Saturday, January 31, 2015

Weekly Round-Up


Hey everyone!

Thanks for the great response to my first week of PCT journal entries! Not-so-deep inside me is a strong desire to share my stories with people, and I’m glad that I have people who will listen.

If you missed them, here are my first four entries:

The saga continues on Monday, with breathtaking adventures such as Lisa Gets a Terrible Head Cold, Lisa Gets a Blister, Zach and Lisa Almost Run Out of Water (Part 1 of 800,000), and Zach and Lisa Eat the Most Delicious Vegetables Ever!

If anyone has any backpack- or travel-related questions, please let me know and I can put them in my queue for future Saturday posts. In the meantime, I’ll just leave you with this handy household tip of the week: Don’t try to fold staticky laundry while listening to music with earbuds. You will get electrocuted.

Until next week!

~The Mandolin

~~~

Friday, January 30, 2015

PCT 2014, Day Three: Leftovers



DAY THREE
April 27th
Mile 30.2 to 47.5

We woke up and I was surprised to see a tent over my head. Once I remembered myself, though, I was even more surprised that I still didn’t feel very sore. We were still draped in shadow, and a chill hung about the air. 

I started packing up while Zach collected our water for the day from a stream. He used our water filter for the first time— a Sawyer that screwed onto a squeeze bag. My hands still felt numb, and I kept bundled up. As we were climbing out of the valley, the sun peered over the edge of the mountain to the east of us, bringing immediate warmth. It was about nine o’clock. 

Today, Zach and I were determined to put in 20 miles. A lot of people at the beginning of the trail insisted that when you were starting, you should try no more than 10 or perhaps 15 miles a day. We were aiming for 20 right from the start; we meant business. (But of course, this didn’t actually work out in practice.)

We continued in a landscape at first unbroken from yesterday: brush-covered mountains. We discovered that Matt and Sam hadn’t gone that much farther after all. We walked faster than them on flat sections, but much slower on hills, and we took more breaks. Matt and Sam (and several other people, too) kept on passing us while we were taking a break, and after a while it was hard to think of cute or clever things to say. Matt started saying, “Tag,” whenever he passed us, and we took that up.

When the sun rode high in the sky, we delved down from the mountains into a forest. I was amazed. When people said 700 miles of desert, I assumed that there wouldn’t be any trees at all until the High Sierra (and maybe not even then). But here we were in a forest of handsome fir trees. I heard a honking, clown-like sound and saw an acorn woodpecker on the tree, chattering with another one. They were stashing acorns in the bark, drilling holes to cubby the nuts in, so tightly that you couldn’t pull them out if you tried.

In the afternoon we ran across a sign advertising the tiny town of Mount Laguna, just half a mile off trail. Zach and I paused and agonized. Going a mile out of our way just to go to a town! What a moral dilemma! (Now, I look back and laugh hysterically. If there is a town where you can get a cold soda just half a mile away, I don’t care how much of a hurry you’re in— you go to the town!)

Eventually we decided to take the detour, and soon emerged onto the paved road of a campground. We walked toward the main road, glimpsing acorn woodpeckers all over, and found ourselves at a long, low log cabin restaurant. We walked in the front door and found a sea of backpacks scattered about. We left ours with the gaggle.

The tables in the restaurant were long, seating a dozen people, and the waitress seated us with some other hikers. One of them was the lady with the shaved head and the kilt that I had seen yesterday. She told me her name, but I don’t remember it. I want to say it was Alice.

Zach and I, mindful of our budget, ordered a piece of berry cobbler to split. Everyone else at the table got halfway through their meals and began tapering off. The hiker hunger hadn’t kicked in. I offered to eat everyone’s leftovers. Kilt Lady (as she will always remain in my head) said, “Hey, I have some cooked Mountain House chicken that I don’t want... would you like it?”

“Sure!” I said. “I’ll eat pretty much anything. I’m like a garbage disposal.”

Everyone chuckled. Kilt Lady said, “You’d better be careful, or your trail name’s going to end up being ‘Garbage Disposal.’”

I laughed nervously, realizing that this was a real possibility. Kilt Lady left and came back with a bag half-full of day-old chicken mixture. “How about ‘Leftovers?’” she asked. “For your trail name.”

I smiled. “I’ll think about it.”


