Day Forty Three

Today's miles: 21
Total miles: 652

We knew we had a brutal mountain climb this morning, and no one wanted to do it in the heat of the day and suffer like yesterday. So we set our alarms for 4:00 am, and the second they went off I heard Sansei deflate his sleeping pad. We were determined not to sleep in. We were determined to hike this hill in the darkness.

We were on trail by 4:45, climbing the five miles into the sky and listening to the coyotes howl in the distance as the sun lightened the horizon. It was already too warm. But we were strong. We took second breakfast at the top of the hill, catching our breath, and pushed on. Focus took off, as usual, and we lost him, but the four of us stuck together, keeping pace. We walked in trees all morning but soon found ourselves outside of them and in open expanses of desert again.

By early afternoon we discovered a small patch of shade and took a break. Wocka Wocka and Giddyup caught up to us and we rested, all of us sighing over the desert heat and how much we wanted to be free of it. Kennedy Meadows, our gateway to the Sierra Nevadas, was a mere 50 miles away, but it seemed so much farther. We had been talking about the beauty of the Sierras since day one, even though none of us had seen it or knew what to expect. We had been dreaming, and begging, and wishing for mountains, and even when we were so close to it now, it seemed farther than ever. The desert felt as though it were getting more dangerous the closer we got to its edge. It was wearing down our resolve, and we didn't know how much longer we could survive before we shriveled up, nothing left but fine dust in our wake.

Wocka Wocka admitted, "at one point yesterday we got so tired of the heat that Giddyup lay down spread-eagle next to the Trail and yelled, 'DESERT, TAKE ME!!'"
We laughed, but we had all felt the same at one time or another.

Sansei and Katie wanted to take our afternoon siesta in the shade, but it was still early in the day and Rotisserie and I wanted to get a little farther. We were trying to get to Walker Pass by early afternoon. A friend of mine named Ross lived in town and he was going to pick us up and take us home for the day, a needed break from the desert. We eventually opted to try and get farther, but we only made it three more miles before the heat battered us back down again. We found a small grove of oak trees and took a two hour nap in the shade on the prickly, dry bed of oak leaves. As usual, though, the sun shifted and I soon found myself lying directly in it. I packed up, itchy to keep moving, but the others were moving more slowly. I finally told them I would meet them at Walker Pass, and I started hiking on my own.

Though it was still very hot, I was feeling strong, and the trail was downhill for the remaining seven miles. I had no one to keep up with, or follow behind, so I flew. Faster than I had before; I ignored the heat and the terrain and the sand and I flew down the mountain. I was walking faster than 3 mph, and it felt wonderful.

Halfway down the mountain, I turned around a corner and suddenly saw a view over the valley and far beyond, and I was struck still by what I saw: mountains. Not shrubby, sandy, Joshua Tree covered mountains, but real mountains. Granite mountains. High, soaring, gray-blue stone mountains tipped with snow and reaching for the sky. My heart pounded in my chest.

The Sierras. I could see them. I could practically touch them. There they were, waiting for my arrival, and we were nearly there. We were nearly there! I could barely breathe from excitement. My heart was singing.

(photo by Sunshine)

I made it to Walker Pass in a record amount of time: seven miles in two hours. To my surprise, the campground was full of hikers who I thought were days ahead of us, and the infamous Yogi (who writes a PCT guide book every year that every thru-hiker knows by heart) had a large tent set up with trail magic waiting. Chairs, drinks, and big pots full of spaghetti and meatballs for dinner.

I found a shady spot under a tree near Focus, Sweet Tooth, Hot Tub and Coincidence and waited for Sansei, Rotisserie, and Katie to join us. I tried to call my friend Ross and his husband Eric about a good pick-up time, but my phone didn't get service and I was fretting about contacting him. Similarly, Rotisserie was supposed to meet up with her sister, brother-in-law and niece but she didn't have service, either. We heard a rumor that there was cell service a mile further down the trail, so Rotisserie and I borrowed Katie's phone (Verizon) and mine (AT&T) and hers (Sprint) and walked down the trail with the phones all lying on our outstretched palms, all of them simultaneously searching for reception.
After a mile, my phone popped up with a text message and I began shrieking, "I have service! One bar! Two bars!"
We shuffled around looking for the best spot and then used my phone to call Rotisserie's sister and Ross. Ross was coming tomorrow and Rotisserie's sister tonight.

