It was on fire when we got here

July 1

I awoke crisp and bright, the plan for an epic day ready-formed in my mind. Breakfast, breaking camp, and striding out into this new sunshine I'd been given was all that I could ask for. 

And so I rolled out the morning like a piece of pie dough, slowing to stare at the towering spires of rock and then speeding back up again. There are those days, my favorite days, when the miles are like a ball of yarn you've tossed down a slope. Your body ceases to be a cage and and becomes a sleek vehicle; your mind stops chewing the cud and reliving the past and just coolly observes the glory of the world.
Yes, these are glorious days. Days of enlightenment. Days during which you are so overly self-satisfied with how blissed-out you have become that you leave your water filter someplace and suddenly come to the grim realization that you're about to be out of water and there's nary another hiker in sight from whom you could borrow a filter or purification solution.
Huh.
Shit.
Well, I reasoned, better to drink some "live" water than no water at all. That's what I like to call untreated water when I drink it: "Live water." It's not a term I invented, but I do think it's a pretty clever rebranding of "non-potable water." Makes it seem like perhaps the bacteria and protozoa in there are new, beneficial probiotics.
Who knows, I thought to myself as I filled my Platypus with water from a little mountain stream. It's probably fine. It's not like there are that many things living up here on these alpine meadows that could shit in this water.
And on cue, a marmot stuck his insolent little head up and chirped at me. Screw you, buddy.

Thusly dispirited and brought back to the reality of my existence -- nasty, brutish, and potentially about to center around diarrhea -- I hiked down to Carson Pass.
I had great hopes for a yogi here. No, not a guided stretching instructor with vague spiritual aspirations, but an opportunity to "yogi," that is, charmingly panhandle for food and/or beer in the fashion of Yogi Bear scheming on a picnic basket. But there were few vehicles stopping as the dusk grew dim, and they were primarily big pickups and shiny BMWs -- not very good prospects. I shuffled on.

So I punched up over a notch in the ridge separating the highway from the wilderness beyond. There was a pleasant drop down into the canyon on other side. I couldn't see any sign of other campers, but I smelled smoke. There were people somewhere down there, and I intended to ask for the use of their filter.

I found camp at a stream crossing underneath a broad, sheltering pine. Just on the other side of the creek was the source of the smoke: Two boys, or perhaps they'd just crossed over into the territory of young men, were huddled next to the sad black remains of their fire. I recognized immediately that they had committed the cardinal sin of no-trace camping: They a had made a new fire ring.
Or rather, they had failed to make a new fire ring; they had just made a fire scar on the flat, grassy ground. But you know, it's bad form to scold people when you plan on begging them for the use of their water filter, so I simply said hello and prevailed upon their kindness. They regarded me with a little fear and shame, clearly cognizant of their crime.
But we both let it pass. I didn't want to chew them out, and they wouldn't have had mich to say in their own defense -- after all, it hadn't been on fire when they got there.

Goodbye, sublime bullshit

June 30

It was cold and damp in the trees I'd chosen for my tentsite, but I heard my new friend Owl clanking around in his impromptu cafe at the picnic area just yards away. I had no way of knowing that this meant coffee, but my keen addict's intuition told me to go invetsigate. It was enough to impel my sore body up and out of the tent a la Nospheratu rising out of his coffin; my legs jolted me over to the table, wide-eyed and vacant of mind.

My guess was correct.
And not just coffee, but dripper cones and a stove to boil water; I could make a pour-over here. This is a pretty big deal to a professional coffee nerd like myself. I have come to expect much less and be happy with it. Percolators, Mr. Coffees, ancient Bunn-o-Matics from the civil rights era, I will drink it all when I want a cup of coffee. In college, there was a commonly told joke that pizza was like sex, because in both cases, even when it was bad, it was still pretty good. This joke is, I have to say, the worst compound lie I was told in all my years of schooling. However, when you really want a cup of coffee, there is almost no such thing as a bad cup.

Anyway, I know, too much coffee nerdery. He left me to make myself a cup of coffee, which I eagerly did, using a heroic dose of ground coffee to do so. The result was ink-black, bitter, dark-roasted Peet's coffee. A related result was me going through the same process of rejuventation that happens to Popeye when he eats a can of spinach. I stuck a piece of chocolate cake in my mouth, leapt to my pack, wished everyone a great day, excellent day, toodles, and scurried off to the trail with the grace of a frightened cat.

Cake and strong coffee had an effect on my metabolism similar to pouring gasoline on a fire and then deciding to go ahead and also put in that stick of dynamite you'd found at the swap meet. I was sugar high. I mean like really high, like illicit-drug high. The trail seemed to be obliging me by flattening, widening, and generally becoming easier to hike. My one remaining trekking pole was tucked into my pack, leaving me to concentrate on my legs and feet. Flying over dirt, careening off boulders, executing antics while hopping across streams. I was making killer time and I knew it. 

The funny thing was that as the sugar and caffeine ebbed, the trail continued to improve. There were no mosquitoes to speak of, either. I looked back across the pass below to the mountains behind. Clothed in brilliant white ice and funereal grey, they seemed to hold some sublime truth. Only that truth seemed to be one which I couldn't quite absorb it. It kept getting stuck in my throat. I saw not just bold, raggedly cut beauty, but also felt the wet seep of mud into my shoes, the annoying throb of bodily danger when crossing ice, and the way the mosquitoes hit my face like confetti.
I love adventure, but in a very important sense, adventure is not what my PCT is about. It's about the miles and the open country. I come here to do big days, see lots of light, feel my mind bleach out in the constant sun and physical labor. That back there? Yeah, it was sublime, glad to have done it. 