After leaving the restaurant, we stopped by the gear store. Zach liked his walking stick, but a trekking pole was clearly an order. There was one for sale, a single one, for $30. We cringed and Zach picked it up to buy it. I stepped outside to wait.

A group of people was gathered around, including some people we had briefly met before, George and Karen. A guy I didn’t know walked up to me while I was standing next to my gigantic, bulky backpack.

“Would you like a shakedown?” he asked.

I was familiar with the term— a veteran backpacker would sort through a novice’s pack and tell them what to keep and what to throw away.

“No thanks,” I said.

“Oh,” he said, his tone turning suddenly sarcastic. “I see. You need everything, huh?”

“No,” I snapped, feeling insecure and testy. I just didn’t want some stranger rooting through all my personal belongings. “I know I don’t need it all. I just haven’t gotten a chance to sort it.”

“I could probably get rid of two pounds.”

I openly glared at him. “No thank you.”

Scowling, he retreated. I was relieved when Zach came out of the store, and we shouldered our packs and headed back to the trail.


We only walked in woods for an hour, trailing and then passing a group of five hikers, before we emerged into a landscape that would become all too familiar: a forest that had been ravaged by a fire. Tufts of grass were the only living things to be seen, and all around were blackened, naked trees. Since this was our first burn area, it seemed all strange and somewhat beautiful. (Hundreds of burn areas later, I was not so happy!) We were also caught in a “no camping” zone. I didn’t know that there were areas like this on the trail— I had assumed we could throw out our bedroll anywhere we liked. No such luck. But if we could do another several miles that night, we could get out of the no-camping zone. 

We looked ahead, across a barren hill speckled with blackened stubs. And for the first time, we saw the first view that really took our breath away.

About ten yards away, the hill dropped off steeply down to the desert floor. In front of us was a barren, alien landscape that looked like piles of dust that had turned to stone. The late sun cast sharp shadows over the hills that rose up from the plain, with writhen lines like dried-up streams flowing from their peaks.

“Wow,” I said. “Oh, wow.”


We just stood staring at it for several minutes. Matt passed us up, and when Sam walked by, we asked him to take our photo. He introduced himself officially. We followed him back into the burn area.

By this time, Zach’s knee was starting to hurt a lot— so badly that he could barely walk. I imagined us having to give up the trail on day three because of injury. It was not a pleasant thought. We sat down in the grass and felt anxious. Finally we realized we were forced to go to the only place to camp in the area: the paid campground that charged 23 bucks a night. We were not thrilled.

When we arrived at the campground, we saw a handwritten note that said eight people were allowed in each slot, and some guy named Happy Man had already claimed a spot and invited others to join him. We found him. He was the only remotely ethnic person I’d seen on trail yet— from Mexico, I later learned. He was polite, if quiet. Matt and Sam ended up joining us, and another couple camped with us later in the evening. We all kicked in money to Happy Man so he could pay for us. 

A campground host drove by and shouted something about a hard frost coming in tonight. “It’s going to be a cold one!” he yelled, barely concealing a huge, somewhat sadistic grin. “I hope you guys have warm blankets!”

“Go to hell,” Matt muttered under his breath.

That night, Zach tried to use the little wood-stove we had brought. The twigs we gathered were damp, and the stove just smoked and fumed. Happy Man and Matt and Sam sat at the table with their Jet-Boil stoves, which cooked their food in less than two minutes. Zach labored with our stove for half an hour. He made mashed potatoes and dumped the chicken meal in. The potatoes were strange and grainy, and he couldn’t get them to heat up. By this time I was feeling delirious with hunger. While we still worked on our stove, everyone else went to bed.

Finally, Zach didn’t want to mess with the stove anymore. He cracked a joke. “You ready for some lukewarm, grainy, weird mashed potatoes?”

I burst into tears.

Zach tried in vain to get me to be quiet. I wanted to calm down, but I felt so hungry and tired and in despair that the best I could do was press a hand over my mouth and silently sob. Zach herded me into the tent and tried to get me to eat. The meal was awful and I had to choke it down. Already a deadly cold was setting in. I thought, We are never going to make it.

I’m sure Happy Man and Matt and Sam thought the same thing.

