By the time the others start stirring I have already spent an hour watching the sky lighten through the window of Sasha’s parents house. At this point in the trip it’s not even remarkable that I’m barely sleeping, it has become the norm. As I start to pack away my things I take solace in knowing that today is the last day of the hike. Tomorrow I will be home and I will sit in the stillness and quiet of my own company, allowing the tension and exhaustion and pressure to slide from my shoulders. It doesn’t have to be fun, I remind myself. You can still do hard things, I remind myself. Only another 13.7 miles to the ocean. 13.7 miles and I will be free.
Since we are staying at Sasha’s parents house tonight we will slack pack the last section of the SDTCT, leaving the majority of our gear behind and only carrying what is needed. Despite this, the packing process drags on as people debate what to bring and what to leave and Sasha wrangles day packs for people to use. Finally at 8am we take the urban equivalent of a hitch, hopping into two Lyfts which take us back to where we left off last night.
Arriving at the trail freshly laundered and showered feels incongruous with my aching body. But then again, thru hiking is a deeply absurd endeavor so why should this trail feel any different. We set off down a gently winding path that runs alongside a small creek. Almost immediately some folks announce their boredom, put in their headphones and hammer off down the trail. But this morning I don’t want to be alone, I feel no need to push my body through these last few miles. The remaining miles to the beach will take us about five hours and for the first time on this hike I am content to let them slowly melt away.
I walk off and on with Liza, Pilar, Kelly, and Riley. We tell stories of childhood and awkward first dates. We decide that Riley is indeed the coolest of all of us and that Liza is the official cult leader of our hiking group. Everything is uproariously funny, drenched in the glow of the last day of a hike. The trail continues to wind through a shallow canyon past parks and below housing complexes, beside industrial areas and below bridges roaring with morning commuter traffic. But almost always on dirt, a fact for which my throbbing feet are grateful. Mile after mile slips away unnoticed and I am content to let them go. Unlike other hikes where I have used the last day for reflection, today I keep myself occupied with conversation. I have neither want nor need to spend another day ricocheting around the walls of my own skull. I want to be here, in this moment, and then I want to be done.
The trail dumps us out at the side of a busy road as though we are too-tan aliens deposited from another planet. This new world we have found ourselves on is inhabited only by rumbling glinting speeding beasts who wish us nothing but harm. Amid the noise and bustle we make our way to the taqueria directly on track at mile 150 where we eat thoroughly average Mexican food.
And then, as though by magic and kindness and luck and wonder I am hiking through a muddy wetland just a mile from the beach. The sky has grown grey, the air damp from ocean spray.
And then I am there.
The scene is not a jubilant sun-soaked dash to the finish but instead something more subdued and powerful in it’s finality. One last sprint across a busy road. A short flight of stairs. I am standing on a shallow beach which gives way to startling blue water that fades into fog like the end of the world. I am standing on the finish line. For all the tourists and hiking partners on the beach I might as well be alone. I made it. It didn’t break me. But something inside me has shattered. I spent eight days hiking and laughing with these people while crying hidden away in private moments. I saw the best of the hiking community while being reminded yet again that thru hikers are not kind to weakness and uncertainly. There is no fault or blame, only a wild, undulating ride through heat and brush and strife. I made it. I can do hard things. I am free.
Later, after we have snapped photos and played in the icy waters of the pacific, I am laying in a tattoo parlor. A tattoo of a jack rabbit jumping over a barrel cactus is being inked onto my skin. The needle piercing flesh reminds me of the pain from the innumerable scratches covering my legs. Only less. The heat from my rising skin reminds me of the brutal sun at the Salton Sea. Only less. I nearly doze off while the artist works, as though I have grown so accustomed to discomfort that this tattoo cannot phase me. I have forced myself to walk through pain and tears, through the loneliness of an endlessly screaming brain and now I will brand that experience into my very skin. I will carry this with me forever, pierced into my body, into my very core. Proof that amid more than a year of raging metal illness I still had the resilience to do something hard. I am trapped and I am free. Tomorrow I go home.
** Thank you for reading this far, you’re my special favorite. Wild Country is going back to it’s regular schedule of posting every other Friday; watch this space for a new post in two weeks. **
Look, by this point you know that I am raising money for Border Angels through this blog. We’re in the second half of the trip now and so is our fundraiser, I believe in the readership and community that has developed at Wild Country and I know you can help us reach our goal. Border angels is really on the front lines of the humanitarian crisis that is the US-Mexico border. They are saving people’s lives. And that is important to remember, you may have different political views than myself, but these immigrants are people and they deserve to not die walking across the desert just a few days away from a massive American city. If you’ve got a few bucks, it all counts.
A fitful night of half-sleep finally gives way as the first dusting of light spreads across the ceiling of our hotel room in Julian. Town sleep in a room with five other hikers never promises to be good and last night was worse than I anticipated. Ah well. What can you do. We’ll be back on trail tonight and I can hopefully get some sleep then.
