Skywalker--Highs and Lows on the Pacific Crest Trail (6 page)

The Kickoff Party was started in 1999 by a group of ex-hikers to serve as a springboard for the long journey ahead. The weekend is divided between festive eating and drinking, meeting and greeting, and educational seminars on various issues hikers will face along the way. It has been a smashing success.

When I had called to make a reservation a lady had told me, “We hate to turn people back, but we’re fully booked.”

“Even for thru-hikers?” I asked alarmed. It had seemed like a good place to meet potential hiking partners for the desert. Better yet, it was billed as a
butterfly killer.

“Oh no, any thru-hiker can come,” she said to my relief. “That’s who the party is for.”

Even before first light I heard people setting up tables and trays of food in the thirty degree weather. These people were all ex-PCT hikers who probably hadn’t been beneficiaries of such
trail magic
during the trail’s early years. I had worried that the PCT was just an isolated footpath. To my great delight, though, I was to see countless examples along the way that the PCT is making solid strides at forming its own culture, just like the Appalachian Trail.

Hikers just aren’t like other people. Any time I’m around lots of long-distance hikers, this truism reveals itself anew. I got to see plenty of them this weekend because the seminars were packed.

At a standing room only seminar on hiker food, a lady with a striking resemblance to the character Major Houlihan on the television show
MASH,
was going on about the importance of continually eating nuts throughout the day.

“Some nuts are better for hikers than other nuts,” she emphasized, going into the details of calories, protein intake, etc. She had an innovative teaching style, variously quizzing us on the difficultto-remember names of various nuts. Finally, she lined up all the nuts together.

“Okay,” she barked out. “Which nut works the best for a thru-hiker?”

“The left one,” some droll male voice in the back answered without missing a beat. That, of course, brought the house down, including Major Houlihan.

A swaggering fella’ of about thirty then took the stage to tell us about hiking in the desert.

“I can’t stress enough how important it is to stay hydrated,” he kept repeating. “It is much, much easier to stay hydrated than to re-hydrate once you start getting dehydrated.” Made sense. The next part, though, stirred up some doubts.

“The best way to do this—trust me on this—is to
hike at night.”
That is the kind of
practical
advice you get from hikers. Incidentally, it was also just the opposite from the counsel you consistently receive from trail guide books, park rangers, and trail bulletin boards. And this guy meant every word of it.

“What about rattlesnakes?” somebody asked. “Aren’t they all over the place at night?”

“No doubt about it,” he plainly answered. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been night-hiking through the desert when I heard that rattling sound and wondered, ‘Where is it’? One time a rattler lunged at the girl in front of me. By the way, less than half of rattlesnake bites are deadly.”

“Have you ever seen a cougar at night?” I asked him.

“I’ve heard ‘em thrashing around, but never seen one,” he answered. “They like to hang out on big rocks and spring out for the clean kill.”

“That doesn’t scare you?” would have been the logical question. But nobody asked it. It wasn’t that type crowd.

Somebody did defensively ask, “What do you recommend doing if you see one?”

“You know in India and countries that have lots of big cat attacks,” he answered, “some of the rural people wear hats with bills on both sides because the cats like to attack the back of your neck. If your hat has a bill on both sides, cougars don’t know where to attack.” That entertaining response brought murmurs of laughter as we all looked at each other in amazement.

“But, honestly,” he reasoned when the laughter died down. “Is a cougar really gonna’ look at something moving six-feet of the ground with a light shining off the top of its head and think, ‘There goes my next meal’?”

“I don’t think so,” he added in a reassuring tone. I’ll have to hand it to him. The reason we were all at the Kickoff was to hear what it’s really like out there, not some hedged remarks in cover-your-ass language.

The seminar ended when a man who looked to be pushing seventy sincerely asked, “I’ve never tried a thru-hike. How do you get your trail name?”

“What’s your real name?”

“Bob Atkinson,” the man responded.