~~~

Thursday, January 29, 2015

PCT 2014, Day Two: Singin' (and Hikin') in the Rain



DAY TWO
April 26th
Lake Morena to ten miles out

I woke up to the sound of rain, accompanied by the widespread sounds of dismay as dozens of new hikers with their ultra-lightweight tarps learned that they had not yet mastered their set-up. Zach and I snuggled in our double sleeping bag and listened to the patter of rain on plastic. My breath smoked in the air, even inside our tent. Wasn’t the desert supposed to be dry?

It was a long time before we felt like leaving our tent, but our bladders compelled us. I unzipped the door, shoved my feet into my trail runners, wrestled the shoes on, tried to lace them up with my cold fingers, then unzipped the rain fly and awkwardly disentangled myself from the tent, lurching into an upright position that made my feet flame up with nerve pain. (This series of gymnastics hereafter became my everyday morning routine.) 

I wrangled my rain coat around me and pulled on a stocking cap. The wet, cold air closed around me like ice. I once again cursed myself for having a raincoat without a hood.

We were camped in the middle of a sea of tents that stretched across a couple of acres. People walked on the asphalt roads that wound through the park, hurried and silent. Zach and I made for the nearest building. The building was hot and steaming with body heat, since everyone was crammed under the shelter to keep out of the rain. There was a silent auction going on, and a presenter with a slideshow talked about the danger of different cacti in the desert. Zach and I wandered around, but we had no money to spend on anything, so there wasn’t much to do.

If you ask practically any other hiker but us how Kick-Off was, you’ll get a glowing report. The chili cook-off! The free food! The amazing, welcoming, instantly warm and friendly community! The freely-distributed pot! Zach and I missed all of it. We just wandered from building to building in the rain, feeling cold and miserable. Everyone else seemed caught up in the friends they had already made. I tried talking to some women in the bathroom, but they answered in monosyllables, and my shyness soon overwhelmed me and drove me back to Zachary’s side, where we stood under a tree (it was too muddy to sit), alone, and ate cold oatmeal for breakfast. 

We wanted to be part of this community, but we didn’t know how. And around 11:30, when the rain started to slack off, and the clouds rolled and fumed and revealed patches of blue sky, we decided there was no point in hanging around at a cold, sopping kick-off party where everyone else seemed to know what was going on. We packed up our stuff, which took forever in those days, since we hadn’t devised a system of which gear went in which bag. We topped off our water bottles at a spigot, strapped on our packs, and hiked into a patchy drizzle, which soon cleared up into a genuinely beautiful day.

We hiked across a plain of sagebrush, and in that time, Zach’s knee began hurting a lot. We began to wonder if having trekking poles was necessary. Zach paused by a bridge to carve a walking stick, and that helped.

While we sat on a boulder overlooking a wide field of sagebrush, we were passed by a young woman, petite and bright-eyed, with a shaved head and a kilt. I instantly liked her, even though we only exchanged a pleasant hello.

We walked through sagebrush, often crossing barbed wire fences that had pipe gates with solemn warnings to close the gate behind us, or else the cows would get out. We also saw some cows, usually in the distance.

We trudged up a mountain that day, and met a man named Starman. He had thru-hiked the PCT once, section-hiked it once, and was coming back to hike another chunk of it, although he wasn’t sure how much of it yet. I asked him what his advice to us was. “Lighten your load,” he said without hesitation, followed by a wistful sigh— “God! The lighter the better. And always keep track of your water. Also, never ever camp in a washout.”

By the time we crested our first mountain of the day, we both felt exhausted, and our maps said that there was a nice campsite near a stream just a couple tenths of a mile off-trail, down the highway we were crossing. As we paused to consider, two guys caught up to us. It was the pair from Colorado and Washington that we had talked to on the first day, Matt and Sam. We recognized each other and exchanged hellos. 

“How far are you guys going tonight?” they asked. It would become a familiar question.

