Day Fifty One

Today's miles: 4 (on PCT) + 17 (round trip to summit Mt. Whitney) = 21
Total PCT miles: 767

We camped last night at high altitudes, so it was very chilly when we woke up. We packed up quickly, excited about our summit today. We only had four miles to reach the base of Mt. Whitney, and the terrain grew more and more beautiful the closer we came. Rolling valleys, grassy meadows, high granite mountains, raging rivers... it was all so amazing. I still couldn't believe I was truly here.

Imagine, if you will, that you have been walking through the desert for 47 days, suffering through some of the harshest conditions on the planet. You have battled unending heat waves, severe drought, poisonous snakes, long days of hiking, sunburn, exhaustion and dehydration. Then, one day, you find yourself in the middle of the beautiful Sierra Nevada mountain range. Sure, you could be a dayhiker and visit here whenever you like, but nothing can possibly compare to the pure, radiant joy on the face of a thru-hiker who has walked through 700 miles of hell and suddenly finds himself in paradise. It's a kind of happiness that cannot be matched.

It was about 9:00am when we arrived at Crabtree Meadows, the lovely campground at the base of Mt. Whitney. It was so beautiful that we almost wanted to give up our hike today just so we could stay there for the night. But we had bigger plans for today, so we continued another two miles to reach a ranger's station and another open campground with a metal bear box for storing food. Since Mt. Whitney is not officially on the PCT (surprisingly, the PCT does not summit any mountain in its 2,650 mile journey, but Mt. Whitney is a must-do for most hikers. When else are you going to be a mere eight miles from the top of the highest mountain in the lower 48 states and in better shape to climb it?) hardly anyone carries their full pack to the summit and back.

Sansei, Rotisserie, Katie and I spent some time unloading our packs of extraneous gear: sleeping bags, pads, tents, bear vaults with most of our food, etc. We kept warm changes of clothes in our packs, a lunch for this afternoon, and headlamps and first aid kits, just in case. Everything else we bagged and locked inside the bear box at the campground.

With significantly lighter packs (weeeeeee!) we began the 8.7 mile trek to the top of Whitney. The first three miles were merely the approach; we passed by Timberline Lake and then Guitar Lake, both stunningly beautiful amid the surrounding mountain peaks. At Guitar Lake we found a surprise: Focus and the Chain Gang were here! They had camped at Guitar Lake last night and summited Mt. Whitney this morning at sunrise. We discovered that Whitney was a great place to have a reunion with our fellow hikers; usually our friends are out of reach if they are one day ahead or behind us, but since almost everyone takes one full day to climb the mountain, it's easy to catch up with friends who are either coming down from the summit or about to climb it.

I saw Dog and Sunshine poking their heads out of their tents, and we yelled to them,
"We've missed you!!"

We enjoyed a snack break beside Guitar Lake to catch up with our friends. It was a beautiful place to camp and I would have liked to stay here if I had felt like carting up my full backpack to this altitude (which I didn't.) From Guitar Lake the true climbing began, and I felt a thrill of nervousness inside me. Since starting the PCT fifty days ago, climbing Mt. Whitney has been an apprehensive milestone for me. I have never climbed so high, and until today the highest elevation we had hiked had been just over 11,000 feet. Mt. Whitney was an impressive 14,508 feet high. I had no idea what that kind of elevation would do to me, and I feared I would get altitude sickness, or get quickly out of breath and lose my ability to keep climbing. My greatest fear was that I would attempt to climb Whitney and not be able to summit. I kept my fingers crossed and took an energy gel before hiking, hoping the caffeine would help me breathe better.

Slowly, the four of us inched up the granite's rocky face. The trail was very well graded and consisted of hundreds of switchbacks slowly curving their way up the mountain. The caffeine seemed to be helping, for though I was moving slowly, I wasn't winded or losing air yet. Sansei was having a harder time; it was the first time this trip that I had seen him struggling. Usually he was the strongest hiker of the four of us, but the altitude appeared to be hitting him hard. When he mentioned he was starting to get a headache, I worried that he might be getting altitude sickness, and so I gave him another one of my caffeine gels. A little while later he appeared to be doing better and said his headache had gone away. As we got closer to the top, Sansei, Rotisserie and I took frequent breaks to catch our breath and admire the increasingly beautiful view. Toward the very top the trail became more of a rock scramble, and sometimes I had to put away my trekking poles to carefully climb or wedge myself around large boulders or tunnels of snow in the trail. Still, we seemed to be doing much better than a lot of the other people on trail. We passed quite a few dayhikers and John Muir Trail (JMT) hikers coming down from the summit. For them, Mt. Whitney was the culmination of a 3-week-long trek through the Sierras, but their packs looked entirely too big and their steps were slow. We passed them in much better shape, our steps steady and determined.

