in my rain gear and read 1984 until my phone rings. It’s Roadside. “Hey Zigzag, where are you? I just got to town.” We meet at the motel desk. While we wait for the manager, he tells me he took a wrong turn down a dirt road. “I ended up at a creepy building and had to turn around.” “I bet that was the abandoned radio tower those guys were going to camp at!” September 29, 2016 Mile 2344.5-2370.4 25.9 Miles The white tule fog has invaded the forest; everything is damp. Our headlamps brighten only the fog, a couple of tree trunks, and the ground. It is impossible to see more than a yard or two beyond my feet. We cannot seem to find the trail. We stop, check the GPS on our phones. We’ve passed it. Backtrack, try again. It is made more difficult by the fact that the ground here is disturbed everywhere. Everything and nothing seems like trail. On our way back, we pass something that seems like a dirt road, slightly depressed into the dirt lot. The GPS says we’re on the trail now, but who knows. GPS isn’t perfect. We try to follow it and check again. Still on the trail. We come across a half-circle of railroad ties that stand vertically in the dirt, a sort of forest road cul-de-sac to keep cars from entering the “camping area”. There’s a sign on the other side, and there it is: our beloved single-track line of dirt. Confidence gained, we pick up speed. Each morning stays darker longer, and this fog doesn’t help. It takes nearly an hour before there is any light at all, and another half hour before the first glimpses of color in the sky. There’s a big climb in the early dawn. I stop briefly to talk to three thruhikers climbing out of their tents. It seems like there have been many more hikers about the past few days. Have we caught up with the crowd? At the top of the climb I stop at a dirt road for breakfast. Below me, a fjord of fog fills lush green forest. A few ridges over, I can see the craggy peaks of the Washington Cascades, the final mountain range of my hike. My mind wheels ahead to the Canadian border, less than two weeks ahead. I am excited to return home, to sit on a couch again, watch a movie, see my wife and my dog. To have plenty of food nearby, and even more just a phone call away. I can’t wait to rest. Then what? A job search, I guess. Back into the culture. Back to the rules and the expectations of my various tribes. Back to the civilized pace of life, so frantic and harried, so noisy and meaningless. Just to think about it overwhelms me, makes me want to dull it all with a drink or a television show. I refuse. I refuse to let myself be browbeaten into mindlessness. When I return to civilization, I will take a piece of the wilderness with me. It will be a fight. The memes of civilization are nearly all attached to a piece of code that says “proselytize.” It’s how the memes spread, and how we gain safety in our tribes—If the others aren’t like you, make them change. If they won’t change, cut them out. Millions of memes, all fighting for dominance, all giving instructions for homogeneity within the tribe, all creating the monoculture. Live in a house. Watch TV. Get a job. Drive a car. There is variety, but only within a small range. If I decided to live in a tent for the rest of my life, or walk everywhere, what jobs would be open to me? If I spend my time reading books instead of watching TV, my memes will be different, and I won’t fit in with the culture. If I choose slow, careful regard over speed and productivity, will people think I’m thoughtful or just lazy? It’s a nice trap society has built for us: conform or face scorn. Roadside catches up while I eat my oatmeal. I realize that I’m lucky in comparison. As constrained as I feel, Roadside has it worse. There’s a reason why van life culture and full-timing (making an RV your permanent home) are primarily white middle-class phenomena. If I fear being seen as a lazy bum or an outcast, how much more scorn would he feel due to his dark skin and all of society’s memes that come along with that? Still, the fact that he has it worse doesn’t make mindless civilization any less of a trap. The three hikers we just passed join us at the dirt road. One of them tries to check his map to see if the road reconnects with the trail ahead. It looks like a flatter, more scenic route. The road doesn’t appear on his map, but they decide to try it anyway. We never see them again. After breakfast, we parallel a ridge through open forest with little undergrowth that reminds me of the higher parts of Oregon. I am left with my own thoughts again. Thinking about the return to civilization depresses me, so I plug into a podcast instead. A couple hours later, I stop at a sunny glade with a view to the east to snack and wait for Roadside. I unplug from the podcast and hear some rustling nearby. I look over and see another hiker, about fifty yards away, stuffing things into his backpack. He sees me and walks over. He’s young, maybe only nineteen or twenty, skinny, with sandy blonde hair.
