Day 108: another day of terror

by Posted in PCT 2014, Uncategorized Tagged , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Day 108
Miles: 34*
From Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park to Crescent City

Can’t say I’m excited to get back on the road this morning, but we’ve only got 26 miles to get to Crescent City, which is where we’re meeting up with J’s parents for a few days. I hope I don’t die before I get there, and I also hope that a couple days off of riding will let my nerves calm down a bit. The riding hasn’t been as physically tough as hiking was, but hiking also didn’t involve a second-to-second contemplation of the fragility of my mortal existence and a day-long struggle to embrace the final moments of my life before there weren’t any moments left. Well, it’s a new day, maybe today is a good day to die. It’s been great, it really has – I’ll be ending on a high note.

The sun is back behind the low, gray clouds, and we start the day with a gnarly, big uphill. We’re riding the Newton B. Drury Scenic Parkway out of the park though, and it’s nearly car-less and lined with redwood giants rising up into the mist. The exertion and damp drenches us in sweat during the climb, and the downhill is exhilarating but hypothermic.

Then we’re back on the highway. Oh man. I’m still so rattled from the ride yesterday – I can barely stand this. I didn’t know you could be this terrified for so long – I pedal in a blind wash of fear – hold my line, hold my line, hold my line – the road turns into climbing hairpins, the shoulder is gone, the fog sinks down on us so the drivers can’t even see us – I pedal faster, faster, breath ragged, sweat-drenched.

We crest the last big uphill and stop at the Damnation Creek trailhead, an enchanting misty forest of redwoods and ferns. “I’m going to walk up the trail a bit,” J says. “Do you want to come?”
“You know, I’m just gonna lay right here,” I tell him, and I lay on the side of the trail. My body sinks into the unmoving soil, relaxing into its contours. I look up at the green lace of the maple understory, and a beam of sun comes through it all, through the mist, through the trees, and warms my face.

But the ride ain’t over yet.

We start the downhill. The pavement has been ground down for resurfacing, and my bicycle and I vibrate wildly, getting the speed wobbles, careening around the hairpins. I’m not slowing down, I’m going to ride this downhill all the way to Crescent City. I ride in the middle of the lane so cars won’t pass me on a blind turn in the fog, but they do anyways. I can feel my nerve cells exploding from adrenaline.

We pedal into Crescent City on jelly-legs. J’s parents are waiting in the motel parking lot. They just drove that same section of road, and are horrified about how dangerous it looked. I confirm all their fears.

I’m so glad I don’t have to ride tomorrow.

IMG_20140818_171805

Share

Day 106: Moving on

by Posted in PCT 2014, Uncategorized Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Day 106
Miles: 55*
From Ferndale to Patricks Point State Park

After a late night, Blake got up at 4 am to make some beet deliveries. We slept in. We played at farmer for a couple days, and we’re exhausted – so we sleep in, wake up on the margins of the beet field, next to blackberry hedges and beehives. Pacman is at work already, trying to squeeze just a little more cash out of this work break.

Time to part ways – Blake promises to mail us some home-grown quinoa, and Pacman, who is staying on the farm for another day or two, promises to catch up with us in Crescent City. We ride out into the gray, dim day, leaving behind the dairy farms and country roads and the wide Eel River, and get on the freeway and officially onto the Pacific Coast Bicycle Route.

The road is still a scary place for me, my tender, woodland soul shocked by the roar of giant steel machines barreling past me, but the shoulder is reassuringly wide: at least two feet! My laser-like hyperfocus on the road doesn’t leave much brain-space for rumination, but I have to wonder how many people would take up biking if they didn’t have to share space with cars. Probably a lot.

As we roll into Eureka, I wonder if the cars aren’t the problem so much as the people… In the vast store of unsolicited advice and opinions that we’ve gathered in the past week, it’s seemed like every single person has told us that Eureka sucks. It turns out that “Eureka sucks” means “Eureka is full of meth-head tweakers and flophouses”. The day has gotten even grayer, if possible, the sky dirty and low, and the boarded up (but obviously still occupied) motels ringing the town echo the greasy grayness and it’s a rough-looking crowd wandering the streets. This ain’t the PCT.