To make it to the ocean before Audrey, Beau, Riley and I need to catch our flight, we are hiking out this afternoon. In my lackadaisical planning for this trip I had miscounted our days as eight hiking with a zero in Julian and last night received the rather rude awakening that this is not the case. We actually have eight days of hiking with no zeros. Well, I think, I am already dragging, what’s one day. This morning is a rush of chores and I am a rock amid the chaotic tide that is the rest of the group. I sit on the porch and call my mom as the tide goes out to coffee and breakfast. I know myself well enough to know that I cannot be civil amid company this morning, so I stay planted. Banking on our sheer numbers to conceal my absence. While the others are at breakfast I cry on the phone to my mom. About the difficulty of thru hiking while depressed. About the bone-deep exhaustion that has followed me for months. About my conflicting desire to both quit and to prove to myself that I am stronger than this hike, than my mental illness. Sitting curled on the floor of the hotel room I sob as quietly as I can until I can get myself under control, until I can hang up and not leave my mother too worried.
I resolve to take advantage of the empty room and grab a shower where I won’t have to rush so anther dirty hiker can take my place. But then Starman calls and the presence of his kind voice sends me spiraling again. Except this time I’m crying on the bathroom floor. Starman offers to help me find a way back to Seattle and through some combination of hubris and hopelessness I decline. I shower. I put on a happy face and just in time. The tide is rolling back in with the boxes full of hiker food that we sent to Julian. I tear into mine, packing things away as quickly as I can before I bolt for the door at a pace that won’t strike the others as bolting. It’s not their fault. It’s nobody’s fault. But my skin is set to crawling at the presence of so many people. Their wants, their needs, their voices burrow into my skull where they mix with the existing chaos of my chemical-imbalanced brain.
While on the phone with good, kind, logistics-oriented Starman we devised a plan to help me make it through the rest of the hike with as much of my mental health in tact as possible. I will rise before the others, hike alone when I need to, rest with the others when I can, and remember that there are only a few days left in this hike. Sometimes distraction is the solution. I will abandon the pointless endeavor to avoid media and stay alone with my thoughts. Then. armed with a plan and a dozen hours of newly-downloaded podcasts I make my way to the Julian Cafe for a breakfast date with myself and the plan to drink as much diner coffee as I can.
After breakfast I take myself back to the hotel to find the others poking at their phones and waiting out the heat of the day. At 2pm Audrey, Beau, Riley, Sasha, Pilar, Ashley our adopted daughter, and myself climb into Carrot Quinn’s van and head back to the trail. Our half day in Julian means we’re going to need to skip 10 miles of exposed road walk in order to keep on schedule. Nobody is terribly upset about that.
A brief ride down some unremarkable dirt roads dumps us at a bend in the road and we start walking. Immediately Riley pulls away and I find myself in the empty middle of the group. Perfect. The hiking is along yet another dirt road this time under the merciful shade of live oaks. But on this turn of the merry go round when my brain starts it’s jet engine whine of panic I don’t try and play the hero and just put some music on. Whether I am manic, depressed, or mixed music has the same effect; to suppose a different set of emotions on top of my own. Like spackling over a wall, the cracks may still be there but at least I can’t see them. And in this way I pass what might be the most pleasant miles of the trip. As the sun inches its way towards the western horizon I decided that this hike is no longer about having fun. Lots of hikes are fun but that doesn’t mean they all have to be. No, I decide, this hike will be about proving to myself that I can still do hard things. After a year of feeling weak and out of control, like a passenger on the runway ride that is my brain, I need to show myself that I am still capable. And if it hurts like hell in the process, then so be it.
The SDTCT runs close to the US-Mexico border. As such, it seemed only right to raise money for an organization doing humane social justice work in this area. Border Angels, a non-profit organization that works to reduce the number of deaths on the US-Mexico border. If you have the means to donate I strongly encourage you to do so.If you appreciate my writing on this blog, consider it a favor to me to donate to this fundraiser.
This morning I feel like I am moving backwards. Every time I pack something away it’s on top of something I need and then I have to reverse course and start over. It’s perhaps unsurprising that I am the last one out of camp, walking up the cool canyon that lays beneath the morning shade. The tendon pain in my left foot has receded to the point where I am no longer worried about it. But in its place the bottoms of my feet throb. Such is part of thru hiking and so I walk on.
Unlike my foot, my mood has not improved much over night and as I make my way up the first gradual climb of the day I find myself thinking of ways I could leave this hike that wouldn’t be my fault. Maybe a rock fall would break my arm. Or maybe just a small bite from a rattle snake. Or maybe a severely rolled ankle in one of the gopher holes that litter the fields we so often walk across on this route. I wish I could say that my brain felt like it was on my side today, that I felt well and truly better, but I can’t. Rather, it feels like one side of my brain is arguing with the other and I can’t stand it anymore. I am growing tired of being awake with this runway brain. I feel like a building that has burned from the inside, leaving nothing but sparking wires and blackened timber.
