Category: PCT

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PCT Day 14 – I Can See the Future

Idyllwild (5 mile side trail to PCT mile 183) to campsite at mile 197

A lizard skitters right under my foot as I’m walking. In the span of a moment my little scaly friend shoots out from a bush, runs under my foot, between my trekking pole, and is off down the trail before I’ve completed my step. So much speed in such a little body. How they must perceive time differently than us. To our little lizard friends we must appear as giants lumbering through their world.

I certainly feel like I’m lumbering today. Six days of food and as many liters of water weigh down my pack, pressing me into the earth. But oh is it beautiful today. High in an alpine forest, jaguar spots of shade covering the ground, the familiar crunch of granite gravel and fallen pine needles under foot. Edward Abby said there are three kinds of people, desert people, mountain people, and river rats. I’ve always been a mountain person. Always will be I bet. Spending the last two weeks crossing the desert has given me a new appreciation for the it’s unique beauty. And still, the mountains, how can anything compare to the mountains. They draw me towards their hidden places unrelentingly, unwaveringly.

Today we emerge from the mountains onto a long ridge, the ground dropping steeply away from us. Behind us the giant San Jacinto with it’s sharp angles and jutting faces of granite. Ahead of us lies San Gorgonio with it’s bald pate and sloping shoulders. And in our present we will walk down from one giant and cross the gulf of a desert valley before climbing onto the shoulders of the next. Onward, always onward. It’s not until I realize we’ve walked off the edge of the first water report that I stop and appreciate how far we’ve already come. From Mexico, we’ve walked nearly two hundred miles from Mexico. It’s worth noting.

From where we’re perched at this little campground above the valley floor I can see the past, present, and future of our hike. Though there is so much further that I cannot see, I cannot imagine, and I try not to let my mind wander there lest I become totally overwhelmed. In planning for the PCT one can skip down the trail in a minute: the desert, the Sierra, then northern California, Oregon, and finally Washington and done. Or reduce the thousands of miles into simple resupply points, Warner Springs, Kennedy Meadows, Sierra City, Belden and on and on to the border. It all seems so neat, simple even.

But on the trail I do not even think beyond the next town, more commonly my mind barely strays beyond the next rest stop. Like Mad Eye Moody’s foe glass, I don’t worry about what’s out there until I can see the whites of their eyes.

Looking across the valley is like staring into the future. I know I will go there, just not yet. For now there is only the stars

and the gentle calls of owls.

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PCT Day 12 & 13- Eating all the Food

Double Zero in Idyllwild – no hiking

I got my double zero! Keith was easy to convince once he saw the soaring temperatures down in Cabazon aka the bottom of Fuller Ridge aka where we will be hiking in two days time. But luckily it looks like a heat spike and by waiting one day we’ll be able to avoid the worst of it.

In the interest of rest and recovery I’m going to keep this post short. Also, because the majority of my two days have been spent eating. Thru hikers don’t mess when it comes to eating, though for the most of us our eyes still greatly outsize our stomachs.

The most exciting thing I have to report at the moment is that I got to meet the mayor of Idyllwild! His name is Max, and yes, he is a dog (and a very good one at that). Max is the only dog to be elected as the mayor of a US city, and makes public appearances during the weekend. Needless to say, meeting Max made my day, as any day with in a dog is a good day.

And now a question for you all – what would you like to read about the PCT, any burning questions or topics you’d like me to cover? Comment below and I can try and answer your questions in future posts.

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PCT Day 11 – The First Hardest Day

Mile 136 to Paradise Valley Cafe (mile 152 + 1 Mile road walk, then a hitch into Idyllwild)

It takes us four hours to hike around the nameless little city in the valley. Hiking up on a ridge, a crest if you will, rising and falling in and out of every fold of every hill. We are on the side of a bowl and on every side there are low round mountains extending to the horizon. Mountains with no sharp angles, all elbows and knees of lovers tangled up under the blankets, stretching into forever; below us the nameless little city in it’s dedicated patch of flat in the bottom of the bowl. We’re not going there and so I do not need to know the city’s name. Maybe that’s a little sad, the way we ignore nearly everything that isn’t within a stones throw of the trail, but today I have other things to worry about. For example: the fact that I don’t have enough food to make it through this section.

Sitting on a rock looking down onto the nameless city I tell Keith I’m hitching into Idyllwild once we reach Paradise Valley Cafe – home of the best burger on the PCT, or so I’m told. This wasn’t the plan, but it’s the only one I’m capable of now. Without the hitch we have two more days of hiking along a terrible alternate, the result of a trail closure. That was the plan, but plans change.