A quick side trip to the downtown area blows our mind – it’s beautiful! The drab skies suddenly seem like they fit for the old victorian seaside vibes this place has going on. Lovely white, red, green buildings, old bookstores, brick streets. A little jewel in a circle of trash. We stop for lunch and park our bicycles directly in front of the picture window, suddenly acutely aware that we never bothered investing in a bicycle lock. “I’m going to buckle my helmet around my tire. How much time do you think that’ll get me if someone jacks my bicycle?” I ask J.
“I don’t know. What about putting it in lowest gear? Isn’t that what Pacman does? So the thief has to pedal like mad?”
“Either that or the highest gear, so they can’t get cranking?”

We spend our entire lunch with both of us staring fixedly at our bicycles. Makes for bad conversation. We buy a bike lock in Aracata. (I also buy a rear-view mirror for my helmet, so if I’m about to smushed into a Gizmo-road-pancake, I’ll get to see it happen.)

On the way out of Arcata, the official Pacific Coast Bicycle Route routes us off the 101 and through farmland, where we waver in the margin of cloud and sun, the line where the permanently installed coastal clouds melt into the California summer. The outrageous pink lilies are back, in front of little farmhouses. And then the bike lane turns into gravel, and the blue skies turn gray, and my butt hurts, and my legs are exhausted, and you know what? I’m not having a great time at the moment, I’m just whining and being miserable. (Misery is for sharing? Right?)

The fog begins to roll in, the afternoon is slipping away from us, but we are not there yet. We push through the darkening day to Patricks Point State Park, exhausted as if we’d been hiking the PCT. We pay our five bucks apiece for the hiker-biker campsite and finally dismount from our mechanical steeds. I sit at the picnic table and stare at nothing while J goes to explore a bit. “Hey Gizmo, come out and check out the view,” J says as he walks back into camp. “It’s really great.”

I follow him out to the lookout, where the fog has just rolled in, and I can see absolutely nothing. It must be time for bed.

20140816_132252_1
Heading into Eureka

20140816_144518_1
The very scenic “warehouse” stretch.

20140816_163355_2

20140816_164614_1

20140816_165707_1
A lane of our own! At least for a little while…

Share

Day 105: to the races

by Posted in Uncategorized Tagged , , , , , , Leave a comment

Day 105
Miles: zero
Ferndale

“It can’t be worse than last night.” The thought from last night rings like a taunt. The only mosquito in a five mile radius found me last night, and we hadn’t set up the net-tent. But c’mon. What’s one mosquito compared to an entire crew of acid tripping teenagers?

I wake up in the morning with my entire face lumpy and one eye swollen nearly shut with mosquito welts. I haven’t been this sore since ever, and I’m as exhausted as when I went to bed. Shucks. Time to hoe some beets. “Morning,” I grumble to J, who has turned towards me. “Happy birthday.”
  “Thanks.”

I’m in a foul mood. I put on a pair of sunglasses to hide my deformed face, get my hoe, and start down the row next to J in the gray, foggy morning. Pacman has been at it for hours already – he needs the cash. We stop for lunch after a couple hours and Blake is horrified that we are hoeing his beets on J’s birthday. “But it’s your birthday!” he insists. “You can’t hoe beets on your birthday!”
  “Well, what do you do for your birthday?” J inquires in return.
  “Well, my birthday is the one day a year I can do things fir myself and not feel guilty.”
(“Huh,” J says to me later that day. “I never feel guilty doing things for myself.”)

Truthfully, we don’t need any encouragement to put down our hoes. Thru-hiking is tough, but hoeing beets… I’d need to train for this. We get our bicycles and ride to town – Ferndale is hosting the county fair. The gray skies have lifted, my eye swelling has gone down, and darn if it ain’t a beautiful day.

