PCT Day 146 – Everything and Nothing

Bumping River (mile 2309) to Bear Gap Trail Junction (2329)

By mid day we have climbed away from the trees, rolling five deep with Cribbage, Hot Lips, and Caveman. The trail flops from ridge to ridge, cruising around the inside of one shallow bowl after another. Using a series of small notches to wind it’s way north. Ripe blueberry bushes line the trail at lower elevations, filling the air with their delicious scent and dragging our feet to a stop. We munch our way along the plants until someone decides we’ve probably dawdled enough and we pick up the pace again. In this way Starman and myself arrive at Sheep Lake for an early dinner, while the other three plan to hike another five miles past our intended campsite in order to avoid dry camping; they depart leaving us to our meal along the smokey bank of a shallow lake.

I barely know these hikers and yet it occurs to me that we will likely never see them again. There are fires burning near the Canadian border which are currently closing the trail and many hikers are opting to end their hikes early. For those who have lost their lust for the trail, the fact that there will very likely be no proverbial carrot at the end of this very long stick, no walking into Canada after all these months of working towards that singular goal, it is too much. It has broken something inside those hikers who just needed to make it to Canada. You can see it in their eyes, something like frustration and desperation mixed with relief. If there is no border to be crossed, no terminus to tag then maybe they can just go home, finally.

After dinner we climb another three miles to a campsite on a ridge. The sun is angling low towards the jagged black ridge, while the trail climbs in long gentle side hills through green vegetation which waves at us as we pass. A cool breeze blows in from the west; dry yet tinged with the cool promise of fall. As the crow flies are only a hundred or so miles north of Cascade Locks but already the very air feels different, darker and colder, wind that hails from a land of snow and dusky winter months. And the land here a reflection of the prehistoric cold which shaped it. Deep bowls filled with shallow lakes, formed by the gouging of snow and ice. Sharp jutting rocks formed by volcanic activity and smoothed by eons of wind and rain. All of this smothered in a thick blanketing smoke, pouring in from the sky, seeping up between trees to fill the valleys, obscuring the land and falsifying small distances as grand.

With each ridge we clamber over a small ache of thrill shoots through my chest. Rounding a bend to where the earth drops away, in the moment before the path is revealed something chants what’s next, what’s next, what’s next. I love the moment of not knowing as much as I want to see what comes next. Always my eyes linger on the trails that I’m not following, branching off towards places unknown, leaving me wondering what is just beyond what I can see. What wonders might be hiding just out of sight.