There is not enough food in my bag. Not enough energy in my legs, in my body. I’m dragging my body over every pass, leaning on my poles in order to pry my feet from the ground and continue forward motion. Today is the hardest day. So far, of course.

The only thing that keeps me moving is the idea of two days off in Idyllwild. Two zeros I tell myself again and again. Make it through today and you can take two zeros. This, along with the promise of the best burger on the PCT and I cajole myself to the highway, to the restaurant, to cold soda and a massive plate of food and after it all dissapears inside of me I’m only barely full. I need to pack more food.

After our cheerful waitress has cleared our food away I zone out with the relaxation of a full stomach and in this state I finally realize I’ve fallen into the valley. The fateful dip between how I started the trail, and the new stronger body that I’m building through days of continual motion. The valley of suck that one must go through before the soreness, exhaustion, and pain transforms into strength and resilience. I knew this was coming, and though it’s arrival was not a surprise, the suddenness and extremity shock me. However, like so many things that require us to grow the only way through this valley is to keep going.

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PCT Day 10 – Mike’s Place

Mike’s Place (mile 127) to mile 136

(Note: all images are taken with the consent of those in them)

At 8am people are already smoking and drinking, pulled into the vortex that surrounds Mike’s Place. From where I’m standing in the back, I can see the trail across the valley. A thin line, like the mark left by a folded piece of paper, a seam moving up and away towards a notch in the hill and then, gone. As I brush my teeth and spit into the dust I eaves drop on the conversations happening around me. One of the caretakers at Mike’s – a thin man with a nervous disposition and the distinct persona of someone who hasn’t matured since the early 90’s – is complaining about his name being brought up online by women who have called this place creepy. He rounds a building and his voice is lost to me, but not before he drops the gem “I only slept with like one trail chick, man…” Charming. Later, I’ll hear the N-word thrown out in a raucaus conversation in the garage. Butcher shows me a military-grade shell he finds while taking a piss. Before 9am the music starts, equal helpings Frank Sinatra and Green Day.

Cheers greet each new set of hikers coming and going throughout the morning. For those arriving the first stop on the tour is the beer cooler, $3/can if you have wrangle it. Then a meandering loop around the two weather-aged buildings, out to the flat patch of a desert backyard where hikers pitch their tents.

The morning slips away, bongs, beer, and painted toenails. More hikers ebb and flow through the yard. I’m snagged by a discussion about the troubles with capitalism which, is clearly an uncomfortable topic for some folks. Bookworm and I discuss gender equality and the influence of powerful mothers on the people we’ve become. As the talk slides into justice, colonialism and white privilege I can feel the side eye from several “I’m on the trail to avoid politics” men who are playing horseshoes nearby. I don’t keep my voice down for these men, their comfort is not my responsibility. The talk moves on to scars, trails hiked, and reasons for departing on the PCT and more folks drift into the hiker circle. There is a sense of ease between these strangers, but not a complete one. The phrase “only kidding” makes a frequent appearance at the end of poorly landed jokes, the mood perpetually light.

The fun feels harmless, but with an edge that suggests it could become something less inocuous as the drinks and pot multiply in volume towards the afternoon and more rambunctious hikers drift in. The promise of pizza drifts around and I’m glad our bags are packed, ensuring that we’ll leave tonight. I cannot fully explain my desire to not spend another night here, but neither do I feel the need to justify my instincts. It’s easy to see how a type of person could get sucked into this Mad Maxian summer camp for disfunctional adults, but we’re bound for Canada and even half a day whiled away has me itching to go.

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PCT Day 9 – Body Glide is my Religion

Warner Springs (mile 109) to Mike’s Place (mile 127)

The temperature is rising as spring slides into summer. Early in the desert, earlier in this year of low water. My body is pouring sweat, drops running down my nose before they fly onto the cracked trail which is climbing long and low. All day we’re climbing and sweating, salt caking our shirts and packs making shapes like inverted mountains. Mountains made of little salt crystals that cut into our skin, like tiny betrayals building into chafe. Fucking chafe. I made you sweat, how dare you cut me! My legs. My back. Thank god(dess) for body glide, my savior in this heat.

All day we skitter miles between shade patches, Keith, myself and Gently Used. For a while we’re a pack along with Jacoba, Drop Bear, and Stephanie who are pulled away by the call of a snack break and we press on.

The last 12 miles of the day we ration water in order to make it to Mike’s Place. The only water in a nearly 40 mile stretch. Mike’s Place with pizza and beer and a place to camp. Or Mike’s Place with sketchy dudes in a ramshackle house in the middle of the desert. We won’t know until we get there, which rumors to believe. So we hike. My brain feels too hot, it’s hard to focus on much of anything. The PCT with it’s clearly defined lines is all too happy to ferry me forward on fatigued legs and an autopilot brain. We’re all grateful when Gently Used suggests we stop and sit in the shade for a bit. Cooling down, legs tightening along with drying sweat and I feel better. But my human form does not belong here I think, this desert of sharp plants and hard baked earth.