As the track rolls out of the narrow canyon and onto a broad valley dotted with cholla cactus and manzanita bushes I realize that I have service. I pull out my phone and start to text Starman. I want to tell him how hard this hike is, how my meds aren’t keeping me stable, how my brain feels less and less like a safe place to be. I want to tell him I wish I could come home. But I settle on “this is hard, I miss you,” then put my phone away. However, my phone soon buzzes, the message from Starman reads “I miss you too, I can’t wait for you to come home.” In those three small words, I miss you, something in my chest cracks open and sobs rip from my throat with only the vast silent desert as witness. I am trapped I think, as I cry-hike my way across the valley.
The sun so far above presses me into the valley bottom like I am an ant walking across a giant open palm. The others are ahead of me and I find I don’t care where, I am content to be relieved of the niceties required of socialization. I simply walk and attempt to tune out from my brain. “Isn’t this what you wanted?” I ask myself. “Isn’t this what you’re out here to get?” To be worn down, to grind my body into the earth until it disappears, to be forced to listen to my thoughts without the distraction of music or podcasts or people or work. The pain becomes me and I surrender to it. I wanted this, brought it upon myself and now I will see it through. As much as I want to quit I know I will regret it if I do. So I walk. On tender feet through campgrounds of clean-smelling tourists in their gleaming RVs. I walk. Tear-stained and salty through narrow sandy canyons below the hiss and rumble of cars on the highway overhead. I walk. Across flat fields full of short grass and hard-packed soil.
I walk until I am past the last highway I could hitch a ride from. I walk past my last out and find myself seated in the sand amongst the group in the shade of a large bush. Lunch time. Today we get to town and because my food bag is still somewhat full I treat myself to soup and a sandwich for lunch. This basic meal is a luxury and I savor it as such. I listen to the others with their funny stories, letting their words wash over me and away. I don’t want to be in my brain anymore but instead let the words of these people cover me until I find I am laughing along side them. I could sit here forever, I think. In the good, calm shade. Laughing and sharing. I could stay in this moment forevermore and be happy and held and safe. But that’s not how time works and soon the others are packing up around me.
We string out along the hard-packed jeep road and begin the climb that will take us up and over a ridge to the Sunrise Highway where we will hitch into Julian. We couldn’t have picked a worse time to start an exposed climb as the hottest part of the day is quickly approaching. The heat is relentless. A thousand fevered hands pressing onto every inch of my body. Any breeze, a kindness. This is the kind of heat that feels dangerous, intolerable. The road climbs steeper and steeper, undulating along the side of a mountain and occasionally, but not nearly often enough, proving a small sliver of shade into which we can squeeze ourselves. Squatting in the red dirt we complain about the heat, the climb, the pain in our feet. The saving grace of the day is that it is still early and even at this slow pace we will be able to make it to the road with enough time to hitch before sunset. The group hops from shade patch to shade patch, the only person who doesn’t seem to be suffering is Audrey who matter of factly tells us they were made for the sun.
The good, the bad, and everything in the middle. All things end, and at long last we crest the top of the climb and the world opens up around us. From here, round-topped mountains march away in ridge lines toward the inland sea where this whole thing began only a few days ago.
The last miles to the highway slip by in an easy downhill, the afternoon cooling as the sun arcs to meet the horizon. When I hit the road it is to find the others gathered on the shoulder waiting for a hitch into town. Relief covers me like a soothing blanket allowing me to breathe fully again. I am still less than half way done, still held firm by the talons of this hike. But I made it to Julian, and perhaps with enough food and time I will be strong enough to make it all the way to the ocean.
The SDTCT runs close to the US-Mexico border. As such it seemed only right to raise money for an organization doing humane social justice work in this area. Border Angels, a non-profit organization that works to reduce the number of deaths on the US-Mexico. If you have the means to donate I strongly encourage you to do so. If you appreciate my writing on this blog, consider it a favor to me to donate to this fundraiser.
I start the climb out of Borrego Springs before the sun has cracked the eastern horizon, priding myself on my early start. However, as soon as the sun makes its way over the ridge I know I didn’t start early enough. The temperature rockets skyward even at this early hour. This morning we are climbing on a real bona fide trail as we gain more than 3,600 feet in a little over four miles. The sun paints the rocks a warm, glowing pink and I think, not for the first time, that I do not find the desert beautiful. The trail winds through a Seussian landscape of house-sized boulders and scratching plants with their curled fingers clawing at the sky. Just past the summit of the climb is our second water cache and we press ourselves into the bushes in search of shade. My cohorts gush about the beauty of the desert while all I can see are rolling scrubby mountains shot through with sandy washes and covered in reaching, splayed vegetation. They say there are three types of people, mountain people, desert dwellers, and river rats. In that case I am a mountain person surrounded by 11 desert dwellers. We hike on.
