October 11, 2016 Mile 2619.5-2638.7 19.2 Miles We’re in a car with a nice old gentleman who just left the dentist’s office. When I woke up this morning, I knew I had to get back out here. A good night’s sleep, dry clothes, and a good meal was all it took. At breakfast, Roadside asked “Are you sure you want to quit? We’re so close to the end,” and when I told him no, I didn’t want to quit, it felt like I had narrowly missed a death sentence. Well, not quite. We still have a storm coming in tomorrow, and we still have to find a ride to a remote trailhead up a narrow dirt road on a Tuesday. The nice old gentleman has promised us a ride to the turnoff, no farther. “I can’t take you all the way,” he says. He doesn’t want to take this car up the dirt road. He calls his wife to tell her he’s giving some hikers a ride. “I’m only taking them to the turnoff,” he says, “they’ll have to find a ride or walk up from there.” I’m hopeful we can find a ride. The road was long and will add a lot of miles onto our trip. At Mazama we pick up another hiker. “I can’t take you all the way,” the old man says, “I’m only going to the turnoff.” As an afterthought he asks “how’s the condition of the road, anyway?” All three of us agree that it was clear, just a few small rocks here and there. “Well, I can’t take you all the way,” he repeats. He takes us all the way. The top of the mountain is still freezing cold. But I’ve rested, eaten, my clothes are all dry, and I’ve had coffee. I’m unstoppable now. And I’m so, so glad to be back. The path is level despite the huge variations in elevation around us. It clings to the side of a steep slope—mountain on the right, valley on the left—and very gradually works its way uphill as it cuts around the mountain. In the Sierra or the Trinity Alps, protrusions of the granite batholith would force a sudden uphill or downhill. Unexpected variations in topography and scenery are part of what makes those mountains exciting. Here, though, it seems there are no rocky knobs or granite cliffs to interrupt the steady climb, only grasses, trees, and sweeping views. I hadn’t noticed until now, but even the huckleberry bushes are gone. In a human being, I would associate this steady, dignified terrain with maturity, and the variegated jumble of the Sierra with youth. In mountains, it’s hard to know which is older. Perhaps the steady, persistent rain and snow has worn the rock down to soil here and mostly left it, whereas sudden and sporadic storms washed the Sierra down to the rock and left it intact. Or maybe more recent and regular volcanic activity in the north has covered the mountainsides in smooth layers of ash. I would have to ask a geologist, or google, but neither is available right now and I’m sort of glad for it. My only choice is to wonder, to stay with my curiosity and uncertainty. There’s something to that, I realize. I have been so focused on trying to get everything right—What career am I going to take on when I get back from the trail? When’s the best time to start a family? Should my money go toward saving for a house or saving for retirement? Will my next job even make me enough money to save?—that I haven’t left space for curiosity and uncertainty. Yesterday, it seemed like I had only one decision: try to finish my hike or quit. I made the safe choice, and the finality of it was a blow. But it wasn’t final. There was another possibility that I didn’t even see, which was that I could return to the trail. Here I am. If I had closed myself off to curiosity and uncertainty, Roadside and I would never have put ourselves on the curb with our thumbs out to see if we could find a ride. It was so improbable. If we had waited for a driver who said he could take us all the way, we might still be waiting. I remember the nervousness I felt about hitchhiking before the start of this hike. What if I don’t get a ride? What if I get kidnapped and murdered? If I had required certainty, I might not have ever begun. The truth is, we all deal with a range of uncertainty in our everyday activities. We can try to narrow that range, and that can give us more confidence in the outcome, but it closes off possibility. Opening ourselves to possibility also opens us to risk, but we can mitigate risk if we can learn to improvise, and that only happens by putting ourselves in the way of manageable risks on a regular basis. It’s like a muscle that we have to flex or it atrophies. My hike has been filled with surprises, and each of them has allowed me to learn the shape of my limits. Southern California taught me about heat and my capacity for pain; the Sierra taught me endurance and patience; Northern California taught me loneliness; Oregon taught me hunger; Washington, it seems, is here to teach me about cold. I’ve also learned about solitude (which is different than loneliness), and stillness, and fear, and the enormous human capacity for generosity, and ego and status and community. I’ve looked at the systems that shape our world and it appears that many of them—the economic and political systems in particular—are there to remove uncertainty. They come from a mindset of scarcity: If I don’t develop this, harvest this, mine this, then someone else will. But I see possibilities that I couldn’t have seen before this hike. I see possibilities for a world where we live with less impact and more connection, where we live with less control but more responsibility, where we open ourselves to new ways of thinking and behaving so that our descendants have access to these magnificent lands, intact and thriving. I stop for lunch at a pass between two valleys. One of my snack bars is frozen so hard that it nearly pulls out my teeth. Roadside is only a minute behind. I’m happy he’s here with me. “I sure am gonna miss this,” I say. “What, the cold?” “No, the cold can go to hell,” I laugh. “The mountains, the valleys, the open space. When I get home I’m going to have to get a job, and I’ll probably have to spend most of my time inside. Maybe I’ll try to get a job outside.” I will try. Most of them will pay too little for me to seriously consider. We keep our lunch short—it’s too cold to go sitting around for long. In the afternoon we pass streams dripping with icicles, patches of ice running across the trail, and a single Yurt, unattached to any road. The hiker who rode up with us told us that this was put up by some skiers who get airdropped here in the winter and spend a few days at a time. We pass from valley to valley, a series of drainages that must all drain to the sea, but seem as jumbled and directionless as a funnelcake. By early evening we come across a campsite in a copse of trees and although we aren’t stopping, it occurs to me that this will be our last night on trail. I am completely ready to be done with the cold, but also completely unprepared to go back to civilized life. I have two choices now: I can start to prepare myself for civilized life by planning and thinking about something that is essentially unknowable, or I can spend my last hours on the trail immersing myself in the beauty of the Northern Cascades. It’s an easy choice, and yet it’s one that the old me would have had trouble achieving the type of presence that allows me to choose it. For months I’ve been practicing: stay here, in the moment. Focus on the grand peaks, the smell of cold earth, the unrelenting rhythmic pressure on the soles of your feet, the stir of the grasses.
We climb up over a pass into another grand basin. Switchbacks cut down, the trail passes underneath the cliff of a peak on our left, then switchbacks back up. We are coming near the end of our day, and it’s time to look for a campsite. One has two hikers huddled around a campfire. The next is empty, but the map tells us there’s one more right under the pass, a quarter mile ahead. Up there will have a better view, and we won’t have to climb as far in the morning. We reach it just as the sun drops, and find that a hiker and his one tent have taken the two spots. He offers to move over for us, but it’s too small to fit both of us. We go to the top of the pass to see if there are more sites on the other side, but the trail hugs a cliff for as far as we can see. We drop back down to the lower site and set up camp in the dusk. It’s a simple dusk, bereft of clouds but filled with subtle shades of blue. It’s a truth known to those who spend long stretches of days outside that no two dusks are the same, and all are spectacular. A mundane dusk is really just a mind that is insufficiently still. A sky has tone and timbre, and divulges information beyond rational understanding. It’s a simple dusk, but it’s sublime, and it’s ours. Dinner is so hot it burns my tongue, and cold again before I’ve finished half of it. Cleanup takes forever. My hands are aching. It doesn’t matter. Every bite, every scrape of the pot, every moment of pain is sacred. This is the last night. This is the last night. When we climb into our tents for the last time, the stars are blurry in my eyes. Whatever sadness I feel is overmatched by gratitude.
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Nick is a teacher, writer, and amateur adventurer. Archives
June 2020
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