PCT Day 29 – Edges

Little Jimmy Camp (mile 384) to campsite at mile 404)

All day feels familiar. Not in the similar but unique way, but in the literal sense of having been someplace before. I have hiked or run the trail from Vincent Gap to Three Points at least half a dozen times in various combinations and segments. While much of the southern California section of the PCT has been near or part of hikes I’ve taken during eight years in LA, none has been so visited as the segment we’ve covered yesterday and today.

The trail here is so well traveled that I cannot muster the appropriate enthusiasm for the remarkable band of mountains which sits squarely between two deserts. I take two pictures all day, though not for want of beauty. Only due to my very human tendency to take things for granted, in the way we do not tell those who mean the most to us how much we truly love them. Assuming they’ll be there tomorrow and the next day, because the knowledge of impermanence is too painful to consider often. But my relationship to these mountains is actively ending, each step takes me further towards the end of the map of familiarity. After the Sierra I’ll fall off the edge of my map completely. Of course, I can find excitement in the unknown in a way I’ve never been able to with the familiar.

The trail so far has felt like waking across a puzzle of a map that’s only partially completed. One ridge known while the next is someplace I’ve never been. It’s fun to fill in the missing pieces via the intimate mode of walking. Knitting together the seams into not quite a quilt, but a scarf: a long thin band just a little wider than the PCT itself. To me, thru hiking is not about knowing one place intimately, but many places in a surface level way. The land rising up and melting away around you while the pressure of seasons keeps you moving north, unable to explore every lovely campground or cascading canyon. This mode of travel is both sad and deeply appealing to me.

So what of these remarkable mountains that I’ve failed to remark on. The mountains of Angeles National Forrest are steep, all plunging valleys and thin ridges that slice into the peaks. Like you could juice an orange on the top of every single one. Covered in rocky crags and equal parts pine and chaparral, they’re not friendly mountains, containing too many sharp edges and not enough soft meadows. Their foothills roll away in ever dropping layers of tan and gold until they flatten completely and merge into the desert. While I know these mountains better than any of the terrain we’ve walked through thus far, and yet I only know, only will ever know, a fraction of their breadth.

Yesterday we were high in a pine forest, surrounded by peaks that almost but not quite break tree line. Today we started in that same forest, but spent the day dropping back down into the desert. Slowly at first, and then all at once in the last mile of the day we slid from forest into scrub and sand. All day I knew the desert was coming, where yesterday the wind was cool, today it held the warmth of lower dryer climes. The wind bringing the promise of newness, where perhaps in the throes of novelty I will take more pictures.