Skywalker--Highs and Lows on the Pacific Crest Trail (19 page)

Luna and I started up. The trail ran sideways along ridges and was covered with snow and ice. I assumed as low of a crouch (not exactly my forte!) as possible, and tentatively began traversing zigzags up the mountain.

“Luna,” I gasped. “I’m holding you up. Go on ahead.”

“Shut up and keep hiking,” she barked.

I kept hiking, but remained schizophrenic about the entire endeavor.
This isn’t part of the PCT. I don’t have to do this.

My head felt like the sun was boring a hole right through my skull. I had just finished reading Jon Krakauer’s book,
Into Thin Air.
In it, he had vividly described the headaches that oxygen-deprived mountaineers get at higher elevations. Krakauer had mentioned that mountaineers frequently attempted to relieve headaches by putting snow on top of their heads. I loaded up my baseball cap with snow and placed it on my head, which brought some temporary relief.

I had only brought one water bottle from base camp, and was rapidly drinking it down in the glaring, early-afternoon sun. My rationale had been that there was snow everywhere, so why lug a bunch of water up to the top. However, I had also heard, “Watch out for the
pink snow.
” Veteran mountaineers have reams of tales of violently being laid low by contaminated, algae snow. Nonetheless, I began stuffing my nalgene bottle full of snow and gulping the contents down.

A man and his teenage daughter came from the opposing direction.

“Excuse me sir,” I anxiously asked. “About how far is it to the top?”

He seemed to pick up the concern in my voice and chose to answer in an empathetic way.

“You’ve done the worst,” he said. “Well,” he corrected himself, “actually you have a couple more icy ridges ahead, but then it levels out close to the top.”

“How long ‘til we get to where it evens out?”

The High Sierras rock. Better yet, the PCT hiker
covers the very most wondrous parts.

“Oh, you should be up there in about fifteen minutes,” he assured me.

Some people low-ball you in situations like that, and others (like me) are more likely to high-ball you. Perhaps Freud could figure out why. All I know is that this guy had dramatically understated the amount of time ahead.

Soon, I was exhausted again.

“Luna, honestly,” I pleaded, “If you fall here, you’ve bought it. I’m not a professional climber. It doesn’t make sense to take so much risk.”

“You’re going to the top with me, Skywalker,” she said unflinchingly. “In fact, you’re leading me up there because I’m hiking behind you the rest of the way up.”

Luna was an unlikely
trail Nazi.
But that’s what this was turning into—a forced march.

“I’ve got to take a break,” I said firmly and lay down on the snow.

I slowly began picking at some food and gulping down Advil. Soon some our comrades arrived in high spirits as they were descending down Whitney. Normally quite voluble in all these shoestring conversations on the trail, I lay there comatose as Luna entertained.

“What did you do to him?” Five Dollar asked.

“Oh, he’s just playing possum,” Luna said merrily.

“Watch out for that right turn up ahead,” Five Dollar said in the first serious comment I’d ever heard him make. “It’s really icy.”

“We’ve got to get going, Skywalker,” Luna said. “Do you want to get caught in the dark on Whitney?”

“I’m going back down with them,” I said, without really meaning it.

“No, you’re not,” she cut me off. “Get your you-know-what moving.”

It was now a matter of just executing the best I could. There were two steep ridges that were completely flat, but iced over. If you slipped, you were
home-free.
I quickly took to my knees and groveled across the iciest parts. Obviously, I wasn’t going to win the Edmund Hilary Stiff-Upper-Lip-Award, but at least I was through complaining. Luna could only carry me so far.

Eventually, we arrived at the flat area, although every time I saw something resembling an icy ridge, tremors pulsed through me. We bore into the stiff, cutting wind, and there were a couple more snowfields as we neared the top. Finally, we arrived at the summit of Mount Whitney about 3:00. It had taken us five hours.

Mount Whitney, at 14,694 feet, is the most awesome landscape I’ve ever had the privilege to behold. It reminded me of the moving footage of Brad Pitt and company in the film,
Seven Years in Tibet—
white capped mountain range after range,
ad infinitum
into the distance. Actually, there had been considerable speculation in the past that Mount Whitney was actually not the tallest mountain in the Lower Forty-Eight. Somewhere in this sea of soaring peaks I was looking at was a lonely mountain a few feet taller. But—so the story goes—the National Park Service and U.S. Forest Service don’t want to publicize it because a whole tourism industry is built around Mount Whitney.

Luna sat there celebrating and snapping photos with John Muir Trail Hikers (The fabulous—and highly recommended by this hiker—John Muir Trail ends at Whitney summit). Meanwhile, I just lay there with an awful headache, worried about the coming descent. The only thing that motivated me was I had to take an emergency crap. As we had left Crabtree Meadow this morning for Mount Whitney, Luna and I had passed a receptacle with small sacks. You were supposed to use these to pack out any bowel movements you might have on Whitney. It was obviously desirable that pristine Mount Whitney not look like human-sized geese had invaded it. But Luna and I had hurried right past it.

