My plan was to surprise Angela at the Greyhound station in Yreka, and then, happily reunited, we’d travel to Etna by rural bus. I couldn’t wait to see her. Six days without her playful chirps, nuzzles, and pats had been extremely difficult. I needed to reconnect the umbilical cord; I hadn’t functioned well without it. I was happy to retire Solo-man and his routeless blundering. This is not to say that my solo-hike hadn’t been memorable—I’d hiked many miles, meandered the hills above and around a beautiful lake, and written prolifically in my journal. It was just that, much like my vision quest ten years prior, this solo experience had been all about girls. Well, actually, the girl, and getting her back.
Cuddles
THE TRIP FROM REDDING TO YREKA was picturesque and pleasant—something I never imagined possible on a Greyhound bus. Traveling on Interstate 5 we passed red-banked Shasta Lake and sneaked under the formidable granitic spires of Castle Crags before arriving in Yreka, a town whose greatest claim to fame may be that it was once the capital of America’s fifty-first state—but more about that later.
I’d never been to Yreka before, but as soon as I stepped onto its oil-stained pavement, I felt like I belonged. Yreka had a PCT-feel—it was the kind of place where people still wore cowboy hats and Wranglers and where you just might see a mule-train in the Wal-Mart parking lot.
Before I even had a chance to look for my bus I caught a glimpse of a familiar silhouette. Turning, I was greeted by a hearty wave, toothy grin, and prominent ears. He was still three blocks away, but I yelled “Duffy!” and sprinted. There on the sidewalk we collided in a hug so fierce that for one ecstatic, exciting moment we forgot to breathe.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, “I thought we were meeting in Etna! How’d you get here?” I was shocked, relieved, and overjoyed. Covering 180 miles in a week had been a lofty goal and I’d figured I might have to wait for Duffy in Etna.
“It wasn’t the same,” Duffy said when I asked him about his adventures as Solo-man. The freedom and spontaneity had been fun at first, but day to day, he said, he enjoyed hiking with me much better. I can’t tell you how pleased I was to hear that.
Ideal hiking partnerships are mutually beneficial in that each member of the party contributes to the experience of the other and benefits in kind. Partners split decision-making and burdens; lend each other encouragement; and share their thoughts, feelings, fears, and hopes. “A good partnership,” writes Jardine in Beyond Backpacking, “leads to a deeper knowledge of oneself, and of one’s companions, as well as a better understanding of the journey as a whole, its hardships and triumphs, its daily delights.” For couples this can be a make-or-break proposition because on-trail they face extremes they’d probably never encounter at home. This makes teamwork crucial not only for physical survival but for the survival of the relationship and the expedition.
Looking back on our rocky desert start, I was surprised that we’d made it this far. Baptism by fire can work, but it can also backfire. And, as I later realized, there may be better ways to learn how to backpack.
In a section of Beyond Backpacking, Jardine explains how a more experienced hiker should introduce backpacking to a neophyte. “Teach beginners how to enjoy hiking and camping by ensuring that the experiences will be pleasant.” Does hiking twenty waterless and heat-exhausted miles through the desert count?
“The person with [genuine outdoor skills] will foresee and avoid any unpleasant incidents,” Jardine continues, “he or she will keep from exhausting the partner with a heavy load and a fast pace.” And finally, some words about how to react to a novice, “lend gentle encouragement while extending illimitable patience. Ignore the inevitable mistakes, and give recognition to the many accomplishments.”
Because Duffy and I jumped on the PCT without either of us having much backpacking experience, we missed the opportunity to “avoid unpleasant circumstances” or “keep from exhausting [ourselves] with a heavy load and fast pace.” And certainly, because we’d been so focused on learning the basics, we hadn’t had enough time or energy to provide each other with encouragement. Despite our ignorance of such matters, however, we’d managed to muddle through and in the process discovered that, as Jardine says, “Each failure teaches more of what you need to know in order to succeed.”
We were still miles and miles from success, however—1,055 miles to be exact. Yet I was proud of our accomplishment thus far—of all the thousands of steps we’d taken and of the lessons we’d learned. Duffy continued to push me to go longer and stronger while doing so with more loving kindness and patience. As for me, I tried not to take the frequent moments of silence or physical distance personally. Instead of continually rushing to catch up, I trundled along as fast or as slow as my feet wanted to go.
