Thirteen Days
When I woke up on September 3rd, I didn’t know that it was going to be my last day on trail. I was only about 25 miles from my next resupply in Quincy and I had a date in mind for meeting my family in Kennedy Meadows South, at the other end of the Sierra. The trail, however, had other plans.
Over thousands of miles and hundreds of thousands of feet of elevation change, mountain after mountain, the Pacific Crest Trail is, unsurprisingly, covered in rocks. There is the infamous lava rock of central Oregon. There are the gray slabs strewn down toward Stevens pass that sound like walking on dinner plates as they shift underfoot. Millions of mostly unremarkable rocks. I must have stepped, and misstepped, on loose rocks hundreds, if not thousands of times since I started the trail in April. I did about a thousand miles in shoes with absurd stack heights. Many friends warned about their instability and I had many close calls. Still, he perambulated.
Then, somewhere in the ten miles between Burney Falls and Burney, at the very moment I was thinking about how much I loved my new, reasonable stack height shoes, I had a misstep that felt more like a sprain and was, in fact, the beginning of the end.
I had gotten to Burney by 7:30 in the morning and set a new record for town chores. By 11 I had resupplied, showered, and done laundry, so I decided a meal at the town’s finest diner was in order before getting back on trail. Simply walking around town with my fully laden pack had me limping, so I stayed the night, iced the ankle and wrote the previous post. And then, for the next five days, I put the pedal to the floor.
I don’t know if more rest would have helped but I certainly acted as though I didn’t need it and raced out of Burney. The trail out of town featured a fish hatchery, amorous bulls, less amorous cows, a plateau with views of Lassen Peak and Shasta, night hiking along the plateau rim, and cowboy camping as the Milky Way turned in the night.
Powered by Mio (energy drink concentrate) and protected by ibuprofen, I moved fast the next morning. Once on the trail, the same cold air that had encouraged me to stay in my quilt was brisk and energizing. As light started to bleed over the horizon I moved faster, accelerating into the day. Getting up before first light is invigorating and I wished I had done it more.
The trick after Old Station is to camp as close to the border of Lassen Volcanic National Park as possible since a bear can is required to camp along the 19 miles of trail in the park. At the same time, this is where the burn from the 2021 Dixie Fire becomes inescapable. Green patches are rare and the widow makers are ever present. I camped about 3 miles before the park and planned on making it to the Domingo Springs campsite about 5 trail miles and a road walk after the exit boundary, a 28 mile effort in total. Even a month before, this would have been intimidating. If the ankle held out, I knew I had the miles in me, and, despite being almost completely burned, Lassen offered a few treats toward its southern boundary: Boiling Springs Lake, heated to 125 degrees Fahrenheit by steam vents and a modest geyser that simply steamed in most years but shot up some water this season thanks, possibly, to a higher water table. Both were treats. I’m always up for a little geothermal action.
An enormous moon rose over the next ridge as I crossed the park boundary. Night had fallen but I wouldn’t need my headlamp until I reentered the forest a little further on. A barn owl, doing its best impression of a pterodactyl, called as I passed a campsite and I committed to the final 6 miles. The trees in the burn were covered by fruiting fungal bodies that plinked as they fell in the quiet of the night. Once or twice a full branch fell in the darkness, one of the more harrowing sounds of backpacking.
The injury that was aggravated by my bad step before Burney had been with me at a more manageable level for several hundred miles of trail, both in the desert and Washington, and I knew that relentless downhill could be trouble. The descent into Domingo Springs was about the worst that it had been. I had the night to rest and, thanks to Blaze, my bookbinder friend from the other night, I had a homemade freeze-dried beef stew–hot beef stew thanks to the stove I acquired for the Sierra. Eating on the trail had been pleasantly utilitarian for me. I had no complaints about four months of cold mashed potatoes and salmon packets, but there was no denying the joy of this gourmet feast.
The highs and lows of this week were whiplash. Beef stew. High! The ankle in pain for the flat ten mile stretch into Chester the next day. Low! Meeting up with Lucy and Caterpillar (formerly Pockets), who I started southbound with, and their friend Trent. High! A blistering 15 miles out of Chester after 2 pm. High! A frigid rainy 23 miles toward Belden. Low!
The last 5 miles of the 23 that day were the real low. I had been on track to make it to Belden a little after dark, but sometime after I passed the geological boundary between the Cascades and the Sierra the ankle had me down to a mile and a half per hour. I might have been winning the mental game with the ankle, but I was losing the physical war. There are few things I like more than being warm and dry under a roof sounding with rain drops. As I camped near the ruins of an old cabin that night, the weather obliged.
In the morning, the rain broke and I got back on trail for the last five miles into Belden. Somewhere in those last miles, this herky-jerky style, where a day off only earned me a few days of hiking seemed unsustainable. The best I could do, it seemed, was limp toward the Sierra. Entering that extreme terrain with its long food carries was a non-starter. Beside feeling pushed off trail because of the injury, I felt pulled by a desire to apply my learnings from the trail in the real world.