We’d been seeing posters for the Humboldt County Fair as far back as Mad River. (“Bounty of the County” reads the poster. “What, are they going to just have displays of bales and bales of weed?” we joke.) I don’t know that I’ve ever been to a county fair before, and we buy tickets and go in. It turns out that Humboldt county does grow things besides marijuana, and the fair has performing sea lions (amazing and depressing), live music, overpriced pieces of pie, and lots of animals. I get a kick out of the fluffy rabbits, the sheep, the goats. In the pigpens there’s a stall with two very large pigs and one small girl. I do a double-take – she’s laying back against one pig and has her feet propped up on the other, like they’re pillows, not hogs. The pigs don’t seem to mind.

The other thing the fair has is horse races. They make you pay three bucks for another ticket, but it’s not J’s birthday every day. After a phone-a-friend horse betting consultation, he’s losing money like a pro. “The races aren’t any fun without some skin in the game,” he explains. We put our noses to the fence and watch the hyper-strung, neurotic racehorses thunder across.

We meet up with Pacman at the local bar at the end of the day, where he tries to pick up a local girl, oblivious to the giant, fuming, dairy-farmer boyfriend lurking behind him. We’ve talked Blake into meeting us at the bar, and he gives us a ride back to the farm, where we stay up talking about organic farming and the Peace Corps and the PCT for long past hiker midnight, and farmer midnight, and midnight midnight.

Finally back at our tarp we string up the net-tent before the blissful moment of becoming horizontal…

Let the races begin!

image

image

image

image

image

image

Share

Day 103: the coast

by Posted in PCT 2014, Uncategorized Tagged , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Day 103
Miles: 27*
From Grizzly Creek Redwoods State Park to the ocean

Mr. Snore-man in the site next to us is still at it in the morning – except he’s also managed to somehow collapse his tent on himself in the middle of the night. Loud, rasping snores emanate from a big, yellow puddle of silnylon. The rest of his family sleeps in the camper. I indulge myself with some feelings of camper-superiority, but otherwise am not too excited about the morning. Gray mornings are good for sleeping. I get up and battle with resident campground Stellar Jays instead.

We have no clear destination today, and we’re not sure where we want to stay. J’s parents are coming out to meet us in a week in Crescent City, which is only 120 miles away. That would be six hard days of hiking, but on bicycle? We’ve got some time to kill. Anyhow, Pacman needs to hit a grocery store, but otherwise, there’s no hurry. I feel like I’m in a holding pattern, circling, circling. (My life-purpose crisis is doing the same, but above me, like a vulture, waiting for the right time…)

“Do you guys want to stop by the Cheatham Grove on our way out?” suggests J. “It’s the redwood grove where they filmed the star wars scooter battle with the storm troopers and the ewoks.” Are you kidding? Of course!

The grove is still dim with the low clouds that move in from the ocean every night, and in the cool, damp gray the redwoods rise. It takes a minute to really appreciate their immensity. I have to touch their splintery bark, look slowly from the roots to the crown, walk their circumference. I imagine all the settlement of the West: LA, Seattle, Phoenix, San Francisco… vague dreams of an unscarred earth – of an unbroken coast of giants –
“It’s so damn peaceful here!” exclaims Pacman. “Can you imagine when the entire forest was like this?”
“We’re pretty good at screwing things up,” replies J.

There are so few of the old trees left. We walk the entire grove in minutes, never out of earshot of the highway. Pacman finds a giant blunt just lying on the ground. Humboldt county, man.

We ride the rest of the way to Fortuna, through classic picturebook countryside. Old farmhouses, apple trees, horses, blackberry bushes, garish pink lilies. We come up on a rise before town, and I swear I can see the ocean.

Fortuna sucks us into the town vortex: hours at the library, the grocery store, time on the phone trying to re-route food packages we sent to trail towns in Oregon that we won’t be getting to. It’s six o’clock and we’re still here, with no plans for the night and no place to stay. Can’t just throw our tents on the nearest flat spot out here… All google can come up with is the Ferndale county fairgrounds, ten miles down the road and past the end of highway 36. We pedal on the 101 for the first time, then take the 211 over the Eel River and a narrow bridge.