We got back on the trail at Etna Summit on August 8, the ninety-third day of our pilgrimage north. Here in the Marble Mountain Wilderness, the PCT cuts along narrow river valleys and climbs forested ridges. Against these deep green forests, the limestone peak of Marble Mountain stands out brilliantly, like a diamond set amongst emeralds. In fact, all of the 214,500-acre Marble Mountain Wilderness seemed like treasure.
In the company of deer and wildflowers so tall they tickled my elbows, we followed the PCT across steep rock-strewn and colorful slopes into wooded valleys. Sugar pines abounded, with their spires reaching 200 feet toward the sky, the thick canopy blocking out nearly all light. Large, airy, oval-shaped cones littered the path, and we kicked them like footballs as we went. We had fifty-six miles to cover before our next brief stop in civilization, at Seiad Valley.
Our first night back on the trail we camped near a murky green lake. Hard thunderclaps woke us before dawn and we scrambled out to put on our rain fly and cover our packs with garbage bags. Lazily, we lay under our sleeping bag until nine in the morning, waiting for an end to the pitter-patter and eating several meals in the process. Finally, we realized that since Canada wasn’t going to come to us, we had to eventually get moving, rain or no rain. Conveniently, soon after we packed up our gear the skies cleared.
My body was still readjusting to the thru-hiking schedule, so we made camp early that night, under a gnarled and stately pine. In the distance a black cloud giving off streaks of gray cut into a pink, sunset-infused sky. As the evening progressed the sky became entirely black. I sat on a root that undulated in and out of the earth like a sea serpent and tended our pasta. Usually, we didn’t eat and sleep in the same location. Fearing hungry bears, we typically utilized Jardine’s “stealth camping” technique—cooking our dinner miles before choosing a (less established) campsite. Theoretically, this practice helped prevent bear invasions by limiting the number of tasty scents that emanated from our camp and keeping us away from campsites that bears habitually raid. But that night, because of my exhaustion and the imminent rain, we not only camped at a well-worn site but also cooked right outside our tent. At the time, we didn’t think much of the indiscretion. So far we hadn’t had much trouble with bears. Actually, our confidence was such that we had gotten in the habit of sleeping with our food bag nestled in the tent. I think it’s part of the thru-hiker mentality to ignore conventional wisdom when it comes to bears; after all, thru-hikers tend to ignore conventional wisdom regarding a lot of things.
Since the desert I’d slept soundly in our tent, falling asleep quickly and not waking up until Duffy’s watch alarm went off. But during the darkest hours of that night, I awoke—not with a start, but slowly and disoriented, wondering whether I had to pee, or was cold—why on earth was I awake? And then I heard it.
Not three feet from my head, with only a thin layer of nylon to protect me: heavy steps and snuffling. The steps were slow, the sniffing erratic, and while I couldn’t see our visitor, I knew immediately it was a bear. I could tell by Duffy’s breathing that he was awake, too, but neither of us spoke or moved. My foot rested on the green nylon bag that held our food—a veritable feast of peanut butter, raisins, Snickers bars, and instant pudding mix. The intrude
r could have it all with one swipe of his paw. But slowly, the footsteps quieted and we were left with just the rustling of leaves in the wind.
“Oh, my God,” I squealed, after I hadn’t heard anything bearlike for a couple of minutes. “What if he’d ripped into our tent?”
“At least we have a tent,” Duffy said.
He was right. Even though the nylon didn’t provide any real protection from bear claws, I felt safer inside.
“Yeah, I couldn’t handle staring a bad-breathed bear in the face. I’d pass out.”
“Then you’d be bear food.” Duffy tried to lighten the mood.
“I can’t believe that Casey and Toby still sleep out after what happened to them.”
