by Bill Walker
“Oh cool, humanoids,” I said to Ralph when we spotted three hikers. Better yet, they had found a rare shaded spot to rest.
“Paul”, “Tom”, and “Jerry”, they introduced themselves.
The first two, Paul and Tom, were flawless physical specimens in their mid-twenties. The third member, Jerry, on the other hand, appeared to have shown up on the PCT gloriously unfit. He was about thirty years old with a baby face, but a matching baby elephant bulging out of his stomach.
“Californians?” I asked.
“No, Detroit,” Jerry offered. That was good news. Everybody knows Third World Countries are incubators of nice people. And since Detroit is the closest thing we have in this blessed land to a Third World Country, that was a favorable omen.
“What do ya’ll think of the desert so far?” I asked.
“Pretty good,” Paul answered.
“You weren’t so happy back there when we ran into those two rattlers,” Jerry laughed.
“You’ve already seen two rattlesnakes?” I asked in amazement.
“Yeah,” they laughed.
“Today?”
“Yeah, just back there.”
“The guidebooks must not have been exaggerating,” Ralph said.
Ralph’s stride was, indeed, that of a marathoner—very little wasted motion. I struggled to keep up. I was maintaining a typical hiker distance of about fifteen feet when he suddenly jumped back towards me. “What’s that?”
“Rattler,” I said, uncharacteristically knowledgeable.
“Where?” he demanded to know. We began scouring the light brown desert surface. The problem is that rattlers in the desert are predominantly light brown themselves, which probably is no coincidence. Nothing revealed itself—just a steady, but eerie, trilling sound.
“Where is it?” Ralph sounded uncommonly agitated.
“Hell if I know.” Finally, after surveying the ground a few minutes, Ralph decided to try to bolt past wherever it was. Just as he started, I saw it.
“There it is,” I shouted. “Under the rock.”
“Sounds like he’s over there,” Ralph pointed at a rock
“Yeah, he’s going down a hole,” I reported. Ralph started high-stepping to minimize any potential contact.
“I think he’s under that rock,” Ralph yelled.
“No, no, I’m looking at him,” I said excitedly. “Look, look.” Soon, the snake had fully slid down the hole.
“I don’t hear him anymore,” Ralph said confused.
“He went down a hole under a rock,” I said relieved.
“Which rock do you think?” he asked.
“No, no, I actually saw him! That rock.”
“You saw the rattler?”
“Yeah, definitely a rattler.”
“Oh, I didn’t know you saw it.”
“No worries,” I said, in a worried tone.
We were seeing everything from blue jeans, to sweaters, to jackets thrown into bushes on the side of the trail.
“Why would somebody get rid of their clothes this early?” I wondered, as we kept seeing garments strewn off to the side of the trail.
“For good reason,” Ralph said knowingly.
“Oh, yeah,” I caught on. Illegals were stripping them off. This not only helped them cool off, but confuse the border patrol as well.
A person could credibly argue that these people were the best hikers on the trail, given their lack of top notch gear, as well as obstacles faced. But this desperate act of border running shouldn’t be glorified one bit. In most cases they risk their lives (approximately 500 illegals per year die in the act of crossing) to get here for one simple reason—economic desperation.
To grow up in Mexico is to have size envy. All their lives Mexicans hear tales about the fantastically rich colossus to the north. Specifically, what they hear is about the imperial power stealing one-third of their country in the Mexican-American War (1846-1848). It is historically more complicated than that for the simple reason that Mexico had just obtained these lands itself, upon gaining independence from imperial Spain. They were thinly populated with Mexicans. But Mexican schoolchildren aren’t taught that.
There is a common saying in Mexico:
Poor, poor, Mexico
So far from God
So close to the United States.
“There is water down at the bottom of this hill,” Ralph said.
“Maybe,” I cautioned. Here in the desert, it seemed especially important to be conservative.
At the bottom, we found several thirsty hikers, but not even a trickle. The creek bed was dry as a bone.
“Is this the water source?” Ralph asked, incredulously.
“Are you completely out?” asked one hiker.
“No,” I responded. “We both have a little.”
“Good,” he responded with a tone of irony. “We don’t need any more drama.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“Did you guys see that helicopter come in here earlier?” Ralph and I looked at each other confused.
He then related the tale of two brothers who had gotten here earlier in the day without any water. In fact, they were already badly dehydrated upon arrival. The older brother was apparently in such bad shape that the younger brother (19 years-old) had gone running and calling all over the place trying to find somebody with water. But in the thinly populated desert he couldn’t find a soul. So he ran back to his prostrated older brother.
“The older brother hit his SPOT button.”
“What’s a SPOT button?” I asked.
“You pay about $20 a month for it,” he said. “When you hit it, they have your exact location and come get you in a helicopter.” The older brother would pick up the trail name, Chopper due to this incident, while the younger brother garnered the name, Savior for his gallant effort to save his older brother. This was just the beginning. We were to hear much more about their exploits and blunders, all along the way.