The signs on the bridge tell cyclists to take the lane while crossing, which means we hold up a whole bunch of evening traffic despite our panicked pedaling. “Please don’t kill me, please don’t hate me, please don’t kill me,” I pant desperately to myself. Off the bridge, we pull over to let the long line of traffic pass. One of the trucks behind us zips forward then pulls off the road as well, just in front of us. The guy in the truck gets out to confront us. Oh no.

A small, compact man with a ponytail and dusty chacos hops out and comes up to Pacman (I’ve dropped about twenty feet to the back, ready to pedal for my life.) Are we looking for work?

Work? He’s a local organic farmer, he explains, looking for some people to hoe his beet fields for a day or two. “I’m pretty hard up for help,” he explains, “and for some reason you seemed like you might be hard workers? You might be interested?”

No kidding, he’s hard up for work. He’s pulling over bicyclists on the side of the road! (To be fair, our bicycle setups do sort of communicate a lack of cash… we have not been confused with vacationing bicycle tourers yet…) Well, as it turns out, it’s his lucky day. Pacman has been searching for work for the entire last week. He’s in the condition known as straight-up-outta-cash. J and I are fine on funds, but not in any rush – no reason to split up Team Whiskers yet. I’ve never hoed beets before – might be fun?

Blake, our new employer, meets up down the road at his beet fields and shows us around. We ask if we might be able to camp for the night on the field, but Blake’s partner is feeling a bit paranoid after a recent robbery, and requests we stay elsewhere. (Shoot. We still have no place to stay. I miss the PCT.) Blake feels terrible about this, so he gives us the keys to his old truck so we can drive ourselves to the beach. “Camping isn’t actually allowed,” he explains, “but no one will bother you there, just go around the corner a bit.”

So that’s how, one week after hitting the halfway point on the Pacific Crest Trail, we find ourselves in front of the vast sweep of the Pacific Ocean.

We made it.

wpid-20140813_085350_1.jpg
Pacman, riding through the redwoods.

wpid-img_109341353678034_1.jpg
(“I’m only going to jump once, so don’t screw it up.”)

wpid-20140813_090140_1.jpg
In the Cheatham Grove

wpid-20140813_090800_1.jpg
Tree-hugger for a day.

wpid-20140813_192334_1.jpg
The Pacific

Share

Day 101: a humboldt county kind of day

by Posted in PCT 2014, Uncategorized Tagged , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Day 101
Miles: 43*
From Hell’s Gate Campground to Swain’s Flat Outpost

We’re packing up our gear to go when Bob, from campsite across from us, comes over. He’s got a neon yellow shirt draped over his arm, and he holds it out to us. “This is the shirt I was telling you about the other night – do you want it?”

High-vis! “Yeah, thanks!” we chorus together. Pacman takes the shirt and attaches it to the back of his pack, a fluorescent offering to the gods of the road, a high-visibility prayer that we will not get squished. Then, packed, decorated, and watered-up, we hop on our wheels and start the uphill.

We have one last big uphill before the eventual descent to the coast, but I’m not afraid of mountain passes anymore. I just have to keep pushing the pedals, pushing, pushing – and we’re at the top. Bam! High fives and a snack break, then we see the old, familiar sign of the truck on a triangle. It’s been only days since our first, terrifying downhill, but already we’ve learned to trust ourselves, and we whizz down the mountain, leaning deep into the curves. My buggy whip describes arcs across the sky as I bank the hairpins.

Two hours to go up, twenty exhilarating minutes down. Welcome to Mad River, proclaims a sign. Don’t blink you’ll miss us. We roll our bikes off the road and stop at the burger shack that constitutes the entirety of downtown Mad River and place our orders. (Ah, the luxuries of bicycling.) Pacman carefully parks his bike to make sure that his cardboard sign: “Mexico to Canada” is in full-view, and we devour our food.

