Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

by Cheryl Strayed

  But I had walked here, and I wasn’t ready to give up on seeing the High Sierra just yet. It had been the section of the trail I’d most anticipated, its untouched beauty extolled by the authors of The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1: California and immortalized by the naturalist John Muir in the books he’d written a century before. It was the section of mountains he’d dubbed the “Range of Light.” The High Sierra and its 13,000- and 14,000-foot-high peaks, its cold, clear lakes and deep canyons were the point of hiking the PCT in California, it seemed. Plus, bypassing it would be a logistical mess. If I had to skip the High Sierra, I’d end up in Ashland more than a month before I intended to.

  “I’d like to push on, if there’s a way,” I said, waving the feather with a flourish. My feet didn’t hurt anymore. They’d gone blissfully numb in the icy water.

  “Well, we do have about forty miles to play with before the going gets seriously rough—from here up to Trail Pass,” said Doug. “There’s a trail there that intersects the PCT and goes down to a campground. We can hike at least that far and see how it goes—see how much snow there is—and then bail out there if we want to.”

  “What do you think of that, Greg?” I asked. Whatever he would do was what I’d do.

  He nodded. “I think that’s a good plan.”

  “That’s what I’m going to do,” I said. “I’ll be okay. I have my ice ax now.”

  Greg looked at me. “You know how to use it?”

  The next morning he gave me a tutorial.

  “This is the shaft,” he said, running his hand up the length of the ax. “And this is the spike,” he added, touching a finger to the sharp end. “And on the other end there’s the head.”

  The shaft? The head? The spike? I tried not to crack up like an eighth grader in sex ed class, but I couldn’t help myself.

  “What?” asked Greg, his hand around the shaft of his ax, but I only shook my head. “You’ve got two edges,” he continued. “The blunt edge is the adze. That’s what you use to chop your steps. And the other edge is the pick. That’s what you use to save your ass when you’re sliding off the side of the mountain.” He spoke in a tone that assumed I knew this already, as if he were just reviewing the basics before we got started.

  “Yep. The shaft, the head, the spike, the pick, the ad,” I said.

  “The adze,” he corrected. “There’s a z.” We were standing on a steep bank along the river, the closest thing we could find to simulate an icy slope. “Now let’s say you’re falling,” said Greg, throwing himself down the incline to demonstrate. As he fell, he jammed the pick into the mud. “You want to dig that pick in as hard as you can, while holding on to the shaft with one hand and the head with the other. Like this. And once you’re anchored in, you try to get your footing.”

  I looked at him. “What if you can’t get your footing?”

  “Well, then you hold on here,” he answered, moving his hands on the ax.

  “What if I can’t hold on that long? I mean, I’ll have my pack and everything and, actually, I’m not strong enough to do a single pull-up.”

  “You hold on,” he said dispassionately. “Unless you’d rather slide off the side of the mountain.”

  I got to work. Again and again I threw myself against the increasingly muddy slope, pretending that I was slipping on ice, and again and again I planted the pick of my ice ax into the soil while Greg watched, coaching and critiquing my technique.

  Doug and Tom sat nearby pretending they weren’t paying attention. Albert and Matt were lying on a tarp we’d spread out for them beneath the shade of a tree near Ed’s truck, too ill to move anywhere but to the outhouse several times an hour. They’d both woken in the middle of the night sick with what we were all beginning to believe was giardia—a waterborne parasite that causes crippling diarrhea and nausea, requires prescription medication to cure, and almost always means a week or more off the trail. It was the reason PCT hikers spent so much time talking about water purifiers and water sources, for fear they’d make one wrong move and have to pay. I didn’t know where Matt and Albert had picked up whatever they had, but I prayed I hadn’t picked it up too. By late afternoon we all stood over them as they lay pale and limp on their tarp, convincing them it was time they got to the hospital in Ridgecrest. Too sick to resist, they watched as we packed their things and loaded their packs into the back of Ed’s truck.

