PCT Day 102 – SoBo Flip – Stories

Middle Trail Junction (mile 827) to South Fork of Kings River (mile 811)

Total PCT miles hiked: 1378

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.

Cheryl Strayed is accompanying me up Mather Pass. Around me the world of green living things is falling away, trees shrink back into the earth under the force of elevation, replaced by ancient crumbling granite where almost nothing grows. White clouds with bruised bottoms merge and break apart in the vast sky, casting a fragmented sort of light over the rock, shading it in a thousand kinds of brightness. A view that might have been formed by the hands of a deranged artist with scalpel and clay—the cuts in the rock so deep and permanent as to look intentional. A landscape forged by water and ice and rock and time. And through it all runs a serpentine trail, leading me ever higher towards a notch in this wall of stone where the rock cedes to the sky and we can scramble into the next valley.

In my ear Cheryl narrates “Tiny Beautiful Things” – a collection of replies from her time as the voice behind the Dear Suagr advise column. All of these people sharing portions of their stories, most of which are challenging, tragic, and beautiful. Though I suppose you don’t write into an advise column if everything in your life is dandy. In some ways it’s the bits of life we least want to live that makes the best stories. It’s the same reason why good news doesn’t sell. An engaging narrative needs challenge, strife, suffering, drama, and hopefully overcoming and triumph—that is, if the story is to have a happy ending. It’s why the outdoors make for such compelling narratives. What better antagonist than a mountain to climb, a jungle to conquer. The man versus nature narrative is so worn in some ways, full of mostly affluent white people—men historically and mostly currently—who venture out to challenge themselves in a very specific way.

The PCT certainly fits this trope. I certainly do as well I’m sure, in ways.

Upon crossing the top of Mather Pass we are suddenly alone and without the reality of other people it is easy to conceptualize the journeys of thousands of hikers through the presence of the trail. Concrete proof of the existence of humans, all following this well trod path across the earth, a line across a map. Each one of us the center of our own dramas and challenges, each one of us overcoming in a way that feels uniquely our own, our story.