The sign works like it’s supposed to, and we start telling our story to the incredulous people eating burgers next to us. “Wow,” they say. “Be careful.” “You’re gonna die.” “That’s crazy.” “Road gets worse right around these curves, you know.” (“Do you smoke?” “Sure” “Here you go – good luck” and Pacman walks away with some Humboldt green.)

We leave the national forest area, keep biking through Humboldt county, where the trees roll across the hills, and the smell of weed perfumes everything, and every gate says POSTED NO TRESPASSING. A long, slightly rolling section gets us to the Dinsmore Store, the center of commerce for a 25-mile radius.

We’d heard about the Dinsmore Store, but seeing is believing. It’s like the inside of Mary Poppins’ bag, small on the outside but impossibly full of everything you could ever need on the inside, one room leading to another, to another – food and clothes and piping and fittings and ammo and knives and kombucha. There’s a gas station out front, and the line is all pickup trucks with beds full of gas cans getting filled with diesel. Huge stacks of bags of potting soil and fertilizer and irrigation pipe are stored outside, and an elaborate closed circuit system watches your every move. The most amazing thing about the place, though, is that this is the first piece of civilization we’ve been to where the three of us hairy, disheveled hikers did not stick out at all. All we need is to have some marijuana leaves emblazoned somewhere on our clothing, and we would be indistinguishable from the natives. If anything, we fall on the more kempt side of the spectrum…

After a food resupply I go relieve Pacman from bicycle guard duty, and I inherit his conversational partner, who simply begins his conversation from the beginning, excited for a fresh victim. “Yep, this road is real dangerous,” he croaks to me. “Just about the windiest, most dangerous road in the country. People die all the time on this road, yep.”
“Yeah, it’s kind of narrow -”
“Oh, you haven’t even seen the worst part yet,” he interrupts. “Just up ahead that ol’ middle line disappears. Have to say,” he muses, “if I had to choose between a truck coming towards me and a bicycle next to me, there’d be a bicyclist funeral, yep.”

You know there’s a third option?? I want to yell, but don’t. It’s called YOUR BRAKES. Standard on every vehicle. Try it out sometime. The choice between a two-second delay or gambling with someone’s life seems like it would be pretty straightforward to me… I mean, I guess it is for all these motorists too: a straightforward choice to pass so close to me I can feel the heat from their exhaust pipes scorching my calves. I silently fume over this while the old man reiterates over and over that first, we are gonna die on this road, and second, he’s gonna be the one that sends us to the promised land. Great.

I’m in a sour mood by the time J and Pacman come back, and we slam back our cold sodas and get back on the road. Just as the old man promised, the yellow stripe down the middle of the road abruptly disappears, and the road narrows. I’m momentarily terrified about the constriction and what it means for my safety, but bizarrely, the cars begin to give us some respectful passing distance. Everyone has slowed down, navigating the narrow turns and tight passing quarters with a little more caution. The cars that pass us swerve nearly to the other white line to give us space.

What is it about the yellow line across the road that affects people so? You’d think it was a force field from the way the drivers treated it on the section behind us. It would be a clear section, no one coming, good visibility, but they would drive their cars right up to the yellow line and not one inch further for passing us. Sometimes that gave us a couple feet of clearance, but more often we got buzzed. Take away the yellow line, and all of a sudden we get passing space.

A brief respite from crazy drivers and the yellow line is back. We pull off the side of the road for a break, across the road from a sign that says GOATS FOR SALE FREE GOATS. “Wanna have a goat roast tonight?” suggests Pacman. “We could strap it on the back of the bike.”
“Sounds like a pain in the neck to me. I’m not really in the mood for butchering a goat tonight.”
“Could be delicious…”
“Could be…”

We’re cruising through hills and woods on a rolling section of road when suddenly it appears: the truck on the triangle. 10% grade, it declares, right next to the brake check pull-out area.

