Skywalker--Highs and Lows on the Pacific Crest Trail

by Bill Walker

  I then hitched to Bend, Oregon, where the only REI was located. What a stroke of luck to have this problem in the only place where there is a nearby REI. Lucky, that is, unless you just happen to be in the near 7-foot range. Then they will tell you that you are SOL (....out of luck). They didn’t have a single tent I could fit in, nor did they have a 7-foot down or synthetic sleeping bag. I did pick up some new gloves and an emergency space blanket.

  But for the most part, I was gonna’ have to make it to Canada with what I had. This whole Labor Day weekend debacle effectively cost me four precious days and God-knows-how-much weight. The possibility of very cold, wet weather would occupy me to the point of obsession from here on out. Even on nice, sunny days, it would be in the back of my mind—the clock is ticking up there in northern Washington.

  Chapter 37

  Pretty Boy Joe

  The PCT is not a pioneer experience. Don’t get me wrong. It’s a very demanding challenge for the average person such as myself. But the U.S. Forest Service and dedicated trail volunteers have done an admirable job of maintaining the trail, and good maps are generally available. We know exactly when we’re gonna’ hit trail towns along the way to stock up on food.

  However, as I covered large parts of the West, I couldn’t help but wonder if amongst the trail population were a few folks who would have made kindred souls with the likes of Davy Crocket, Kit Carson, or Daniel Boone back in the 19th century. Almost surely, the answer is yes.

  My favorite candidate would probably be Pretty Boy Joe. He was 22 years old, just graduated from the University of California, and chock full of idealism. However, he seemed to have a maturity well beyond his years, and got along well with the trail’s more senior citizens (such as myself). With his long, lean physique, straight gaze, and manner of speaking in the soft, unhurried cadences of the West, he even reminded me of a younger Clint Eastwood.

  His hiking style was utterly unpredictable. From the very beginning to the very end, I’d see him turn up at all odd times of the day and evening, and from all kinds of side trails. Back in the desert, he had found a dead rattlesnake on the trail, skinned it, and carried it draping off his backpack for weeks. Then, he had met a Dartmouth University student out for summer hikes; soon the two of them were performing dumpster dives. It wasn’t for financial necessity, as Joe’s father was reputedly a very wealthy California real estate maven.

  One of the less pretty faces of Pretty Boy Joe. This talented 22-year-old often seemed afflicted with a low boredom threshold.

  “I hate seeing things go to waste,” he simply said.

  Luna had given him his trail name, and other women had commented excitedly on this tall, handsome prince. But he proved to be quite elusive. Surely, he wasn’t immune to temptation. However, the more I saw of him the more I saw a larger force at work.

  “We Americans are titillated by sex, obsessed by it, horrified by it, wrote Jon Krakauer in Into the Wild. “When an apparently healthy young man, elects to forgo the enticements of the flesh, suspicions are aroused.”

  Krakauer mentioned Thoreau (who reputedly died a virgin), John Muir, and Tolstoy—as well as the book’s protagonist, Chris McCandless—as adventurers and intellectuals who maintained ambivalent attitudes towards sex. “Like not a few of those seduced by the wild, McCandless seems to have been driven by a variety of lust that supplanted sexual desire. His yearning, in a sense, was too powerful to be quenched by human contact.”

  Pretty Boy Joe seemed to have similar impulses at work. He sought a more ecstatic way of living; comfort and security were secondary. In fact, we chatted six months after the PCT hike ended and he told me he had been eating out of dumpsters at least every other day (Having worked in a retirement home and seen how much food they throw away, I recommended he look for some geriatric dumpsters).

  “This Timberline Lodge tests the workability of recreational facilities built by the government itself and operated under its complete control,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt said on September 28, 1937 at its dedication.

  Like a lot of people, I have been infected at times with the prejudice that our federal government seemingly can’t do anything right. However, one trip to a place like Timberline Lodge utterly refutes that notion. It’s a classic case of something that simply wouldn’t have gotten done if the government hadn’t done it.

