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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 5 – Trail Names

Mile 64 to Sissors Crossing (mile 77) then a hitch into Julian

We rush rush rush down out of the lowland desert hills into the capital D Desert where even in the last day of March it’s hot. A sort of desperate heat, the kind humans aren’t designed for. In this baking valley floor with it’s menagerie of twisted brittle plants, it feels as though nothing is actually meant to live here. The high thin clouds have been coming and going over the sun all day, as mercurial in nature in our ability to decide if and where we’re going into town. It’s just thirteen miles from camp to Sissors Crossing, and if we can get to Sissors by early afternoon we’ll have earned ourselves a precious nero (a day of low milage, typically less than a half day hiking) in addition to our zero (day of no hiking) tomorrow. At Sissors we’ll hitch into Julian. Or maybe we’ll hitch four miles in the other direction and stay at the Stagecoach RV park. Or maybe we’ll hang out under the bridge where we stumble upon the first trail magic we’ve encountered. Finally we end up in downtown Julian surrounded by other hikers at Carmen’s, talking about the only thing hikers ever want to talk about: hiking.

I find myself sitting next to a man who self describes as a “mystic, telepathic energy healer” and I cannot tell if he’s just messing with me or if that’s his real life. We trade names and he informs me that Kara is too hard of a name to pronounce and then works in vain to give me a trail name – which is a sort of nickname that folks use on the tail in lieu of their real names.

At 29 I have conflicting feelings around trail names. On the one hand they’re largely innocuous, fun and often funny, and can be used to preserve ones anonymity if that’s you’re thing. But also, I’m not sure I need or want a different persona for hiking. Maybe it’s a product of growing up and becoming more comfortable with who I am. Or perhaps as a person who has never been conducive to being given nicknames I’ve never grown comfortable with the practice personally.

However, as this drunken stranger who knows nothing more about me than my name – which he doesn’t even like, tries to rename me, I find myself growing defensive over my name for perhaps the first time in my life. When I first heard about the PCT I had such a strong desire for my own trail name, and I’m not ruling out the possibility of adopting one in the future. But I like the feeling of being someone who is strong enough to propose, plan, and tackle the PCT, just me, no alter ego attached.

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PCT Day 4 – Little by Little

Mount Laguna (mile 41) to mile 64

The miles out of Mount Laguna feel hard. Or rather, obligatory. Uninspiring. Nothing is really wrong, but on day four tiredness has begun to creep into my legs and this early in the morning the endorphins from hiking haven’t had the chance to elevate my mood beyond it’s normal morning calm. It’s certainly not reason for alarm, just the reality of big goals.

How can I best say this. I once read that every overnight success is actually five years in the making. I may be bastardizing that quote, but I’m writing this from the side of a mountain hiding from the afternoon heat in the shade of a rock, so I’ll kindly ask you to cut me a break. I love the sentiment behind that idea. In that, it’s so easy to look at someone else’s achievement and fill in the fantasy of how they got there with a nicely paved road to the top. But that’s never the reality of the process, is it?

Like any big goal in life, there are sure to be moments of elation and joy, breakthroughs and beauty. Just as there will be crushing lows and challenges; days that end in tears and stories you’ll only tell after the passage of years have dulled the sharp edges that cut so deep. These are the memories that we celebrate or commiserate over, but I’ve found, and continue to find, that the highs and lows are greatly outnumbered by the mundane doing of a task.

This is exactly what I’m walking through today. The steps one must take day upon day in order to move oneself incrementally closer to the finish line. It just so happens to be that my steps towards the finish line are quite literal. So today, as I’m sure many days in the future, I work to be content with the simple act of walking. To be grateful to live in a body that can do these things I ask of it, in a part of the world where thru hiking is even possible. I work to be happy with knowing that I’m grinding down this hike little by little, and I try not to think too far in the future lest I totally overwhelm myself.

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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.

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PCT Day 2 – Fantastic, Fantastic, Fantastic.