  “Thank you for all your help with lightening my pack,” I said to Albert when we had a moment alone before he departed. He looked wanly up at me from his bed on the tarp. “I couldn’t have done it myself.”

  He gave me a weak smile and nodded.

  “By the way,” I said, “I wanted to tell you—about why I decided to hike the PCT? I got divorced. I was married and not long ago I got divorced, and also about four years ago my mom died—she was only forty-five and she got cancer suddenly and died. It’s been a hard time in my life and I’ve sort of gotten offtrack. So I …” He opened his eyes wider, looking at me. “I thought it would help me find my center, to come out here.” I made a crumpled gesture with my hands, out of words, a bit surprised that I’d let so many tumble out.

  “Well, you’ve got your bearings now, haven’t you?” he said, and sat up, his face lighting up despite his nausea. He rose and walked slowly to Ed’s truck and got in beside his son. I clambered into the back with their backpacks and the box of things I no longer needed and rode with them as far as the general store. When we reached it, Ed stopped for a few moments; I jumped out with my box and waved to Albert and Matt, hollering good luck.

  I felt a stinging rush of affection as I watched them drive away. Ed would return in a few hours, but most likely I’d never see Albert and Matt again. I would be hiking into the High Sierra with Doug and Tom the next day, and in the morning I’d have to say goodbye to Ed and Greg too—Greg was laying over in Kennedy Meadows another day, and though he would certainly catch up to me, it would likely be a fleeting visit, and then he too would pass out of my life.

  I walked to the porch of the general store and put everything but the foldable saw, the special high-tech flash for my camera, and the miniature binoculars into the PCT hiker free box. Those I packed into my old resupply box and addressed it to Lisa in Portland. As I sealed my box with a roll of tape Ed had loaned me, I kept having the feeling that something was missing.

  Later, as I walked the road back to the campground, I realized what it was: the fat roll of condoms.

  Every last one was gone.

  PART THREE

  RANGE OF LIGHT

  We are now in the mountains

  and they are in us …

  JOHN MUIR,

  My First Summer in the Sierra

  If your Nerve, deny you –

  Go above your Nerve –

  EMILY DICKINSON

  8

  CORVIDOLOGY

  Kennedy Meadows is called the gateway to the High Sierra, and early the next morning I walked through that gate. Doug and Tom accompanied me for the first quarter mile, but then I stopped, telling them to go on ahead because I had to get something from my pack. We embraced and wished one another well, saying goodbye forever or for fifteen minutes, we didn’t know. I leaned against a boulder to lift some of Monster’s weight from my back, watching them go.

  Their leaving made me melancholy, though I also felt something like relief when they disappeared into the dark trees. I hadn’t needed to get anything from my pack; I’d only wanted to be alone. Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren’t a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was. The radical aloneness of the PCT had altered that sense. Alone wasn’t a room anymore, but the whole wide world, and now I was alone in that world, occupying it in a way I never had before. Living at large like this, without even a roof over my head, made the world feel both bigger and smaller to me. Until now, I hadn’t truly understood the world’s vastness—hadn’t even understood how vast a mile could be—until each mile was
beheld at walking speed. And yet there was also its opposite, the strange intimacy I’d come to have with the trail, the way the piñon pines and monkey flowers I passed that morning, the shallow streams I crossed, felt familiar and known, though I’d never passed them or crossed them before.

  I walked in the cool of the morning to the rhythm of my new white ski pole clicking against the trail, feeling the lightened-but-still-ridiculously-heavy weight of Monster shift and settle in. When I’d set off that morning, I thought that it would feel different to be on the trail, that the hiking would be easier. My pack was lighter, after all, not only thanks to Albert’s purge but because I no longer needed to carry more than a couple of bottles of water at a time, now that I’d reached a less arid stretch of the trail. But an hour and a half into the day I stopped for a break, feeling the familiar aches and pains. At the same time, I could ever so slightly feel my body toughening up, just as Greg had promised would happen.