At last we reached the top, the final 1,000 feet of elevation hitting us hard. What a sight it was! The ground was littered with rocks and bits of shale, and a large, stone hut awaited us at the top with a register to sign. The elevation was doing strange things to my motor functions - I could barely grip the pen to sign my name: Bramble, on top of the world today! but soon I was gasping with delight more than lack of air and walking around the summit of Whitney with a full heart.

I made it! I summited the tallest mountain in the contiguous United States!

I jumped on top of one of the rock stacks, high above the world, and yelled into the open sky,
"700 miles of desert was totally worth this!!"
A dayhiker, lounging on a rock near me, turned at this with a laugh.
"Are you thru-hiking the PCT?" he asked me.
I smiled and nodded.
"Is this your first introduction to the Sierras?"
"Yes! We've only been here a few days so far. It's amazing."
"It gets better," he promised. "I imagine it's quite a change from the desert."
"Oh, yes," I said.
"If you had the chance to hike that section again, would you do it?" he wondered.
"The desert?!" I yelped. "Hell no!"
"But it's really only 'desert' hiking for the last 150 miles, right?" he asked.
"Ha!" I laughed, "and the 500 miles before that!"
At this point Rotisserie, Sansei and Katie caught wind of our conversation, and they began reiterating what I was saying.
"It's hot," we said vehemently, "and sandy, and there's hardly any water, and everything is prickly and trying to kill you..." we spouted for ten minutes the reasons we hated the desert so much, and then, after a long moment, the dayhiker said, "So... I'm planning to thru-hike the PCT next year."
"Oh..."
There was a sudden, awkward silence, and then I said weakly,
"I mean... the desert's not that bad..."

He laughed and said he was from San Diego, so he thought he had a good idea of what it would be like, even without our tirade. He bid us goodbye and as he left called back, "Enjoy the water in the Sierras!"

We stayed at the top to eat lunch and enjoy the view. It was cold at the summit, but the wind was tame and the sun felt wonderful. We took photos of the spanning view and walked as close as we dared to the edges, vertigo grabbing hold of us as we looked thousands of feet down to the bottom. The mountains around us rolled into infinity, gray and blue and purple in the distance. It was a truly beautiful sight.

Sansei, Rotisserie, Bramble, Honey Bunny

Most of the JMT hikers had descended already, and PCT hikers usually like to summit for the sunrise, so we had the whole mountaintop to ourselves. We enjoyed our accomplishment for a few hours, and then decided it was time to descend before the sun set on us. Even though we were going to log 21 miles hiking by the time the day was over, it was nice knowing that once we got down from Whitney, we just had to set up camp near the ranger's station instead of hiking further.

The hike down went infinitely faster than the hike up: just over an hour, whereas the hike to the summit from Guitar Lake had taken three. We descended into oxygen-rich air and practically ran over terrain we had struggled through on the way up. Rotisserie and I, however, were overly cautious on descents and we went much slower than Sansei and Katie. We were careful not to stumble over the slick rocks, and take care of our knees by moving more slowly.

"Maybe if they get down to camp way before us, they'll set up the tents!" Rotisserie joked.
But halfway down the mountain, Sansei and Katie were waiting for us, and I said dourly,
"Oh, we were hoping you guys would have camp set up for us by now!"
Katie laughed. "Yeah, and dinner ready, too?"
"Well, now that you mention it..."
She and Sansei laughed and took off again, leaving Rotisserie and I to follow slowly behind.
"So.... do you think they'll do it?" Rotisserie asked me a little while.
"Set up camp and make us dinner?" I said. "I doubt it. When I mentioned it to Honey Bunny, she laughed like she thought I was kidding."
"THAT WAS NOT A SUGGESTION!!" Rotisserie mock-roared, and I laughed.

