Skywalker--Highs and Lows on the Pacific Crest Trail

by Bill Walker

  buried myself inside. CanaDoug and Ingrid never arrived. Doug must have been at least a little shaky, himself. He would end up taking the wrong turn at this fork the next day and hike off course for several miles. That was especially unfortunate because it was to be the very worst bug day yet.

  It was a little bit weird. I had a long-standing habit of talking to almost all south-bounders. It had served me well in the past. On this mid-July day I would see them coming a couple hundred yards away, looking like widows at a Catholic funeral.

  I’d ask complete strangers through my net, “Are the bugs any better up ahead?”

  “No,” this one lady in her mid-thirties who appeared out of breath told me through her net. “In Grace Meadows I had to run, they were so tortuous.”

  That was discouraging, but believable. Unfortunately, I was absolutely forced to stop and defecate. But in the middle of it I had to go sprinting, the sharp bites on my non-DEET-treated rear-end were so acute.

  Grace Meadows was another gorgeous grassy meadow, the product of over a hundred inches of precipitation per year. I would have probably stopped and had a prolonged picnic right here. But a break was now completely out of the question. Instead, it turned into a forced march, and a bit eerie of one at that. The thought kept recurring that they were on a virtually equal footing with me. Finally, I got to Kennedy Canyon Creek where I called it a day.

  Ingrid arrived, sans CanaDoug, just before dark.

  “How was your day?” I asked.

  A German’s style is bound to be different from a southerner’s style. The former are more empirical and understated. The latter are more prone to hyperbole.

  “Worst bug day in PCT history,” she stated without hesitation.

  This southerner couldn’t have said it any better.

  Chapter 27

  The ‘Root Canal’

  Aspect of Hiking

  People who don’t climb mountains tend to assume that the sport is a reckless, Dionysian pursuit of ever escalating thrills. But the notion that climbers are merely adrenaline junkies chasing a fix is a fallacy. It is a Calvinist undertaking.

  Jon Krakauer Into Thin Air

  Mountain climbing clearly is more dangerous than long-distance hiking by an order of great magnitude. But they do have a few things in common. Both begin with an initial frisson of excitement. Then, reality intrudes, and it becomes hard work.

  To be sure, hiking trails attract their share of adrenaline junkies. Both the desert and the High Sierra had offered great novelty. But now we were entering a new phase that I frequently referred to as “the root canal aspect of thru-hiking.” The ratio of pleasure to misery was bound to be unfavorable at times.

  Long-distance hiking can feel like a job and not that easy of one—easily 70 hours a week and quite physically demanding. Why do it? Many chose not to. The trail would claim the forfeit of many hikers in northern California. Many of the dropouts were quite surprising. Of course, some were for reasons of legitimate injury. More often, though, the reason given was, “I’m not having fun anymore.” Needless to say, that is a perfectly suitable excuse on the face of it. But if you looked deeper you saw nuance at work.

  Strange as it sounds, many would quit at the top of their game. They would hike fast and furiously (25 or 30 mile days), hurrying to a trail town. When they arrived the adrenaline would be rushing. There, great festivities would ensue. The hiker would almost always be talking along the lines of, “I’m heading back out tomorrow to go long.” But then the tyranny of civilization would take over. They wouldn’t want to leave town.

  In one sense, it was a thing of beauty watching hikers dissect these backwater trail towns in such efficient fashion. Everybody would be scurrying around on a shoestring (“The post office is down there.” “The Laundromat is behind that building.” “Have you seen the grocery store?” “No, any idea where the outfitter and the internet are?”). It was much more mentally taxing than a day on the trail, and just as important. In a matter of hours, we routinely prepared for trips that would take most people weeks or even months to map out and provision.

  Even the hikers disciplined enough to leave town on schedule would have palpably more downbeat looks on their faces than when arriving in town. Perhaps the moral of the story is that as uncivilized as we humans so often act, we are ultimately civilized beings. The sad thing is that so many of the people who got off the trail in this fashion would have been perfectly happy if they could have just forced themselves to hoist their pack, hitch back to the trail, and take the very first few steps. The challenge simply lay in beginning.