“These SPOT buttons sound like James Bond stuff,” I laughed. In fact, a few female hikers later told me their parents had made them carry one as a condition of hiking the PCT. But they could be controversial. The previous year a hiker named Lady Bug had come across a rattlesnake in the desert, and leapt onto a boulder for safe haven. There she hit her SPOT button; when the helicopter rescue crew had arrived, they were apoplectic. But then Lady Bug had hit the button again a couple months later, when she broke her leg in northern California.
“Whaddya’ think?” Ralph asked.
“Do you think there’s time to make it to the Kickoff tonight?” I asked in a suggestive manner.
“I don’t know,” he replied, “but if we make it tonight there is bound to be some hot food.” That right there should have set off a red flag. How many times had I seen hikers make reckless decisions because they thought it gave them an angle on some hot food?
“We should be able to make it if we go now.” We headed off on our first serious climb, as other hikers looked at us curiously from the comfort of their sleeping bags.
Nowhere does the bottom drop out of the temperature like in the desert.
“Hey Ralph,” I called ahead as we hurried climbing up the mountain, “I’m stopping to bundle up.”
“Me too.” A half-hour later, darkness had descended, and we were leaning into a cold, stiff breeze. Worse yet, we were climbing a bare, rocky mountain that offered nowhere feasible to camp.
“My fault,” I yelled up to Ralph. “It’s unbelievable how quick it got dark.”
“No problem,” he said, “but I’ve got to add another jacket.” I quickly threw on long-johns and practically everything else. Our breaths were now completely visible. We both put on headlamps and tried to find out where we were on the maps, but it was useless in such a barren area.
“If we keep going we might hear the noise from the Kickoff,”
Ralph suggested.
That became our strategy. But another half-hour later, and we were still climbi
ng, as it got colder and windier. I had hiked 171 days and 0 nights on the Appalachian Trail. Now, here I was my first night on the PCT, hiking practically petrified in the black as pitch night.
“Looks like we’re off the trail,” Ralph said.
“We could go back down the mountain,” I faintly suggested.
But the nighttime adrenaline kept us humping. “Hey,” Ralph suddenly said. “Is that a light down there to the left?”
“I see it,” I said hopefully. “And that looks like a lake too.”
We found ourselves stumbling over rocks and running into various obstacles over the next half-mile. But we finally made it to the Kickoff party. Things were wrapping up for the evening except for some people shivering around a campfire. We had gotten our miles, but not our hot food.
Chapter 5
The Kickoff Party
How am I going to get out and take a leak with frozen shoes?
I lay shivering inside my tent, amidst a sea of other tents. As usual, I had awoken in the middle of the night heeding nature’s call. The mountain cold settling into this lake valley had plunged the temperature all the way down into the twenties. When I had opened my tent flap and begun clawing around, everything was frozen—the exterior of the tent, the backpack, water bottles, even my shoes. For once, however, I was prepared.
My ever-industrious mother had ordered a light, plastic urine jar from Home Health Care. It’s strange how, even in the anonymity of a tent on a freezing cold night, one still can be self-conscious. Nonetheless, this midnight urination came off as planned and saved me an unpleasant midnight rendezvous with the freezing cold. Call it a small confidence-builder, if you will.
Another hiker here in Tent City (we were all later to learn) had awoken with a similar problem. Actually, this woman in her mid-twenties had a bigger dilemma. She needed to have a bowel movement. There was probably a bathroom somewhere in this park, but it was likely a good ways away. And, of course, it was freezing cold. Serendipitously (or so she thought!) though, she had a plastic bag in her tent. I doubt I need to enlighten you as to what brilliant solution she conceived. What the average person may not be aware of, however, is just how difficult such a crapshoot can actually be. Here, I must force myself to admit that a month later in a freezing hovel in the Mojave desert, I would consider the exact same course of action as this woman attempted. Quickly, I was to realize the physics of such an act were much more complicated than I had ever fathomed. Plus, I had knowledge of this woman’s ill-fated effort at the Kickoff.
Surely, I don’t need to tell you the anti-climactic final result of her crapshot. She missed. Needless to say, that led to emergency cleanup action that exposed her to the cold more than if she had just gone outside her tent to begin with.
Missing this once-in-a-lifetime crapshot, however, may not have been her biggest mistake. If you ask me, she made an even bigger blunder the following morning. That’s when she told another hiker (“Hey, don’t tell anybody, but guess what happened...”). Of course, that hiker did what almost anybody would. She commiserated with the woman before slinking off to tell somebody else. The poor girl who suffered the mishap was soon saddled with the trail name Shit Bag for the next 2,600 miles.
The Kickoff Party was started in 1999 by a group of ex-hikers to serve as a springboard for the long journey ahead. The weekend is divided between festive eating and drinking, meeting and greeting, and educational seminars on various issues hikers will face along the way. It has been a smashing success.
When I had called to make a reservation a lady had told me, “We hate to turn people back, but we’re fully booked.”
“Even for thru-hikers?” I asked alarmed. It had seemed like a good place to meet potential hiking partners for the desert. Better yet, it was billed as a butterfly killer.