  It’s brilliantly done by the famed depression-era WPA. Hundreds of out-of-work artisans employed by the WPA did the Lodge up with Native American materials and in western motifs. The rustic design had a subliminal appeal to my simple tastes. After an extensive tour of the lodge, I went so far as to vow, “If I ever get married, this is where the honeymoon happens.”

  The lodge is actually only halfway up Mount Hood, at about the point tree-line is breached. That had been plenty OK with me, given the mountain has seen over 130 deaths in the last centry – most having to do with sudden weather change (In one notorious case in May, 1986, fourteen high school students were killed when the teacher urged the group to keep climbing in a snowstorm. The class was a requirement, not an elective). However, Pretty Boy Joe had seemed disappointed. As we had started up Mount Hood that morning, Joe had spotted some ski slopes.

  “I’m going up there,” he said non-chalantly, and off he had gone.

  My immediate purpose at Timberline Lodge was very straightforward—to commit mayhem at the buffet. For the very reasonable (given the magnitude of what is getting ready to transpire) price of $16, one gets the choice of all manner of delicatessens and delights. In fact, my five helpings there may have been my five best meals on the entire PCT. Others said the same. And this comes from people who at times revere food to the point of sac-religion.

  Pretty Boy Joe finally turned up after a steep climb up a glacier field. Along the way he had picked up a Danish hiker named Valhalla. “This place is really cool,” Joe said in his soft-spoken manner, and then went poking around looking for some nook or cranny where he could hide for the night.

  “How about this?” he said to Valhalla and me, as he perched up in what looked like a small attic or linen closet.

  That pretty much left Valhalla and me to hike out from Timberline Lodge at dusk. And we were to stay pretty much together the rest of the way.

  “Scandinavians are navigators,” Valhalla plainly said. “Look at the Vikings. It runs in our blood.”

  Over the years I have cottoned on to the contrarian notion that being from a small country has great advantages.

  “The Dutch are everybody’s favorite travelers,” my roommate in a Latin American hostel once spontaneously said. He may have been on to something. To that you could probably add the Swiss and the New Zealanders. These people from modest-sized countries aren’t afflicted with all these silly, megalomaniacal arguments—“We’re the biggest, the best, the most sophisticated—that we Americans, French, and British like to scrimmage over.

  Their secret is they adapt. Valhalla was 50 years old and in trim form. As I got to know him better, it became clear he had traveled absolutely everywhere, despite making a modest salary as a social worker. Obviously, he knew how to do more with less. That’s kinda’ what hiking is all about.

  He was also a map-reader non-pareil. This skill came in quite handy right off the bat, in the confusing maze of circuitous routes above tree line.

  “Hey, we can take this side trail to Ramona Falls,” he said enthusiastically.

  “Yeah, I guess,” I answered unenthusiastically, thinking about the extra miles it would add. To be sure, it was spectacular as we entered a lush green forest and soon came upon water rushing over a volcanic cliff. But Canada was still a helluva’ long way away.

  “I don’t think it will be that cold up there in October,” Valhalla said. Of course, being Scandinavian, he would say that.

  Pretty Boy Joe had bolted from Timberline Lodge at 6 a.m., and soon caught up with us with tales of his previous night’s evasive activities. I had forsworn night-hiking just a few nights before. But the o
dds of these two characters stopping at any reasonable hour were slim. At dark, we found ourselves on an exposed ridge in a steady drizzle, which conjured up deep-seated fears. Fortunately, Valhalla located what appeared to be an obscure side trail for us to camp. That side trail ended up being the most spectacular short-distance trail in the Northwest.

  The Eagle Creek Trail is an engineering marvel. Over the course of just twenty miles, it passes a half-dozen major waterfalls. WPA workers had blasted ledges out of sheer cliffs for hikers to walk along (with clammy palms, to be sure!). In one place they had even smashed an entire tunnel out of a rock wall, so that hikers can walk underneath a 150 foot waterfall called Tunnel Falls. That was exhilarating enough for me. But not for Pretty Boy Joe. Soon he found a way down a steep bank, and suddenly had stripped down and dove naked in the pool of water where the cascades were crashing down.

