Sierra

... or postholing in shoecicles amidst stunning beauty

By the time I got to the portal to the highest part of the PCT I was ready to be done with the desert. As much as I loved it, I was ready for new vistas. We walked into Kennedy Meadows in time to pick up packages and order burgers. There were a couple dozen other hikertrash around and we drank beers and bounced between trading ridiculous stories and comparing rumors of what we were getting ready to walk into. It was May 15th and conventional wisdom agreed that the earliest one should walk into the Sierra was early to middle June. A snow storm had already been through that week and we’d heard of hikers being turned back by the weather. We were all very minimally geared and with few exceptions no one had traction devices or ice axes with them. Many of us had been lured on trail early by reports of record low snowpack and the desire to get through the desert before it got hot. Now we were facing the consequences of our decisions. Once we left Kennedy Meadows there were only two ways out of the mountains, on foot or in a rescue helicopter.

A group of us walked out that morning, the sun was shining and the air was chilled. The landscape still looked like desert, but that changed quickly. I look back at photos that day and see optimistic faces and insufficient clothing. The air thinned, the horizon darkened, and my optimism waned. I was born and raised in small town Kansas and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a bit nervous. Many of my walking tribe were more experienced at walking in mountains and snow and I decided quickly to replace my fear with their wary confidence. If they could do it, I could do it; and if they turned back, well, I’d turn back.

I’m sitting in my car waiting on roadside assistance. Must’ve left my lights on. Two girls walk by, early 20s, attractive. They glance at me sideways and suspicious. I want to tell them that yes, they should be afraid, but not of me. They should fear the realization, much too late, of a life left unlived. The hours spent working to buy shiny new things and the energy expended worrying what others are thinking. They are those raindrops at that tip of the divide deciding to go east or west and they chose safe and limited, a nice car, the appearance of happiness. The other way looked murky, strewn with uncertainty, clouded by possibility, but mostly it looked uncrowded when crowds were what they wanted.

I have fears too. I’m afraid I will forget what I learned. I'm afraid I’ll fall back into old habits, be drawn toward comfort and consumption. I remember Mike with his beaten Subaru, his lusting glances at the horizon, sunburnt face, forearms thick from clinging to smooth rock faces. He knows something most people will never learn and I’m hoping that specific something settles deep into the foundation of my life.

We quickly learned to take advantage of any break in the weather to dry gear; wet gear left unchecked meant possible hypothermia if the weather turned on us and mountain weather is unpredictable. Mornings were sunny and snow would drift in by early afternoon. We made our way to Crabtree Meadows under wet heavy snow and found a roaring campfire, the first one I had seen in 766 miles. I set up on an inch or two of snow, donned a trash bag as poncho, and tried to collect as much warmth as I could among the other 19 hikers.

Here the talk turned to our odds of making it over Forester Pass, at 13,200 feet the highest point on the PCT. A hiker called Backtrack stayed true to his name announcing with an easy smile that he was turning back to get out via a side trail many miles back. In the days before 7 other hikers had tried to get over and were turned back by a wall of snow at the top of the pass. The word they used was ‘impassable’. Two hikers I had not previously met, Flying Fish and Ninja Tortoise had both been over Forester before. Flying Fish had been over it in 2011, a notoriously high snow year, and both men shrugged with quiet confidence agreeing we would be able to get over. Hot Mess had more backcountry experience than most people I’d meet and she felt confident as well. We each checked our food supply and with the pass itself only 13 miles away we realized that worst case scenario it would only cost us an extra day’s food if Forester turned us back.

I wasn’t confident about our chances of getting over the pass. The most likely scenario seemed to be we’d walk all day, be turned back like the others and find ourselves almost 2 days from a way out. Vague tragic stories drifted through the periphery of my consciousness: inexperienced people in the woods, one questionable decision, a small lapse in judgment, overconfidence. In the end my decision was less a conscious choice and more a shrugging indifference. “Well, I’ll give it a shot, I didn’t come to this trail in search of comfort or safety, it’ll be fine... probably” Besides, these were people whom I trusted, even the ones I’d just met.

The next morning, with varying levels of trepidation, we set out. We climbed a few thousand feet to get to the base of Forester, but altitude and nerves weighted packs, lengthened miles, and spread us out along the trail. The sky was blue and the sun bright when we began the day, but all morning we watched clouds gather and darken the horizon ahead of us. Every step got us closer, and every new cloud made success less likely. Just getting to the base of Forester was a long hard slog, I was exhausted and couldn’t understand why.

When I finally arrived the first hikers, Ryman and Oatmeal, were already at the top of the pass followed closely by Flying Fish and Iron Chef, I watched from below to see if they would find a way over or around the wall of snow blocking the trail before I started up. When the first dot disappeared up and to the left over the pass I swallowed the last of three big Snickers Peanut Butter Bars that constituted my breakfast and began the exhausting last 800 feet of climb. I’ve been through Marine Corps boot camp and combat training, done two-a-day soccer practices under a sweltering Kansas sun and nothing has ever exhausted me like that final climb.

My feet moved like they were encased in concrete and I struggled to take in enough oxygen in the cold, thin air. My memories of that day are clear and sharp, my focus was narrowed to just the act of moving forward.  Looking at a map of that climb there were only eight switchbacks, but if you’d asked me at the time I’d have guessed at least a hundred, maybe a thousand. I got to the top with three other hikers I’d just met the night before, Ninja Tortoise, Data, and Stop&Go. We paused for a few quick photos and then began following the deep footprints of the hikers who’d gone before. Ninja Tortoise seemed bothered by the white-out snow conditions, lamenting that the views from Forester were his favorite of the trail and all we could see was solid white. The walk down began in snow, took us through sleet, then freezing rain, and finally just rain and a campfire more welcoming than the last.