10% GRADE??? The steepest we’ve ridden so far is 7% – this is going to be a doozy of a downhill. We check our brakes, then drop down over the hill.

I’d let myself go flying on the other downhills today, but we blast into the descent with our brakes screaming, miles and miles of relentless descent, hairpin turns with 10mph speed limits and steeply banked curves. At every pullout is a truck with smoking brakes, and the persistent marijuana aroma is overpowered by the stench of it. We take the road, not letting cars pass us – for once, we are all going the same speed. It’s a relief when it’s over. Maintaining that sort of attention wears me out, even if I don’t have to pedal. Actually, bicycling all day wears me out too.

Exhausted, we pull into a small general store on the side of the road to get a cold drink. Next thing you know, we are having the same conversation we’ve been having all day. “You’re BICYCLING this road?” “You’re crazy!” “You’re gonna die!” (“You guys smoke?”… Pacman’s pockets bulge with Humboldt green.) This is a friendly crew though, that runs the little store and the giant complex next to it that sells grow supplies, and in no time at all we’re in the back, hanging out with the locals, and setting up our tents for the night in the backyard. I pick blackberries from across the road, the bushes loaded with the most luscious, the biggest, juiciest, dirtiest, dustiest, dieseliest berries ever. I soak and wash them five times before I eat them, the warm, deep blackberry flavor still faintly exuding diesel. We’d meant to get to the redwoods tonight, just two miles down the road, but this will do.

Share

Day 75: friends

by Posted in Uncategorized Tagged , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Day 75
Miles: 0
South Lake Tahoe

Rest day. I’m so tired I get the wobbles when I stand for too long, but J and I go climbing with Dan and Christina anyhow. That’s what top-ropes are for. It’s strange to try and move my body in the vertical direction. My arms are weak, surprise, surprise. My feet hurt like crazy all the time.

We’re taking tomorrow off too, hope I can pull it together.

image

Share

Day 70: things turn around

by Posted in Uncategorized Tagged , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Day 70
Miles: 21.5
From falls creek to Emigrant wilderness

No fish, lost flies, popped squeeze bladder, spilled dinner, burned windshirt, not enough miles,fogs of mosquitoes, tired feet, raw hipbones… and a leaky air mattress to top off the night. I wake up on the ground, cold and achey. Bad night’s sleep. I hope this isn’t a trajectory. I might not make it 1000 miles.

No point getting up early with this kind of luck. My exhaustion is sitting on me like a 200lb man. Or perhaps like several: one for each of the passes. I’m so tired. I feel stretched – thin. My pants are sagging badly at the waist, but it’s not just my butt that’s disappearing. My motivation is thin, my energy is thin, the thread of this journey, the thing that’s pulling me forwards – it’s thin too, pulling out like taffy. I do not know if I can do this trail. I will give it everything, but I do not know if I will have enough to give. I’ve given my pound(s) of flesh, will this take bone?

We finally get going. J is sick of being hustled and having my neuroticism passed onto him – we hike off in two separate sulks.

Around eleven we come up on Dorothy Lake, like a vision of miles past. The lake lies shimmering under ice carved ridges and spires. The water reflects the black shadows of the thunderheads building to the north – hovering at the meeting of blue skies behind us and black skies ahead. I repack my entire pack using a trash bag as a liner.

The thunder rolling ahead of us makes us nervous as we scurry across Dorothy Pass, but the weather holds.  Suddenly we’ve passed the sign that marks the end boundary of Yosemite National Park. That’s it. The High Sierra is behind us. Of all the parts of the trail, that section is the one I worried about the most, prepared for the most, thought about the most… just like that it’s over. It’s strange to have things behind us, instead of feeling the length of the entire trail still reaching out before us. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at that, with a thousand miles under our belts. Just like that, we’re standing at the 1000 mile mark.

1000 miles! Not even halfway.

We’re hardly out of Yosemite and the rocks change. Goodbye granite… there’s a huge bear claw mark across a tree, so I point it out to J. J? Where’d he go? I wait. I wait. I start freaking out, and do the unthinkable: walk south. I finally find J five minutes later. He’d gotten distracted at the contact between the granite and the calcareous meta-seds.