“I think we’re going to stop here,” Zach said.

“Cool,” they said. “We’re hoping for another five miles.”

I felt self-conscious. They were going another five miles? Maybe we should go another five miles. After all, ten miles in a day was only half of our itinerary! Maybe we were slacking! We were so pathetic! We would never get to Canada!

But we turned off on the highway anyway, and clunked down the steep road until we came to a meadow with large trees on our right, next to a bubbling brook. A few other people were already camped there, but we found a nice spot underneath one of the trees. There was even grass. This really wasn’t at all like the desert I had imagined, and I was okay with that.

That night, Zach attempted to cook our first meal with our homemade alcohol stove. A cold wind had whipped up, making it almost impossible to keep the stove lit. Night fell fast— we were still a ways away from the solstice. I knew the desert got cold at night, but I had imagined myself safely tucked away in our sleeping bag by then, not standing with all my layers on, shivering uncontrollably, watching Zach fight with a stove just to boil enough water to make pasta. By the time we ducked into our tent, my fingers were completely numb. We had forgotten to put meat in the sauce. When I ate it, it tasted awful. 

I began to cry. Zach tried to comfort me (he did back in those days, before he realized this was going to be a nightly occurrence). I was crying so hard I could hardly eat my food. I curled up in the sleeping bag, listening to the wind slashing against the side of our tent, and felt freezing. Zach put his arms around me so I could try to soak up his body heat. “It’s okay,” he whispered. “It’s okay.”