The afternoon is one long descent towards another highway and I allow the group to pull ahead. My brain feels too full, chattering with itself, making up stories and playing out imagined scenarios. There is already too much going on between my ears and I feel panicked at the presence of other people. My mood feels like it is perpetually falling down a flight of stairs and I am struggling to right myself amid the tumbling. Toward the bottom of the climb I find most of the group posted up for a snack and smoke break in the shade of a large bush. I stop long enough to shovel down some snacks before I head off alone.
I imagine they think I’m weird. Or that I don’t like them. That I’m a loner, antisocial, a freak. My brain is too full and today none of the voices are on my side. I can’t manage the niceties of being social and yet not doing so makes me feel like I am somehow failing at this hike. Why would I come all this way to hike through terrain I don’t even like if I’m not even going to hang out with the people I came to see? It makes me want to cry, just as so much does these days. But I don’t, I can’t. I’ve never been much of a crier, something which at this moment I’m frustrated by and grateful for. After all, it’s not easy to hike when you’re crying.
A few miles after I pass my group I see Ashley, a woman who started this hike on the same day as us and who has been flitting around us like a serene humming bird. She is sitting on the side of the trail in some deep shade all by herself. I am so envious that my knees almost buckle from the wanting. To be alone, I think, I would give anything to be that alone. But I know the group is just behind me and so after a quick chat with Ashley I press on, pushing myself harder and harder down the shallow descent.
My legs churn and my feet ache and my brain starts looking for a way out. When I get home, I tell myself, I’ll have one single afternoon before Starman gets home from work where I can be totally alone. Somehow, I’ve reasoned, being alone will stop the roiling current in my head. Somehow if I can just be alone, if I can just make everything stop then maybe I won’t be so very tired and so very wound up at the same time. And then, I do something I have never done before on a thru hike, I pull out my phone and look for flights back to Seattle. Or, I would have, but there is no service out here. And so I hike on with my head too full of thoughts and my body weighed down from the inside with this exhaustion that has followed me for the better part of a year. On throbbing feet that ache with every step I march into camp and set up my tarp with the others.
Over dinner that night I laugh and joke and listen to the others tell hiking stories as we eat our dinners out of our tiny pots. In the darkness it is easier to be social, almost effortless. Like it used to be. It only occurs to me now, after a day of being disappointed in myself, that my meds still aren’t right and that my brain is still running away with me. But there is less than nothing I can do about it now and so I return to my little home under my tarp and prepare for bed.
The SDTCT runs close to the US-Mexico border. As such it seemed only right to raise money for an organization doing humane social justice work in this area. Border Angels, a non-profit organization that works to reduce the number of deaths on the US-Mexico. If you have the means to donate I strongly encourage you to do so.
Sasha’s father is driving us to the eastern terminus of the San Diego Trans County Trail. In the early morning light the road drops away below us and I can see the Salton Sea where it meets the horizon as an expense of flat white nothing. As though the earth fades away at the intersection of sky and brackish water. Even in the early morning, the desert here is brutal. Mountains like curtains thrown over furniture drop onto painfully flat valley floors shot through with pink sand washes. And it is these self same washes that we’ll be walking today. Gaining just under 1,000 feet in 19 miles the hiking should feel nearly flat. Meanwhile the sun makes will make its presence known in every minute of its arc across the sky. Even the flora here is suffused with it, twisting branches as much warm brown as green.
11 hikers clamber out of three cars and we all assemble dutifully to take a picture on the edge of this great, man-made inland sea. My body feels pale and soft after a winter spent in Seattle and my dysphoric brain is whispering unpleasant nothings to me. So I hide behind my camera and refuse offers to take it so that I might be in the picture. I cannot handle being in a picture today but I can handle taking pictures.
Finally it is time to walk and like a gangly field trip we head off across the sand. Veering this way and that as we make our way through the brush and into the wash that we will follow for the rest of the day. Annoyingly, the ebouliant mood of the previous three days is gone and I feel overwhelmed and edgy around this many people. Like I need to perform joviality, gain popularity, be chatty and pleasant. At the first opportunity I drop back under the guise of going to the bathroom and back here I can walk alone and talk to myself, wondering at the desert I spent so many years living near and yet never learned to love.
The group takes their first rest stop at mile four and I pause only long enough to tell them I’m going on. I have long since recognized that my hiking style is not the way most people hike. Which isn’t to say my style is the best, I think the average hikes would prefer to take more than two stops in nearly 20 miles, but I don’t. Soon Kelly catches up to me and though I only met her yesterday we fall into easy conversation. One person I can handle. One person at a time doesn’t send my panicked brain reeling.
