Northern California

... or an example of why hell is always depicted as heat

There is no clear demarcation separating the Sierra Nevada from northern California. Not anything one would notice while walking anyway. The passes became easier, the scenery more subtle. Walking had become, by now, our occupation and the trail our home and it was hard not to take on an entitled attitude. Other hikers would come and visit for a few days before returning to running water and climate control, but we’d still be out there living the trail every day.

We could tell who was a thruhiker at a glance. Thruhikers carry less and have the patina of old, well-worn shoes about them. We had become simple machines, self-designed to do just one thing: walk up and down moderate hills while carrying 20-30 lbs on our backs. That and nothing else. In town if I had to jog across a busy road my hips would tweak and I’d get the feeling that more than a few moments of it would cripple me permanently. On trail when I needed to step over a fallen tree my knees would cry out in protest. But walking was our vocation, had become our religion, and we were zealots.

It was hot, mostly. Not in the beginning, at first the weather was pleasant enough, but when the heat took hold it did so so fiercely that the nice days became distant memories. The heat never really felt dangerous like ridge-walking into thunderstorms or the onset of hypothermia, but emotionally heat was the biggest obstacle. It envelops absolutely and then saps energy and morale alike in a way that can only be described as intimate. It steals water and sleep and eventually sanity. You can night hike to find some relief but that leaves scant time for rest and at the end of the day you’ve only traded one flavor of misery for another. The only advice I would give (if anyone were foolish enough to ask it) is to get through it as best you can and try not to let your misery make you cruel. The heat did eventually pass and the only part of it that gave me solace is that I never felt like I behaved poorly from it.

It’s difficult now, sitting in a climate-controlled loft with a hot cup of coffee, to remember how it felt out there. I know it happened, I know how it crushed me in a manner nothing else did. The heat was visceral, almost tangible. It seemed to almost take faceless yet corporeal form. The memory of pain becomes an abstract idea when enveloped in comfort. If I were to find myself on the PCT again, Northern California would be the only section I would consider skipping.

By now it was becoming a solid foursome: GBH, Hot Mess, Iron Chef, and myself. Many others were still around and would appear and vanish as before, but we four coalesced into a family and began camping together every night. We might drift apart throughout the day but would only stop once we’d found a spot big enough to fit us all, sometimes going miles more than any of us intended to accomplish this. In Sierra City Little Feet joined us as well, rounding out the family and providing a quiet thoughtful balance to the family dynamic. There are so many ways this experience could have turned out but I can’t imagine it any other way.

The trail was not about the trail and hadn’t been for some time. The trail was about the people. The scenery rarely impressed me at this point; mountains, trees, lakes, repeat. Most of my strongest memories involve groups of hikers laying about drinking beer or root beer floats, going through resupply boxes and trading their contents. We’d swap trail gossip and ridiculous jokes and bond in our shared unspoken misery. I am deliberately avoiding writing much about others even though they comprise some of the most amazing people I’ve ever met. This is the story of the my hike and it would feel presumptuous to try and tell others’ stories.

Sometimes I’d quietly observe us and try to figure out the common thread. What could possibly link people from such a wide spectrum of age, education, socioeconomic status, and a dozen other metrics in this way and in this place? I never did come up with any sound theory. We had each decided, for whatever reason, to spend months walking thousands of miles and endure all manner of hardship to get from one arbitrary line on a map to another along a trail that spent as many miles going east and west as it did going north and south. The link, if there is one, is probably related to the substance of our souls or perhaps a vague chronic dissatisfaction with life as we’d come to know it.

Iron Chef has a theory regarding our motivations. He says we all have two reasons for hiking the trail: the reason we give when people ask and the real reason, and based on many conversations with many hikers I’d say he’s right. The reason I’d give was something along the lines of a mid-life crisis. I was 39 and tired of the work I’d been doing and this seemed like an interesting adventure. The reality was I’d come to hate not just the life I lived but who I was at my core. I’d internalized shame to such a degree that spending more than ten minutes not distracted or drunk risked sending me into a dark spiral toward self-destruction. I'd become a living schism and saw only an unlikable stranger in the mirror.