** Hey Folks! A little delayed on this one. I wrote this post on trail, but then somehow forgot to publish it.

Hauser Creek (mile 15) to Cibbets Flat CG (mile 32 + 1mi off trail road walk)

It’s 3pm when we start the climb out of Boulder Oaks Campground; we’re 10 miles into our second day on the trail and already we’ve had a leisurely brunch at Lake Morena and then whiled away a few hours more at Boulder Oaks Campground stretching and chatting with our fellow hikers. The afternoon is cooling and we decide to press on a few more miles.

The climb is gradual and tidy in the special way of the PCT, shepherding us higher along the red sand path, fenced in by the chaparral and below a tumbling stream appears from nowhere, cascading down the valley in slides and pools, rushing channels that plunge into gem colored tubs and then out of sight to who knows where. My legs feel strong and capable, making efficient work of the ascent. There is a light breeze that offsets the blazing sun shining down from the perfect blue sky and everything is fantastic. Every last detail is perfectly rendered in brilliant Technicolor.

I look. I gape at my surroundings. I try and take it all in. How good I feel, Keith cruising up the hill ahead of me, the sun, the rocks, this wonderful trail that so many people worked to make a reality just so a bunch of weirdos could try and walk from Mexico to Canada each year. What could we have possibly done to deserve all this?

I try to make the moment part of me. I want to consume this experience, let it fill me up until there is nothing left but lightness and a breeze on my arms. I want to hold onto this feeling forever even though I know I never could. But I try, I try so hard.

These perfect Instagram moments are the ones that draw people to thru hiking initially, and keep them coming back. But they are not the only moments or even the majority of the experience. There will be hours of difficulty ahead of us, cold nights and blisters and painful joints and arguments and boredom and frustration so profound as to make you scream your lungs out into the silent hills.

So as I climb I try my best to hold onto this moment, this fantastic gift of a day, and I endeavor to tuck this joy deep down inside me like a little stone that I can hold onto when the hard times come. I will rub my little stone from this wonderful day and remember why I’m out here.

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PCT Day 0 – The Kindness of Strangers

We step off the train in San Diego and everything is the same as when we left southern California one week ago, and yet it’s totally different feeling too. But perhaps it’s just that we feel different now, like stepping into a new life. Slowly, by degrees and leaps the reality of what we’re doing sinks in. A dawning that’s lasted days and weeks.

Before long we’re picked up by none other than Frodo herself – one half of the famous trail angel couple Scout and Frodo. She is a petite stoic woman. By the time we swing by the airport there are five soon to be PCT hikers riding along in a minivan trying to make small talk as we wind into the hills above San Diego.

At the house people are milling about, there is a grocery store run for snacks, and people drift from room to room, uncertainty abounds. Everything is starting but not quite yet.

Over dinner Scout gently rambles to and fro, covering topics such as house rules, trail angle etiquette, LNT, and the history of the PCT itself while 25 thru hiking hopefuls eat tacos in rapt silence. 66 years old with an exuberant ease, childlike and joyful Scout is a delight to listen to, while Frodo plays the straight man, chiming in with small corrections and easing the topic back on track whenever her husband drifts too far afield. What people, what kindness, who could possibly ask for more than these remarkable folks are giving us. I could listen to them talk forever and a day, but soon dinner, along with the announcements, are over and a short time later people drift off to bed.

Tomorrow it all starts for real. Though what that will truly mean in the minutes and details of a thru hike remain a mystery, at least one last night.

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Goodbye, Los Angeles

Goodbye, Los Angeles. What a ride it has been.

I was 21 when I arrived in this city. An ugly, sprawling mess of a city hidden under a blanket of smog, rimmed by barely visible mountains and populated with some of the most careless drivers I have ever seen. I remember the first drive across the city, from east to west, cars swirling around me, concrete flashing below me, the sun blazing down from on high. I was overwhelmed and wanted to love it, but I couldn’t, I never did, and I still can’t. The novelty of palm trees and year-round sun wore away quickly under the constant strain of living in the overpriced heart of the film industry. Within a year of arriving I was looking for a way out, though it would take me another seven years before I could fully conjure my escape.