When we got back to the campground, spaghetti was being served and all our friends were sitting in lounge chairs in a big circle. I plopped myself between Giddyup and Wocka Wocka and asked if it was okay if I was sitting there.
"Sure," said Wocka Wocka, "we'll just include you in our hand-holding."
And simultaneously, Wocka Wocka and Giddyup both solemnly placed a hand on each of my knees, and I said, "wow, did you guys feel that? I think we just had a moment."
We were all laughing, and later I made some other joke that had them rolling and Wocka Wocka declared, "oh, we've missed you!!"

I had missed them, too. It was fun to reunite with people who make you laugh as much as these friends do. We spent the evening swapping stories and jokes and later cookies that Yogi brought for us. We passed the big bags of cookies around the circle, and at one point Sneaks tried picking up one of the bags and fumbled with it, dropping it on the ground. We laughed and I teased,
"He can carry a 40 pound pack, but he can't pick up a bag of cookies!"
"Shut up, it's heavy!" he whined.

We stayed up talking until late, and then gave hugs to Rotisserie when her sister came to pick her up. She would be skipping this section of trail and would rejoin us when we reached Kennedy Meadows in a few days. Sansei, Katie and I went to look for a tentsite out of the way and found a flat spot up by Wocka Wocka, Giddyup and Sneaks, who pitched his tent inside a horse corral, making us laugh.

The three of us cowboy camped and Sansei sighed sadly into the darkness, "awwww, she's gone..." he was missing Rotisserie already.
"Don't worry, we'll find her again soon," I promised.
"Sorry if we've been too mushy lately," he said, suddenly embarrassed.
"No, it's cute!" Katie promised. "It's like my sister and brother suddenly decided to hook up! ..... wait.... that sounded wrong...."
We laughed and bid each other goodnight.

Day Forty Two

Today's miles: 18
Total miles: 631

Today was unanimously rated our worst day on trail thus far.

We knew it would be a rough day the minute we woke up. Sansei and Rotisserie woke up screaming, for their sleeping bags were overrun by thousands of ants. Focus's cookpot (though clean) was swarming with them, too, and he chucked it at a rock to dislodge the little pests. My shoes were crawling with ants, though my sleeping bag was fortunately free of them. It was not a pleasant wake up call. We shook out our gear and left camp as quickly as humanly possible.

The day didn't get much better after that. We hiked out of tree cover very early in the day and the PCT spit us back into the open desert. We traversed rocky, shrubby mountains through soft and silty sand, and the tallest things we saw were Joshua Trees, whose spiny leaves offered no shade.

We stopped at a water cache five miles in and relaxed as we filled up. The breeze was blowing but the sun was getting hot. As we pushed on, it grew hotter and the trail steeper, and we panted and sweated our way through the desert. I focused on watching Rotisserie's heels moving up and down in front of me and tried to ignore the heat and I forced myself to move my feet forward. It was exhausting. We took a couple of short breaks under the "shade" of Joshua Trees and decided we needed to find a better spot for our afternoon siesta if we were going to survive. Focus hiked faster than the rest of us, so we sent him ahead to scout out a good spot for the five of us to rest for the afternoon.

As we walked, we were passed by a decent number of hikers, and I fretted that they would find the only small patch of shade in the entire desert and take it for themselves.