“Hey, do you know what kind of mushroom this is?” He’s holding a bright red mushroom with spots. It looks like the archetype of the poisonous mushroom. “No idea, sorry.” I pause for a beat. “I’m Zigzag.” “Oh, I’m Blackout. I’m pretty sure this is the mushroom that was the first recorded use of hallucinogens, but I’m not sure. It’s supposed to make you feel pretty ill, though. I was considering taking a small bite.” If he’s asking me to give him permission, I am completely the wrong person. “Yeah, I’m sorry, I know nothing about mushrooms. It looks like straight poison to me.” “I think I’ll wait until the next water source.” Maybe what he’s really looking for is recognition of his bravado. I chuckle and express my disbelief, kindly tell him I think he’s crazy, and this seems to be enough. We chat a little more about the trail, and he heads on before Roadside arrives. An hour later I find Blackout’s backpack lying at the end of a switchback. A side trail cuts a ways across the mountainside to a brook. I expect to find him there, but no. I fill my bottles and worry a little. This kid was thinking about trying a wild, poisonous-looking mushroom and now he has disappeared and left his pack behind. He’s probably just using the restroom somewhere, but maybe he’s on a wild hallucinogenic trip, lost in the woods. The last time I came into contact with someone on psilocybin mushrooms, it was a bad scene. My friend Jay was going into the woods near Flagstaff to do them with a friend. I was dating his sister at the time, but I considered him a good friend, too. On his way out of town, I told him to give me a call if anything came up. A couple hours later, he called to tell me his friend was freaking out. When I arrived, Jay’s mouth was all bloody. We found his friend up on a hill, walking barefoot over lava rocks, his jeans around his ankles and torn to shreds, penis hanging out of his boxer shorts. He was completely incoherent, and stared at me with confusion and malice. He moved like a stork over uneven shallows, bobbing and stumbling, arms wildly akimbo. He got in my face and squawked at me, then took a wild swing. I stepped back out of reach as he tripped over his pants and opened his knees on the sharp rocks. Jay and I weren’t able to get him into the car, so we had to get two of his friends to help us. “Man, that kid can’t handle his drugs,” one of them said after a massive bong hit. By the time we got back out, all that was left of the stork-man was his tattered jeans. Eventually someone saw him walking at the other end of a lava field, at the edge of the trees. He was beginning to come down, and as we walked him back to the car, he kept muttering “I hate you guys.” On the way into town, all five of us crammed into a little Toyota Corolla, we were followed by a police officer for several miles. I still remember the tangible release I felt when he turned off down a side road. Before that day, I had always thought of psilocybin as a fairly harmless drug. The mushroom Blackout took might be much worse than that, and we’re in the middle of nowhere. I finish pumping my water and carry the bottles back to my pack. Blackout is there, talking to Roadside. He must have just stepped into the woods to use the bathroom. Roadside doesn’t need water right now, so we continue on. A few minutes later, Blackout flies by in a downhill run. Another couple hours, and we run into him again at the top of a hill, eating lunch. We join him. “Hey Blackout, did you end up trying that mushroom?” I ask. “Yeah. I took a little nibble. I feel a little queasy, and all the colors seem a little brighter, but that’s about it.” I just hope it doesn’t get any worse. The afternoon is an endless forest and blurs by. We see Blackout one more time, at a spring in the evening, and then he is gone, another temporary friend in this temporary world. We find a wooded site between two steep hills. A couple hikers come by while we’re eating dinner, looking for a campsite. They explore near us for a bit, then tell us they’re going to head on to an abandoned power station a few miles ahead and see if they can camp inside. It sounds horribly uncomfortable to me—a hard floor, stale air, the likelihood of mice or insects. Probably beer cans and broken glass, too. No thanks. Give me the interconnected, efficient forest, the naked night sky. Give me flowing rivers of cleansing air, living walls of wood and leaf. Let the soft earth hold me in her bosom. Let me sleep under the billion billion