We reached camp by sundown and met up with more of our hiker friends for dinner: Coincidence, 30 Pack, Outburst, Hot Tub, Games and Reason. We set up tents and went to sleep with the promise that we're totally sleeping in tomorrow!

It had been a fulfilling, wonderful day, and I couldn't remember a day on trail that I've been so perfectly happy.

Day Fifty

Today's miles: 21
Total miles: 763

I'm not sure why we kept setting our alarms for 5:00am, because inevitably our warm sleeping bags were much more inviting than the trail, and we ended up sleeping until 7:00am every day, anyway.

We had been setting up tents lately, since the weather was much colder at night than in the desert, and with Rotisserie and Sansei now sharing a tent, we only had two of them to pack up each morning.

We were on trail at 8:00 and climbing to higher elevations, hovering around 11,000 feet all day. I thought back to my days in Idyllwild when I was struggling to breathe and hike at 8,000 and 9,000 feet, and now such heights seemed trivial. We were growing stronger every day, and the trail was testing us with bigger and bigger challenges. At 11,000 feet I could feel the altitude slowly tightening my chest and my breath grow achey with each gasp, but I was determined to make it through. After all, there were much higher elevations to come.

We went slowly, and took our second breakfast break at a trail junction for the town of Lone Pine, CA. While we ate, a group of three older dayhikers came by and we talked with them for a while. When they learned we were PCT thru-hikers, they became naturally inquisitive and asked the questions we had heard many times over.

"How many days have you been hiking?" they wanted to know.
"Today is day fifty!" I crowed.
"How long does it take to finish the trail?"
"About five months."
"How do you resupply your food?"
"We stop in towns every 5-7 days to buy food."

It's funny how many people don't get that concept. I think they expect us to say that we have food helicoptered in to us, as though going into town each week is some sort of violation of thru-hiking. (What?! You're not on trail every second?!)

But it's fun to see the excitement in their eyes when they learn what we're doing. We never, never saw dayhikers in the desert, so the only people who asked about our journey were trail angels or the people who picked us up on hitchhikes. Because, honestly, who would dayhike in the desert? The only people you ever see are fellow thru-hikers, because thru-hikers are the only ones crazy enough to spend 700 miles walking through sand and Joshua trees.

But now that we are in the Sierras, we have been seeing a lot more people on the trail. Dayhikers, weekend backpackers, and section hikers. Sometimes they are traveling northbound like us, but often they are walking in the other direction, which throws us for a loop.
Wait, a hiker going southbound? They must be lost.
It's pretty easy to tell a dayhiker/weekend backpacker/section hiker apart from a thru-hiker. Usually they are wearing nicer clothing, or much larger packs, or smell way too clean and soapy. But the tell-tale sign (if you couldn't figure it out before that) is just to look at their shoes. If they're wearing any kind of boot, it's not a thru-hiker. Thru-hikers wear dirty, banged up trail runners with colorful Dirty Girl gaiters. We all know each other's footprints by heart by now because we've been tracking them in the sand for months. Dayhikers wear pristine, waterproof, leather boots that rise up above the ankle with expensive wool socks beneath them. Dead give away.

We bid our new dayhiker friends goodbye and continued on our way toward Cottonwood Pass, the portal to Mt. Whitney. After eight miles we arrived at Chicken Spring Lake, our very first alpine lake. It was here that our water report officially ended and we were on our own.

The lake was tucked beneath a steep, granite mountain and it was shockingly big and beautifully blue. We took our lunch break beside it, wading in the icy waters and enjoying the view. We were soon joined by Coincidence, Hot Tub, Sweet Tooth, 30 Pack and Outburst.
"THIS IS AWESOME!" Coincidence screamed.
We agreed. After so long in the desert, this sight was beyond amazing.

We debated about how much water to pack out and ultimately decided that 2 liters would probably be enough. This was a very difficult change for me, for I was used to carrying 5-6 liters, but I could no longer justify the extra weight that all that water created. After all, we were in the Sierras, and there was supposedly water everywhere, right? Right.