  It was day 1 of week 3, officially summer—the last week of June—and I was not only in a different season now, but in different country too, ascending higher in the South Sierra Wilderness. In the forty miles between Kennedy Meadows and Trail Pass, I’d climb from an elevation of just over 6,100 feet to nearly 11,000. Even in the heat of that first afternoon back on the trail, I could feel an edge of cool in the air that would no doubt envelop me at night. There was no question I was in the Sierra now—Muir’s beloved Range of Light. I walked beneath great dark trees that put the smaller plants beneath in almost complete shadow and past wide grassy meadows of wildflowers; I scrambled over snowmelt streams by stepping from one unsteady rock to another, aided by my ski pole. At foot speed, the Sierra Nevada seemed just barely surmountable. I could always take another step. It was only when I rounded a bend and glimpsed the white peaks ahead that I doubted my abilities, only when I thought how far I had yet to go that I lost faith that I would get there.

  Doug’s and Tom’s tracks periodically appeared on the alternately muddy and dusty trail, and by midafternoon I came upon them as they sat near a stream, their faces registering surprise when I walked up. I sat next to them and pumped water and we chatted for a while.

  “You should camp with us tonight if you catch up with us,” said Tom before they hiked on.

  “I already have caught up to you,” I replied, and we laughed.

  That evening I strolled into the small clearing where they’d pitched their tents. After dinner, they shared the two beers they’d brought from Kennedy Meadows, giving me swigs as we sat in the dirt bundled in our clothes. As we drank, I wondered which one of them had taken the eleven ultrathin nonlubricated Trojan condoms I’d purchased in Portland a few weeks before. It seemed it had to be one of them.

  The next day when I was hiking alone I came to a wide swath of snow on a steep incline, a giant ice-crusted sheath that obliterated the trail. It was like the rockslide, only scarier, a river of ice instead of stones. If I slipped while attempting to cross it, I would slide down the side of the mountain and crash into the boulders far below, or worse, fall farther into who knew what. Air, it seemed, from my vantage point. If I didn’t attempt to cross it, I’d have to go back to Kennedy Meadows. That didn’t seem like an altogether bad idea. And yet here I was.

  Hell, I thought. Bloody hell. I took out my ice ax and studied my course, which really only meant standing there for several minutes working up the nerve. I could see that Doug and Tom had made it across, their tracks a series of potholes in the snow. I held my ice ax the way Greg had taught me and stepped into one of the potholes. Its existence made my life both harder and easier. I didn’t have to chip my own steps, but those of the men were awkwardly placed and slippery and sometimes so deep that my boot got trapped inside and I’d lose my balance and fall, my ice ax so unwieldy it felt more like a burden than an aid. Arrest, I kept thinking, imagining what I’d do with the ax if I started to slide down the slope. The snow was different from the snow in Minnesota. In some places it was more ice than flake, so densely packed it reminded me of the hard layer of ice in a freezer that needs defrosting. In other places it gave way, slushier than it first appeared.

  I didn’t look at the bank of boulders below until I’d reached the other side of the snow and was standing on the muddy trail, trembling but glad. I knew that little jaunt was only a sample of what lay ahead. If I didn’t opt to get off the trail at Trail Pass to bypass the snow, I’d soon reach Forester Pass, at 13,160 feet the highest point on the PCT. And if I didn’t slip off the side of the mountain while going over that pass, I’d spend the next several weeks crossing nothing but snow. It would be snow far more treacherous than the patch I’d just crossed, but having crossed even this much made what lay ahead more real to me. It told me that I had no choice but to bypass. I wasn’t rightly prepared to be on the PCT in a regular year, let alone a year in which the snow depth measurements were double and triple what they’d been the year before. There hadn’t been a winter as snowy as the previous one since 1983, and there wouldn’t be another for more than a dozen years.