Sansei said, "don't worry, that's why we sent Focus ahead. He's in front of them, and he'll save us a good spot."
Ten minutes later we discovered Focus wedged into a small, one-person shade of a boulder, shirtless and napping out of the sunlight.
"FOCUS!" Sansei shrieked. "What kind of reconnaissance man are you?!"
"Sorry?" Focus said.
"We sent you ahead of all those other hikers to get us a good patch of shade!" Sansei said, "and here you are, having let them all pass you, in a spot no bigger than one person!"
"Oh..." said Focus, "my bad...."
"Focus," I said, "you're fired."

We kept walking until we came upon an open area with a random picnic table and a couple of useless Joshua Trees. There was no shade to be seen, but it was too hot to keep hiking without risking dehydration and heat exhaustion, so we McGuyvered Sansei and Focus's tarps into awnings to create some shade. We lay underneath them for a total of 5.6 seconds until we realized that the tarps were simply greenhouses and were reflecting even more heat down onto us. So we squished ourselves around the small, patchy shade of a Joshua Tree and attempted to sleep. As the sun moved, so did we, carefully avoiding the cactus-like thorns that enshrouded the tree.
"Ow!" I grumbled as I was stabbed once again. "You know, when we started this trail, being in the desert was like, 'oh cool, everything is all spiky,' and now it's like, 'OHMIGOD EVERYTHING IS ALL SPIKY.'"

We sweated in the shade and had a difficult time napping, so we made ourselves lunch, instead. I made my usual tuna/cheese tortilla wrap, and Focus was doing something similar, but instead of a small pack of tortillas, he pulled a giant wad of 24 out of his food bag.
"Holy crap," I said. "How heavy is that?"
"Uh... I dunno... a pound?"
I laughed. "You know tortillas come in packs of 10, right?"
"Yeah, but this is for a whole week!"
I stared at him blankly and then repeated, "...you know they come in packs of 10, right?"
"Not when you eat 3-4 every day!"

And he proceeded to lay out several tortillas in succession and fill them with random assortments of things: ham, cheese, peanut butter, jelly, honey, and the small single-serve packs of cream cheese he had swiped from the Tehachapi continental breakfast.

We stayed under the Joshua Tree until 4pm, when we finally deemed it "cool" enough to start hiking again. Focus took off ahead of us and the rest of us dragged slowly behind. We had eight miles left to reach the next water cache for the night, and we desperately needed to get there. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a very painful and exhausting eight miles. It was still hot as hell and we pulled ourselves through the heat, muttering fuck, fuck, fuck! as we went, the hours dragging by, the sun never growing any cooler.

A quick word about cursing: for those of you who know me, you know I don't curse very often, and even when I do, I very rarely use the f-word, for I find it crass and distasteful. But the Trail changes you in small and big ways, and this was something that changed for me.

For there comes a day when you have been hiking for miles on end, through the worst kind of heat imaginable, pushed past all your physical and emotional and mental limits for the day. You have no energy left, and half a liter of water lingering in your bottle, and you know there are still five miles to go to reach water. You have no choice. You have to keep walking or die, even though every muscle in your body screams that you cannot possibly walk one more step. The sand beneath you is soft and fine, the kind of sand that makes your feet sink with every step, so that you feel as though you are running in slow motion underwater, not really moving anywhere. And the sun beats on your head, hotter and hotter, and the sweat drips from every pore in your body, and your nose bleeds with the dryness, and your throat aches with thirst. And just when you think the trail could not possibly get any worse, it begins to climb uphill. Slowly. Steadily. Painfully. And you drag yourself up the hill until suddenly a wave of desperation rushes over you and you throw down your trekking poles with an exhausted sob, for you were done hours ago, and you scream over the mountain with as much strength as you can muster:
"FUCK!!!"
And the word echoes in the emptiness and then fades away, and you stand there, defeated, at the top of the hill. And then, after a long, somber moment, you slowly pick up your trekking poles. And you gather what little bit of strength you had left, given to you by that single word, and you slowly push on. Because you have no choice. Because water is five miles away and you have to keep walking, no matter your limits.