worlds, and know that I am alive. September 28, 2016 Mile 2314.6-2344.5 29.9 Miles The days have crept their steady crawl, and winter may pounce at any moment. Only luck has kept our hike alive; in previous years, hiking season has ended as early as September 1st, when an early storm has made the Washington Cascades impassable without specialized equipment. No accounts have recommended planning a hike lasting past the fifteenth, and now we are creeping toward October. If the weather holds and we can hold our 25-mile-per-day pace, we should finish in 14 days. I don’t doubt the pace, but the weather worries me. This morning it is cold, colder than it has been until now. The anaerobic chemistry repairing my muscles overnight has kept me warm enough in my sleeping bag, but when I pack up, not enough blood can flow into my fingers to keep them nimble. I operate like a backhoe, a stiff claw scooping and stuffing items into the open pit of my backpack. The land is leopard-print with tiny lakes this morning. I wonder what geologic process has speckled the earth this way. In the early dark, they reflect starlight and fairy dust. As daylight encroaches, the sky blushes and the ponds fill with rosé. Birds call quietly, perhaps in warning of our rough footsteps. This morning we mount an ascent toward Chinook pass. I remember my father’s sturdy white kayak, called a Chinook. Both are named for the native tribe that helped the Lewis and Clark party survive the winters of 1805 and 1806. It would be nice to have some of that magic right now. The pass has pit toilets, and they look new, and like they have been cleaned recently. It seems silly to be this excited about clean pit toilets, but this is our life now. We use the cinder-block walls of the toilets as backrests while we make our breakfast and gaze out over the valley below. People drive up a road in cars look at us askance, but who cares? There are no other backrests around, and there’s nothing unclean about our choice of breakfast spots, despite the associations people carry around. We can see the road wind down the mountain for four or five miles. I wonder what towns this pass connects. It’s strange to be on the edge of civilization and yet so disconnected from it. A couple hikers come through while we’re eating. They are tall, strong young men who look like they should be on the Yale rowing team, not like dirty nomads who have been starving themselves for months. They speak confidently about the pass ahead, with perhaps a touch of arrogance. They are friendly, but I feel inadequate in comparison. Where does that feeling come from? If I had their physical stature, it would give me nothing more that I don’t already have. I might gain additional respect from people who care about such things, but are those the people whose esteem I crave? A half hour later, Roadside and I catch up to them on the way up the mountain. They are pausing every few steps, huffing and sweating. We stroll past easily and wish them a good hike. I wonder, too, about this other feeling, not entirely kind, that puffs out my chest as we stop at the top of the pass and look back to see them far below. What is it that makes us feel the need to compare ourselves to others? I have no need to compete for territory or a mate, there is no survival or replication advantage that I gain by hiking faster than these two men who I have never met before and will probably never meet again. Nor did I stand to lose something if they had outhiked me. Is it hardwired into us? It seems to be a primarily masculine affliction, this drive to competition, although I see women engage in different versions of the same. Whether hardwired or learned, it does seem to ease when I recognize it for what it is: ego. It’s a story I tell myself about myself, a meme that I can release by telling myself a different story, creating a different meme. Hike your own hike. It means many things, but first and foremost, it means to release the stories about status or glory and hike in a way that makes me fundamentally happy. It makes me realize that genuine happiness and concerns about status seem to be fundamentally opposed. Strangely, as I recognize my own ego and choose this new story, I notice another layer of pride emerge—pride that I am able to recognize my own ego, and that I am somehow better than other people for my ‘enlightenment’. I release that, and then notice another layer of the exact same. Perhaps it is hardwired. I turn my attention out, toward the landscape. I