“Well, Blow-Job Bob hasn’t been taken yet,” he replied logically. The seminar broke up in stitches, and we all filed out.

A well-known trail angel named Meadow Mary (married to the even better-known hiker, Billy Goat) had a booth set up to give massages to hikers hoping to iron out any kinks before heading off into the desert. All the predictably idiotic jokes aside, the massages were anything but kinky. Rather, hikers kept emerging from there looking like they had gone fifteen rounds with Mike Tyson.

The next morning the former hikers served us yet another fabulous breakfast, while a volunteer went around passing out a very critical piece of paper to each hiker—containing the most up-to-date information available about the water sources in the desert. Then, I joined the northward-bound masses fanning out into the desert.

Chapter 6

The Desert

The desert is atonal, cruel, clear, neither romantic nor classical. Like death? Perhaps. And that is why life nowhere appears so brave, so bright, so full of miracle as in the desert.

Edward Abbey,
Desert Solitaire

T
he summer of 1942 was the very darkest hour of the Second World War. The British, despite their vast experience in desert warfare, had been shocked when the Germans sacked their fortress at Tobruk in the Sahara Desert. Suddenly, the United States had been thrust into desert warfare against the
Desert Fox
himself, Erwin Rommel. Despite the vast desert regions in our own homeland, the United States was utterly lacking in desert warfare experience.

One of the first things the U.S. military did was hire Edward Adolph, a professor at the University of Rochester, to commission a study on how much water soldiers required in desert warfare. Adolph commenced a series of studies on water deprivation in which he variously locked people in jeeps all day in the glaring sun, marched them in the day, at night, etc. The results were not encouraging.

“We find that a man who stops drinking water
sweats about as fast
as one who continues to drink,” Adolph found. Since the human brain is about 75% water, we can keep on sweating without drinking water. However, after a few hours a person begins to lose his or her mental faculties.

“All the evidence known at present shows that a man cannot do without water, nor be trained to do with less water.”

Adolph’s research was groundbreaking at the time of World War II, and to this day remains the gold standard on human water requirements.

Every year about two hundred people die in our national parks. They drown, they fall, have heart attacks, drive off cliffs, you name it. But few ever die as strangely as 26 year-old David Coughlin.

In the summer of 1999, David and his friend, Raffi Kodikian headed out on that great American rite of passage—the cross-country road trip. They left from Boston and on day six arrived at Carlsbad Caverns National Park in the Chihuahuan desert in southern New Mexico. First, they went to the ranger station to inquire as to the cheapest place they could camp. The ranger recommended a campsite in an area called
Rattlesnake Canyon.
Specifically, they were to drive down a dirt road, park their car, and walk a mile down to the campsite on the desert floor. Raffi filled out their campsite permit for a stay of
one day.

The ranger also advised them to carry at least
one gallon of water for each day
they planned to be out there. David and Raffi were on tight budgets, however, and chose to purchase just three pint bottles for the two of them. They hurried out to make it to the campsite before dark.

They easily found the parking lot for Rattlesnake Canyon, strapped on their backpacks, and soon reached the bottom of the canyon floor. They had planned to camp right there, but were in an adventuresome mood. So David and Raffi took a turn onto a
lightly traveled trail
which they followed for about a mile. Here they set up camp

All was well.

David and Raffi broke camp early the next morning to avoid getting caught in the broiling sun. Quickly they realized they were lost.

Because of its shear vastness, hiking in the desert can be tricky. David and Rafffi spent the afternoon wandering thirstily in various directions hoping vainly to come across water somewhere. But wisely they elected to not wander too far afield. They reasoned that since they had filled out the camping permit for only one day, somebody would soon come looking for them.

That night around midnight their hopes were suddenly lifted when both spotted a light on the far canyon wall.
There must be a road over there,
they reasoned. The following morning they began scaling a steep incline to try to find the road. Altogether, it took three hours in the blazing heat to arrive at the top. Once at the top, it became immediately clear there was no road anywhere around. But that wasn’t the worst part.