Category: PCT

Campsite at mile 739 to Horseshoe Meadows via Mulkey Pass (mile 745 + 2 miles on side trail)

We arrive at the Dow Villa in Lone Pine and immediately see Moonshine, Bean Dip, All American Austin, Low Key, and Lost sitting in the lobby packing their bear canisters and planning to hike out in the morning. Trail family! It’s so good to see them and at the same time it breaks my heart. They’re heading into the Sierra, and we’re not. They’re going forward in a straight line, and we’re not. We’re doing what’s right for us, and they’re not. And even though I know we’re making the right choice for us, it hurts to know that this is probably good bye, probably forever. Six weeks in and we’ve just started to build a trail family and it barely lasted a week. The trail has a way of throwing people into your path and then after a week, a month, a day they’re gone, maybe forever, maybe not. Oh social situations, how you continue to perplex me.

Over dinner I watch videos of people traversing Forester Pass inch by inch, videos that my mother has sent me, mind you. Sent days ago and left unwatched in my inbox while I hiked far away from cell service. She had no way of knowing that we were already planning to skip around the Sierras and come back later, and now I’m certain our choice is right. I am at best, a reluctant mountaineer. My winter activity of choice is snowboarding, or skiing, perhaps the causal snowshoeing outing with my mom. But definitely, definitely not mountaineering. Keith is the mountaineer, climbing up stupid looking snow fields in the winter and spring while I rock climb and trail run in LA’s cool temperatures. In fact, the only reason I even know how to travel with ice axe and crampons is so that I can navigate small snow fields while hiking, not to use them in real deal winter travel. The idea of spending three weeks hiking through the snow and climbing steep passes under icy terrain makes me want to vomit. I climbed over every single one of these passes least the summer, I know exactly what they entail and I don’t want might be my last summer in the Sierras to be one of fear and frustration. Plus, as if that weren’t enough, there is a five day storm arriving tomorrow, that’s promising snow over 10,000 feet from Whitney to Yosemite.

What does worry me is that everybody else is heading into the heart of the Sierras in a snow storm. Keith and I propose our plan to the group but there are no takers. Squish and Carmen San Diego almost decide to come with us to northern California, but after sleeping on it decide that heading through the mountains in the snow is “kind of a right of passage” as Squish calls it. I get it and I don’t. I have seen the euphoric Instagram posts from the few brave souls who have made it through already. They’re enough to cause serious envy. But I’ve also seen the posts from people who started hiking at 4am, postholed all day, and are barely hitting double digit miles. And isn’t thru hiking hard enough without additional suffering? Who am I going to impress by doing something that feels unsafe? Why in the ever loving fudge does anyone’s opinion but my own matter?

So maybe I’m more on the side of not viewing going into the Sierra’s too early as a right of passage. I’m supremely unconcerned with the opinion of folks who will think flipping means that I’m not a “real thru hiker.” I try and curb my nervousness around others heading out, and focus on the minor logistical mess that lies ahead.

Campsite below Olancha Peak (mile 725) to Campsite at mile 739

I wake to the crunching of boots heading down the trail. The sun is already up and warming the tent. 7am. For some this might as well be hiker noon, like the person we camped near last night who was already in bed and asleep by the time we got into camp at 6pm. But for us it’s close to our normal wakeup time, and on this cool breezy morning I let Keith snooze even longer while I read. Content to let the sun cast dappled shadows across the tent walls and listen to morning hikers trek past.

This section we’re taking it easy. What could have been a three day jaunt we’re stretching into four. It feels necessary after the least restful zero day ever at Grumpy Bears. After all, a large part of my desire to hike the PCT was to enjoy myself. To relax and drink in nature through the simple act of walking each day.

With only 14 miles on the agenda for today I turn off the part of my brain that’s always chatting ‘go, go, go’ and when Keith finally wakes I propose Saturday morning cartoons. Though, it’s actually a Thursday. Saturday morning cartoons is our code for a leisurely morning, breakfast in bed, and a late start. I make myself a cup of coffee, using the steam to gently warm the gluten free stroopwaffle my sister sent me all the way from Europe – it feels deliriously luxurious. Meanwhile Keith cues up the movie we didn’t finish last night, and we snuggle down in our quilts together. I can hear more hikers going past and I vaguely wonder what they make of the laughter coming from our tent.