In fact, over the next few miles, we walked next to a surprising number of streams and rivers, enough that I found myself stopping and gaping at each one. At one point a tiny stream crossed the trail, and I stood, dumbfounded, watching it trickle in front of my feet. My mind was whirring. In the desert, this tiny stream would be a huge deal. Hikers would carefully record how wide it was, how fast it flowed, how deep it ran, and would dutifully update the water report to inform the hikers behind them. Those hikers would check the water report every morning and hike for hours and miles in order to reach this one tiny stream, and then they would spend precious time filling up the water containers in their backpacks in order to pack it out. This tiny stream would be a life saver for some.

But here, in the Sierras, this stream was nothing. It wasn't on any water report, it wasn't on any map. No one cared how wide it was, or how fast it flowed, or how deep it was. No one counted on it for their survival. No one hiked twenty miles through the arid desert just to get here. It was incredible. Because in just twenty more feet, there would be another river. And a mile after that, another. And so on and so on, at each turn. There was water. Everywhere. It was amazing.

I shook my head, and after a long moment, I stepped over the stream. Everything about the Sierras was sensory overload.

Our first glimpse of Mt. Whitney

We had a long afternoon of hiking. My feet grew sore and I lagged behind. After ten more miles we stopped for dinner near a river, and eating food gave me back the energy I had been lacking.

Sansei, noticing how quiet I had been in the past few hours, joked, "let's give Bramble some caffeine and see if she'll make up a song about taking a bath in the river!"
"Oh, no caffeine necessary," I smiled, and immediately launched into a made-up song about how to wash your "pits and bits" in an alpine stream. It made everyone laugh.

Eating dinner gave me a second wind and allowed me to tackle a streep three-mile uphill climb. When we stopped for the night, we were a mere three miles from Mt. Whitney, and we were all pretty  excited/terrified about our alpine summit tomorrow - for Rotisserie, Sansei, and I, it would be our first of that altitude.

Day Forty Nine

Today's miles: 20
Total miles: 742

Hiking in the mountains was a new and strange concept for us. For more than a month we have been wanderers in the desert, defining our days by the sun's rise and fall. Though it was difficult, it, nonetheless, became familiar. We knew to wake up before dawn, hike ten miles before 10:00am, take a long nap midday and hike again at sunset. We knew how to dress for the heat and how to plan our days around water and shade and shelter. It became second nature, this adaptation to the desert, and now that we were free from it, we felt lost. We were suddenly strangers in a strange new world. We were adventurers on our very first day, and we felt like children again, trying to piece together a schedule of normalcy when we didn't know what the rules were.

What time do we wake up in the morning? We wondered. How many miles do we hike? Do we take an afternoon siesta? How will we know where the water is without a water report? Do we wear sunhats or just a bandana? Should we keep warm clothes handy? Do we cowboy camp or set up a tent?

It was as though we were relearning everything we had come to know by heart.

Slowly, though, we began teaching ourselves anew. We didn't have to wake up at 4:00am because it was still very cold at 10,000 feet. So we woke up at 7:00. We were told we wouldn't be able to hike 20 miles a day in the Sierras because the terrain was tougher. Expect closer to 15-17 miles a day. We probably wouldn't need afternoon siestas because it wouldn't be as hot, and the miles would be harder, and slower to hike. We were told we no longer needed a water report because there was supposedly water at each turn. Sunhats might not be necessary because of tree cover. Warm clothes might be necessary because of wind and elevation. Cowboy camping would be colder, and a tent advisable to protect from the elements. We were slowly adapting to this new world.

Still, it was strange to sleep so late and be on trail at 8:00. Even then, the wind was chilly and we found ourselves taking breaks in the sun instead of the shade. One habit we had yet to break was our attachment to our water report. It ended in a mere 40 miles, and after that, we had no hiker-updated report to tell us how big the water sources were, how quickly they were flowing, and how clear. We still carried 4-5 liters of water in our packs, for it had been so engrained in us to protect ourselves from dehydration.

We took a lunch break at a stream eight miles from camp and enjoyed a small nap before moving on. The afternoon was mostly climbing. I was still loving the scenery and the tantalizing vanilla scent of the Ponderosa Pine Trees (it was not uncommon to see a group of hikers with their noses pressed up against the rough bark) but the weight of my pack was slowly wearing on me. We were hiking much slower than normal, which was to be expected, but it was frustrating to see the miles move by so slowly.