  In his bestselling book, A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson spoke of the low-level ecstasy—so scarce in American life—that he found while hiking. I, too, retained bedrock faith that long-distance hiking was an endeavor utterly anathema to false gods, such as celebrity and money worship. Thus, it was an extremely healthy thing to do.

  I had a demanding challenge ahead to make it to Canada. And it was going to be all the more difficult due to a factor that was beginning to loom larger by the day.

  The average height of the Boston Marathon winner in the 20th century was just over 5’ 7”. An entire century is too long for the statistic to be a fluke. Likewise, if you look at the podium for decathlon events, you will see it disproportionately weighted towards people on the short side. In other words, being short is an advantage in endurance events.

  “That’s scary,” Poet immediately said, when she saw my emaciated upper body. Indeed, crushing weight loss and fatigue made me vastly more sensitive to the nighttime cold.

  On a normal day, a hiker of average height with an average weight backpack would use approximately 5,000 calories. However, I probably used closer to 7,000 calories per day. For a typical five day journey from one trail town to the next, over 30,000 calories were required for me to break even. I usually carried about half of that. I don’t need to tell you the results. After 1,000 miles I was down 30 pounds, with over 1,600 miles to travel. And I was absolutely bankrupt for ideas as to how to staunch this hemorrhaging of weight.

  In trail towns, I would call my mother up and anguish over this problem.

  “Bill, listen to me.” she would sternly lecture me. “You’ve got to carry more food.”

  “My backpack already weighs a lot more than on the Appalachian Trail,” I would shoot back. “The more weight I carry, the more calories I use up.” It was all a downward spiral.

  The only surefire way to break it was to hike less miles per day. However, for the first time I was beginning to hear that ticking sound. It was imperative that I begin to hike more miles on a daily basis if I was to make it to Canada. And I badly wanted to make it.

  Chapter 28

  Alone

  Someone—somewhere—pointed out that if you are miserable when you’re alone, then the problem is that you are keeping bad company. I had hiked in the midst of the bubble of hikers most of the way. Now, though I was going to be alone a lot.

  CanaDoug’s motto was moderation. He took great Canadian pride that he could handle whatever cold weather the hiking gods threw at him in October in northern Washington. So he was in no real hurry. But I was.

  In a way, I was looking forward to it. Now, I would see what I was capable of. The gold standard on the Appalachian Trail had been 20 mile days. However, on the PCT, once out of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the gold standard becomes 25 miles per day. It required discipline for me to hike 25 miles in one day. Objectively, though, that was one of my strengths as a hiker.

  Typically, I would get up soon after first light. It always maddened me that I couldn’t get off faster. There were just too many things to do—gather everything up and put in the right stuff sack, treat my feet with ointment, eat a cold breakfast, break down the tent, head off to the bushes to perform ablutions, and usually retrieve water from any nearby source. I rarely could get all this done in less than an hour; but never gave up looking for ways to reduce it.

  It normally took me ri
ght about 12 or 13 hours to hike 25 miles. My walking speed probably averaged about 2.6 miles per hour, depending on the terrain and topography. This left room for a five minute break every hour during which I typically devoured a snickers or granola bar. Also, I would try to take a lunch break of at least an hour in the early afternoon. This was usually a packet of tuna, bites out of a block of cheese, triscuits and bagels and peanut butter, and beef jerky. Usually, around 8:30 I would actively begin scouting for a flat place to put my tent. Unfortunately, dinner looked a helluva’ lot like breakfast and lunch.

  In A Blistered Kind of Love, Angela and Duffy Ballard referred to the intense solitude of long-distance hiking as spectacular monotony. Whatever oscillations a hiker has in morale throughout the day, the primary trend is almost always upward to some state of grace—or call it low-level ecstasy—by the time one sets up camp.