By the time we start hiking is after 11am and we have the trail to ourselves. We amuse ourselves by pointing out faces and shapes in the strange rock formations that we’ll walk past all day. Each one looking like a creation from Walt Disney himself. And by making up alternate lyrics to “Livin’ on a Prayer” by Bon Jovi.

Whoa, we’re half way there

Who-oh pigeon on a bear

Whoa, we’re half way there

Who-oh chocolate covered pear

Whoa, we’re half way there

Who-oh haven’t cut my hair

It’s a small miracle we don’t asphyxiate in the thin air.

Kennedy Meadows (mile 702) to Campsite at mile 709

I don’t even know where to start. Today was a whirlwind of attempted plan making that somehow also culminated in hiking seven late afternoon miles.

Perhaps I need to back up.

When we arrived in Kennedy Meadows two days ago the plan was to gather our gear and hike into the Sierra for a six day section over Keirsarge Pass to resupply in Bishop. Then we began to read the trail reports in earnest, stories of people postholing for hours and days, cornices on Mather Pass. Learning that VVR is still closed, Red’s Meadow Road is still closed, Tioga Pass Road is still closed. Meaning that once we got further into the Sierra, it would be very hard to get out. Going into the Sierra began to seem foolish. All around us people spouted incorrect information garnered from who knows what resources. While people are summiting Mt Whitney in winter mountaineering style people clad in trail runners debated about carrying an ice axe since “it’s not like we know how to use them anyway.” I’m cringing.

Keith, who has far more winter mountaineering experience than me, and whose judgement I trust immensely tells me that he thinks we’d be able to make it through, but that it would likely be a cold miserable slog and that it would probably be frightening. I believe him. I’ve seen the pictures, I’ve slogged through wet California snow for hours when you’re postholing up to your hip, and I’m pretty sure we’re about two weeks too early to enter the Sierra safely. Our early success has become our downfall and it’s time to change plans. Many people are burning time by going on side trips or else spending days or weeks in the front country towns of Lone Pine and Bishop. But I don’t like the idea of sitting still, spending money and losing fitness.

After a flurry of research we decide we’re going to shorten this section to go over Mulkey Pass and into Lone Pine, then flip up to the California/Oregon border and SoBo back. Probably. It’s not set in stone yet, but we have a reservation for a hotel in Lone Pine for Friday night and it’s getting late and the internet here is terrible and so we hike out. Bags too full of extra food, with unnecessary microspikes and ice axes for snow we won’t encounter on our new plan.

Aside from the stress of the morning, I feel sad. The loss of a continuous NoBo thru hike is somehow more upsetting than I thought it would be. I know it means we’ll likely lose the start of a trail family we’ve been forming. It will put us away from everybody we’ve been hiking near, people we may not get to see again the rest of the trail. I also mourn the adventure of the Sierra under snow, the challenge that we’re choosing to bypass. The loss of a plan and idea can still hurt.

But at the same time I know it’s absolutely the right choice for us. Keith is worried that slogging through the Sierra for three weeks would ruin the trail for him, and I don’t want that. When I started this trail I told myself that I would prioritize my relationship and finishing the trail over all else, and by making the choice to flip north I’m doing both. Plus this different plan and the associated logistical nightmare will be an adventure, in the fun way that following the same trail north day after day can be devoid of.

By the time we reach camp the details of our plan are no more set, but my mood is much improved. We’ll do the rest of California SoBo and figure out the details in town. It’s going to be great.

Zero day in Kennedy Meadows – no hiking

I first saw Early Bird on the trail outside of Casa de Luna – I couldn’t help but think there was a person who was having a bad day, groaning and inching down the descent as she was. Later, from time spent with her and stories told to me by others, I would come to regard Early Bird as the toughest person on the trail.

The second time I saw Early Bird on the trail was the day we hiked across the LA aqueduct. I slowed my pace to walk with her, something she was unexpectedly grateful for. She told me that people usually just rushed past her, barely saying a word, and that she’d cried in her tent last night thinking that nobody liked her. How she’d started with two friends, but quickly fell behind their pace. Getting the trail name Early Bird because, in an effort to keep up with the people she started the trail with, she’d often started hiking long before sunrise. A retired Los Angeles fire fighter Early Bird would beam at her phone as texts and pictures from the men at her old station came in. She called them “her boys”, they were rooting for her, and now I was too.

