September 8, 2016 Mile 1841.2-1871.7 30.5 miles 5:30am feels like a luxury. It was the first warm night of sleep I’ve gotten since entering Oregon, and we only hiked twelve miles yesterday, so I’m rested and ready to fly. The landscape is desktop-flat, and I get to the first road in under an hour. I check my map to see how far I’ve gone. 4.2 miles! Someone has cached water and mandarin oranges in an ice chest with a sign above it that says “PCT Thruhikers”. Don’t mind if I do. Roadside catches up while I’m peeling my second orange. Then it’s on, on and up the long flank of Mt. Thielsen. It’s a volcanic plug, a sharp spire of rock left over from hundreds or thousands of years ago and partially crumbled into rock piles along the western slope. We pass several campers along the gentle incline. It must be a weekend (later, I’ll figure out that it’s a Thursday—people just camp more in Oregon, I guess). One of the campers is leaning out of his tent door, cooking breakfast from the warm comfort of his sleeping bag. I’ve lost Roadside again, though I can’t see far behind me because of the winding trail and the thick forest. The smell of coffee catches my attention, but I don’t see anyone around and I keep going. A few minutes later a camp with a man and woman in their forties comes into view, and I stop to chat, secretly hoping that they’ll offer me a cup of joe. They don’t, but the man tells me there’s a long water carry coming up—about ten miles. Water has been so common since California that I rarely think to check the water report anymore. It’s almost become a given that there will always be plenty whenever I need it. It’s a form of entitlement, I suppose, this belief that nature will provide whatever I need. A dangerous belief. At 9, I stop for breakfast at a junction with a view. Two branches are PCT, the other two come steeply up the shoulder and continue up toward the peak. It’s cold and windy here, but I don’t want to go too much farther before eating—I’ve learned the hard way that once I’m low on energy, it never really gets better until I’ve slept. I have service, so I call Lindsey. She’s at work, but she’s able to talk with me for about twenty minutes before she has to go. It’s nice to hear her voice. Roadside shows up during the call and makes his breakfast quietly nearby. After I get off the phone, I note that this cold would have been miserable to me a few months ago—it’s the sort of cold that I might have canceled a camping trip over. But now, it’s a minor nuisance. I’m so immersed in the thruhiking experience that it barely even occurs to me that there’s a choice in the matter. And without a choice, it doesn’t occur to me to complain, not even to myself. To be completely honest, I revel in the suffering a little. It makes me feel alive in a way that warm comfort does not. I share all this with Roadside, and he seems unimpressed. “Yeah” is all the response I get from him. It’s a little strange to me that after a week I still know nothing about him aside from his ethnicity and where he’s from. He never shares stories about himself, and his responses are limited to a few short phrases. It suits me, but I start to wonder whether he’s hiding something or if he has some sort of trauma in his past. It’s a short ways to the last stream, which cuts a steep, straight, eroded line down from the mountain. It’s warm here, out of the wind, and the knowledge that the stream is our last one for a while helps me to appreciate it. Why do we do that? Why can’t our minds appreciate beauty when it’s ubiquitous, instead of only when it is about to disappear? The trail cuts down around the other side of the mountain, and then starts back up toward the highest Oregon point on the PCT. I’m sick of listening to podcasts; it’s time for some tunes. I plug into my iPhone and look for some good hiking music, something that I haven’t already played to death. Bruce Springsteen—now there’s someone I haven’t listened to in a while. It’s perfect music for hiking. Apart from the occasional ballad, the tempos are upbeat and energetic, the raw vocals and wailing saxophone fill me with the urge to drive forward, pumping my quads and glutes like pistons. I’m immersed in the physical body, not particularly connected with the land around me, but enjoying myself nonetheless. There’s more than one way to enjoy a hike. I’m chugging along through meadows, jamming to Bruce, when a southbound hiker comes around a corner. I pop my headphones out to say hi, but he doesn’t even make eye contact and blows past me as if he doesn’t even see me. I’m a little offended at first, but as I hike on and think about it, I start to get it. I saw about twenty hikers all leaving Crater lake the same day as Roadside and I. I haven’t seen any of them today, but he probably has. And probably twenty or thirty more hikers the day before. And the day before that, for maybe a month or more. How many of them want to stop and chat? How many hike-stopping conversations before someone says “enough, I need to hike now.” It gets me thinking about distraction. I once read that the novelist Haruki Murakami refuses most interviews because they take away from his writing time. Many famous composers and artists were considered cold and distant because they were so immersed in their work. The archetype of the absent-minded professor has something to it: to do great work requires great focus, and sometimes that requires tradeoffs that many of us aren’t willing to make. A few minutes after passing the hiker, I get to a sign for the highest PCT point in Oregon, elevation 7560’. I’m at the edge of a field of dirt with a few sparse grasses holding the topsoil down. It’s barely a meadow, much less a mountain. Compared to California’s high point, Forrester Pass (elevation 13,200’), this is barely worth noting. I stop for lunch a little while later on a sunny slope looking out to the northeast. Roadside shows up a few minutes later. We’ve gotten ourselves into a rhythm: long stretches of hiking alone, followed by breaks and camping together. It’s a perfect combination for me: I get a lot of time with my thoughts, and I get to soak in the beauty fo the trail without the distraction of conversation (I’ve noticed over many years of hiking that even the best conversations take me out of the world around me, and I end up focusing all my attention on the subject), and I get some company during my breaks. For me, it’s the perfect balance between solitude and loneliness. I wonder if Roadside feels the same. The downhill after lunch is wooded but open enough to let the sunshine through. It’s an especially winding path that occasionally affords an overlook of Maidu lake to the east. We descend for a few miles and immediately start back uphill. Despite the occasional view, we’ve mostly stayed in a trench of trees all day, and I’m beginning to feel a little claustrophobic. I miss the wide California views. I’m alone again when I reach a wide clearing with five hikers who I haven’t met before, all young white men with light colored hair. I don’t catch all of their trail names, but some are easy to remember: there’s PIF (pronounced as one syllable), short for Pay It Forward, who greets us with an open-hearted smile. King Arthur is tall and has a silver crown attached to his pack. PBR is named for his favorite beer (this is an assumption on my part, which will be strengthened later when I see him drinking a Pabst at the next lodge we stop at). The other two hikers tell me their names, but they are quickly forgotten.
They are stopped here because of water, of which I am in need. The water is down a steep side trail, and I don’t want to bring my pack down there (and more importantly, back up) with me, so I ask if they’re going to stick around for a few minutes. I don’t want to leave my pack up here unattended. I grab my fold-up bucket and head down the steep switchbacks. The sound of the group is quickly muffled by the forest. The trees are widely spaced, but the canopy cover is complete and dark. It doesn’t matter that I’ve been walking by myself for much of the day, this feels ominous. At the bottom of the switchbacks there are a couple of small ponds. Bugs and pine needles are scattered on the surface and the depths are obscured by floating pollen or stirred-up mud. I scan around me in an attempt to make myself feel more comfortable, but it doesn’t work. It feels like something is watching me. I scoop up a bucketful of murky water and hurry back uphill, carefully, so as not to spill the bucket, and away from this dreary place. When I reach the top, the other hikers have left my pack unattended, but Roadside has arrived. We filter the water into our bottles and hike on the last two miles to our campsite.
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Nick is a teacher, writer, and amateur adventurer. Archives
June 2020
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