Skywalker--Highs and Lows on the Pacific Crest Trail (18 page)

The ascent was slow at first. White-capped peaks appeared in the distance. Of course, it was the snowmelt from those same peaks that had created this brilliantly verdant setting.

My new hiking partner, CanaDoug, a stocky, 53 year-old Canadian, and I arrived in Menarche Meadows. It was a beautiful, wide-open meadow, but nakedly exposed to a strong current. Immediately, I made a bone-headed mistake.

The Kern River flowed out of the mountains and through Menarche Meadows, in an almost lyrically beautiful way.

“Hey, that sand bar along the river looks perfect for our tents,” I said to CanaDoug.

“Are you kidding?” CanaDoug asked.

“But shouldn’t the wind die down at dark?” I asked hopefully.

“I don’t know,” he said skeptically. “I’m going up on that hill.”

I pitched my tent on the sand bar, only to be clobbered by gales of wind all night. No sleep. Bad start.

I followed that up by getting lost second thing next morning. Head down and leaning forward into the powerful current, I had barged across Menarche Meadows and was happy to get to tree cover. But then I went the wrong way.

Every other time I had been lost, I would simply backtrack angrily and soon find out where I had blundered. But here I thrashed determinedly straight up the bank of a creek, surprised at how rugged and steep the trail had become. A grave feeling set in. This wasn’t a careless mistake. When you worry constantly about something for days and weeks, even months and years, but it happens anyway, it takes on a different type of gravity. Not anger, because you were doing your damndest to avoid it. A more profound negative feeling sets in.
Maybe I’m in over my head.

I kept walking. Finally, I came upon a well-maintained trail running at a right angle to the direction I was climbing. But I had no idea if it was the PCT. Unlike the desert, the Sierras have an extensive network of hiking trails. And if this was the PCT, should I go left or right? I went left and soon came to a fork.

I dropped my backpack and spent almost an hour running sorties in various directions. But I worried about straying too far from my backpack, given the bear-dense environment. My reconnaisance only left me more confused. Finally, I decided to sit down and eat lunch, and hope another hiker came along.

I soon heard singing. That meant it was probably Backtrack, the brainy college professor from Alaska. What a study in contradictions this man was. He had an utter fear of bears.

“If I saw a bear,” he insisted, “I would feel like I’ve done something wrong.”

“I thought Alaskans treated ‘em like pets,” I said surprised.

“No,” he corrected me, “I had a friend in Alaska that got attacked and killed by a bear while riding his bicycle.”

Despite this, Backtrack hiked at night more than anyone else. He compensated by keeping up a lively repertoire of evening tunes.

“Where in the world is the PCT?” I asked Backtrack. “You’re sitting on it,” he said.

“That way,” I started down the hill to the left.

“No, this way,” he headed right up the hill. The only solace I could find from my haplessness was that
Backtrack
had gotten his own trail name from similar mishaps.

We soon came upon CanaDoug, who had corralled three other hikers who had taken the same errant route as me.

“Skywalker,” CanaDoug laughed, “you’re lucky you took the wrong trail. I ran into a big bear—350 pounder—right on the PCT.”

“Oh great, he must have wandered down from Canada.”

“We’ve already decided,” CanaDoug said in pep-talk fashion, “everybody needs to hang with another person, at least until we get through these mountains.”

That was music to my ears. As I was to see on several occasions further along, this rugged Canadian had some latent leadership skills that surfaced on impromptu occasions.

Chapter 19

Two-Miles High

B
eing over 10,000 feet takes some getting used to. There is the obvious reason—the air is thinner. I seemed to do alright here, while others gasped, as we climbed and climbed the second and third day into the Sierras. Maybe the years I had spent getting and staying in shape for this trail were helping.

The cold was another story. It must be noted that mammals living in cold climates (ex. polar bears) tend to be short-limbed and thick trunked.
Humans
can adapt over time, as well. Eskimos are the most short-limbed people on this planet. This minimizes the surface area and helps them retain heat. Giraffes, on the other hand, have massive surface areas, which makes it difficult to retain heat. Surely not coincidentally, this is why they are found exclusively in warmer climes. Thousands of lame giraffe jokes over the years aside, it is obviously the animal I most closely resemble.

The weather is almost always perfect this time of year in the Sierras. But when the sun goes down, the temperature plummets forty or more degrees. I was to spend a total of ten nights camped above ten thousand feet, and the pattern was always the same—start the night off reasonably warm and end up shivering in seven layers of clothing.

On the third day, we entered Sequoia National Park, where the scenery bordered on
ethereal.
Being from Georgia, I was partial to pine trees to begin with. But I had never seen anything like these gigantic Sequoia trees. In fact, they are the largest living things on this planet (a few things in the ocean are bigger). Sequoias can measure over 300 feet in height and have been around since Biblical times. California’s redwood trees, found in the coastal region, are actually taller, but Sequoias have much larger trunks and branches. Despite their weight being in the neighborhood of two-and-a-half million pounds, they retain a graceful beauty about them. It doesn’t take a dewy-eyed tree hugger to realize that cutting them down would be worse than a crime.