  It was a Sunday afternoon and the Eagle Creek Trail was teeming with weekend hikers coming up from the Columbia River Gorge. That’s where we were headed down to. We lost over 4,000 feet of elevation as we descended towards the gorge in what proved to be a glorious end to Oregon. Practically every hiker had developed an affinity for this state, so populated with adventurous souls.

  We arrived at the small, riverside town of Cascade Locks, which at 150 feet is the lowest point on the entire PCT. The town was hospitable enough to allow hikers to camp and shower for free in a city park right along the river. Washington State—where I had never set foot—lay just across the way. But it was this magnificent Colombia River lying right in front of us that I couldn’t get my mind off.

  It was one of the scenes in what I still consider, even in this day and age of revisionist history, to be one of the most dramatic stories of the American epic. I speak, of course, of the Corps of Discovery.

  Chapter 38

  The Corps of Discovery

  The library of Thomas Jefferson is the stuff of legend. With 15,000 volumes, it was by far the largest collection of books in the country. Better yet, Jefferson seemed to have actually read most of them. His collection on North American geography was unparalleled anywhere in the world. There was one book in this collection, however, that had captured his imagination more than any other. In fact, he had become virtually obsessed by it.

  The book was entitled Voyages from Montreal, Through the Continent of North America, to the Pacific Ocean. It was written by a young Scotsman named Alexander Mackenzie. In 1793, MacKenzie had attempted to find a continual water route all the way to the Pacific Ocean. MacKenzie’s crew had navigated various waterways from Montreal, Canada all the way to the Canadian Rockies. There his team found a mountain pass with an elevation of only 3,000 feet to get over the Rockies. They were easily able to portage (carry their boat overland) at this mountain pass, and eventually made it to the Pacific. There he staked a British claim to the Northwest. This alarmed Jefferson.

  One specific passage in the book was particularly provocative. MacKenzie described the Columbia as “the most Northern situation fit for colonization, and suitable to the residence of a civilized people.” His recommended solution was for the British to settle the Columbia River. The possibility of the British moving south and colonizing the Columbia River threw the normally self-contained Jefferson into manic activity.

  Thomas Jefferson was probably the greatest Francophile, and the greatest Anglophobe, in American history. This was especially ironic in a country that tends to be just the opposite. However, amongst the Nation’s Founders, suspicion of the British ran universally deep. Despite losing their thirteen colonies on the Atlantic coast in the Revolutionary War, Great Britain still held more land on the American continent than the United States. When Jefferson took the oath of office as President in 1801, he had every intention of reversing this.

  What followed, of course, was the Louisiana Purchase. The seller, Napoleon Bonaparte, couldn’t believe his luck. Why would we actually pay for the territory? After all, France was bogged down in the Napoleonic Wars with England, and had no way to defend the territories from the United States.

  “The sale gives England a rival,” he chortled.

  The situation in the American West was like a chessboard—extremely fluid. To be sure, the European imperial powers were veterans at power politics and land grabbing. What they couldn’t reckon on, however, was that Jefferson, the notorious Romantic Man of the Enlightenment, would prove to be quite the Machiavellian, himself.

  One huge question had been just how wide the American continent was—2,000, 3,000, 5,000 miles? Nobody had known for sure until British Captain James Cook’s third voyage up the Pacific Coast in 1780. The information from this voyage gave Jefferson a rough idea of the extent of the American continent. It was about 3,000 miles wide.

  Jefferson and his secretary and alter-ego, Merriwether Lewis had picked up some vague information from various Indians passing through Washington about a large mountain chain in the West. Their best guess was that these mountains (the Rockies) were probably about the same height and breadth as the Appalachian Mountain Chain. Thus, Lewis shouldn’t have too much trouble finding a route to the Pacific. They even thought Lewis’ expedition could sail to and from the Pacific in one year. This was in spite of the fact that both of them thought woolly mammoths and other prehistoric creatures stalked the West.