  I can’t resist saying it, again. You’ve just got to see this PCT. It can actually stagger you with its sheer beauty.

  In South Lake Tahoe, I had performed what has become a rite of passage for PCT hikers by committing an atrocity at the buffet at Harrah’s. Obviously, this wasn’t a panacea to my weight hemorrhaging problem. But at least it made me feel like I was trying something.

  The trail out of Tahoe had followed gorgeous Echo Lake for miles before coming to an even more beautiful body of water, Aloha Lake. Glaciers have carved the rocky soil to give this sub-alpine region an alpine setting. Stunning granite cliff-like peaks with white snow caps tower above the shoreline of white rocks, making this perhaps the most underrated view on the entire PCT.

  Often, it is the unexpected views that have the strongest impact. Or at least that’s my excuse for why I got lost for the fourth time in the last two weeks. Soon I was all the way on the far side of Aloha Lake. That was confusing because, according to my data book, I was supposed to be climbing by now. Finally, I did start precipitously winding up some steep mountain. Then, I got a break.

  The only person I would see the next several hours was an older fella’ who came piking down this mysterious mountain I was now climbing. Better yet, he was a veteran local hiker.

  “Excuse me sir,” I addressed him anxiously. “Is this the PCT?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said softly.

  “You don’t think it is, or you know it’s not?”

  “It’s not the PCT.”

  “Oh wow. Now I’ve got to go back a couple miles, huh?”

  “Not necessarily,” he said. He then pulled out his maps and showed me a route over Mosquito Pass, followed by a labrynthine course that would put me back on the PCT in twelve miles.

  An overpowering bright sun was bearing down on these white granite rocks. My high mileage goals for the day were in jeopardy, plus I wondered where I might find water if I needed it. For once, I decided to try to navigate my way back onto the PCT, instead of just putting my head between my tail and retracing my steps.

  Let me say this about the Mosquito Pass trail I now doggedly pursued. When President Obama shuts down Guantanamo, they should consider transferring the prisoners here. They’d soon be begging to go back to Guantanamo. Mosquito Pass was a bug-ridden swampland.

  Twice I came to turns in the trail that the man had not advised me about. All I could rationalize was that the PCT was somewhere to the east so I should probably take the right fork. Taking a break was completely out of the question given the ferocity of the mosquito attacks. Finally, I started scaling up a mountain per this man’s instructions. After about 1,500 feet in elevation gain, I came upon a PCT sign. All’s well that ends well, and my morale—so shaky for the last several hours—jumped.

  Apparently the route had been a shortcut because Boo-Boo and D-Wreck—two hikers that had gone ahead of me that morning—soon came by with looks of total confusion.

  “What took ya’ll so long?” I kidded them.

  “Did you parachute in?” D-Wreck asked befuddled.

  I cut my break short just to be able to follow them. We got to Phipps Creek where the water flowed grudgingly, but the mosquitoes attacked with an agonizing ferocity. But we all needed water, and dutifully pulled out our filters.

  “Hurry up or I’m setting the tent up,” Boo-Boo commanded D-Wreck.

  The God’s honest truth is the mosquitoes were so tortuous that I had to put on my marmot jacket just to fill up one nalgene bottle of water.

  Boo-Boo and D-Wreck hightailed it out of there, while I still pumped. I came upon them in a couple miles where they lay inside the protective netting of their tent. They didn’t leave their tent and all I heard was discussion of how many more miles they would do tomorrow and the day after and so on. All about miles.

  I lay there in my tent listening to the frequent sound of bugs’ sorties colliding against my tent netting in their attempts to get at me.

  Fortunately, I had the blue majesty of Lake Tahoe to keep me company for a little while. Actually, it was for more than a little while, given that Lake Tahoe is the largest alpine lake in North America with a circumference of 71 miles around. Up until now, most of the lakes we had passed were from glacier melt. But Lake Tahoe—the second deepest lake in America at 1,645 feet—is the product of a volcano explosion.