But I thought, If every night is going to be like this, it is not okay!

~~~

Wednesday, January 28, 2015

PCT 2014, Day One, Part 2 of 2: Our First Day



April 25th
Southern Terminus to Lake Morena

In contrast to my Looney-Toon-desert imaginings (complete with a purple roadrunner going “meep meep!”), the landscape was surprisingly green and hilly, speckled with bushes and clumps of grayish-green sagebrush. Huge power lines kept the scenery from looking overly wild or picturesque (for some reason I imagined that the whole trail would be delving through the heart of wilderness). The trail was even and well-packed sand, pleasant to walk on. 

It was almost 11:00, so the sun was strong but not overly hot, and I would become increasingly impressed, over the next several weeks, with my “magic hat”— a Sun Day Afternoon hat with a wide brim that looked dorky but magically kept me from the sunstroke that had plagued my summers ever since I was a kid. We walked steadily, Zach in front, me in the middle, Mary bringing up the rear. After we had walked for about 20 minutes, we came to a road-marker sign that said “MILE 1.” We took a dramatic picture next to it, and I giggled. This still didn’t feel real. But it didn’t feel fake, either. My life was completely different, but, as with so many life changes, my conscious mind took it all in stride. It was my body that would rebel.

After MILE 1, we stopped to get water out of a pipe near a ranch. This was marked on our maps as WR001. We stopped at the spigot. Two young men were there, wearing tan shirts and tan pants and looking very serious and experienced. I fumbled with the water handle, and made my first attempt at making cheerful trail banter.

“Nice day!” I said, entirely too loudly.

Both of them looked kind of uncomfortable. Zach got quiet, as he often does when I’m trying to rope unwilling strangers into conversation. “Where are you guys from?” I asked. This was always my go-to question when I traveled. Most people would instantly feel superior when they heard I was from Missouri, and would often be more willing to talk.

“I’m from Washington,” the taller of the two said. He had small glasses and a serious expression and pale skin. He looked like he had probably done a lot of hiking. We later learned his name was Matt. He pointed to the other guy, rosier-cheeked and a bit friendlier looking, who we’d later know as Sam. “He’s from Colorado.”

“Cool,” I said. “We’re from St. Louis, Missouri. Although he’s from Portland originally. You guys done much backpacking before?”

“A bit,” Matt said.

“I hiked the Colorado Trail,” Sam said. They quickly gathered up their backpacks. Clearly I was throwing a wrench in their hiking momentum. “See you down the trail,” Sam said, and they hit the trail again with a determined pace.


Mary is one of my few friends who can push her body to hike almost any distance, and she did this with impressive skill. We hiked at a strong, steady pace, over rolling hills. Then I noticed, with some surprise, that we were hiking up a mountain. An honest-to-goodness mountain— probably even by east coast standards. This surprised me because I didn’t think that we would hike up any mountains in the desert. We crossed some railroad tracks and plunged up a set of switchbacks, ducking in and out of sparsely-vegetated trees. 

After a few hours, we were skirting a ridge that was covered in a blanket of eight-foot-high manzanita bushes, with their twisty red limbs and dark waxy leaves. Mount Hauser rose up in the near distance, flat-topped and impressively draped in late afternoon sunshine. My feet ached and stung. We had gone about nine miles so far, and my feet felt like they were on fire! I was beginning to doubt that we would make it to our destination for the night, Lake Morena, which was still 11 miles away. But at this point we had little choice— we were dropping Mary off there, and she didn’t have the equipment to go alone. So we took a break, snacked on a Clif bar, some Fritos, some leftover Little Caesar’s pizza, and sipped some Gatorade. Then we stood up, ignored the protests of our feet, and kept walking.

The wonderful thing about the human body is that it prioritizes what’s going to feel pain. After a while, our bodies realized that we weren’t going to stop walking, so it flooded us with endorphins, and the pain in my feet faded away. By the time we started a descent into a deep valley between the mountain we were on and Hauser Mountain, I felt good as new. I felt like I could walk all day. Which was good, considering that I did have to walk all day.

Two problems began to steadily grow as the day went on. The first was that we realized it was going to be a tight time squeeze to get to Lake Morena by 8:00, when Mary was supposed to meet a friend there. The second was that gray clouds were blowing in, and a wind was whipping up. Zach and I determined that we had to reach Lake Morena by the time allotment, or we were going to get Mary stuck in the wilderness.

Down the side of the mountain we zigzagged, blazing through the switchbacks. Fortunately the trail was well-graded and nice to walk on, without rocks. Down in the valley at the 15-mile mark, we paused at a dry stream bed near a jeep road. Somebody had dragged a hundred gallons of water to this site, leaving a cache for hikers who would run out. We had heard of such caches, but it was fun to see one in real life. To think that a stranger would invest so much time, effort and money (even tap water is expensive in California) to help out a bunch of hikers was really touching.

There was a crowd of people around the water cache, including the Union soldier/boy scout guy, Angry Bird, who was writing in a journal. Zach, Mary and I sat down for a little while for a snack, but we didn’t plan to stay long, because storm clouds were gathering.

We chatted with some of the people there, then picked up our backpacks. The group collectively gasped. It was already 6:00, a respectable time for stopping on your first day. “You’re not staying here?” someone asked.