As my brain slides back into focus I wonder if this the other shoe dropping. The trail thus far has been relatively painless, which I know is not the whole story of a thru hike. Hiking is hard work day after day and perhaps this chafe, this heat is just what the trail has chosen to throw at me. Though of course the trail doesn’t actually choose to throw anything at you. It’s indifferent to our suffering, only existing because we built it into existence.

I think of the words tattooed on my arm. A quote from the writer and runner Lauren Fleshman “to choose one’s method of suffering is a privilege.” As the trail climbs away from me, serpentine along the hill, I think, this is a good suffering to have chosen.

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Day 8 – 800 Calories of Cheese

Mile 94 to Warner Springs (mile 109)

Ask yourself, when was the last time you knew, with certainty, how many calories per ounce were in the food you were eating. I’m guessing almost never. That’s because during the course of a normal day in a city, this information is totally irrelevant. For hikers however, it’s one of the top concerns. In normal life, you might read the caloric info on a package to make sure there isn’t too much sugar or too many calories. On trail, you read the caloric info to make sure there are enough calories and sugar. In normal life, your food is filled with water, while on trail you might subsist entirely on food that’s had all the moisture sucked out, just so you could add it back in later. And these are just some of the ways in which your relationship to food changes once you start going on long backpacking trips. In fact, I’m going to go as far to say that trail food and normal life food are not even the same thing.

In normal life, food may be selected based on a variety of factors. How close a restaurant is, what is in season at the grocery store, what you feel like eating at this very moment. Depending on where you live the options for what and where to eat may be overwhelming.

During trail life, choosing what to eat becomes sort of like a game in which the prize is that you don’t starve. Furthermore, there are only two ways in which you get to choose what you eat. One – what is in the grocery store that you’re standing in right now, is nonperishable, and you’re willing to carry on your back for the next four to ten days. Two – what of the remaining food you packed out of town are you most interested in eating as you sit in the dust on the side of the trail. There are no other options until you’re back in town, and then the game starts over. The best part of the game is when you’ve grown tired of all your food and so you try to combine them in new and interesting ways. It’s fun, in a way.

Here are some things of import if you’re interested in backpacking, or hiking a long trail and wish to win the food game.

⁃ Potato chips are a backpacker super food, they come in lots of flavors, can be found anywhere, and at 150 calories per ounce are some of the most calorically dense foods around.

⁃ Cheese will survive 2-5 days on the trail unrefrigerated. Furthermore, a standard block of cheese contains about 800 calories and can be consumed by an average woman in two days. Trust me on this one.

⁃ Tuna can be added to anything. Anything.

⁃ Forget lunch, just snack repeatedly until dinner time.

⁃ Seaweed sheets are a good way to fool yourself into thinking you’re eating enough veggies on trail.

⁃ The only utensil you need is a long spoon.

⁃ Campbell’s Soup to Go cups are the perfect backcountry mug, and they have a lid!

⁃ Just because you don’t like something normally, doesn’t mean you won’t love eating it on the trail. Gummy bears are now a standard carry for me even though I used to hate them.

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PCT Day 7 – The Living Dessert

Sissors Crossing (mile 77) to mile 94

The desert is joyous today under a clear and mercifully cool blue sky. All around the hardy desert plants put on their best show. Stubby barrel cactus litter the hillside pushing up in jaunty angles, their barbs curling in instead of out, as though for self protection rather than attack. They’ve just started to bloom, small pale green flowers as delicate as tissue paper. The ocotillos reach their long arms towards the sun, tiny red pettals fluttering. Aloe, yucca, prickly pear, and a dozen more I cannot name. As the trail climbs away from the valley floor there are juniper and the red barked manzanita.

The trail today has a thousand faces, it looks like the Badlands I think, and then Sedona. Around a bend in the rock and we could be in the Grand Canyon on the Kaibab trail. Or maybe it’s like none of these, but instead just the ever shifting face of the PCT.

Evening finds us standing on top of the world. The trail hugging the cliff face as rocks drop away thousands of feet below. The wind roars up from below, a howling powerful thing that pulls the hats from our heads and makes its presence known by flinging sand at our bare legs, drying the sweat from our faces in an instant. Down and away we can look back on all we’ve come through, so far and yet only the beginning. My head spins at the enormity of what we’re trying to do and in this moment I feel so so small. I am a speck on the side of a hill in the foothills above the desert in one state in one country and all around me are mountains who have stood the test of time in a way that is unimaginable to my human scale. How lucky I must be, to be standing here and now.