While our late-night visitor either wasn’t hungry enough or didn’t like the aroma of our MREs enough to relieve us of our heavy food bag, Casey and Toby hadn’t been so lucky. While in the Sierra, day hikers gave Crazy Legs and Catch-23 a foot-long salami, which they devoured in one sitting. “The only problem with receiving the salami,” Catch-23 later wrote, “was that with it we received the salami wrapper . . . and we were in bear country.” Like many thru-hikers, Crazy Legs and Catch-23 slept with their food. On the evening of their salami snack, just as Catch-23 zipped himself up in his sleeping bag, he heard a strange ripping sound. Poking his head out he came face to face—in fact within inches—of a drooling bear. The bear was in the process of tearing into the food bag he’d just extracted from Catch-23’s pack by neatly slitting it open with a single claw. In an effort to scare away their uninvited dinner guest, the Seattle boys started singing, banging on their cooking pot, throwing rocks, and clapping. After a few minutes the bear moved away and Toby rescued what was left of their food supply. But still the bear lingered in the bushes, as if waiting for them to go back to sleep. That didn’t seem like a “keepin’ it real” sort of scenario, so the boys packed up and left.
We didn’t sleep much the rest of the night, and when morning came we bolted quickly out of camp. The trail down to Seiad Valley led us through a tunnel of blackberry brambles and tall pines. It was early afternoon and we were cruising. Rounding a switchback, our ears were suddenly assaulted with the sound of something crashing through the trees, scratching on bark and breaking branches. At first I thought it was two squirrels fighting. But as we got within ten feet of the commotion I saw something large and brown shuffling up a sugar pine’s trunk. When the furry creature reached a height of about fifteen feet, it stopped and peered down at us. “A cub!” I squeaked, delighted that my first face-to-face bear contact was with a cuddly baby. His perked-up ears stood out against the bright blue sky. Duffy whipped out the camera and started snapping photos. I cooed at the cub and called him “Cuddles.” He was on our right, and suddenly to our left we heard a much louder ruckus.
“It’s momma,” whispered Duffy. “We gotta go.” As if we could hide our presence now. He scooped up a handful of rocks, started singing “Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to work we go” at the top of his lungs, and began hurrying down the trail—all in the same instant. I grabbed some rocks, too, joined in the song, and scurried behind. Black bears are rarely violent, but if there’s anything that can set those fangs a-gnashing, it’s getting between momma and cub.
In his chillingly titled book Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance, author Stephen Herrero, Ph.D., provides a comprehensive review of two decades’ worth of maulings. Herrero reports that between 1960 and 1980, black bears caused five hundred human injuries and twenty-three deaths. But despite those twenty-three deaths, Herrero asserts that sudden encounters with black bears don’t usually end in injury. More commonly, when a person surprises a black bear, the bear will charge and swat the ground with a front paw or make loud huffing noises but ultimately disappear. That said, it’s not unheard of for a mother black bear to maul a human in an effort to protect her young. Herrero cites a 1973 incident in Yellowstone Park in which a momma bear pulled a fleeing man from a tree by his foot and “proceeded to maul and bite him.” The man required seventy-one stitches.
Flying in the face of conventional backpacker wisdom, Herrero gives another (more gruesome) example that demonstrates that black bears can be just as ferocious as their grizzly, Kodiak, and polar counterparts. In 1950, sixty-five-year-old Athabascan Indian Alexie Pitka was hunting black bear in Alaska. After firing a shot, he waited to make sure that the bear was motionless before approaching. When he walked to within several yards of the downed bear, the creature suddenly rolled to its feet and leaped on him. Pitka survived the attack but the “entire right side of his face from the eye across to the nose and down to the chin was torn away. The right eye was ripped out of the socket. . . . His nose was torn off, with cartilage sticking out of raw flesh. The right check and part of the left were gone. . . . Three teeth were left in the jaw; the rest were dangling loose.” This mauling, writes Herrero, “is a stark reminder of the power that black bears can unleash.” In fact, black bears can bite through trees thicker than your arm and kill a full-grown steer with one chomp to the neck. The most dangerous blackie, says Herrero, “appears to be one that attacks a person who has been hiking, walking, berry picking, fishing or playing during the day in a rural or remote area.”
That sounded awfully familiar. We were glad to escape the momma bear encounter without testing the strength of her bite.