During one of our climbs we enjoyed an unexpected show: a squadron of fighter jets came roaring through, and we were so high in elevation at that time that they flew nearly below us, deafening our senses as they flipped and did tricks in the sky. We watched in delighted awe as a half dozen jets roared by, one after the other.

By dinnertime we had put in an impressive 15 miles already, and once we ate, the calories gave us enough energy to pound out another five miles. The four of us hiked in a compact, single-file line, Sansei, then Katie, then Rotisserie, then me. Sansei, unfortunately, has a bad habit of taking photos every five seconds (hence his old trail name "Shutterbug"). He also gets easily distracted and excitedly points out lizards or flowers and stares at them for five minutes. Each time he did so we nearly bumped into him like a line of toppling dominoes. After he stopped our hiking train for the fourth time in ten minutes, I yelled, "Sansei! You're a horrible leader!"
He laughed.
I said, "if you point out a tree stump that looks like a bear one more time I'm sending you to the back of the line!!"
We made it to our next water source and a tentsite by dusk, watching the sun set over the hilltops.

Day Forty Eight

Today's miles: 17
Total miles: 722

My alarm went off at 5:00, but it was surprisingly chilly this morning, so we slept until 6:00. It was our first full hiking day with bear vaults, which proved to be a new challenge. It took longer than usual for us to pack up in the morning since we had yet to learn the best way to pack our bear vaults, but soon we hefted our awkward, overloaded bags into the familiar hollows of our shoulders and hips, and we marched forward.

Truth be told, I barely even noticed that my pack was bigger and heavier than usual. Nor did I care that I had to carry that extra weight for another 500 miles before I could send the bear vault home. All I cared about today was that the sun was shining, the weather was cool, the trail was calling, and the mountains were ahead! Everything I saw was beautiful. Rocks! Trees! Mountains! Rivers! Every step we took drew us further into the Sierra Wilderness. Nothing could shake my good mood today.

We were all in high spirits, trying to make light of our heavy burdens, filled with seven days worth of food. We joked that we should eat all our food today so we'd have less to carry tomorrow.

Sansei joked, "ok guys.... it appears we got really high last night and ate three days worth of food. So.... we're going to have to hike forty miles today."

But as the day wore on, the packs dragged at our shoulders and we sighed beneath the weight. I tried to make up a new song to keep everyone's spirits up. Since making up the "Uphill Song" (soon followed by the "Downhill Song") in Idyllwild after a good dose of caffeine, it was habit of mine to make up funny ditties on trail and sing them to my hiking mates, as Rotisserie and Sansei had become well aware. It was a running joke that if you gave me enough caffeine I might make up an entire Broadway musical about something ridiculous, like pancakes.

Today, when we stopped for a break and everyone stood quietly trying to catch their breath, I piped up,
"So I made up a new song about my bear vault! Who wants to hear it?"
They agreed, so I launched into my verses:
"This is my bear vault song! I hope you sing along!
It's full of really heavy food! And it puts me in a bad mood!
Carrying it is not a thrill! Especially when we go uphill!"
They found it funny.

When we had hiked eleven miles, we came across another turn of the South Fork of the Kern River. It had a beautiful bridge spanning it, beneath which hundreds of swallows were swooping and diving from little nests they had built. The river itself had a long, grassy bank, perfect for resting, and we couldn't pass up such a beautiful spot, not after so long in the desert.

We laid out our sleeping pads in the grass and waded knee-deep in the river, letting the cool water run over our feet and the gritty sand sift between our toes. We relaxed on the bank, had lunch, and listened to a hiker named Monk play his Didgeridoo while Sansei played his bear vault like a drum. We stayed for a few hours and then kept hiking. The grassy hills gave way to steeper terrain, and soon we were climbing from 8,000 feet to 10,000 - the highest elevation we had been to yet. We took it slow and steady, and though it was difficult, when we made it to the top for a break, Sansei said,

"That's how you know you're a thru-hiker. Can you imagine trying to climb that hill on your very first day? And here we are, having made it to the top barely stopping the whole way."

As exhausted as I was, I knew he was right, and it was a good moment.

We found a beautiful campsite that night on a ridge with a gorgeous view of the sunset, but it was incredibly windy at such high elevation, so we went a little further until the trail dipped into the pine trees and we found a flat spot protected from the elements. It was very strange to be so cold, and we enjoyed bundling up in all our warm clothing before bed. How novel!