Zero in Mammoth Lakes, no hiking.
Total PCT miles hiked: 1331
Due to our early start Keith (Starman) and I arrived at the Sierras when there was still a lot of snow, and decided it wasn’t safe to attempt a crossing given my skill level. We elected to flip up to northern California and hike southbound (SoBo) back to where we left off near Lone Pine – giving the snow a chance to melt out. During this flip the PCT milage will be counting down, but I’ll include a tally of our total milage hiked so that you can keep aprised of our progress in a linear fashion.
I met Alyssa and her husband at a hostel in Mammoth Lakes California. Keith and I sat with them around a pale wood dinner table eating and talking as outside the windows the sun set and the light cascading in faded and was replaced by the warm glow of overhead lighting. Over the course of her meal I watched as she drank a liter of Coke zero, poured out three ounces at a time over ice. Her and her husband were young, 26 but looking younger than that. Married at 26 feels impossibly young, but that is for them to decide, not me. 26 with long brown hair, a gentle face, and dark sparkling eyes behind horn rimmed glasses. As we talked, the men left one at a time to drift off to bed. It’s such a rare thing on the trail to spend time with another woman.
She’d come from Australia to do the trail, and unlike everyone else I’d met from that great nation continent, she wasn’t a nurse. Before the trail she left Brisbane and a job “filling in boxes in immigration” – a job and a city she had no desire to return to after the trail. But, she confessed, she felt mostly done with the trail now. The lustre and romance had worn off. Without as many words she made it clear that it wasn’t her idea to do this hike, but that she decided to try. The break and the adventure felt necessary. Like so many twenty something’s she felt stuck and bored, looking around at her life and wondering if this was really it.
Her hope for the trail was to have time to reevaluate her life, to think deep thoughts while walking. To figure something out. But that “at the end of the day I’m just so tired, and there is always so much to do, sometimes I feel like I barely have the energy to take pictures much less write a blog and ponder life!” They might be done after Yosemite, or maybe just do Oregon and Washington, it’s still up in the air.
Alyssa was nervous about what people back home would say, that they would think she failed. “Sometimes I wish I didn’t tell anybody at all about this hike, so I wouldn’t have to explain it if we didn’t finish.” It’s not fair, as is the way in life, that all hiking on the PCT is compared to a complete thru hike. In any other context hiking 1,000 miles, hiking for a month or three, hiking 200 miles, hiking for a week is an incredible accomplishment. But in comparison to a full thru hike all of those accomplishments feel like falling short. She hoped that this hike will still change her, but maybe it would take time to fully realize how.
It’s funny, or perhaps just annoying and sad, how we can give advise that we are least likely to accept ourselves. I told her to be proud of everything she has accomplished and to not be so eager to compare herself to others. In many ways, achievements are only what we make of them, the story we tell about something is often as important as the doing, and we can turn bad moments into good stories. That any experience you learn from is valuable in it’s own way.
Alyssa has hiked more PCT than Cheryl Strayed so maybe there’s a book deal in it for her. 🙂
Both Alyssa and you can be proud of the incredible accomplishment of starting the PCT and walking so far!! Congratulations!