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PCT Day 6 – Shouldn’t I be Doing Something?

Zero in Julian, no hiking.

There’s a strange restless energy inside me, flighty birds alight in my chest, skittering lizards are my legs. Never a skilled waiter, five days of walking seems to have obliterated the skill of calmness completely.

All day I stand, sit, give up my chair at the hiker table behind Carmen’s when another person arrives. After breakfast there is a period of socializing back around the table, the only place in Julian where thru hikers can coalesce without attracting the bald stares of tourists. It’s Easter Sunday and Julian Main Street is filled with families driven up from the big cities for a quiet day in a quaint town. When the talk around the table finally turns into fear mongering and misinformation about the trail, I make my break.

Down the street for trail food. To a park to write, email and call family. And when finally finally my absence from the hiker table is noted and texts are sent, I return to the comfortable company and limbo that is the back table at Carmen’s.

Tomorrow we hitch from Julian and hike from Scissors and who knows what the trail will bring us next. My head and heart are a circus, anticipating the newness and novelty of whatever is to come.

Masshole, our ride from Sissors Crossing, and general hiking guru.

Irish Tony, kind and hilarious, like the uncle at the party with all the best jokes.

Marbles, cool as a cucumber and provider of free weed.

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PCT Day 3 – A Nero at Mount Laguna

Cibbets Flat CG (mile 32 + 1mi off trail road walk) to Mount Laguna (mile 41)

When I make my way out of the tent I discover that our camp mates Sparky and Ghost Hiker – two hikers who met on the AT last year and are tackling the PCT this year – are gone. With our early start date and intentionally leisurely schedule this doesn’t alarm me. What does however is the tightness in my right foot. I had hoped I’d get at least a week before hiker hobble set in. It’s come early but luckily not severely.

It’s an hour and a half later when we finally make it out of camp. The morning is spent climbing along the sides of baking desert hills until suddenly we’re deposited into a fragrant pine forest. What was once a hard packed dirt track is now a cushioned ribbon leading us through the forest. Tall pines provide the first shade we’ve felt since leaving the border.

When we arrive at Mount Laguna we find a dozen or more thru hikers crowding the tables in the small cafe. Our fellow early starters.

Since before the start of the trail people with similar start days to ours have been adamant about keeping their days short. Staying healthy early on, not stressing; a casual pace is the name of the game. But already the pull of Canada is drawing people out. As I watch folks from lunch stream up the road and away from the campsite where we’ll be spending the night I feel like I’m missing out. Though unspoken, the pressure to hike bigger miles is there. Burbling under the surface is a tension that is not quite competitive, but close.

This sort of hiking is a balancing act between not getting injured on the one hand, and moving fast enough to complete the trail in the available five month weather window. So early on it’s impossible to tell if you’re perfectly balanced, or if you’ve already starting to slip to one side.

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PCT Day 1 – What Are we Even Doing?

Campo/Mexico border (mile 0) to Hauser Creek (mile 15)

We wake early in the dark, movement all around as sleepy anxious hikers mill about. Drinking coffee. Laughing briskly. Sunscreen on. Bags on the porch. Then everybody is out of the house, the cars are loaded and we’re speeding east towards the lightening sky in a beige minivan with bottomed out suspension.

32 degrees today, there is frost on the corrugated rusted metal that makes up the border wall which runs to the horizon both east and west. Everybody climbs out of the cars and I wonder if everybody else worries if their bags are too big, if they have packed too much food or too little water. But what is there to be done? Nothing. So I sling my bag on my back and walk the small hill to the start of the trail. The monument at the southern terminus is a collection of concrete pillars and though it signifies so much it is barely memorable in appearance. After dozens of sets of pictures that we both are and are not in another car load of hikers arrives and we begin to shuffle on our way.

As I hike into the sunrise again and again I think we’re here, we’re doing it, is this it? is this real? how did we manage any of this? It must be, but my god, how incredible.

Our day is filled with the desert scrub land that is so ubiquitous in these areas, giant piles of boulders strewn in haphazard formations dot the hills, shot through with the faded green chaparral, yucca, and at lower elevations oak, all folded upon each other, layer by layer like so many rumpled blankets.

As we hike I think of our fellow hikers. Who are these other people out here on this strange vacation with us? Are these people I’ll call my friends later, and who of them do I like, and can I even tell? I wonder who will be the first person to drop out. I imagine everybody who sets out from the southern terminus believes that they’ll finish. But this idea clashes with the idea that less than half do. I guess we’ll see.