  The general belief was that the Louisiana Purchase covered the area between the Mississippi River and the Continental Divide. However, Jefferson had a more expansive interpretation—that it also included the Northwest Territories on the far side of the Continental Divide. It was up for grabs. But he needed an all-water Northwest Passage to stake an American claim. The Russians were known to have designs on a warm water ports in the Northwest region. The Spanish, who then held California, were perennial candidates to grab the Oregon territories further north. But the greatest threat was the British.

  Jefferson’s and Lewis’ competitive instincts were aroused. If the British had already done it, we could do it better. This expedition was destined to be American naivete at its best.

  It’s tempting, but I’m not going to go into the details of Lewis and Clark’s famous journey. The story is told in spellbinding fashion by Stephen Ambrose in his bestseller, Undaunted Courage.

  However, a few points do seem noteworthy:

  --Lewis and Clark operated the Corps of Discovery through a joint command. Traditionally, this has had disastrous effects on a military mission. Why did it work here? The two men trusted each other completely. Never once did they quarrel.

  --They had the very best men and equipment of the time on the mission. Every frontiersman, mapmaker, hunter, fisherman, woodsman, or boat builder worth his salt was dying for the opportunity to go west on this historic mission. Eventually, 33 people were named by Lewis and Clark. They chose well. Only one member died, and that was from sickness.

  --No tales, of course, can match the drama of Sacagawea, the Shoshone Indian girl who helped get them safely through the Rockies. However, Cameahwait, Old Toby, and other Indians also guided them at critical junctures. Lewis and Clark deserve credit for having a gut-level feel for just whom they could trust.

  --President Jefferson, as well as Lewis and Clark, had generally enlightened attitudes toward natives. “Treat them in the most friendly manner which their own conduct will permit,” were Jefferson’s instructions. He had every intention of constructively bringing them into the American orbit. Only sporadic violence was perpetrated along the way against the native tribes, and it was generally done in self-defense. Unfortunately, neither Jefferson (a large slaveowner), Lewis, nor Clark showed such high-mindedness towards blacks. Clark brought a slave (York) along who participated fully in Corps activities. But Clark treated him very differently from the other men, and refused York’s request for release upon return.

  In a technical sense, the Lewis and Clark mission was a failure. They didn’t find an all-water route to link the Atlantic with the Pacific that Jefferson so badly wanted. But what they d
id achieve was ultimately more important. Their journey firmly staked an American claim not just on the territory explicitly acquired in the Louisiana Purchase, but the territory west of the Rocky Mountains as well.

  The British were still much more powerful than the United States and could easily have extended their territorial claims down to the Columbia River. The headwaters of the Columbia lie several hundred miles north in the Canadian Rockies, which would have made this huge river a more natural border.

  Given that the PCT is a hike from Mexico to Canada, I would now be finished if that alternative scenario had prevailed. Part of me would have been relieved at that prospect! However, the PCT in Washington combines great beauty with difficulty. With a certain amount of trepidation, to be sure, I was greatly looking forward to it.

  Chapter 39

  The Evergreen State

  Without perpetual uncertainty,

  the drama of human life would be destroyed.

  Winston Churchill

  “You know you’re supposed to buy all of your food for Washington in Cascade Locks,” Uber Bitch had told me back in central Oregon.

  “You’re honestly telling me there’s not one decent grocery store we’re going to pass in all of Washington,” I had protested.

  “Forget it. There’s nothing there.” Other hikers confirmed it.

  “I’m gonna’ hike all the way through Washington without spending a dime,” Pretty Boy Joe immediately announced.

  “What, are you gonna’ re-enact the Donner’s Pass episode?” I responded. But, of course, he was serious, as we would soon see.