Throughout the day I hike with Kelly then Riley, Hadley, and Muffy. As the day wears on and I wear myself out I find I can sit and chat with the group as a whole without feeling like all of their voices are clanging through my head like so many cow bells. For not the first time I notice how there are two ways that hikers typically react when faced with the inevitable discomfort of hiking. The first kind seem to only understand hiking through pain, and they talk about it constantly. As though by witnessing their own discomfort they can better understand the experience they have put themselves in. To the outside observer it seems as though this type of hiker is perpetually surprised by the discomfort that is hiking 20 miles day after day. They want to talk about their feet, how they are sore, how thirsty they are. I wonder if in their minds an ideal hike would be entirely pleasant. For in contrast to the first type of hiker, stands the second. Those who know that pain is a part of thru hiking the same way filtering water or peeing outside is. Pain is inevitable and therefore not worth commenting on. Pain need not be discussed or compared or dissected because in the end it is irrelevant—you just accept it and move on.
I have always fallen in the second group of hikers, preferring to tuck my pain away from the world. I know it is an inevitable part of life and so why would I mention it. But I wonder if this is for the best. As Pilar said today, “there is a kind of camaraderie that comes from cataloging your pain.” And I wonder if I might be better, if we all might be better if we understood pain as inevitable, yes, but also worth discussing. If for no other reason than to gain a fuller understanding of what our fellow humans are going through.
This February I am attempting a 9 day thru hike of the 160 mile San Diego Trans County Trail with a group of 10 rad queers. During this hike we are raising funds for Boarder Angles, a non-profit that does important humanitarian work along our southern border. If you have the means I would encourage you to donate to the fundraiser that we are hosting. All money raised will go directly to border angels. You can find the fundraiser here: https://charity.gofundme.com/o/en/campaign/sdtct-hike-for-border-angels
Since this is a shorter hike I’ll plan to write on the trail and then publish after. So watch this space for blog posts coming up.
I always look out the window during takeoff; I love the feeling of flying. The rising whine of the engines, the sprint down the runway followed by the first tenuous rise of the front wheel and the sudden leap into the sky. As we climb up and above the undulating cotton candy clouds I look south as though from this height I might be able to see all the way to our destination.
Bookworm, Beau, Audrey, and myself are flying to San Diego on this typically wet m Seattle day. We are the four person Seattle contingent on what is to be a 10 person group of queer hikers setting off on a nine day hike of the San Diego Trans County Trail. The SDTCT is a little-known thru hike that runs 160 miles across San Diego county. Starting at the Salton Sea and terminating at the Pacific Ocean the SDTCT is part desert bushwhack part urban walk. To me, a largely unknown entity having been no more than a silent observer in the group chat. As others discussed food planning, water caches, daily mileage and more I feigned enthusiasm while my mental health wained. I was feigning enthusiasm for my entire life.
The two months prior to the departure of this hike I began what I have come to recognize as my yearly descent into depression. This time, mitigated by a nightly cocktail of medication the depression lacked it’s usual potency. It casually chugged along making getting out of bed in the morning a burdensome chore, sucking the excitement from the world while filling my brain with anxious thought spirals and gruesome images. It was not until a sudden change in medication that the wheels really came off. Rapidly and violently I was pitched headlong into a vacuous mixed episode. My once depressed brain took on a frenetic anxiety the likes of which I am becoming intimately familiar with. Now the bone-deep exhaustion was paired with a restless, directionless energy that wanted nothing but out. Mornings took on an arduous quality as I struggled, and often failed, to get myself out of bed. When I did manage to leave the house it was to find a world of endless noise and light, like a thousand needles trying to work their way under my skin. Simply existing in a city became painful, my body was gripped with the agony of it, like a full body sensation of bsomeone driving splinters under your finger nails. Meanwhile my brain spun out narratives of fictional characters, cute stories that consumed my entire mind before turning dark, brutal and violent. My brain was inventing characters only to show me how violently it could maim and dismember them.
And it was against this backdrop that the final weeks before the SDTCT passed. I felt nothing. As though I stood on an eldless grey plain. I felt desperate to be away from the grating noise of Seattle, to let myself vanish into the desert, to grind my body down across the sandy earth. I felt that even on the other end of the country I would be haunted by the endless, spiraling echo chamber of my mind. Such is the reality of a prison you carry with you wherever you go. And in the way that anxiety can warp even the simplest interaction I began to worry that I would be the weakest link of the hike, that I wouldn’t be able to cope with the planned 20 mile days, that the escape of the desert would be nothing more than a case study in my own failing. In going into this hike I am acutely aware that I am unfit and under trained. After all, when you are struggling to make it to work, working out becomes something of a tertiary concern.
And then, and then dear reader the most wonderful thing happened! Two days before I was to board this flight to San Diego hypomania arrived in all her chattering, creative, ebouliant energy. The world flooded back into color, my chest was an expanding balloon of light and wonder and I found myself laughing not at anything in particular but with the simple joy of being alive. And oh music, music and the power of being bouyed along on the soaring emotions of another. For this hike I didn’t download a single podcast. Instead, goodr vibes only music. (Insert link to Jump in the Line) My excitement crescendoed just in time for takeoff and for the first time in more than a month I was looking into the near future with something resembling hope.