I walked sullenly over behind the emergency hut on the

Whitney summit. Here, I quickly laid a
deuce
in the snow. Obviously, that won’t win me any trail good citizenship award, but—believe me—I didn’t have any jurisdiction in the matter at this point.

“Let’s go, Luna,” I kept urging her. “It’s almost four.”

But she was a fish in water to my fish out of water on Whitney summit, and kept on socializing. Finally, everybody left except us.

We were quite lucky, to be honest. Violent electrical storms are very common on Mount Whitney late on summer afternoons and have aborted many a climb to Whitney’s summit; several people have even been struck and died over the years. The weather could have changed on a dime. But it didn’t.

Luna and I started down. I didn’t think we would pass anybody still climbing this late in the afternoon. But in the distance appeared a lone female figure trudging to the top. When she got up to us, it appeared this lady was pushing sixty.

“Excuse me,” this woman asked us, “how much longer do I have to reach the summit?”

“Forty-five minutes max,” I quickly said.

“Forty-five minutes,” she gasped, “It’s just right there.”

“Less,” Luna said sympathetically.

“Forty-five minutes max,” I said. I honestly thought it was best to not lead her on with a low-ball. She looked worried, but soldiered on.

We soon came up on the John Muir Trail hikers, who were all gathered around a gigantic crevasse in the snow. Worse yet, it was right where we would ordinarily walk.

“What the hell happened here?” I asked.

“It looks like a horse, or something, might have fallen through,” one of them laughed.

“Man, if you fell in there,” I exclaimed, “how would you ever get out?”

All I know is I became especially careful, gingerly planting my steps on solid snow to avoid this most dreadful of possibilities. It was late June after all.

The icy patches and steep falloffs were every bit as daunting while descending. But now I had a psychological tailwind, and we made good time back to Guitar Lake.

“I’m washing my hair,” Luna immediately said, and headed straight over to the crystal clear tarn to submerge her head.

“You’re next,” she announced when she pulled her head out. I put up a tepid argument, but quickly caved. Magically, the bitter cold water devastated my headache, and I was able to hike at maximum speed with Luna back down to base camp.

Luna had obviously found the perfect combination of humiliation and encouragement (heavily weighted towards the former!) to get me to Whitney summit. I’ll leave it up to the reader to decide whether or not I would have made it to the top without her.

Chapter 20

“Fifty Feet”

If at first you don’t succeed, parachuting is probably not for you.

Old saying

S
tupidity can run amok in groups, especially after having been out for so many days and with everybody running low on food.

It was two days later and we were facing Forrester’s Pass, the highest point on the actual PCT at 13,180 feet. The minute a person begins planning a PCT hike, you hear about Forrester’s Pass. Yesterday afternoon, CanaDoug and I had forded ice-cold Tindall Creek and camped with others along its banks. Some hikers had seemed tight as a tick. However, summiting Mount Whitney seemed to have temporarily inoculated me. I was uncharacteristically serene about what lay ahead.

CanaDoug had eagerly bolted out of camp this morning. He seemed especially determined after having missed Mount Whitney. Usually, I could catch up with him. But this morning he was in a fly pattern. So was everybody else for that matter. It made no sense. Speaker after speaker at the Kickoff had reiterated what Yogi had emphasized in her guidebook:

Indeed, it seemed especially important to heed that advice on this occasion. Back at the Whitney base camp, a ranger had told a group of us, “There’s about fifty feet of
black ice
right at the top of Forrester Pass. That’s where it gets sketchy.”

Sketchy.

I rushed for miles through snow and rock fields trying to catch up with everyone. A giant wall of granite running at virtually a right angle appeared ahead a few miles in front of us. Somewhere in there was an opening—albeit narrow and icy—that was the pass we needed to get through this large monolith. It was difficult to tell exactly where because the sun wasn’t peering over the granite wall yet. But nobody was a waitin’.

A couple days before, a woman named Pepperoni, who was attempting to become the first woman to ever ride a horse the entire PCT, had arrived at the foot of Forrester’s Pass. She actually had two horses tied together (one for carrying supplies). But when she had craned her neck up at this steep, snowy ascent, she didn’t like what she saw. Neither did her horses which became balky and unruly. Pepperoni decided it would be virtually suicidal for her horses to attempt to clear Forrester’s Pass. Unfortunately, she had to retrace every single foot she and her horses had covered the last two days, to bail out all the way back at Cottonwood Pass. It may have been the best decision she ever made.

“This way,” Big John said when I finally caught up with everyone. He then started straight up a snowbank. The big lumberjack boots Big John wore—which would eventually lead to his downfall on the PCT—worked wonders here in the deep snow. He started straight up a steep, icy snow field. CanaDoug went next, followed by me.