Chimney Creek Campground (mile 681) to Kennedy Meadows (mile 702)
Today feels like the final chapter of a book that you’re not quite sure if you enjoyed. Or rather, a book that challenged your world view and which you will not come to fully appreciate for years to come. Rebecca Solnit’s writing, for example.
We woke up 21 miles from the road into Kennedy Meadows and spent the morning walking in and out of the accordion folds of the hills; as is so common in the desert. 700 miles. Today we’ll cross the 700 mile mark and the arbitrarily determined end of the desert. Intellectually I know this mile marker has little geographic significance, and yet the screaming emotional monkey side of my brain leaps against it’s cage, flinging emotional poo willy nilly. I think back to the stoic thrill of the first day, first town stop, first trail magic. I think about the hardest days where I often wondered what it would take to make me want to quit, what that breaking point would or will be. I thought about our good fortune with the weather, blisters, logistics; we’ve been so lucky on the trail thus far and I think it plays a big part in our currently good morale. And I laugh over the random nothingness that sometimes is my brain on walking. The fragments of song that chase their way around the inside of my skull for hours or days in ceaseless monotony, or the scenes of random interactions played-altered-replayed ad nauseum, or sometimes just seeing how long you can close your eyes while walking.
After lunch we finally come down from the hills and Rockhouse Basin explodes around us in all its splendor – clouded purple skies, golden grass, haphazard piles of white granite boulders. Different memories flood back from a long weekend Keith and I spent traversing through Domeland Wilderness, just across the river from where we’re standing now. Where we left the well groomed meadow trails to bushwack down ridges following the footprints of bears and drank from soot blackened Kern that taste like campfire.
The Kern river flows more clearly today. It’s beautiful here today, truly magical.
We almost reach Sherman Pass Road at 6:00 just as five cars woosh past. But by the time we walk the remaining quarter mile they’re gone, and after a half hour sitting on the road side without another car anywhere in sight, we accept the statistical anomaly and walk the mile to the general store instead. By the time we make it to Grumpy Bears Retreat the kitchen is closed and the milkshake I’ve been motivation fantasizing about during the day evaporates from possibly. I can’t even be mad. Somehow the extraordinary effort and low grade discomfort of the PCT has erased my ability to get upset over little things. Besides, the bar is still open and serving massive glasses of cheap wine for four dollars. After hiking 21 miles to the end of the desert I drink wine for dinner, surrounded by our slowly forming trail family wondering how I ever could be so lucky as this.