And I know, I do. I know that stability comes only when the up and down give way to a middle ground of average. But please, please let me live in this space just a little longer. Just a little longer before the lack of sleep and mile-a-minute brain burn out my core and reduce me to ash. Let me marvel at the desert and feeling the sun on my face in the winter. Let me have deep, roaming conversations with this ragtag band of strangers with whom I feel I already have so much in common. As I wing my way south down the coast I find myself pleading with my jumbled brain not for 10 days of normalcy, I know that would be too much to ask given the circumstances, but simply 10 more days of anything before the inevitable crash.
“…this, dear reader, is what I want to tell you about the Pacific Crest Trail. That it is not the romance you expect it to be. Nor is it the suffering which one can imagine it to be, nor the constant elation that many wish it to be. But as with every dream turned accomplishment it lies somewhere in the middle.”
Outside the window the North Cascades roll past as the bus travels south towards Seattle. A verdant green valley stretches away towards craggy cliffs which jut skyward to be capped with low grey clouds. As viewed from the enclosed glass bubble of a Greyhound bus this otherwise expansive view feels distinctly minimized, small, removed—as though I am being sealed off from the natural world. With every traffic-laden mile I roll back hours of walking and this, more than anything, makes me realize that my PCT thru hike is well and truly over. Â
On March 27, 2018 I stood at the southern terminus of the Pacific Crest Trail outside the minuscule town of Campo, California. Hemmed in on all sides by rolling desert hills and nervously laughing strangers I took my start day pictures. I remember thinking that if it were not for the PCT no one would visit this particular stretch of border wall, this particular stretch of chaparral and sand and sky. But there we stood, 35 pale, squinting strangers assembled under a flat blue sky looking north and pretending we could see all the way to Canada. All the way along this wild stretching journey laid out in front of us. The plan: to walk the land between Mexico and Canada, the height of a country. An act which on that day in late March felt more feasible than it does now, some 168 days later. Bizarrely it is only upon completion of the PCT that I have come to realize how absurdly improbable the task of thru hiking is.
At its most basic level a Pacific Crest Trail thru hike is an exceedingly long logistical and physical challenge set against the backdrop of some of America’s greatest natural spaces. Which, when compared to the romantic notion of what people believe a thru hike to be, may sound overly reductive. But the most basic elements of thru hiking are precisely what drew me towards it. Like a thread tied deep within my chest tugging me forward through the months of preparation, it was the thrill of the challenge that sustained me. I have long been drawn to being physically challenged beyond what is expected, or assumed that I am capable of. Furthermore, this hike was an opportunity to spend an extended period of time backpacking in remote places—something which is central to who I am as a person and seek to do as often as possible. I didn’t want to hike the PCT as a means of suffering my way towards a life realization, but because I believed I would genuinely enjoy it—the sleeping in the dirt, the hours spent walking through wild places far away from the next human animal, the self reliance and accompanying logistical planning.
“I remember thinking I wasn’t sure if the PCT would be a life altering experience, or simply another experience in a life.”
And this, dear reader, is what I want to tell you about the Pacific Crest Trail. That it is not the romance you expect it to be. Nor is it the suffering which one can imagine it to be, nor the constant elation that many wish it to be. But as with every dream turned accomplishment it lies somewhere in the middle. More indescribable, more nuanced in the ways it will affect you. More prone to leaving you staring at your keyboard in frustration as you attempt to express an entire world of roiling emotions into the cumbersome, imperfect things we call words. Early on in my hike, as I stood panting atop Mount Laguna and looking down onto the vast beige desert below me, I remember thinking I wasn’t sure if the PCT would be a life altering experience, or simply another experience in a life. Now that it has come and gone and I am left standing along the shores of the aftermath I can say it feels more like the later.
Looking out at the great forward expanse that will be the rest of my life, the PCT stands behind me as part of who I am, not the entirety of who I am. An experience that has left me changed, but was not life changing—a sentiment that I tend to feel a little guilty about. As though I should have produced a deeper moral to this story. That I should want to leave my life in the city, throw everything in my backpack, and wander into the wilderness where I would be my deepest and truest self. I know this is the story that many people want to read. But for me it is simply not true, and I have never been a person capable of dishonesty simply to placate others.
You see, there is a prescribed narrative splashed across the pages of books and the screens of social media, a story that says thru hiking will radically change your life or else thru hiking will become your life. For there are a small but highly vocal minority of hikers for whom long distance thru hiking has become the central pillar of their lives. They post YouTube videos about gear and food in the winter. While during hiking season they fill our Instagram feeds with stunning images of wild places and wax rhapsodical about the purity of life on the trail, how the simplicity of living from a backpack and wandering through the woods will lead you onto a higher plane of being. This narrative is so pervasive, that to the uninitiated it feels preordained. In the days after I finished the PCT I was subjected to the constant refrain: what’s next? Strangers who had followed my hike inquired about my next big hike. Would it be the AT? CDT? Something abroad? The online peanut gallery has read the script and in witnessing my success looks to cast me in the roll of thru hiker for life.