I came to Los Angeles with dreams, as so many do, of life in the entertainment industry. Weekends spent beneath towering palm trees, and days spent crafting the future of cinema. I was eager and sure of myself, and also deeply insecure and afraid that my dreams would all come to naught, that I’d be seen as the creative fraud that I feared I was. That I still fear that I am. But I had dreams, and so I leapt into the unknown. Knowing that I could swim for my life if I must, but hoping it wouldn’t come to that. I wanted to find success here, praise, and perhaps even community. In the end I found all of these and none of these, for life is not the highway that I believed it to be, but rather a reckless flailing about, a grasping. Weather purely through fault of my own, bad luck, or changing tides I could never hold on hard enough to make myself happy here.

First, I was a film student, eager to please and prove myself. Then, an underpaid and often unpaid set lackey, taking orders from my peers who sought to impress the famous among us. As though the way to the top were paved in stepped on toes and screamed orders. Perhaps they knew better than I, as many of those same peers are measurably more successful than myself. Next, I became an advertising industry wanna be, and though my career there ended in what can best be described as burnout and knockout, I was deeply happy for a time. So many days my work felt like creative summer camp and I stayed longer than I should have. Under the mentorship of a workaholic and acutely inspiring boss I grew and learned and in a way found my voice. Eventually, I learned that hard work and early mornings don’t pay the bills, that drive doesn’t make you valuable enough to withstand budget cuts, and my agency decided they could do without me. The leaving broke my heart, but also taught me so much. I’m ending my time here as a corporate shill, bored on a daily basis, uninspired and overpaid, scraping together creative projects on the side to keep myself stimulated. And yet. And yet! I cannot define my time in Los Angeles purely on the basis of a lackluster career. If my graceless forced departure from the advertising industry taught me one thing, it is that we are so much more than our job titles.

What I never dreamed of is the friends I would make, and the love I would find. To those I met in college, I want to say thank you. Thank you for taking me in, giving me my first home here, allowing me to express myself and grow creatively. Thank you for the early hours and the late nights, the drunken discussions and the sober editorial sessions. I have so many happy memories from the two years we spent together, and if I regret anything it is that I didn’t hold tighter to your hands as we stepped out into the wider world. And to my professional friends, I owe you for helping me become who I am today both personally and professionally. Our relationships were occasionally adversarial, but more often they were inspirational, educational, and illuminating. You showed me that I have a voice and ideas that are worth expressing. You taught me how to defend an idea and, more importantly, when to concede and compromise for the sake of the work. And finally, you taught me not to define myself by my career, that desire doesn’t equate gain. It is because of you that I learned failure is not the worst thing that can happen to a person, not as much as clinging to something you don’t fully believe in. Though, I am not sure you ever planned to teach me that last lesson.

Interspersed between my work friends and my college friends, are my true friends, those of you whom I hope I will never lose. I owe you a great deal more than I can express. You know who you are, and you should know that I love you. Thank you.

When I think back on my time in Los Angeles, I’m struck by how nothing turned out how I planned. The comedy of my hubris is laughable now, as though any five year plan could have anticipated the rollercoaster of experiences that I’ve had the pleasure to live through in my nearly eight years here. My time in this city has been full of firsts and for that I will always be grateful.  Beyond that, the barely controlled chaos of living in such a massive city has mellowed me in some ways, and radicalized me in others. I am no more the person I was when I arrived here, than the person my 21 year old self dreamed I would become. I’ve let go of so many of the things that I thought I wanted, and in doing so have set the basis for the person I hope I can become one day.

My time in Los Angeles has taught me that the best thing you can do for yourself is to believe in something. Anything. Believe in your convictions, and your knowledge of what is right. Believe in your partners and your friends, and let them surprise you. Believe that we can change the world, that things are getting better and that we are the building blocks that the future will stand on. Believe in yourself, your value, your worth, even when no one else does. And believe in your right to speak up for what is right, walk away from what is no longer serving you and seek out the answer to that calling deep inside you. Believe in that bone deep ache that is calling you towards something bigger and better.

Today Keith and I are leaving Los Angeles, onto our next adventure, onto the future of our lives together. So little in our future is certain and I’m eager for all the surprises that are in store for us. When I arrived in Los Angeles I never believed that it would bring this kind, generous, funny, caring man into my life. And while I cannot say I have loved my time here, I love him and if it took eight confusing years to get to this point, than it will have been worth it.

Goodbye, Los Angeles. I can’t say I’ll miss you, but I can say that I’m glad of our time together.