September 12, 2016 Mile 1961.5-1981.2 19.7 Miles Last night we decided to wake up a little earlier this morning because the map tells us hitching can be a little difficult here. We start in full dark, bleary-eyed and headachy because of lack of sleep. Even in our protected basin, the wind shook our tents hard enough and often enough to wake us regularly. Our first hour is forested, with steep slopes and occasional switchbacks. Eventually we open onto meadowy slopes, but the wind is still raging. Several times it shoves me violently from the trail like an aggressive drunk, angry at some perceived slight. I don’t know what sin I’ve committed against the wind god, so I just brace myself and push forward. Dawn light emerges, but the Sisters have blocked any direct sunlight from where we’re standing. A sign informs us that we are entering the Obsidian Limited Entry Area. There are strict permitting rules, but our PCT permits apply and give us entry. I’ve been looking forward to this section. The black, glassy rock starts a short while later. Small chunks of it are embedded in the dirt all around us, including in the trail under our feet. My conscience engages in a battle with itself. I badly want to collect a piece of obsidian as a memento of this amazing place, but Leave No Trace principles forbid it. So does Kant’s categorical imperative. Bentham might be more forgiving, but I’ve never held much stock in utilitarianism. I wonder what the Buddha would have to say. I start out thinking about nonduality and the interconnection of all things, but there’s a much simpler answer: I’m craving, and that’s one of the roots of suffering. Even if I took a piece of obsidian without guilt, it wouldn’t make me happy. It wasn’t a real battle anyway; I would never do that. We come to Obsidian Falls. I was sort of hoping for cliffs of hard, uniform black. There is lots of obsidian in the cliff, but in many ways it’s just like every other waterfall I’ve seen. It’s beautiful, but not as interesting as I had hoped. I realize I’ve been craving again. A tough habit to break. Two older women are hiking just ahead of us. One stops to put something in her backpack, and startles when I approach to pass. Apparently the waterfall obscured the sound of my footsteps. I make sure to announce myself when I close on the other woman with a hearty “good morning!” The creek above Obsidian Falls makes a hard right straight toward the mountain, and the trail follows. I can see the midnight jewels in the bed of the creek. It seems like I should stop and shout for joy, it’s like I’ve found something out of a fairy-tale book. And I am in awe, completely geeking out on nature—it’s almost beyond possibility, that this exists in the world we inhabit—, but I don’t stop. The trail has momentum, and I’ve learned through the experience of months that to stop and try to hold on to this would make me just as unhappy and dissatisfied as if I were to try to eat these rocks. We cross the shallow creek on a series of stones protruding from the surface. A short way to the east, it flows directly out of the bottom of a rockslide. Is this real life? The obsidian increases. On my left side is a boulder of the stuff subsumed in the earth, a portal to another world, a black mirror, a glass darkly. On my right is a shallow pool of poison magic, lacking inlet or outlet, still and opaque. These, too, I must pass by without question, without pause. The obsidian ends abruptly, and now we find ourselves in a landscape of burnt gravel and igneous rock. Trees that I think are cypress and juniper line the edges of wide maroon channels of the cooled lava. The trees are bent over from an eternal wind, barely holding on in a hostile land, and many of them are stripped white like bones scattered about. The trail cuts across the channels of sharp rock, and every footstep holds risks—of turning, of tearing my pants further, of kicking up and biting against an ankle. One rock grabs onto my pants leg and tears it to the calf. A little later, another one splits it to the knee. The trail climbs up one of these magma channels, then around a ridge. The lava rock makes it difficult for anything to grow, so we have an epic view: cumulus clouds are widely spaced in the sky; Three-Fingered Jack and Mt. Jefferson form a line with some lower ridges away to the north. When we drop down again, the rock gives way to gravel, then black and red sands. The evergreens thicken in tufts and patches. Trails jut off in different directions across the sands. Some of them are marked. Others look like they were formed as the result of a single person who took a shortcut and left a scar. We start to see a lot of hikers, many of them backpacking, some of them day hiking, all of them cleaner and less weathered than us. I’m happy to see all the hikers—it should be easier to find a hitch into town. We stop for breakfast at a wind-protected turn in the trail and exchange niceties with the hikers that pass us. A few have questions about thru-hiking for us, but nobody stays to chat long. Then we’re descending, hurrying to get to the road and town and a shower and real food. The downhill starts gently—traditional dirt soil among fir trees. The dayhikers become more frequent and talkative, a sure sign we must be getting close to a trailhead, but then they disappear altogether. Later I’ll check the map and realize there was a side trail that went to a parking lot. We stick to the main PCT, and soon we are back in the lava rock. It’s uniformly gunmetal gray now, and despite the engineering feats that the trail crew used to build this section, nothing can make these rocks easy to traverse. Only a few minutes in, I feel a lactic burn in my ankles and shins, two places where I’m not used to feeling muscle fatigue. The trees drop away and we continue over vast fields of rock for miles. Eventually we reach the road. It’s a tiny road sunk into the rock, almost invisible in the lava fields until you are right on it. It lacks the center yellow line that would mark a two-lane road, and almost lacks the width, too. There’s no pullout area for cars, no place where a driver might stop to pick us up. For that matter, there are no cars driving by at all. Roadside shows up a few minutes after me, cursing the ankle-busting lava rock. When he finishes, he looks around and says “where are all the people?” I’m wondering the same thing.