I last saw Early Bird at a campground above the aqueduct, singing quietly to herself as she set up her tent; but I think of her often. How she’s willing to get up at two and three in the morning in order to get her miles in. How she’s often hiking alone because her pace doesn’t match the other hikers – either those she started with, or the packs of young people rushing past. She seems capable of marching along through circumstances that would push many hikers off the trail. I desperately want her to find her trail family, or even just one other person who she can hike with, I want her to finish as badly as I want to finish this trail myself. And I think she can, I believe she has it in her, she just might need a little help, as we all do from time to time.

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.

Hitch from Lake Isabella (mile 652) to campsite at mile 662

Ten hikers are riding the bus back from Lake Isabella to the trail at Walker Pass. We’re comparing trails hiked when an older man in front of me turns around and says “the Camino del Santiago, PCT, and AT give up elevation like women give up sex.” I’m already wary of where this is going, he continues: “the Camino is like a nun, never gives up anything. The PCT is a regular woman who gives it up the right amount, and the AT is a whore, going up and down all god damn day long!” He roars with laughter and gestures to his wife who is sitting in the seat next to him in agitated silence, “she hates when I tell that joke.”

Gee, I can’t imagine why.

I try to let it go and plan to avoid this guy in the future. We haven’t seen this couple until now, there’s a good chance they’ll pass out of our bubble and I won’t have to see them again. But later when we’re standing on the side of the road applying sunscreen the same guy shouts over to Keith, “hey Starman! What’s the difference between a giant, raging boner, like a huge hard boner and a Cadillac?” Keith, unsettled, just shrugs. “I haven’t got a Cadillac!” laughs the man before heading across the road and up the trail.

I round on the guys still standing around, “what a fucking creep, right?!” One guy shrugs and says “I like a joke as much as the next guy, but his delivery is terrible, too slow.” Yes, because the delivery is the real issue with the boner joke. Well spotted, you.

Immediately I’m equally mad and tired. Tired that the PCT, like so many outdoors spaces, is a veritable boys club, mad at the fact that men refuse to police themselves, mad that when a woman says certain behavior is unacceptable she’s labeled an over sensitive kill joy. I’m mad that folks will defend these behaviors by saying “not all men are like that” when movements like #MeToo and #YesAllWomen reveal that an alarming number of men are like that, and a fair few more offer complicit approval through their silence. And I’m tired of people offering up the hollow phrase “I’m sorry you had to deal with that” instead of examining their own actions, the times they condoned rape culture by not calling out a tasteless joke, the times they made a woman feel uncomfortable with their actions, the time they didn’t take “no” as a complete sentence. I’m mad that some people will read this and say “hey, let’s not get political, I come to nature to escape all that!” A phrase that is only said by those who are so shrouded in their own privilege both on and off the trail so as to be able to avoid politics completely. Why care about poverty if you’re safely middle class? Why speak up against fatphobic and ableist language when you fit societies standard of ‘normal’? Why care about police killing unarmed black men in their own back yards if your whiteness ensures that your every interaction with law enforcement ends in “thank you officer, have a nice day”?

People want to hide behind the idea that nature is for everyone, that the trail doesn’t care what you look like. But the reality is the outdoors have been built, branded, and all but reserved for a select few and they’re not all that kind to folks who fall outside their mold.

Do you need an example? I have them, I have more than I could ever possibly write down, most women/queer/fat/black/lantina/black people do.

We’re standing at the southern terminus and some guys turn to chat with Keith about first day milage, they block me out of the conversation, literally turn their backs to me, ignore my existence.

Taking a break at Boulder Oaks Campground when an older man comes up and asks Keith if we’re staying there tonight. Keith looks to me and I tell the man we’ll be hiking on. He tells me it’s uphill to the next campground. I know. It’s a ways away. I know. He won’t let the issue drop until he shows me his maps, points out every detail, as though I don’t have the exact same maps, as though he’s more informed of my abilities than I am.

Sitting around a camp fire one night I notice men blatantly taking over women and queer folks, interrupting them mid sentence again and again.

Filtering water at Tylerhouse canyon and discussing old Mel Brooks films a college professor says “they could never make that film today, it’s too offensive, and all the directors now days are pussies.” Ah yes, the old usage of female genitalia to refer to cowardice.

One night a drunk man old enough to be my father puts his arm around me and tells me I remind him of his college girlfriend.