Yet, thru hiking is not something I wish to build my life around. I believe the act is simply too unsustainable for that—you can’t thru hike forever, no matter what social media portrays. And beyond that, neither my body nor mind have the desire to do so. To thru hike repeatedly at the exclusion of all other activities would be to trim oneself into a mere shadow of the multitudes we contain. I am a thru hiker as much as I am a writer, a skier, an adventurer, a traveler. And substantially less than I am a daughter, a sister, a partner, and a individual with myriad desires and flaws.
Please don’t be disappointed dear reader. For while my months long walking vacation has not rent me into a new person for which unabated hiking is the only path to happiness, it has gifted me a great deal.
Thru hiking taught me that there is a great joy in unbalanced, unrelenting forward progress towards a singular goal. The very nature of thru hiking gives us that. Something with which we can focus all our energy towards, an unambiguous pursuit to which we can commit fully and in doing so strip away the banalities and distractions of a more complex life. To realize that balance is rarely at the center of great achievements, but conversely is required for us to be full and complete humans. That balance should be sought in the long game, not the cause for strife in the minute workings of a day.
In the unbalanced volume of time spent walking I was afforded a chance to think, to wander and wonder about my life, to leave space for realizations about what is important. In the broadest sense I came to realize that I do not want to spend my life working towards things to which I only feel the most obligatory passions. Namely, dedicating my life to a career. I have struggled most of my life against the highly American notion that our work lives should be placed at the center of our whole lives. I believe this is most obviously seen in the question we all deem most important to ask new acquaintances–“what do you do.”  To which it is implied “for work.” Not what do you do for joy, or to relax, or to challenge yourself. But what do you do to earn money, who are you in relation to the way you feed your ever hungry bank account. And in the drive for transparency I must admit that it scares me to write this.
You see, upon leaving the trail I am also unemployed and will need to seek work, and what if some future employer reads this and in doing so discovers that a my career has never found a home in my heart? It is subversive in the most basic way to not want to work. America believes itself a country of hard workers and capitalists. But thru hiking gave me the time to fully step outside that narrative and see how artificial that idea is. To re-frame my life’s long struggle to figure out what I want to do with my one wild and precious life, and begin to frame that question outside of a career. What do I want to do with the rest of my life if my job is not the most central part of it, but instead a facet of who I am?
Maybe in some ways thru hiking the PCT simply gave me the space to recognize the full measure of myself. It gave me time to see what I thought was important, and most invaluably, why those things were important to me. To have the time and space to fully observe why I choose to do things, even the somewhat silly things like thru hiking was a tremendous privilege.
In truth my beautiful reader, I didn’t hike the PCT for any real reason other than I wanted to. There was no burning desire to memorialize a loved one, nor did I expect the trail to somehow solve all of my life’s problems. In the most literal sense there was no point to it, no purpose other than that I thought I would like it. In so many ways the whole PCT is a pointless, deeply absurd endeavor. To walk the land between Mexico and Canada along a set line between two arbitrarily decided borders–and to what end? To live a life of social conformity–and to what end? If I don’t have my own own reasons for doing something, then why am I doing it? If I am not finding joy in the process or working towards a goal, then what am I doing and why? Why, I was given the time to ask, does one choose to anything in life?
Ultimately, I chose to thru hike the PCT because the challenge appealed to me and gave me the time to shed the gaze of the world and play freely in the outdoors. And that, maybe more than anything, is what the PCT was to me. A chance to honor myself by doing something that was so purely selfish and joyful. Yes, maybe that is the real truth of it—to me, the PCT was an act of joy.
For joy is not something that is without pain, or suffering, or strife. Joy is electing to go through that pain because what is waiting on the other side is so much grander and more beautiful than comfort and conformity could ever be. To bleed, to ache, to hurt in pursuit of something that you want–that is joy. To peel back the layers of your skin like a wild, feral, inhuman beast, to dig deep within yourself for no other reason than the thrill of adventure–that is joy. To choose how you suffer, to look far into the distance and recognize that this ridiculous idea of walking to Canada is nothing but an expression of want–that is joy. It is a privilege to be given the body, time, and world in which that is a possibility.
So no, the PCT did not change my life so much as it was an opportunity to step away from how we are told to live and open up to the ways in which I would prefer to live.
The ground below me feels perilously steep. A long white chute of snow dropping away towards the valley floor. I step, and step again and the snow beneath my boots shifts a little and my whole body tenses. Far below me Keith is watching my painfully slow process. His mountaineering confidence and skill allows him to move quickly and easily across the same terrain I am clinging to like a frightened cat. Moments before, as he plopped on his butt and prepared to glissade out of sight he offered these parting words. “Remember” he said, “if you do have to self arrest lift your feet. If you dig your feet in while wearing crampons you’ll probably break your leg.” Casual, good pep talk.
