Skywalker--Highs and Lows on the Pacific Crest Trail (23 page)

For several straight miles we hiked all out to try to make it. Along the way, I did my first-ever
face-plant—
falling straight forward on my face. We arrived just in time, at which point I stumbled again rushing up the ramp of the ferry in front of a crowd of amazed onlookers. Perhaps it was a fitting end to my journey through the High Sierra. It wasn’t pretty, but I made it.

But it doesn’t capture the Sierras one bit. It’s easy to over-romanticize something like this. Yet I have got to believe that the snow-capped peaks, rushing streams, lush green meadows, and sharp granite faces of the High Sierra put it in the category of one of the most beautiful places on the entire earth.

The idea of a gift to yourself sounds inherently narcissistic. I’ve never been much for birthday celebrations (ask some of my ex-girlfriends!). But by immersing myself so deeply in such indescribable beauty for the last few weeks, I honestly felt like I had given myself one of the great gifts of my forty-eight years.

Chapter 24

Three’s Not the Charm

B
ad things happen in threes. Right?

HWAP and I had spent a day re-supplying in Mammoth Mountain. Everything about this resort town had been new and cool. The roads, the post office, the free trolley system—it was all brand spanking new. The Great Recession never seemed to have even happened in these gold-plated environs.

HWAP and I were on the the bus going back to the PCT at Red’s Meadow, when I suddenly blurted out, “Oh, shit.”

“What?” he said calmly.

I began frantically rifling through my backpack.

“%#* dammit, I left my tent poles in the room,” I steamed.

Apparently—at least in HWAP’s later recounting of the scene to other hikers—the entire bus had gone hush over this giant’s (my) temper tantrum.

“This stop,” I yelled out to the driver.

“I’ll wait for you at Red’s Meadow,” HWAP said.

“No, just keep going,” I said, realizing how bad I’d screwed up. “I’ll try to catch up with you in Yosemite.”

HWAP had been the ideal hiking partner, and I hated getting separated from him like this. In fact, it was to be the last time I ever saw him. I flagged down a car that was going down the mountain. “Stop here, please.” I then practically announced to the elderly couple in the car they were going to give me a ride. They took me back to the motel where I went into
chicken-with-my-head-cut-off mode.
The front desk clerk gave me a key to the room, but the tent poles weren’t there.

I rushed back to the front desk, and said, “The maid must have thrown ‘em away. Can I look in the dumpster?” They assigned a Mexican maid to take me out to the dumpster, where I frantically rummaged through garbage without luck.
I’m screwed. No way I can find a two-person tent long enough for me in this town.

“Who cleaned the room?” I peppered the people at the front desk. They all concerned themselves with trying to sort the problem out.

The more cynical reader might just have become suspicious the problem lay elsewhere. I became suspicious of that possibility, too. I hurriedly dug deep into my backpack. Of course, angled off to the side of my backpack were the bloody tent poles.

Particularly strange things can happen at high elevations.

I had run into CanaDoug leaving Mammoth the second time.

“Where’s HWAP?” he asked.

After I coughed up the embarrassing explanation, he said, “Don’t worry. We should make it to Yosemite by tomorrow night.” Indeed, we hiked until dark and got off early the next morning.

“I’ll catch right up,” I said to CanaDoug as he headed off. “I’m going to dry my tent off.”

I began flailing the tent in every direction to wick any moisture off it.
Whap.
One of the tent straps hit my finger and opened a crease. Blood began flowing freely. I anxiously rifled through my first aid packet, and tried applying band-aids. But the blood kept oozing. My fingers were biting cold up here above 10,000 feet.

Why won’t it quit bleeding?
I began to suspect it had something to do with the high altitude. I also began to panic. There had been a couple unexplained deaths on the PCT in 2006. One guy apparently had a heart attack and was found in the middle of the trail. The other was found down a steep hill where he had fallen.
But wouldn’t this be the freakiest death ever—bleeding to death on the trail from a minor cut?

I had no idea what to do. Finally, being a creature of hope, I just decided to hike forward and hope like heck to find somebody with some bandages. I kept the bleeding finger in my little towel, but it kept gushing and turned the towel a shock of red. Finally, I spotted a family camped up the hill and approached them.

If nature is your thing, the PCT is tough to beat.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Do you have any wrapping tape. I’m losing a lot of blood.”

It was a family of Mexicans and my question was greeted with blank stares. So I repeated it in a brand of spanish that Forrest Gump would be extremely proud of, and held out my pouring red finger for emphasis.

“You need pressure,” he said, and pulled out some gauze pads and tape and wrapped it brilliantly.

“Wow, do you have medical training?”

“No, but blood no stop at high elevations.”

“Golly, I can’t thank you enough,” I said. “I don’t need all the food I’m carrying. Please let me share it.”

“No thank you, mister,” his wife responded. “You want hot burrito.”.

Needless to say, I craved the possibility of a hot burrito. But this guy conceivably had just saved my life.