am hiking through a series of lake basins framed by pastel cliffs. Greens and golds paint the rock walls and spill into the reflected surfaces of the lakes. They are unexpected hues, august and regal. The autumn air has a dignified quietude that softens my knotted pride. I am humbled before the earth. We stop for lunch, then continue through a long section of easy climbs and descents. Roadside falls back a ways. I continue to examine and try to escape my ego and status roles for most of the afternoon, but each time ends in failure unless I turn my attention to the landscape. Ego always sneaks back in, but I get a temporary reprieve each time I look outward, and it seems like I am able to do so a little longer each time. In the early evening I wind down to arrive at the Mike Ulrich cabin. It is a wooden cabin open to all, situated in the trees on the edge of a meadow. Unnaturally white tule fog blankets the meadow and creeps slowly downhill, but dissipates as soon as it reaches the clearing. On the front porch of the cabin, two fifty-gallon trash bags overflow with garbage. A few beer cans and other scraps of paper are scattered about in the dirt. Under the trees, the vegetation has been cleared and the ground crushed by heavy equipment as far back as I can see. It is a truly ugly place in the middle of a vast sea of beauty. Roadside and I plan to camp here tonight.
I climb the stairs and open the wide heavy door. A fire is blazing in a deep-set fireplace in the back wall and I can barely make out the silhouettes of people in the dark. Voices greet me, both male and female. They seem familiar to each other, engaging in the sort of easy ribbing and playful insults of long-standing friends. As my eyes adjust, I can make out six of them around a thick wood table and benches, four male, two female. Some backpacks are leaned against the walls, and I set mine there too. On the other wall is a ladder leading up to a sleeping platform above. The room is warm and stuffy. “Hey, I’m Zigzag. You guys northbound?” “Hey Zigzag,” one of the guys says. Yeah, we’re all northbound.” He introduces himself, then they go around the table, but the names come too fast for me to remember and I’m struggling to make out faces. “My hiking partner Roadside should be here any minute.” “Cool, man. Pull up a seat. You want a hit?” Roadside shows up a couple minutes later and we go through the same ritual of introductions. A couple of guys get up and go outside. Every time the door opens, the light is blinding. For dinner, each of us cooks something different on our individual camp stoves. The conversation is noisy and filled with laughter, but Roadside and I are mostly left out their conversation. I try to ask them questions, but each time it seems like an interruption and I feel like an outsider. The loudness is jarring to me and makes me feel even more isolated. It is clear that this group has been hiking together for a long time. Roadside and I aren’t unwelcome, we’re just extraneous. It’s nobody’s fault, it’s just the way things are. The guy who first welcomed me is coming around with a pot and offering a little to each person. He asks if I want some. “What is it?” “Wild mushrooms.” and then he offers the scientific name. It’s dangerous to eat wild mushrooms. Some of them can permanently destroy your liver with a single bite. Some of them can kill you in a matter of hours. Lots of others can make you so sick you want to die. “Sure! Thanks.” He knows the scientific name. That sounds to me like he knows what he’s talking about. I’m not especially afraid of death, but I’m definitely afraid of not living. The mushrooms are tasty, but they aren’t the wild flavor I was expecting. Honestly, they don’t taste all that different from the white mushrooms at the supermarket. I sure hope they don’t kill us all. After dinner, Roadside and I convene briefly about sleeping. We had planned to stay in the cabin, but it’s so hot in here, and so noisy, and the group seems so far away from sleep, that we decide to find a place to camp outside. We wish them a good night and find a place close to the meadow, under the trees. The nearby tule fog creeps down toward us and reaches out tendrils between the trees. It looks like something out of a horror movie, and yet I feel nothing but relief in the cold dark quiet. |
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Nick is a teacher, writer, and amateur adventurer. Archives
June 2020
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