I think there will come a day when I return to the Real World, and I find myself in a situation where someone is tossing around fuck in casual conversation, like it means nothing. And somewhere inside, I will feel sorry for that person, for until they have walked 600 miles in the desert and discovered what it means to push yourself beyond all of your physical, emotional, and mental breaking limits, until they have found themselves against a wall and know that they have no choice but to keep pushing, only then will they know the true meaning of the word.

And so we climbed. Through soft sand, through blasting heat, through walls that we built for ourselves long ago and have since destroyed. We screamed at the desert. We sat in the sand and felt our resolve slipping away. We watched our half liters of water slowly dwindle. We moved as fast as we could, but it was still slow, slow, slow.

At long last, when we needed headlamps to keep hiking, the terrain changed to firmer ground and steadier elevation. We skirted a valley on a high mountain ridge and for once enjoyed a beautiful sunset on a very trying day. It was dark by the time we arrived, and there were many other hikers camping and cooking in the area. We couldn't distinguish any of them in the dark, so we walked around yelling, "Focus! Focus!" until an Aussie called back, "oi! I'm here!"

We filled up our water at the cache and found a flat spot in which to roll out our sleeping bags. We lay in a single file line, squished close together: Focus, Sansei, Rotisserie, Katie, and me. The stars were brilliant above us, and we lay looking up at them as we played Sansei's letter game before bed.

"F," Katie said.
"Future," was the first word I thought of.
"You tell a story, Focus," Sansei prompted.
"In the future," Focus said, "all of us will reach Canada."
After today, it seemed a very worthy goal.

Day Forty One

Miles today: 19
Total miles: 612

We realized with chagrin this morning that we had miscalculated the mileage to the campsite where we were meeting Bryan and Katie, and we still had 15 miles to cover to get there. To try and make it by early afternoon, we got up again at 5:30 and hit the trail, but the terrain was not kind. It went up steeply several times in succession through the morning, but in between the climbs the trail went through wooded glens and beautiful vistas, so it was hard to complain. I found myself hiking alone for a bit when Focus, Sansei and Rotisserie pulled ahead, but I found I really enjoyed it. I sang songs to myself as loudly as I pleased and didn't have to worry about catching up with anyone or slowing anyone down.

We stopped for second breakfast around 8:00 and made good time to our next water source, arriving around 10:00 with ten miles already logged. We still had five to go, but it was already getting hot and we needed a break. We took a nap by the water source and shared the spring with some cows (Sansei does an impeccable cow impression and I think kept luring them in our direction) while swapping some more riddles between us. I was the one telling most of them, but they were getting pretty good at solving them now.

We kept hiking at noon, probably not the best idea since it was getting very hot, but we wanted to take our real afternoon siesta at the campground. The last five miles were brutally hot and seemed to drag on forever, but we finally made it at 3:00. Katie and Bryan were waiting at the campground with drinks and food and blankets on the ground for resting, and we took full advantage.

Sansei and Rotisserie

We lounged in the shade of the campsite for three hours, eating, napping, and hanging out. Focus and I taught Katie and Bryan how to play 500 and we got another competitive game going. By 6:00 we decided we needed to hike further in order to camp for the night, and Bryan had a long drive to get home to Portland. We bid him goodbye and hiked out, opting to take a shorter road detour rather than the trail, which also had steeper elevation gains.

To our surprise, we discovered several different kinds of animal prints as we walked along the road: deer, bear, and even mountain lion. After stopping for the hundredth time to look at some more tracks, Sansei cried, "ohmigod, what kind of animal made that?!" and with his trekking pole made a circle around the footprint of Focus's shoe.

We trooped onward in a single file line, and as we walked, Sansei started a new game for us to play: the first person in line thinks of a letter, the next person in line names a word that starts with that letter, and then the third person in line tells a personal story about that word. Then the game continues by the second person in line thinking of a letter, the third person thinking of a word, and the fourth person telling a story. We went around in a circle like this, telling funny anecdotes until we came across a beautiful tentsite on top of a ridge, overlooking a tree-filled valley below. We made camp - Sansei and Rotisserie were still sequestering spots to themselves, much to our amusement - and played a few rounds of 500 before turning in for bed.