“No,” I said, “we’ve got to get my sister to Lake Morena by 8:00.”

The person doubtfully looked at Mount Hauser. It was just dawning on me that we would have to climb that mountain. That 828-foot mountain (Buford Mountain is 640 feet). It seemed like a lot of elevation at the time, and we still had five miles to go, and it was getting dark quickly. I would have loved to stay at that cache, set up camp, sit around and chat, etc. But that just wasn’t an option. So we said goodbye to the people there and started our trek up the mountain.

I look at the elevation of Hauser Mountain now and chuckle in a nostalgic sort of way. It wasn’t much of a mountain compared to what we’d be up against next, but it was one of the hardest mountains I’d ever tackled to that point. The Ozarks, and even the Smokies, do little to prepare you for the mountains that the west coast can throw at you. The switchbacks seemed endless, and I felt my blood pumping hard, my heart throbbing as I doubled over with effort. 

Mary was our guiding light. She knew we were walking so far because of us, and she was determined to help us get to our destination. You could practically see an aura of positivity around here, and her energy flowed into me, keeping me going step after step. We flew up the mountain, zigzagging over the switchbacks. The storm clouds closed in, alarmingly close over our head. Thunder rumbled. Darkness fell.

We only had one headlamp. This had seemed like a good idea at the time of packing— save money and weight!— but it’s hard to see in the pitch dark with only one among three people. Fortunately the trail was still smooth, although it turned into slabs of sandstone. Zach led the way, calling out hazards in the path. “Step down!” “Rock in the middle!” “Uneven section!” Mary and I trailed behind, taking short, quick steps and trying not to stumble. I hadn’t expected it to get dark so fast. 

We were lost in a flurry of darkness, with only the cold glow of the headlamp to guide us through the eerie boulders and dark trees as the air got wetter and heavier with the threat of rain. 

After a while of silence, hearing both my heart and my feet thumping, I heard Mary’s calm voice behind me. “Remember that scene in The Horse and His Boy, where Aravis has to spend the night in the tombs, and the cat comes and sits with her when she feels afraid?”

I barely remembered. It had been years since I read that book of The Chronicles of Narnia. “Vaguely.”

“That’s how I feel right now.”

Something about the calmness in her voice made the whipping wind and the roiling clouds and the unseen trail seem less scary. In silence, we continued on.

We continued in this furtive way for almost an hour. Then we looked ahead and saw the one sight that would never fail to bring tears to my eyes— the lights of civilization. They were yellow, houselights in the darkness. We were almost there, and our spirits lifted. 

We burst out of a clearing of trees onto a lawn of city grass at about 7:30, and street lamps glared in our faces. To our left we saw a park where the Annual Day Zero Pacific Crest Trail Kick-Off (ADZPCTKO) was being held, and a sign told us to check into site #18 and pay at the front ranger station. We headed instead to the general store, where Mary’s friend would be meeting her. It was a half-mile walk, but a half mile suddenly seemed like a long way. When we got there, I sort of melted into the booth. Zach ordered us ice cream cones and a pizza. I sat under the harsh glare of the florescent lights, feeling every muscle and tendon in my body calcify. Now that I wasn’t pumping endorphins into myself, my body was letting me know, loud and clear, that it was not happy about the 22.5 miles I had just walked.

Mary’s friend arrived and sat at the booth with us. I found myself utterly exhausted, incapable of conversation. A guy walked into the store and loudly asked if we had heard about “that kid who died here yesterday.” We said we had not. He was grave but eager to tell us about it: a 19-year old had started on the PCT from the border the day before with only a liter of water. He got almost all the way to Lake Morena, then dropped dead of dehydration. I stared numbly ahead, feeling vaguely sorry, but also mad at the kid. He could have asked for water from anyone on the trail that day. He could have gotten some at the cache. But then I thought, why am I mad at him? One stupid mistake cost him his life. God knows that if all our stupid mistakes had such consequences, we’d all be dead.

I said goodbye to Mary, giving her a hug. I felt too tired and sick to feel any emotion. Right after she left, I ducked into the bathroom and felt like I was going to throw up. I couldn’t vomit, and that made me feel worse. I stumbled outside and told Zach we should probably find a place to camp.

By the time we stepped outside, my body was shaking uncontrollably, like a severe shiver that wouldn’t go away. I could barely walk I was shaking so hard. I wished I could throw up and get it over with. Zach put his arm around me and we limped to the campground. A couple guys were standing there, laughing and drinking. They told us that, this particular weekend, we could camp anywhere we pleased. As if by magic, my muscles loosened up. I was still sore, but I didn’t feel like I was dying anymore. 

I have little memory of setting up our first night, packed in between hundreds of other tents in the city park. Our camping set-up was a bit ridiculous, and involved blowing up veritable air mattresses and stuffing them into a special pocket on the underside of our sleeping bag. I just remember lying in the tent, feeling the sensation of plastic— plastic cloth in the sleeping bag, synthetic clothing, the plastic over our heads— and listening to the first few raindrops fall. Then I was out, lost in a sleep that had never felt so good.