Half an hour later, I’ve lost him again. At least, I think I have. I just stopped to look at this little waterfall next to the trail, then came back out to wait for J. I thought he was only a few minutes behind me, so he should be here by now. I walk back on the trail a bit – no sign of him. I walk forward – no sign. Did he pass me in the minute I was off trail? Does he think he’s behind me still? I walk back again, this time looking for his tracks, but it’s all gravel. I walk forward, doing my best Sherlock Holmes impression, nose to the ground, until I convince myself that I’ve found his footprints. So he is ahead of me!

I think.

I feel panic rising. If he thinks he’s ahead of me, I’ll never catch him, we’ll both be running down the trail after each other. If I’m wrong, and he’s still behind me, I could be running away from him. I start booking it down the trail, eyes for nothing but footprints, J’s footprints. It rained up here earlier today, so the trail is really fresh, and I know I’m following a pair of Merrell Moabs, but Merrells are really popular shoes. “Dammit J,” I shout out loud, “wait for me! You haven’t seen my footprints in two miles, I know it!” I’m wearing a pair of Salomon crossmax shoes, and my tread is far more distinctive. I run, then walk slowly, torn between catching up with him, or letting him catch up with me. I cry and rage, worried and frustrated. I’ve been hustling J all day, bugging him to go faster – he probably thinks I’ve ditched him.

At what point do I stop and wait? If we both decide to stop and wait, we won’t find each that way either. J doesn’t even have maps for this area. The next water coming up, a little creek, it’s the last water for ten miles. I told that to J before we were separated, now I’m hoping he’s remembered. “Wait for me at the water, please!” I shout to the silent, dripping trees. If he’s not there, I’ll wait for him, long as it takes.

I come around the corner, to where the creek crosses the trail, and I see him. “J! J!” He opens his arms and catches me up, where I cry again, this time in relief. “You got ahead of me but I was behind you I was following your footprints why didn’t you wait for me I’ve been so worried I’m so glad I found you!” I blurt out all at once.

He explains his end – like I thought, he thought I was ahead of him, that I had ditched him. He’d been practically running down the trail trying to catch up with me. After while he realized he hadn’t seen any of my footprints in a long time and started freaking out himself. He’d made it to the last water and I wasn’t there. He’d left a note and gone ahead – no sign of me. He was on his way to look back down the trail when I got there.

“Let’s not get separated ever again ever,” I tell him, still holding onto him.
  “Yeah, let’s stay cheek-to-cheek for a while.” We’ve been driving each other a little bit crazy, but separation is worse.

The entire episode took an hour. “Worst hour of this trip yet,” J says.

I’m all frazzled still, but at least we made good time, right? We grab some water and start the switchbacks out of the valley. The sheer granite of Yosemite has been replaced with big basaltic cones with huge, smooth, brown sides. We climb the trail, a flat groove notched into the slope of talus, up, up.

It’s getting dark as we reach the top. There’s a man there, nothing but a tank top and running shorts and a small camelbak. What is he doing out here?

He turns out to be the support crew for Joe McConaughey (String Bean), the guy trying to break the PCT speed record this year. “He’s doing 44 miles a day right now,” he tells us. “He’d really like to do 45, but that last mile is just really tough, you know?”
  “Yeah,” we agree. “That last mile is tough for us too.” Of course, for us the difference is between 19 and 20 miles, but kind of the same.

It’s super steep up here, but I’d really like to camp. We discover a flat spot on a little saddle below the peaks, right at the timberline, where the trees grow bent over, windblown into shrubberies. We’re on the rim of a huge valley, lakes down below, the peaks of Yosemite, King’s Canyon, Sequoia, all stretching back in row after row of jagged spires and snow. The rainclouds of earlier have lifted and broke, and the setting sun drops beneath them to light up the entire place in incendiary hues. This is the most beautiful place I’ve ever been. This is the most beautiful place we’ve seen, here on the PCT.