  Plus, there wasn’t only the snow to consider. There were also the things related to the snow: the dangerously high rivers and streams I’d need to ford alone, the temperatures that would put me at risk of hypothermia, the reality that I’d have to rely exclusively on my map and compass for long stretches when the trail was concealed by the snow—all of those made more grave by the fact that I was alone. I didn’t have the gear I needed; I didn’t have the knowledge and experience. And because I was solo, I didn’t have a margin for error either. By bailing out like most of the other PCT hikers had, I’d miss the glory of the High Sierra. But if I stayed on the trail, I’d risk my life.

  “I’m getting off at Trail Pass,” I told Doug and Tom as we ate dinner that night. I’d hiked all day alone—logging my second fifteen-plus-mile day—but caught up with them again as they made camp. “I’m going to go up to Sierra City and get back on the trail there.”

  “We decided to push on,” said Doug.

  “We talked about it and we think you should join us,” said Tom.

  “Join you?” I asked, peering out from the tunnel of my dark fleece hood. I was wearing all the clothes I’d brought, the temperature down near freezing. Patches of snow surrounded us beneath the trees in spots shaded from the sun.

  “It’s not safe for you to go alone,” Doug said.

  “Neither one of us would go alone,” said Tom.

  “But it’s not safe for any of us to go into the snow. Together or alone,” I said.

  “We want to try it,” said Tom.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’m touched you’d offer, but I can’t.”

  “Why can’t you?” Doug asked.

  “Because the point of my trip is that I’m out here to do it alone.”

  We were silent for a while then, eating our dinners, each of us cradling a warm pot full of rice or beans or noodles in our gloved hands. I felt sad to say no. Not only because I knew it meant I was opting to bypass the High Sierra, but because as much as I said I wanted to do this trip alone, I was soothed by their company. Being near Tom and Doug at night kept me from having to say to myself I am not afraid whenever I heard a branch snap in the dark or the wind shook so fiercely it seemed something bad was bound to happen. But I wasn’t out here to keep myself from having to say I am not afraid. I’d come, I realized, to stare that fear down, to stare everything down, really—all that I’d done to myself and all that had been done to me. I couldn’t do that while tagging along with someone else.

  After dinner, I lay in my tent with Flannery O’Connor’s Complete Stories on my chest, too exhausted to hold the book aloft. It wasn’t only that I was cold and tired from the day’s hike: at this elevation, the air was thinner. And yet I couldn’t exactly fall asleep. In what seemed a fugue state, I thought about what it meant to bypass the High Sierra. It basically ruined everything. All the planning I’d done, the way I’d mapped out the whole summer down to each box and meal. Now I�
��d be leapfrogging over 450 miles of the trail I’d intended to hike. I’d reach Ashland in early August instead of the middle of September.

  “Doug?” I called into the darkness, his tent only an arm’s length from mine.

  “Yeah?”

  “I was thinking, if I bypass, I could hike all of Oregon instead.” I rolled onto my side to face in the direction of his tent, half wishing he would come lie next to me in mine—that anyone would. It was that same hungry, empty feeling I’d had back in that Mojave motel when I’d wished I had a companion. Not someone to love. Just someone to press my body against. “Do you happen to know how long the trail is in Oregon?”

  “About five hundred miles,” he answered.

  “That’s perfect,” I said, my heartbeat quickening with the idea before I closed my eyes and fell into a deep sleep.

  The next afternoon Greg caught up to me just before I reached Trail Pass Trail, my route off the PCT.

  “I’m bypassing,” I said to him reluctantly.

  “I am too,” he said.

  “You are?” I asked with relief and delight.

  “It’s way too socked-in up here,” he said, and we looked around at the wind-twisted foxtail pines among the trailside boulders; the mountains and ridges visible miles away under the pure blue sky. The highest point of the trail was only thirty-five trail miles farther on. The summit of Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the contiguous United States, was closer still, a short detour off the PCT.