PCT Day 7 – The Living Dessert

Sissors Crossing (mile 77) to mile 94

The desert is joyous today under a clear and mercifully cool blue sky. All around the hardy desert plants put on their best show. Stubby barrel cactus litter the hillside pushing up in jaunty angles, their barbs curling in instead of out, as though for self protection rather than attack. They’ve just started to bloom, small pale green flowers as delicate as tissue paper. The ocotillos reach their long arms towards the sun, tiny red pettals fluttering. Aloe, yucca, prickly pear, and a dozen more I cannot name. As the trail climbs away from the valley floor there are juniper and the red barked manzanita.

The trail today has a thousand faces, it looks like the Badlands I think, and then Sedona. Around a bend in the rock and we could be in the Grand Canyon on the Kaibab trail. Or maybe it’s like none of these, but instead just the ever shifting face of the PCT.

Evening finds us standing on top of the world. The trail hugging the cliff face as rocks drop away thousands of feet below. The wind roars up from below, a howling powerful thing that pulls the hats from our heads and makes its presence known by flinging sand at our bare legs, drying the sweat from our faces in an instant. Down and away we can look back on all we’ve come through, so far and yet only the beginning. My head spins at the enormity of what we’re trying to do and in this moment I feel so so small. I am a speck on the side of a hill in the foothills above the desert in one state in one country and all around me are mountains who have stood the test of time in a way that is unimaginable to my human scale. How lucky I must be, to be standing here and now.