“No thanks,” I lied. “I just ate a big breakfast.”

Off I went trying to make up for lost time.

I proceeded to lose a helluva’ lot more, walking for miles along shimmering Thousand Island Lake, thinking of my good luck and the beautiful scenery. I wasn’t seeing any footprints. Usually, when I was worried about being lost, I was just being over-vigilant. But this trail was a
talisman.
It was well-maintained enough in various places to keep suckering me along. I followed it for miles along this massive lake. Finally, it just completely gave out. All I could do is angrily retrace my steps for over three miles. Now it was going to require 29 miles, instead of twenty-two to reach Yosemite National Park today. But given everything I’d always heard about Yosemite, I really wanted to get there.

Donahue Pass lay between here and there. Worst of all, someone had described it with that god-awful word, sketchy. Fortunately, it didn’t rise to the level of sketchiness—or even gnarliness—that some of its kin had. Now it was a matter of gliding at my maximum speed of perhaps a little over three miles-per-hour along the gorgeous Tuolomne River, which flowed the entire way to Yosemite. My amateur outdoorsman’s eye was able to notice that the deer in the meadow on the other side of the river stayed out in the middle of the pasture. Undoubtedly, that was to give them good sight lines for where their attackers (bears and wolves) habitually emerged from late in the day.

Finally, I took the side turn directing me to the well-known Tuolomne Meadows Campground. Parked campers and throngs of tourists filled every nook and cranny of this monstruous playground. It was a scene straight out of
Americana.
And I was licking my chops.

Let me just say this. Plenty of these road trippers were surely better versed in outdoor matters than this here hiker. But in one area, they were no match for any long-distance hiker.
Food.

Ninety-nine percent of road-trippers pack 200% or more of the food they need. Long-distance hikers have a very different philosophy. And the longer the distances you cover, the closer you learn to cut it. I never met a hiker who wasn’t a total opportunist. Give him or her any opening, and they will make Robin Hood proud in re-distributing food from those who have lots of it, to those who devour lots of it. I was no slouch at this myself.

I wandered through the Tuolomne Meadows Campground attracting various stares. Finally, I got the question I was waiting for. “Gosh, you must have a big advantage with those long legs?” some lady asked nicely. “Just how tall are you?”

Two delicious hamburgers and some vegetables and blueberry pie later, she and her family had all the answers.

“You can stay right here with us,” the family offered.

However, I wanted to find my colleagues somewhere in the campground.

“Well, we’re having a big breakfast, please come back.”

“Oh please, now,” I joked.

But I just managed to stumble down there and run into them again the next morning, where ample helpings of pancakes, bacon, and eggs greeted me. Yeah, folks. Life sure is hell on the PCT.

It was dark, but I thought I spotted Ingrid in the distance.

“Ingrid, is that you?”

“Skywalker,” she yelled back.”

“Is there anywhere I can camp here?” I said.

“Yes, right there,” she said. “And you can lock your food up in the locker here.”

“Where’s the rest of
Team Hustle
(Dirk, Laura, and Snake Charmer)?”

“Team Hustle has broken up,” she said in a downcast fashion.

“What happened?”

“Laura and Snake Charmer went back to his house in Los Angeles for a week. Dirk is meeting up with his girlfriend.”

“Do you think they’ll come back?” I asked Ingrid (I knew Dirk would).

“I don’t know. Their feet are hurting pretty badly.”

Snake Charmer and Laura had met at the Kickoff and hiked every step of the way. In fact, in what would be the culmination of their PCT romance, they even got MRI’s on their feet together. Then they quit together. Shades of
Romeo and Juliet
, but with a much less tragic ending.

Ingrid and I stood there chatting about the sights in Yosemite when we heard loud screams, followed by banging of pots and pans. There was only one possible explanation.

“That’s probably a bear,” said Ingrid, the former student park ranger. We heard more people yelling “bear”. Apparently, it was moving our way. I stood there watching over Ingrid’s right shoulder looking for the bear to appear. The gentlemanly thing to do was not to impede her view of the bear, by standing between the bear and her.
Right?

“Where is it?” I asked.

“Over there somewhere,” Ingrid said.

Finally, somebody’s flashlight shined on a medium-sized bear strolling through the campground like an insolent teenager.

His or her attitude seemed to be
“You’re all a pain in the ass. And I know you’re not going to shoot me. So just shut up and let me see what damn food is lying around.”

Soon an armed ranger came up trying to shoo the bear away. Alas, this may have been one of this bear’s last passes through this campground. The next morning somebody told us he had seen two tags on the bear. That meant it had been anesthetized and moved from the area twice, but kept coming back. The policy is ‘three strikes and you’re out’.

This was a fitting end to an eventful day. I was in high spirits because tomorrow I was taking a bus down into Yosemite Valley to get a tour of
Nature’s Cathedral.

It had been the life mission of one most extraordinary man to preserve it for us masses to enjoy.