That evening we arrived at Chicken Spring Lake, a gorgeous alpine lake that had obviously been fed from the snowmelt in the mountains hovering steeply on three sides of it. I just took my nalgene bottle and dipped it straight into the lake for a drink. Attila was on hand and rhapsodic at the whole scene.

“I didn’t expect to see you again,” I said to the fleet-footed hydrologist.

“Oh man,” he said wondrously, “a place like this shows the world has hope.”

Attila had gotten here last night and spent all day just gazing at the water. He would repeat this habit of taking a zero day at the best water sources all the way to Canada.

“But bundle up,” he added, “it got down to seventeen last night.”

Although I obsessed over the approaching cold night, the excitement was palpable around the campsite as a dozen-and-a-half of our comrades arrived on the scene. Mount Whitney, the highest point in the contiguous United States, was only two days away.

Luna, the young girl I had seen at various points along the way (who hadn’t!), was also on hand.

“Skywalker,” she asked, “are you going up Mount Whitney (Mount Whitney is a side trail off the PCT)?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t have an ice axe.”

“Oh, come on now,” she scoffed. “You’re going up with me.”

I would have loved to have climbed a marquee mountain such as Mount Whitney, but it would add an extra day-and-a-half before getting to the next food re-supply point. But I was soon to find out that, for whatever reason, this young girl wanted me to summit Whitney even more than I did.

“It’s a little sketchy in a few places,” Dirk said.

There was that damn word
sketchy
again. Hikers loved to use it. But I would soon learn to fear this god-awful word, whenever I heard it. For whatever reason—perhaps not to appear cowardly—hikers don’t like to say the word “dangerous. So they use “sketchy.”

Dirk, Snake Charmer, and Laura, were descending from Mount Whitney as we were headed up to the ranger’s base camp. Ingrid had sensibly chosen not to go up because she was having breathing problems at this altitude. The other three looked
flushed
in the face. We’ve all seen that kind of flushed look before.

“Why don’t we start up at three in the morning,” CanaDoug suddenly suggested to everyone at base camp.

“Why?” I asked perplexed.

“We could watch the sunrise from the summit.”

“Man, that would be cool,” said Donovan and several other hikers.

“Come on, Skywalker,” Doug exhorted me.

“Forget it,” I said, uncharacteristically decisive. “I may try for the summit tomorrow morning.”

“You’re going up,” Luna again insisted. “I’m not taking no for an answer.”

“I don’t know if I have enough food for the extra day,” I grumbled.

“You will be fed, Skywalker,” HWAP said amused.

All I knew is I’d be shivering all night here at the base camp, which was at 11,500 feet, and higher than I’d ever been in my 48 years. By contrast, Clingman’s Dome, the highest point on the entire Appalachian Trail, measures 6,700 feet.

I expected to hear all kinds of racket in the middle of night as everyone headed off. But to my surprise, I heard nothing. And it sure wasn’t because I was sound asleep. When I emerged from my tent, there was CanaDoug.

“My foot’s really banged up,” said Canadoug. “I’m giving it a rest today.”

Sitting next to him was Spare Parts, an older guy who had practically killed himself the last few weeks straining to keep up with Luna. Because Mount Whitney is not part of the official PCT, he was also planning to rest in his tent all day.

“That leaves you and me, Skywalker,” Luna said confidently. “Are you about ready?”

Luna was a physical specimen, pure and simple. I honestly don’t say that in a prurient sense. Describing her any other way would be like trying to describe me without using the word tall. She was of Scandinavian ancestry and had the type physique one routinely sees in winter Olympic athletes. She also had the most upright, purest stride I’ve ever seen in a hiker. I was sentenced to trying to keep up with her the entire day. And that—putting in your maximum effort, or more commonly said, hiking your ass off—isn’t necessarily a good idea at such high elevations.

I halfway expected Luna to zoom ahead out of view, at which point I could decide whether to continue, or turn around. But every time it looked like it might happen, she would stop and wait on me.

We ascended a thousand feet to Guitar Lake, which is referred to by mountaineers as a
tarn.
Many of these alpine lakes remain a turquoise-colored ice, year-round. However, Guitar Lake gets enough sun for it to melt into crystal clear water. I dipped my nalgene bottle in and drank what was undoubtedly some of the best water in the world. Dark-brown
marmots,
that could be mistaken for raccoons or rabbits, were doing somersaults all over the boulders surrounding the lake. In fact, the next couple weeks I was to notice that the higher the elevation, the more marmots we saw. They are obviously especially well-insulated animals.

“Are all these marmot jackets and sleeping bags we use made of actual marmots?” I asked several people. I was hoping the answer was yes, but nobody really seemed to know.

Several hikers had camped right here at Guitar Lake last night. This would have been hugely advantageous to camp this far up, and I had considered it. But I had worried the extreme cold would overwhelm my lean frame.