Hitching into town an older man mumbles “that bitch” to every female driver who doesn’t pick him up. To the men he says nothing.

An alarming number of people still casually use the word retarded in a pejorative way.

At Carmen’s in Julian we meet a rad 19 year old hiker from Seattle. When she leaves the table to get a drink a guy informs me that they’re going to give her the trail name “Barely Legal.” Because apparently all women are divided into “can have sex with” and “can’t have sex with, yet” categories depending on age.

Hiking from a spring between Mojave and Tehachapi a guy launches into a 30 minute tirade when he learns I’m a P3 Hiker. He tells me he applied and was rejected because they wanted to pad the program with more women and people of color. It never seems to cross his mind that the choice might have been made on talent, and that he simply didn’t make the cut. He rants “they just picked a bunch of women and Asians, that’s not even what the trail looks like!” As though we all need reminding of the lack of diversity on trail.

Taken individually these incidents seem insignificant, petty even, which is what so many people fail to comprehend. Because it’s never just one man, one interaction, but a lifetime of being seen as weaker, less intelligent, and less talented than my male peers. Imagine being told in ways subtle and overt that the simple fact of your gender makes you less than for your entire life. It’s never just one man, and I’m not speaking from a place as just one woman.

I rage hike up the trail from Walker Pass, mad at myself for not saying something to the man on the bus. Feeling like a crap feminist and a bad ally. Why am I preserving his comfort over my own, over that of other women? Why can’t I speak up in the moment and tell people they’re behavior makes me feel uncomfortable? Am I really so worried about being liked by people like that? Have I really bought into the idea that the best thing a woman can be is nice? I feel like I’m failing myself, like I’m failing the hiking community and those who will come after me looking for a safe space and only finding a boys club. Already the PCT has forced me to be uncomfortable physically, so why stop there? Maybe this is the catalyst to growth that I need.

Campsite at mile 634 to Walker Pass (mile 652 + a hitch into Lake Isabella)

I’m just starting to think that Onyx is going to be a hard town to hitch out of when a big man driving a big white pickup truck pulls into the now defunct gas station across the road. He thumbs silently in the direction of Lake Isabella – our intended destination for the evening. I nod silently to the man and he waves us over.

“You two PCT hikers?” He asks by way of an introduction. We are, and we’re trying to get into Lake Isabella after hitching first into the tiny community of Onyx to pick up our resupply box and then being called further afield by the siren song of showers and restaurant meals in the substantially bigger town of Lake Isabella. After some shuffling of dog beds off seats we’re rumbling westward into the afternoon sun.

Our driver’s name is David. He’s clad in a blue flannel button down tucked into brown work pants, a large gold and silver watch glints on his wrist, catching the sun as he pilots the truck – the attire of a man accustomed to manual labor. A union carpenter of 40 years who just retired from working in the film industry, a foreman on prime time family TV shows, Murphy Brown, The Big Bang Theory among others. And after he retired he and his wife bought a ranch up in Keyesville, a piece of property and a house for them and their dogs. But that was a while ago. His wife passed away five years ago, and now it’s just him and the dogs. But maybe not forever.

David tells us he’s heading out to Bakersfield to visit his new girlfriend. His response to my inquiry about online dating is similar to that of so many in his generation; “oh, I’m not sure that’s for me.” To which he adds “I think if you’re on the right path, you’ll connect with the people you’re supposed to. And that’s good because then your paths are similar, it’s how you’ll connect to each other. That’s why I keep myself active.”

Active means volunteering on a desert trail crew and with the local adubon society. He answers my questions about the differences between crows and ravens – ravens are bigger and with a hooked beak, while crows are smaller and with a straight beak. And about a striking yellow bird we’ve seen on the trail recently – a finch. Outside the window the south fork of the Kern river cuts a lazy path through the flat valley bottom. In this riparian zone, David informs us, they see some of the largest flocks of migrating turkey vulchers, enough to warrant a festival each fall. So fitting, a turkey vulcher festival in a small town in the Sierra foothills. I’d like to come back and see that one day.

After 20 minutes David drops us at a trailer park and campground on the edge of town. He climbs out of the truck with us and stands by as we unload our backpacks before shaking both of our hands. Then he gets back into his truck and drives away, out of our narrative and back into his own. Like all of us, he is the center of his own movie and we are but small characters.