~~~



Tuesday, January 27, 2015

PCT 2014, Day One, Part 1 of 2: The First Steps


(This entry was so incredibly long that I decided to break it into two. They get shorter after this, I promise.)

DAY ONE
April 25th
Southern Terminus to Lake Morena

Our plan, in its most rudimentary form, was simple:

1. Go to the southern terminus of the Pacific Crest National Scenic Trail, at the border of Mexico and California.

2. Walk.

3. Stop walking when we get to Canada.

But of course, things are never as easy as they seem.

This was going to be the trip of our lifetime, probably the biggest thing either of us had ever tackled, and certainly the biggest challenge we had ever faced together in our brief three years of knowing each other. We were husband and wife, Mr. and Mrs. Zachary Strader, newlywed, 23 and 24 years of age, respectively. We had no kids, no college debt, and no mortgage payment: a rare window of our lives where we could reasonably take six months off work to go walking on a 2,668-mile trail. 

We had our reasons for tackling this adventure, of course. Very few people do a hike like this on a whim. We wanted a challenge. We wanted to see what we could do. We wanted to walk 20 miles a day for five months straight and see where it got us. There was no one big reason. But somehow, a curly-headed eighteen-year old boy from Oregon saw a sign for the Pacific Crest Trail— or PCT as I will be calling it ever after— and realized it was something he wanted to do. That thought simmered on the back-burners of his mind, and it wasn’t until he met a crazy cornfed girl from Missouri that the dream became a reality. That girl was me.

Now we were on a bus— breezy and hot— taking a ride from San Diego. My sister had lived there for the past couple years, and she had hosted us and was coming to hike the first day with us. She couldn’t wait to get out of St. Louis, with the sedentary people and the ethnic non-diversity and the cornfields and the lack of beach. She was working as an actress/promotional model/whatever-heck-else-she-could-find-to-do, trying to pay the sky-high California rent, and happy as could be. 

I, on the other hand, was happy with my life in Missouri. Zach and I had a nice little two-bedroom townhouse that we rented for $500 a month. I had put up pictures on the wall, unpacked our book collection (three sets of The Lord of the Rings included), and I even had houseplants for a while. Now we were leaving all that. We had packed up our stuff and scattered it to friends’ houses throughout the St. Louis area. Zach got a leave of absence from his customer service job at Wal-Mart, and I took the summer and half a semester off from my online writing coaching job. All the material possessions we would use for the next five months were packed up into two backpacks. REI brand and Deuter, orange-gray and blue. Mine had an artificial yellow flower on the outside.

Mary was asleep at my side, slumped across her daypack. I cradled my bulky backpack, taller than my torso, between my knees on the jostling bus. Zach sat next to me, still and silent, staring with great focus at nothing. He’s good at that look. 

The bus was crowded with civilians from the San Diego area, and the backpackers were banished to the caboose. I looked nervously around at them, feeling insecure. Most of them looked very confident. A middle-aged couple who had hiked the Appalachian Trail looked very relaxed. Next to them sat a young man of some Asian origin (I later learned he was Japanese). He looked a little nervous but also excited. Next to him, a man about my age stared stonily ahead: he had a red beard, a shirt buttoned all the way up, an Appalachian Trail patch, gauged ears, and a hat that made him look like either a Union soldier or a boy scout. Someone on the bus asked him if he had a trail name. Most everyone who hikes a long-distance trail gets a trail name. He responded politely, but stiffly: his name was Angry Bird because in Maine he’d been dive-bombed by a goshawk. He had a clear air of having everything together. He seemed like a bit of a snob. Later on, I learned that he was just shy. That’s the problem with shy people— they always come off as snobs.


Two years before, when I heard that the first 700 miles of the PCT were desert, I was horrified. I grew up in a place where you have to dog-paddle through the humidity all summer, and when I spent a week in Tucson visiting cousins, I felt desperately thirsty all the time, I had a constant nosebleed, and I was picking microfibers of cactus out of my skin for weeks afterward. But this desert, just judging by the view out the window, was going to be more interesting than I thought. The landscape rose up in tumbled piles of boulders, interspersed with greenery. It was still spring, and things still grew here. It quieted the fearful memories of the beautiful but terrifyingly desolate Sonora National Forest, which was a plain of rocks and saguaro. The air blustering through the bus windows was hot, but it didn’t seem rife with cactus needles. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad.

The bus didn’t actually go to the PCT’s southern terminus. It dropped us off at a convenience store in Campo, 1.5 miles from the border. The sun was beating down, but it still wasn’t too hot. We poked around the c-store for a few minutes. They let us top off our water bottles. Then it was time to strap on our packs. 