Katie and I lay awake talking in our sleeping bags, counting the number of satellites we saw streaking across the sky and shrieking excitedly every time we saw a shooting star. It was a beautiful night.

Day Forty

Today's miles: 18
Total miles: 593

When I started the PCT I never thought I would enjoy cowboy camping. Something about sleeping in the dirt and potentially being visited by rattlesnakes in the middle of the night was not appealing. But since being on trail I've discovered that I really love it. The cool touch of the night breeze on your face, the moon rise and constellations turning slowly in the sky, and the thrill of waking up in the middle of the night to see the Milky Way blazing above you. Another added bonus of cowboy camping is waking up at first light when the sun touches your brow, and how easy it is to pack up your gear for another day of hiking.

And so we were awake at 5:30 and moving through the miles before the sun reached its zenith. My pack settled into my shoulders comfortably and didn't feel as heavy as it had yesterday. Sometimes the first days out of town were difficult, trying to get your body to remember the rhythm of moving. But once you're fully immersed in the outdoors, everything becomes second nature.

The terrain was friendly to us today and we made great time all morning. I was having a great time hiking with Rotisserie, Sansei and Focus. We were a rowdy crew and one of Sansei's favorite jokes was to tack "that's what she said!!" to every phrase that fit the bill, and soon it became a contest to see who could say it first. We beat the joke like a dead horse, utilizing it far more than was socially appropriate, but it had us in stitches every time.

By 9:30 we had hiked eight miles and made it to our first water stop of the day. It was a spigot flowing a very slow one liter per three minutes into a dirty cow trough. We spent the necessary time to fill our containers and then enjoyed the shade and trees that this water spot afforded us. We ran into a moral dilemma: we wanted to stay here for our afternoon siesta, but it was still very early in the day and we could probably get in another six miles before it got too hot outside. Then again, there was no telling that there would be shade in six miles, and we technically didn't have to do big mileage today since we were only going 43 miles in three days.

We decided to do at least ten more miles today, and that could easily be accomplished this afternoon, so we opted to stay in the shade. We ended up taking one of the longest afternoon siestas that I have had on trail yet, and one of the most fun.

Focus taking pictures of bugs (this is how he came by his trail name)

Rotisserie, Sansei, Focus and I rolled out our sleeping mats below a tree and Rotisserie got out her deck of cards and a bag of jelly bellies. We ate handfuls of candy all afternoon as we played a game Focus taught us called "500." It was a trump game, very similar to a game I used to play often called Euchre, so I picked up on it pretty quickly. Sansei and I played on a team across from Rotisserie and Focus, and Focus and I quickly discovered that we're both pretty competitive when it comes to card games. A lengthy battle ensued, in which we gained and lost points so quickly that a new team was in the lead with each hand we played. It was fun, and raucous, and a completely wonderful way to pass an afternoon.

Since we sat there so long, we were soon joined by quite a few hikers. Some stayed only to get water, and others joined us for afternoon siesta. Soon the wait for the water spigot was quite long, and it was reminiscent of a Dust Bowl-era food stamps line, with despondent looking hikers waiting patiently in the sun for their chance of filtering a few liters of slow-dripping water.

Papa Bear joined us with his new hiking companion, his son Chris, who was joining him for a few days on trail. We nicknamed Chris "baby bear" even though he was in his thirties and looked as though he had some sort of military background. Old friends Wocka Wocka, Giddyup and Sneaks also joined us, and soon the area around the water trough was full of lounging hikers enjoying a bit of shade.

At 5:30 we realized we had been playing games for eight hours and it was time to start hiking again. The next ten miles stretched through a burnt and exposed section of trail, so we were happy we hadn't tried hiking further this morning. We hiked into the evening and made it to a wide, open meadow just as it got dark. We set up camp, made dinner, and I told riddles to Sansei, Rotisserie and Focus, letting them solve them before we went to sleep.