On a hunch, we decide to follow the road uphill. My maps didn’t download correctly at the last town, and I sent myself the wrong set of paper maps in the last resupply, so I’m left with just the trail information and an empty grid on my phone. Luckily we don’t have to walk very far before we find cars. There’s a small parking lot with space for about 10 cars, and on the other side of the road, a small castle built out of lava rock. We’re at the top of a pass now, and we can see that the lava flows extend for miles in every direction. It truly looks like a different planet. People are wandering the castle hurriedly in the cold wind. We read a sign about the castle—it’s called the Dee Wright Observatory, and it’s built so that you can look through slots in the walls to see each of the high points around the area. We opt not to go into it in the hopes that one of these people leaving will be able to give us a ride. Roadside stays with the packs while I wander about and ask people for a hitch into town. I come up short. It seems like everyone is either going the other direction or has no room left in their car. So we sit in an empty space at the end of the parking lot and wait for more cars to come by. A new car shows up about every five minutes, but each one has some excuse for why they can’t take us. A guy in a 4-door pickup truck parks right next to us and asks us if we’re PCT hikers. This is it, I think. Even if he doesn’t have room in the cab, we can always pile into the bed of the truck. We chat with him for a minute while his family is unpiling from the cab, and he’s friendly and impressed by our hike. “Hey,” I venture, “after you guys get done looking around, do you think you could give us a ride to town?” “Oh, um, I think we’re headed the other direction,” he says. “Sorry.” Five minutes later they pile back into the truck and leave to the east, in the direction we wanted to go. My hiking furnace has died down, and I’m getting cold. This stupid wind is miserable. We continue to ask every visitor that looks like they might have a seat—we’ll hitch down in separate cars if needed. For over an hour, each of them says no. Finally, a guy in a small car pulls up from the east and rolls down his window. “I felt bad and decided to come back,” he says. I don’t remember talking to him. “I don’t have a passenger seat, so you’ll have to lie down, is that okay?” I’m not sure what he means by that, but we assure him that we’re grateful for the ride, however it works. He pulls around and opens up the car to rearrange his stuff and make room—the passenger seat has been replaced with a mattress that runs to the back of the car. He tells us he is living out of his car for the summer, traveling around the west to explore. It’s an ingenious setup, and he’s brought everything he needs with him, including his cat, who is in a carrier. He asks me to hold the kennel up on a shelf behind the driver’s seat so it doesn’t fall over while he’s driving. We pile our backpacks in and squeeze together into the tiny car. On our way down the mountain, we exchange stories about traveling. I’m trying to brace myself and the cat kennel against the turns in the road, so it’s up to Roadside, who is closer to the front of the car anyway, to do most of the talking. It’s the most I’ve heard him talk since I met him. He seems especially interested in the car setup, like he’s thinking about doing something similar. Something in his questions makes me think he’s trying to escape going home after the trail. My stomach is doing somersaults around the turns. I strain to position myself so I can see out the front window, then I ask for someone to crack a window. Just when I think I’m going to have to ask them to pull over so I can get out and vomit, we hit a straight section. And then we’re here, on the outskirts of Sisters, Oregon. Our driver drops us at a restaurant called the Hop & Brew, and just like that, he’s gone. I think to myself how amazing that there are so many people in this world willing to help others with no thought of recompense. I have never once picked up a hitchhiker, and now I’m aware of it as a lack of character in myself. I vow to start after I finish this hike. Maybe not every hitchhiker, but whenever I can help out, especially if it’s a hiker. After lunch, we find a hotel with decent rates on the west end of town. I make plans for dinner with a friend from college who lives about an hour away and who I haven’t seen in fifteen years. Then I take a long shower and a longer nap.
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Nick is a teacher, writer, and amateur adventurer. Archives
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