My pack, fully loaded with food and water, was about 37 pounds. My scrawny arm strained to lift it, and I had to get some momentum to be able to sling it onto my back. For a second it felt horribly heavy. Then I leaned forward and began tightening the straps, carefully obeying the order that Foster at REI had taught me: hip belt first, as tight as you can go. Shoulder straps next. Chest strap next, to keep the shoulder straps from pulling apart sideways. Finally, the load lifters, a couple of straps attached to your shoulder straps. For a few seconds I fine-tuned the straps, tightening here, loosening there. Then my pack felt solid, like part of my own body. I still felt its weight, but it seemed more like we were coexisting in a space together, rather than feeling like it was heavy. I thought, Maybe I can do this hike after all.


I have a tendency to rush into things headlong, without knowing whether or not I can do them. This trip was no exception. Zach and I had never been backpacking before. One time I had walked for three days on the hiking/biking Katy Trail near my house, but it’s a perfectly flat trail and I only camped one night. Another time Zach and I had backpacked on Buford Mountain, a beautiful tree-clad hill that holds the prestigious title of Third Highest Mountain in Missouri. Talk about bragging rights! We had talked about trying to do something beforehand to prepare— a week on the Appalachian Trail, maybe, or even just a few days on the budding Ozark Trail in Missouri. But since Zach works a retail job where it’s very rare to get even two days off in a row, it didn’t happen through the summer and fall. The next thing we knew, we were caught up in the most freezing, snow-buried winter I had ever seen, and our chance was lost. At this point, the PCT was the next trail we could do.

There’s a very narrow window for hiking the PCT. You have to start in the desert before it gets too hot, but you can’t get to the High Sierra too early because it will be buried in snow. Once you’re past the Sierra, you have to book it through northern California and Oregon, because you want to finish the trail before the cold weather blows in. 2014 was a low snow year, so our time budget wasn’t as tight, which proved to be a good thing.


We started walking down the dusty gravel road, eager to get the unnecessary 1.5 miles out of the way. We got a little lost; a man in a pickup truck pointed us in the correct direction. We climbed a small, round hill and found ourselves at the southern terminus. An ugly corrugated metal fence, further fenced off by a tangle of barbed wire, marked the Mexican/American border. A clump of square posts, emblazoned with the PCT badge, stood unassuming there. Four or five other people were hanging around, signing the leather-bound trail register, taking their photos, adjusting straps, saying nervous goodbyes. Zach and I waited our turn. I felt shy. Usually when I traveled I put all my extroverted tendencies to work in a frenzy of friendly harassment of my fellow travelers, but now, I felt like a child again, barely saying a word, listening to the grown-ups talk about how lucky my parents were to have such a sweet, quiet little girl. Everyone else seemed so experienced. Everyone else knew what they were doing. Everyone else had trekking poles. We had never used trekking poles when we hiked before, so we hadn’t brought any. But I noticed that everyone— even the people with backpacks half as large as ours, indicating expensive gear and packing skill— had brought trekking poles. I hoped it wouldn’t be too much of a problem not to have them. After all, we had no extra money for such things.

It was our turn. Mary snapped our picture in front of the monument. I tried to look confident for the camera. Then Zach and I took a picture of us kissing. Someone yelled from the sidelines, “If you’re still doing that at the end of the trail, you’re good!”

At that point, the end of the trail seemed a thousand miles away. No, check that, it seemed 2,668 miles away. The trail feels exactly as long as it sounds.


Without much ado, we began hiking. This was disappointing. I had dreamed of this moment for weeks— years. I had dreamed of standing at the terminus, looking over a flat, rocky landscaped spotted with saguaro (no, not saguaro, they don’t grow in this region. But maybe just a bunch of prickly pear), standing next to Zach with determined looks on our faces. I imagined a grilling, searing, dry heat that robbed me of all the moisture in my mouth. I would stare at that barren landscape, and then I would start walking. And it would hit me. It would hit me that we were hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, and that we would be hiking this trail for the next five months. 

I kept waiting for it to hit me.

I’m still waiting.

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