  “I thought it must surely be the fairest picture the whole earth affords,” Mark Twain wrote of the beautiful lake. Its tranquil presence is the ultimate in dreamlike serenity. Speaking of dreams, everybody should be afforded a few of those over the course of a Mexico-Canada journey on foot. Right? Here’s mine.

  All through the wonders of the High Sierra, and now following a rim above Lake Tahoe, I had a recurring thought. If Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and George W. Bush could have gone on a backpacking trip together through this kind of hushed landscape, would they have been able to work out their differences in a less violent fashion? Obviously, it’s a pie-in-the-sky scenario. But there is something about backpacking that brings out the better angels of our nature, as compared to politics and power.

  Unfortunately, Lake Tahoe may not have the hold on backpackers that it once did. Besides its size, it is renowned for its crystal clear, blue water. But studies show it is up much less clear than just thirty years ago, due to over-construction and the consequent soil erosion mucking up the whole scene. It doesn’t take a frothing-at-themouth eco-warrior to get bent out of shape over that.

  I was intensely lonely and happy to run into Wisconsin and Firefly on the ridge overlooking Squaw Valley. A different kettle of fish they were. Wisconsin was essentially an anarchist.

  “I hate money,” he repeatedly said. “Look at how well we all get along out here trading things, bartering everything. Why can’t the rest of the world be that way?”

  His girlfriend, Firefly, was a professional roller-derby player and a real physical specimen, but with an amazingly elegant personality to match.

  At our campsite overlooking Sherrold Lake, he pulled out some electrical device that was presumably compliments of the capitalist system he so detested.

  “What songs would you like to hear, Skywalker?” he asked me.

  “Have you got the Allman Brothers on there?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “How about Midnight Rider?”

  The Allman Brothers were from my hometown of Macon, Georgia, so requesting this song was a small lapse into provincialism. In 1972, the group’s guitarist, Duane Allman, had died when his motorcycle had crashed into the back of a peach truck. They subsequently named the album they had been working on, Eat A Peach. Its memorable lyrics, which came pouring out of Wisconsin’s machine at 9,000 feet in the California mountains, go as follows:

  Well, I’ve got to run to keep from hiding

  And I’m bound to keep on riding

  And I’ve got one more silver dollar

  But I’m not gonna’ let ‘em catch me, no

  Not gonna’ let ‘em catch the midnight rider

  The song is a paen to freedom and independence, which, come to think about it, is kinda’ w
hat the PCT is. And the God’s-honest-truth is that for the next two days this song carried me a total of fifty miles in an elevated state of morale.

  Chapter 29

  Donner’s (Dahmer’s) Pass

  In the early spring of 1846, an advertisement appeared in the Springfield, Illinois Gazette.

  “Westward ho,” it declared. “Who wants to go to California without it costing them anything?” It sought eight able-bodied men. The ad was placed by 65 year-old George S. Donner. Like many farmers of the time, Donner craved more land in the West. Given the pioneer spirit of the mid-nineteenth century, this expedition soon swelled to 87 people.

  Timing was everything. The wagon trains couldn’t leave before the winter rains and snow stopped, yet it was absolutely crucial to clear the Sierra Nevada Mountains before the first heavy snows of the new season. On October 31, 1846 the Donner Party only needed to ascend a 1,000 more feet to have cleared the last mountain pass in the Sierras. At that point, it would be all downhill to their destination. The exhausted party raced up the pass. But heavy snow began to fall. By morning the pass had become completely blocked with twenty-foot snowdrifts. They had arrived one day too late. Thus commenced one of the most gruesome tales to ever unfold in the mountains.

  Over the next four months, the men, women, and children huddled together in tents and make shift lean-tos. First, the cattle and dogs were all eaten. Then people began to eat bark and twigs. Realizing that doom was impending, a group of fifteen, dubbed the Forlorn Hope, set out in the snow-covered mountains to look for help. Soon they were lost and on the verge of starvation.