Although I found through-hiking to be a lot less restorative than shorter backpacking trips, the noise of regular life was clearly reduced. Some lessons came early and I had hundreds of miles to better understand or work on them: difficulty in dealing with certain kinds of adversity was one early lesson. Although I wanted to be on trail more than anywhere else, realizing that a misplaced competitiveness had been part of what brought me there helped me shed a number of distracting thoughts. The relentless challenges and surprises of the trail gave me time to contemplate on and practice, sometimes successfully, these learnings and others. I was looking forward to bringing this process to the off-trail world. This came with a feeling of guilt, however. This sense that I would enjoy post-trail life made me question whether there was a difference between getting off trail due to injury and simply quitting.
Still, it was settled. This would be it. It felt right. I felt optimistic. I slowly made my way toward Belden, the conifers on the ridge across the river fading in and out of the stubborn mist of the morning. I started to play out possibilities for my most immediate days post-trail. Maybe hitch down to LA and celebrate my birthday with Dave and Gustavo? Visit my friend Noah’s new bar? Follow that up with trail magic for Lucy and Naked Dave as they made it to the desert?
As I thought along these lines, my earbuds were filled with the tell-tale ringing of a FaceTime call. It was Kyler! He was checking in from the southern Sierra. He had a few hikes planned around Whitney, but after, did I want to do the Sierra southbound? Hell, yes, I did. All of a sudden, those trail lessons didn’t seem like they needed immediate application in the real world, the need to rehab my ankle a less welcome conduit for doing so. I told him I wanted to, but also that there was trouble in paradise. I’d reach out soon.
Immediately, I scrapped the LA plan. I would rent a car, do some trail magic, shuttle hikers around, schedule some time with Blaze Physio and rehab the ankle. I would not say goodbye to the trail just yet.
I dropped further down toward Belden, finally catching a glimpse of the bridge over the Feather River. Was that a martini made of iron and Edison bulbs atop the bridge? Earlier in Oregon, I had learned that trail adjacent resorts were more rustic cabin than five-star luxury. Still, this incongruous icon could only be read as a welcome sign.
I was joined in Belden by a coterie of very wet hikers, relieved to be off their feet and out of the rain. There were no martinis, but there were some local recreators who shared their breakfast burritos. The sun came out and we had a yard sale (dried out our gear) and charged up our devices. An older couple was heading toward Sacramento and were kind enough to give me a ride. This was good luck. The southbound climb out of Belden is of a legendary grade and most vehicle traffic was two-wheeled.
Within a day, I had picked up my car in Sacramento and, with a cooler full of beer and Lacroix, I headed out. I spent the next couple of days driving to the north Sierra, then south to Truckee, distributing Coors Banquet and PCT hikers along the way. I had been in touch with Kyler and Trevor who, along with Sydney, Amelia, Leggy, Gusher and Stakes, were going to camp at Onion Valley Campground on my birthday before tackling Mount Whitney. I would join them for the camping, at least.
US-395 is possibly the most beautiful drive in the country. The Owens Valley sits just below 4,000 feet, while the tallest peaks in the Sierra sit above 14,000. The perspective on these peaks from the valley floor is nothing less than majestic. The stories of the hikers I met, along with these views, were some comfort for not covering these miles the way I had wanted to.
A little further down the way, I picked up pizza in Bishop and half of the crew in Independence before heading up to the campground. The pizza feast was preceded by a candle in a gluten-free marshmallow. A round of happy birthday rang throughout the Range of Light, or at least Campsite 11.
The first days on trail with Kyler and Trevor and Sydney had felt incredibly special, the bond with them as real as any of my friendships that don’t span an age difference of decades. While our meeting might have been happenstance, the fundamentals of the bonds were clearly not random. The other hikers that they had met along the way, some of whom I knew well and some of whom I had only met during our Washington meet-up, had the same commitment to humor first, the same maturity, the same strong empathy. I had often questioned my decision to flip up to the Canadian border. I could have met this crew at Crater Lake and continued north with them. It would have been a lot of fun. But there would have been other bonds lost. It’s hard to imagine Lucy and Naked Dave and Sweetblood or Big Daddy and Jai and Maverick or Wonka and her trail family as mere faces passing south.
We said our goodbyes the next morning and I headed down to Independence, picking up several hikers on the way. I drove north, the jagged peaks of the Sierra once again towering over my favorite highway. .
Just outside of Yosemite, I ran into Sam and Cameron, who I hadn’t seen since Washington, and camped with them at one of my favorite campgrounds outside the park. The next morning, I drove them toward Tuolumne Meadows to drop them off for the Sierra High Route. On the way, we happened upon the Israeli-born hasidic rabbi who drove them all the way from Oregon to Yosemite a few days before. He supervises a matzo bakery in Williamsburg. Naturally, we exchanged information
I then took a few more hikers down from the park and crossed the Sierra one last time on my way to Sacramento. I spent the next day with my friend Adam, who I knew from our time with Teach for America in Louisiana, meeting his wife and daughter for the first time. In the morning, I drove to the airport and, for the first time since April, did not know when I would see the trail again.