The next morning I slipped out quietly over Kearsarge Pass, contemplating this new trail I found myself on. The desert PCT was a distant cousin to the Sierra PCT, connected but not alike in any way I could discern. The desert was all sun and dust and long waterless stretches. The Sierra was schizophrenic weather, postcard views, and water so abundant that keeping my feet dry was a constant and losing battle.

A thing I've noticed, I don’t care about the things people care about anymore. I don’t care as much for stuff, objects, the crap we lust over, acquire, and then pile on the lawn a few years later at a garage sale. Some things, sure, if it’s something I can use in a concrete way to make my life simpler or a necessary piece of gear for a specific adventure. Other than that, I mostly just want to get rid of what few possessions I still have (and that’s not many, a car, a 6x12 storage unit’s worth of stuff including a motorcycle, that’s it). But imagining even the small pile of stuff I have gives me a headache.

I spent an extra day in town after my friends left trying to get over a head cold, the cold wasn’t the issue, fear of it progressing to pneumonia was. Severe enough pneumonia, at 10k plus feet, in the snow could result in a helicopter ride out, but impatience got the better of me and I trudged back in feeling like death but hoping the feeling would pass.

When people get sick they usually stay go home to get better, what I hadn’t realized while I lay about a cheap hostel was that the trail was my home. Back on trail I endured an exhausting day and a half of sporadic sleet and snow, then the sun came out and there, at home, in the thin clean air and under a warming yellow sun I recovered. Maybe a cold virus is a byproduct of modern life, maybe carpet and stale air and traffic makes us sick, drains our strength, corrupts our souls? Maybe the cure is as simple as escaping our caves and finding a fresh patch of dirt to walk on?

I learned to camp a mile or two shy of the passes. This put me at 10,000 feet plus and let me cross over the passes on hard snow crust before the morning sun had a chance to soften it. Sleeping at elevation also acclimatized me to the thin oxygen more quickly so 25 mile days were still possible.

When we’d left Kennedy Meadows, several of our extended tribe decided to skip north 300 miles and hike south to give the late season storms time to pass. One result of this was my extra day in town left me almost entirely alone in the Sierra. I came back in over Kearsarge, still sick, with Dawg and Tinker but they quickly hiked on. I met Little Feet briefly on Pinchot Pass and then he was gone as well. The other passes I crossed over with just my thoughts to keep me company.

The thought that struck over and over was the price of admission. Most people will only see the things we saw in photos. At the end of this blog will be a montage of photos. You can watch it fullscreen, maybe even put it on a big flat screen TV, but you won’t see what we saw. You’ll see hints of it, pale representations of the grandeur, and nothing more. The Sierra, more so than many places along the trail, is isolated. We paid the price of admission in the hundreds of thousands of steps we took. We saw it raw and unfiltered and my memories of that place still cause me to stare into the middle distance, lost in wonder.

I reached a point where the thing I was doing became who I was. I didn’t want to be around non-thruhikers. I didn’t have anything to say to them. So many interactions with dayhikers and locals were one-sided affairs. They’d ask me questions, I'd try to answer in a way that wasn’t sprinkled with inside jokes or thruhiker slang, and I’d get lost trying to find the right words. I knew what they wanted to hear, how it was an uplifting personal journey resulting in real and positive change at a deeply spiritual level. But it wasn’t that. Mostly it was what it looked like, hungry tired people walking for hours on end, days on end, months on end.

We walked out of the Sierra the same way we’d walked in, lost in a white-out. Just a few miles shy of Sonora Pass the wind howled and snow blew up the side of the mountain at us. My sunglasses crusted over with ice and the trail disappeared. Indy was in a dangerously low state, not enough calories or layers maybe. GBH seemed resolute but was receding into herself, just stringing together her steps. Most frustrating was the knowledge that a paved highway was not more than two or three miles away, but it might as well have been a thousand. As before, GPS failed and maps become useless when you can only see a few dozen feet. Hot Mess combined our efforts and eventually found our way just as Larb, Jackrabbit, and Breathless showed up, high-spirited and singing.

Around 400 miles after walking out of Kennedy Meadows the Sierras became a thing we did. The long desert and the high mountains were done. The two hardest sections were behind us, but we still had over 1600 miles to go and a lot of hardship and wonder can happen in 1600 miles.

I won’t bore you with every detail of the Sierra, but here are some highlights:

·      I fell in a creek early on and lost my sunglasses, after a day of a piercing headache and constant squinting figured out to double up my bug net over my eyes to cut the glare and avoid snow blindness

·      Catching up to Hot Mess and GBH under a full moon sky

·      A bonus day of hiking to finish off the JMT and climb Half-Dome

·      Hiking from half dome to the Yosemite Lodge in the shortest shorts you’ve seen and a shirt unbuttoned to my navel while making prolonged eye contact with hundreds of day hikers

·      The best hitch of the trail, Keith H, a biogeographer (PhD)/mountain climber (Denali) who has lived a dozen lives already with no signs of slowing down

·      Swimming in half a dozen frigid lakes (which was half as many as Hot Mess, Breathless, and Indy)

·      Hiking half-drunk out of Tuolumne with Flying Fish while we talked of pickups, footwear, and making life fit into the margins of the next adventure