PCT Day 101 – SoBo Flip – High Def in Real Life

Bishop (11 miles on the Bishop Pass trail) to Middle Trail Junction (mile 827)

Total PCT miles hiked: 1362

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.

The sky above Bishop Pass is the most ethereal blue. Void of smoke or clouds it presses into the earth with an blanketing, radiating intensity. Painting the landscape in broad brush strokes of good kind light in which everything everything looks aesthetically pleasing. Happy aspen trees wave their little hands at us as we pass, their dusty white bark an extension of the granite peaks towering above us like the shattered edge of a grand bowl. Rumpled green and a thousand shades of blue, all shot through with white—belonging to bark, to rock, to snow, the shades of white and blue tie the world together. And somehow we can walk through it all on this nicely made trail that will take us just where we want to go. How thoughtful.

I leave Keith filtering water at a steam and meander towards the gaping maw of the sky. Below me is a gently rippling lake which from a distance is a burnished undulating blue that fades to hues of aquamarine as it presses against the shore. Behind me someone is shouting. No, they’re shouting at me. No wait, it’s Keith. Have I dropped something? What is wrong? No, he’s smiling and so are the people following him.

I stand in the cool shade as Pied Piper style Keith leads a group of four day hikers to me. The woman at the head of the pack is Andrea who reads this blog and recognized me by my voice as I walked past. She is utterly generous in her compliments and effusively kind at our chance meeting. It’s as though a book has snapped shut, pressing two scenes from the same story right up against each other. A delightful surprise with such minuscule odds of occuring. Had we stuck with our original plan and hiked over Bishop Pass heading into town instead of out, had we left town yesterday instead of today, had we dallied at the trailhead or left a few minutes earlier this meeting never would have happened and I would have lost a great unknown gift. What even is this sort of reality which places kind strangers in your path? How delightful to live in a world in which one woman writing on the internet can positively impact the life of another, if only with a few words for a few minutes.

As I climb towards the pass I think about Andrea and the kindness she showed me today and it dredges up two conflicting sentiments which have always lived in terse symbiosis in my mind. That, on the one hand, I believe that individual people are deserving of recognition and validation and that sharing our personal narratives helps everyone feel less alone. On the other hand, I recognize that most individuals are largely unimportant when held in comparison to the scale of seven billion humans and counting – even more so when compared to the scope and scale of the natural world.

Though perhaps that is the wrong comparison to make. Perhaps I am guilty of operating on an impractical scale.

From the top of Bishop Pass we cross onto a valley of arresting scope and beauty. In the literal sense that the scene into which we are descending demands that one stop walking to fully appreciate it. To stand in awed silence. To behold just one tiny piece of this world that so completely dwarfs our human form. Turrets of dark stone reach into the sky and simultaneously plunge with brutal efficiency to the valley floor. All at once I am cracked open and silenced, the mountains roar into the chasm within my chest that I am small small small. While at the same time letting me know that my smallness, my very human limitations are ok. I will never be as ever-present or humbling as a mountain, I will never impact thousands of living creatures the way a river might. But then why, tell me why should that be my aim? Maybe there is just the one, and maybe if I am lucky there will be a handful of humans who I can positively impact in some small way. Maybe that is all the majority of us can ever hope to accomplish within our limited lives. Maybe that’s ok, or maybe it’s enough to break my damn heart.