I’d been driving trucks in the oilfield in North Dakota. Up at 4am, strapped into the groaning beast and churning through gears for 12 hours, maybe 14, sometimes 16. I was the sort of person who told people that money wasn’t important to me, and I believed it too. Yet there I was, far from friends and family, in a place I found to be mostly miserable in an industry I found to be mostly cruel doing a job I found mostly soul crushing. And I was only there for the money. I couldn’t decide who I was or what I wanted out of life, but I knew enough to know that life as I was living it was not satisfying in any lasting way.

Walking the trail was exhausting. Mining all the emotions and memories of it is exhausting too. Even here, bracketed by all the wonders of the modern world I know there is a quiet trail out there wanting muted steps. Hikers like blood cells coursing their way, life against a backdrop of immense life. All those steps found us here, now apart, quietly reinserted into this grinding machine we hammered and ripsawed out of a world too rough for us. As a species we’ve evolved beyond a utility to anything but ourselves, but a trail waits quietly.

            There was one impossibly bright spot in northern California. At mile 1136 I kissed Hot Mess, the girl with the luminous smile and a penchant for snooze alarms from mile 115. It took only 1021 miles for me to make my move. We’d been walking with each other, leap frogging each other, splitting hotel rooms, and nonchalantly trying like hell to be around each other for most of the trail to this point. I was (somehow) caught off guard but apparently her mom, GBH, saw it coming even before we did. Romance is the last thing either of us expected on a long trail, so of course, it’s what we found. From that point on we were rarely more than a fraction of a mile apart. Trail romances are not the easiest thing, they bare more than a passing resemblance to middle school romances (especially with her mom so often nearby).  We’d steal kisses when we had a moment alone, if the trail were wide enough to walk side by side we’d even hold hands. It may sounds ridiculous and frustrating, but I found it to be sweet and innocent. We’d regressed to children in so many other ways, why not this one?

Many of the towns here seemed interchangeable. We’d drop down thousands of feet in elevation to a diner, a gas station, a post office. We’d resupply and eat as much as we could and we’d climb back up, quietly giving ourselves up to the trail. It was, as I mentioned, usually hot. Shirts would be drenched through within the first couple miles and we’d be forcing ourselves to drink the hot water we were carrying. Sweat brought on chafe on our shoulders and hips. Our feet cooked in our shoes. There was no fix but to walk on and hope that farther north would be cooler.

            Climbing up outside of Belden we found ourselves having to camp at Myrtle Flats (henceforth to be referred to as Murder Flats), an infamous campsite and one that Hot Mess had sworn she would avoid. It was late in the day and the contour lines on the map indicated it would be a long time before we found another flat patch of ground so there we were, the usual five plus Ginger Grouse. We were tired, we were hot and sleep was not coming easy, especially when we began hearing noises just outside our camp. By 9:30 Hot Mess and I were the only ones awake, and we were wide awake. The sounds, sticks breaking mostly, had continued to circle us. I had my anemic (but ultralight!) headlamp scouring my side and Hot Mess was doing the same with hers. We didn’t want to cry wolf, it’s a damnable thing to wake up a thruhiker, but we were getting concerned. Individually, Hot Mess and I were running possibilities through our minds, as loud and large as it sounded it seemed a bear was most likely. We didn’t much bother with worrying about food smells and none of us had or would hang a bear bag on this trail. Part of me was worried but also I was a little excited as I had only seen one bear on this walk, and that was fleeting and from a distance. The sounds got closer on my side of camp and soon I could see a pair of glowing green eyes tracking back and forth just beyond the limits of my headlamp.

Bear or cat, I thought, bear or cat. I could see a vague silhouette pacing just beyond a pair of trees and then he rounded one of them, crouched low and began stalking towards me. It was only then I could clearly see he was a mountain lion. Fear froze me in place for a moment before I acted. With as much bass and ferocity as I could muster I bellowed, “FUCK OFF!” I still remember the feeling of shattering the silence of the forest, it felt a bit like yelling in church. And he did fuck off, a short distance, and then he sat and watched us.