It was my third day back on the PCT, and my trail legs were coming back to me. That, combined with the adrenaline released by two bear encounters in less than twelve hours, helped to speed me along. The terrain was beautiful and the weather hot—just another day on the PCT, or so it seemed. But something was different—we were walking our last California miles. A new state, Oregon, lay on the horizon. But really, we were already in a new state; we just didn’t know it yet. We were in the fifty-first state, the State of Jefferson.
Located in the mountainous border regions of what is “commonly known as California and Oregon,” the State of Jefferson dates back to a secession movement in the 1940s. Mostly, the first Jefferson secession movement was about roads—or lack thereof. Migration brought settlers to the region in the 1840s and 1850s, and mining and agriculture convinced them to stay. But the people of Jefferson were, and are, miles away from centers of commerce, and this led to feelings of isolation and neglect. In the 1940s, Jeffersonians complained that poor roadways hindered their logging, mining, and agriculture industries and that they were being “double-crossed” by the leaders of California and Oregon. Today, the “double-cross,” or “XX,” is a common Jefferson symbol found on tee shirts, hats, suspenders, bumper stickers, signs, and graffiti-ridden walls.
The name “Jefferson” was chosen for the state in 1941 via a popular vote conducted by the Siskiyou Daily News. The inspiration was, of course, Thomas Jefferson, who championed the rights of states to govern themselves.
After choosing a name, the residents of Jefferson took immediate action by blocking Highway 99 outside of Yreka and levying “taxes” on those who tried to enter. At the roadblocks they handed out a Proclamation of Independence, which began:
You are now entering Jefferson, the 49th State of the Union. [This was before Hawaii and Alaska became states.] Jefferson is now in patriotic rebellion against the States of California and Oregon. This State has seceded from California and Oregon this Thursday, November 27th, 1941. . . .
In Yreka, on December 4, 1941, Judge John L. Childs was inaugurated governor of Jefferson. Signs all over town read, “Our roads are not passable, hardly jackassable; if our roads you would travel, bring your own gravel.” Three days later, the tragedy at Pearl Harbor changed everyone’s perspective and the movement was temporarily forgotten while most of the region’s men went off to war.
Today, State of Jefferson supporters live on and continue to criticize government officials in the state capitals of Sacramento and Salem for imposing environmental and land-use regulations on a region they don’t know or understand. “People from the Bay Area and southern California,
” a Yreka resident told a reporter for the Contra Costa Times, “have no idea of what actually transpires in rural America.” Indeed, to the uninitiated, entering the border region of Interstate 5 near Oregon can be like an episode of the Twilight Zone. Suddenly signs, graffiti, and twelve-foot black letters painted on the roof of a highway-side barn proclaim “The State of Jefferson”—a whole “state” most of us have never even heard of.
This is not to say that the State of Jefferson is merely a pipe dream amongst gun-toting rural anarchists. On the contrary. During sixty years of secession attempts, Jefferson proponents have come remarkably close to achieving their goal. In the early 1990s, California Assemblyman Stan Statham of Redding publicly advocated the division of California into two or three separate states and pushed the process far enough that an advisory plebiscite over the state’s division appeared on the statewide California ballot. The logistics of getting statehood, however, remain a large hurdle. New states can’t be carved out of existing ones without the approval of the state legislature and Congress. Beyond that, there are no laws on the books to govern such a procedure. Duffy joked that it was too bad that the measure hadn’t gone through; if it had, we’d be finishing up our second or third state rather than just our first.
The PCT crosses the California–Oregon border in the middle of nowhere—approximately halfway between Seiad Valley on Highway 96 and Ashland, Oregon, on Interstate 5. Climbing out of Seiad Valley we followed interminable switchbacks through Douglas fir, incense cedar, Oregon oak, and poison oak as well as western white pines. We climbed approximately 3,000 feet and reached a saddle where the only place to put our tent was right in the middle of the trail. Figuring it was too late for anyone to be climbing behind us and that we’d be up and moving before any morning hikers could complete the climb, we pitched our tent literally on the PCT. Remembering that when Tweedle, the crazy goatee’d hiker from Agua Dulce, had once slept on the trail, he’d been stepped on by a stampeding buck and ended up in the hospital, I hesitated for a second. But as usual, I was too tired to argue.
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