“The universe was testing us, and we passed! Now it’s rewarding us!”
  “Gizmo, the universe is not personally interested in you,” J shoots me down.
  “Yes it is!” I laugh, buoyant, undeterred. “Look at this!” I sweep my arms around. I don’t really care the universe cares or not – this moment is perfect. Everything is perfect, is worth it. 1000 miles to end up here.

image

Dorothy Lake. Guess which way we’re headed…

image

1000 miles.

image

The waterfall I stopped to look at.

image

image

Bears in these woods.

image

image

image

Share

Day 69: a string of small catastrophes

by Posted in Uncategorized Tagged , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Day 69
Miles: 20
From volunteer peak to Falls Creek

We camped high, hoping to catch the first sun and ride it out of bed. It sort of works… on the trail by 8. I’ll take it. We hop back on the granite rollercoaster ride through Yosemite’s backcountry.

We’re not fast – not here – but we pass tons of people, section hikers and weekenders, mostly. Don’t be fooled, this trail is kicking our butts. I think we’re also low on food. Every time we eat take out all our food and look at it. The huge pile we dragged out of Tuolomne doesn’t seem so big anymore. We eat a few things out of one bag, a few things out of another… We put the bags away, a little hungry. I hope it’s enough.

It’s lovely here, granite with huge shear zones, a wonderland jumble of swells and domes and rock. Flowers line all the infernal stone staircases, like they hired a landscaper after the brute labor of laying stone. Atop seavey pass we swim in the small lakes there, then go down again, down Kerrick Canyon. I’ve stopped looking at the elevation profiles that come with our maps. What’s the point? When the trail goes up, I go up. When the trail goes down, I go down. When the trail goes around I go round and around and around and around and around. 

Coming from the other direction is a familiar face – Halfstep! He’d hitched to South Lake Tahoe for the fourth of July, now he’s hiking back to Tuolomne Meadows, where he’ll hitch back to South Lake Tahoe. It’s easier walking north of here, he says.

At Wilma lake we stop to fish. If we keep hiking, then maybe we’ll run out of miles before we run out of food. But if we can catch some fish, we’ll be ok too. I love to watch J cast, flicking his line further out over the water. No fish though. Nothing, nothing. The mosquitoes are horrendous, everywhere. I’m in full mosquito-armour: windshirt, hat, headnet. I’m still about to lose my mind. J is well down that road… No headnet. He flicks his line to cast and gets his fly stuck in a tree. It’s the only fly that has been getting any attention from the fish, so I stand on J’s hands and pull it out, crashing down myself. I get the fly out, and a bloody gash across my palm for the trouble. J loses the fly completely on his next cast.

Nerves shot from the sharp whine of mosquitoes in our ears, no miles made, no fish caught, it’s time to go. Except when we pass the outlet to the lake, full of trout. J loses another fly, loses his cool. He’s got the mosquito rage! Only cure is a good night’s sleep in a net tent. We take off, desperate to make just a few more miles before bed, and our sawyer squeeze water filter bladder slips out of his pack and pops. We watch the water spurt out. “Good thing we have a spare, huh?”

Not enough miles (never enough miles) we find a spot to camp. my feet feel terrible, shooting pains. My hipbones are screaming against the indignity of carrying my bear canister yet another day. So far I have managed to keep then from turning into open sores. Like last night, we look for a spot that will catch early morning light, hoping to ride the sunrise out of bed. J is setting up camp and I’m cooking dinner, I swat at a mosquito and flip the dinner out instead. Lipton pasta side Alfredo flavor, all spilled in the sand! I reach for the pot as it goes and burn a hole in my windshirt, the one my mother made me.

J and I just look at our food, in the sand. We don’t have enough as it is. So we scoop it up, pasta, Alfredo, sand, and put it back in the pot. We eat our dinner very slowly, discouraged, besieged by mosquitoes. What a day.

image

image

image

image

image

Share