There is nothing like locking eyes with a large predator on a dark night and I was extremely glad for my hiker family being nearby. We were all awake now and soon agreed on a plan. GBH, Hot Mess, and Ginger Grouse built a fire while Iron Chef, Little Feet, and I found fist sized rocks. We’d charge at him yelling aggressive things (Iron Chef: ‘We are only partially afraid of you!’) and hurling rocks. He would sit in awe of our abysmal level of accuracy and eventually disappear back into the forest only to appear moments later on the other side of camp. This went on for an hour and a half until it seemed he had disappeared back into the night and our need for sleep superseded our need to not be cat food. We snuffed out the fire and were all asleep fairly quickly, if fitfully, considering all the excitement.    

            Myrtle Flats was infamous due to a similar experience by a lone hiker in 2013; Muk Muk spent the night watching the (likely) same lion stalk around her tent, catching much of it on video, and eventually hitting the ‘oh shit’ button on her Spot locator beacon. In the safe light of day we decided he was probably just a curious adolescent and were probably not ever in any real danger, we even dubbed him Gaston the Asshole Lion and made jokes about him whenever we’d hear some new noise from the forest. But that night the fear was real and even now the hair on the back of my neck stands up when I remember that moment, the moment when he rounded a tree that was only 13 steps from my tent, crouched low, and stalked toward me.

I always took issue with the “we are visitors here” ethos. We aren’t visitors, or at least we weren’t always visitors. The idea of that is intended to invoke in us a sacred respect for the outdoors. We are to tiptoe around the local creatures and feel a vague sort of guilt about our presence outside of streets and structures. I see it differently. The out of doors is our home, it’s where we came from and we belong there. It also does us well to remember our animal natures. If you’ve any doubt about that just watch the evening news, it is a catalog of the worst of animal behavior and it makes sharks and mountain lions tame in comparison. Visitors? No, because visitors will treat a place as disposable, just ask any small business owner in a tourist town. My home is my sanctuary, I treat my cave with respect, and for those 140 days the trail and it’s environs were my home. I’ve a right to the space above my feet and I refuse to stand at reverential distance from this world. I embrace the rugged and the wild both inside and outside of myself.

By now we were more than trail hardened, we had evolved to trail life. Which was why I was so surprised at new pain. Over 1500 miles of hiking and pain was as ubiquitous as walking into spiderwebs and about as noteworthy. And then the shin splints hit.
Shin splints are a special kind of hell for a thruhiker. Ups and flats aren’t too bad, just a slight limp, but downs are affairs of winces, gasps, and muttered curses. I could manage to keep up with the hiker family until the downs at which point I would step aside knowing I would go from three and a half mph to less than one. I would track progress on the elevation profile and just before I would get to the top of a hill I would pop three ibuprofen to prepare. They didn’t seem to do much, maybe take the sharpest edge off. One shuffling step at a time, careful not to bump my foot on anything, I would slowly descend and my focus would narrow to a hand-sized spot on my lower right shin. My entire lower leg felt like it was unraveling like a wrapping paper tube and I was convinced I had to be doing permanent muscluloskeletal damage.

According to WebMD they can be caused by just about anything and the treatment is, of course, rest. GBH had shin splints at the end of the desert and she took no time off, just set her jaw and walked on. It was nice to have someone around who knew what it felt like so I followed her example and walked though it (while also gaining even more respect for how tough GBH is). About a week and a half and over 200 miles after the onset it began to abate and it felt like my pack was thirty pounds lighter. As I healed I found myself walking fast and far ahead of my family, enjoying the feeling of the planet spinning away under my rejuvenated stride.

Northern California Highlights

·      Best swimming of the trail, the Middle Fork of the Feather River

·      Hike Naked Day! Hot Mess did thirteen miles naked, I managed ten due to a morning chill (do you know about shrinkage?! (do you know about chafe?))

·      Coming down from 110 degrees on Hat Creek Rim to find a water pipe crossing the trail with a hole in it and a jet of the coldest, iciest water this side of the Arctic Ocean

·      Root beer floats outside of the gas station in Castella with almost all of the extended hiker family

·      Scotch at the halfway point of the trail

·      The Ginger Grouse game

·      After three months and 1689.2 miles, finally finishing our first state