“Oh no, any thru-hiker can come,” she said to my relief. “That’s who the party is for.”
Even before first light I heard people setting up tables and trays of food in the thirty degree weather. These people were all ex-PCT hikers who probably hadn’t been beneficiaries of such trail magic during the trail’s early years. I had worried that the PCT was just an isolated footpath. To my great delight, though, I was to see countless examples along the way that the PCT is making solid strides at forming its own culture, just like the Appalachian Trail.
Hikers just aren’t like other people. Any time I’m around lots of long-distance hikers, this truism reveals itself anew. I got to see plenty of them this weekend because the seminars were packed.
At a standing room only seminar on hiker food, a lady with a striking resemblance to the character Major Houlihan on the television show MASH, was going on about the importance of continually eating nuts throughout the day.
“Some nuts are better for hikers than other nuts,” she emphasized, going into the details of calories, protein intake, etc. She had an innovative teaching style, variously quizzing us on the difficultto-remember names of various nuts. Finally, she lined up all the nuts together.
“Okay,” she barked out. “Which nut works the best for a thru-hiker?”
“The left one,” some droll male voice in the back answered without missing a beat. That, of course, brought the house down, including Major Houlihan.
A swaggering fella’ of about thirty then took the stage to tell us about hiking in the desert.
“I can’t stress enough how important it is to stay hydrated,” he kept repeating. “It is much, much easier to stay hydrated than to re-hydrate once you start getting dehydrated.” Made sense. The next part, though, stirred up some doubts.
“The best way to do this—trust me on this—is to hike at night.” That is the kind of practical advice you get from hikers. Incidentally, it was also just the opposite from the counsel you consistently receive from trail guide books, park rangers, and trail bulletin boards. And this guy meant every word of it.
“What about rattlesnakes?” somebody asked. “Aren’t they all over the place at night?”
“No doubt about it,” he plainly answered. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been night-hiking through the desert when I heard that rattling sound and wondered, ‘Where is it’? One time a rattler lunged at the girl in front of me. By the way, less than half of rattlesnake bites are deadly.”
“Have you ever seen a cougar at night?” I asked him.
“I’ve heard ‘em thrashing around, but never seen one,” he answered. “They like to hang out on big rocks and spring out for the clean kill.”
“That doesn’t scare you?” would have been the logical question. But nobody asked it. It wasn’t that type crowd.
Somebody did defensively ask, “What do you recommend doing if you see one?”
“You know in India and countries that have lots of big cat attacks,” he answered, “some of the rural people wear hats with bills on both sides because the cats like to attack the back of your neck. If your hat has a bill on both sides, cougars don’t know where to attack.” That entertaining response brought murmurs of laughter as we all looked at each other in amazement.
“But, honestly,” he reasoned when the laughter died down. “Is a cougar really gonna’ look at something moving six-feet of the ground with a light shining off the top of its head and think, ‘There goes my next meal’?”
“I don’t think so,” he added in a reassuring tone. I’ll have to hand it to him. The reason we were all at the Kickoff was to hear what it’s really like out there, not some hedged remarks in cover-your-ass language.
The seminar ended when a man who looked to be pushing seventy sincerely asked, “I’ve never tried a thru-hike. How do you get your trail name?”
“What’s your real name?”
“Bob Atkinson,” the man responded.
“Well, Blow-Job Bob hasn’t been taken yet,” he replied logically. The seminar broke up in stitches, and we all filed out.
A well-known trail angel named Meadow Mary (married to the even better-known hiker, Billy Goat) had
a booth set up to give massages to hikers hoping to iron out any kinks before heading off into the desert. All the predictably idiotic jokes aside, the massages were anything but kinky. Rather, hikers kept emerging from there looking like they had gone fifteen rounds with Mike Tyson.
The next morning the former hikers served us yet another fabulous breakfast, while a volunteer went around passing out a very critical piece of paper to each hiker—containing the most up-to-date information available about the water sources in the desert. Then, I joined the northward-bound masses fanning out into the desert.
Chapter 6
The Desert
The desert is atonal, cruel, clear, neither romantic nor classical. Like death? Perhaps. And that is why life nowhere appears so brave, so bright, so full of miracle as in the desert.
Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire
The summer of 1942 was the very darkest hour of the Second World War. The British, despite their vast experience in desert warfare, had been shocked when the Germans sacked their fortress at Tobruk in the Sahara Desert. Suddenly, the United States had been thrust into desert warfare against the Desert Fox himself, Erwin Rommel. Despite the vast desert regions in our own homeland, the United States was utterly lacking in desert warfare experience.
One of the first things the U.S. military did was hire Edward Adolph, a professor at the University of Rochester, to commission a study on how much water soldiers required in desert warfare. Adolph commenced a series of studies on water deprivation in which he variously locked people in jeeps all day in the glaring sun, marched them in the day, at night, etc. The results were not encouraging.
“We find that a man who stops drinking water sweats about as fast as one who continues to drink,” Adolph found. Since the human brain is about 75% water, we can keep on sweating without drinking water. However, after a few hours a person begins to lose his or her mental faculties.