I step, and step again. Repeating to myself “French step, French step, French step.” I am not even doing a proper French step–a mountaineering move in which you cross one leg over the other as you zig zag across a face–but the phrase focuses my mind. French step. French step. Ignore the dozens of ski tourers shuffling up the face around me. French step. French step. Ignore the couple having a shouting argument, the woman at the bottom of the hill too scared to go on, her boyfriend above me too ignorant of her fear to do anything helpful. French step. French step. The hill levels out and I stare around in wonder. It is so beautiful here.
The City
It’s Monday and I’m sitting at a red light watching cars stream past my driver side window where, through a combination of rain water and grit clinging to the glass, they melt into undistinguished blobs of light and motion before passing out of view. Above me, warm lights shine down from so many apartment buildings, glowing indicators of their invisible inhabitants. A reflection of a building, a city, a world full of so many people. Seen from the reverse I suppose I am just another invisible city dweller as indicated by my car’s headlights. In the span of a breath I feel my entire life collapse around me and I am left wondering how I came to be here. In this life, in this city, sitting in this body at this traffic light on this night. The light turns green.
“…is happiness a choice or a gift or a circumstance.”
As I drive through the rain blackened streets I perform a series of invisible yet impressive mental gymnastics. I think about the temp job I am working. I try and parce my feelings from each other but like a tangled ball of twine I cannot figure out what each string connects; what everything leads back to. I wonder if I am happy; is happiness a choice or a gift or a circumstance. I think about money and student debt and about the small apartment that Keith and I share. The choices of comfort and the resultant financial responsibility. I think about an alternate life, one in which I didn’t go to college, didn’t incur this wet blanket of student debt just to squeeze myself into the trap of specificity. I wonder if this other self would be happier. Or maybe I’m am simply dousing an imagined life in nostalgia, staring through rose colored glasses at a path not taken.
Or maybe it’s all irrelevant because I did go to college and graduated with all the accompanying debts and privileges and options and trappings. And now here I am in this life, in this city and the only option is to move forward. It’s the only option that is ever available to any of us.
The Plan
Before I found myself standing in a snow chute trying to French step my way off a mountain I felt the pull to escape the city. Our plans began as they so often do, as half formed ideas on a Thursday night which, by the miracle of the internet would be fully formed by Friday night only to be rethought on Saturday morning and finally acted upon.
 “A brilliant last hurrah in celebration of a day before the world turned to black and we were forced to scurry into our tent like the small burrowing mammals that we are.”
On Saturday we left my car in an empty parking lot in Mount Rainier National Park and climbed up the shoulders of the giant sleeping beast. Above us was only a grey bowl of clouds and in the distance we could hear small avalanches sliding off the Nisqually Glacier.
We climb up up up towards the clouds into a land of white until all of a sudden the sky dropped away and the world was flooded with a pastel dreamscape sunset. A brilliant last hurrah in celebration of a day before the world turned to black and we were forced to scurry into our tent like the small burrowing mammals that we are. Bundled in the misty interior of the tent we laughed and ate half frozen snacks, taking unflattering selfies because one day I’ll want to look back and be able to remember this. Because one day I may no longer be able to. Sitting inside the tent felt like a return to normal, a shedding of all the trappings of society until we could simply be. Away from the myriad people and needs of a city. It felt like being back on the PCT, like tentative normalcy.
The Process of Starting
It’s been a little over two months since Keith and I finished hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. In that time I feel like I have arrived at the start of what can whimsically be called the next chapter of my life. I worry that it’s going to look surprisingly like the last chapter. Weeks spent working in a large city, apathetically trading hours of my day for money. While on weekends we flee to the mountains to press the reset button on contentment. I wonder if it will be enough.
At 30 I have somehow found myself at a crossroads between the two world views with which I was raised. When I was a child I was told to follow my dreams, to pursue passion and to live a life of intensity. At the same time I was taught that the American dream way my responsibility and right to pursue. The house, career, car, and children were the epitome of normal, of expectation. So was the high flying life of dirtbagging adventure. However, it doesn’t take an overly skilled observer to see that these lives are at odds with each other. Be risky and responsible, daring and dutiful, adventuresome and adherent. And I did it, I did what was expected of me.
I have spent time dedicating myself to my career. Spent weekends in the office and burned the midnight oil. Then, I spent a glorious sun-drenched summer following my passion for the outdoors and living a life or irresponsible freedom. In the end I found neither to be sustainable. I have checked the boxes, been a good worker bee and an inspirational traveler. Put my nose to the grindstone and wandered in the woods and after all of that I am left with nothing more than questions.
I find myself in the muddy middle ground of life after an epic adventure. At the start of the narrative that so few bother to tell. Where expectations give way to honest desires and the realization that I am not entirely sure what those desires are. But I think change first comes from the willingness to open oneself up to possibilities. To look around and imagine that things might be different than it is even possible to know. So while I stand on the banks of a future I cannot see I will allow myself the grace to be happy with hitting the reset button of contentment each week as I escape into the mountains. I don’t know if it will always be enough. But for now it is. It’s enough.