Looking back at the Southern Sierra... screw that (glorious) noise

But goodbye, sublime BS. I'll take this PCT that winds it's way in and out. This trail of wildflowers and dust sloping ridges in the distance. No, the angles of the peaks are not so sharp, but the curves of the valleys invite the eye to rest in a way that the High Sierra cannot.

Mostly, I was happy for good trail.

Accordingly, I pounded out the miles. Ten miles, fifteen, twenty.
Sometimes the trail serves flashbacks. I suddenly remembered taking a break with the Croat, perched on our packs in these meadows of green grassy flowers and red dirt. Another turn and I was thinking about what a funny man he was, what a good trail companion. My mind was running reels of footage believed long-lost, all the way back to my childhood with Dan Mikesell, and my first encounters with a natural world kind enough to let my brain do its own thing. I didn't have to think about where my next step was going to land; it was all good trail. And that day good trail meant it was all good.

It was well after sunset when I finally slowed down and started scouting for a campsite. I found one hidden in a stand of junipers on a small lip of land above a lake. There was a majestic stone fireplace and enough wood for a week, so I made my first fire of the trip while dining on instant noodles. The fire burnt down to coals with minutes of the last bite being shoveled into my mouth. I doused the coals and let my mind extinguish itself, wrapped in my bag and covered by my tent. 

Snap June 29

June 29

I awoke to once again find my entourage awaiting me at the door. Before allowing my adoring public access, I packed up as much of my pack as I could, then slipped out. I was dressed in my "mosquito spacesuit" -- headnet, rainjacket, long pants -- and my shoes were soaked. Get me the hell out of here.
Munching pop tarts and hurriedly slurping tea, I regarded the surroundings as I was trotting by: Swampy buff-colored rock outcroppings. Swampy dark green forest. Verdant, very swampy meadows. The ridges on either side of the canyon I inhabited did not look swampy, but one could not be sure without crossing more swamplands to check.
There was only one solution: Forward progress. I needed out of this alpine bog in the worst way. Out of here and into... what? A place of better drainage?
It's a low standard, I thought, but there you go.
Basically, I needed out of Yosemite.

Goodbye Yosemite, you crumbum!

I got my wish, as the trail shot straight north up the canyon, then past the inviting shores of a swamp named Dorothee Lake. At the head of the valley, I crossed into another watershed and saw, buried in the snow, the sign of my release and relief: I was out of the national park and into Hoover Wilderness.
Before me rose a very different kind of range. Slopes of porous volcanic rock and scree surrounded pinnacles of uneroded stone. I knew from experience that this softer, more porous stone held less water and wasn't as likely to form glacial lakes. From a nature photographer's point of view, I suppose that's bad, but for me, it meant good drainage.
Just a mile or two past the border, I walked past the 1,000 mile mark. Good stuff, I thought. Then, quite quickly, I was walking up Kennedy Canyon and onto the volcanic ridge that leads to Sonora Pass (where Highway 108 crosses the trail). The sloped were open, the views astounding. I could see storms building up thirty miles to my east, and the green grasses and rust-red stone were accented by bright yellow flowers.
Still quite a bit of snow, though. Couple challenging fields on the way up to the ridge -- but I've done worse, I thought. The snow's consistency was really challenging -- melted soft as a Slurpee on the surface by the day's heat, but too dense and firm underneath to kick steps easily.  It was two steps forward, another sideways, some slapstick-banana-peel moments, another step. And then: >snap<
I looked down. My beloved Gossamer Gear trekking pole had sunk deep into the snow and snapped as I tried to pull it back out.
My heart sank and my anger rose. These poles are the epitome of grace and joy as tools; I would not choose to hike with any others. Knife enthusiasts talk about specific blades as being balanced, or seeming to belong in your hand. That describes my relationship to these poles. They were also, coincidentally, very out of stock. It took a huge effort on both Lily and my part to replace the tips at Vermillion Valley Resort. And I had broken it going through one of my last snowfields.
I raged. Raged against the PCT for the routing, which seems to take a tour of every patch of snow remaining on the slopes. I raged at myself for breaking the pole, although i am unsure what I could have done differently. For good measure, I went ahead and got pissed at the useless, enormous bear can I was still lugging around.
Cursing and flailing with one pole, I slipped and stumbled down the loose dirt and slushy snow to the road. But upon reaching the pass, my spirits got the much needed boost: Somebody had set up an impromptu cafe at the picnic area at the pass. Two somebodies, it turned out: Owl, who gave me cookies and a beer, and iPod, who gave me two hot dogs to add to my noodle dinner. I'm not trying to brag, but the Knorr Teriyaki Pasta Side pairs quite well with hot dogs and lukewarm beer. My fuel cartridge ran out, but Owl let me use his. They took my trash, including my tragically broken pole.
I felt almost whole again. It isn't all bad luck, I thought. I can hike without a pole. Well past dark, I and a few other stragglers left the cafe and set up camp in some trees near the highway.

True love in the corduroy canyons June 28

June 28

I had chosen a campsite in some rocks up to the left of the trail. This had some distinct advantages: Slightly fewer mosquitoes than in the crowded trailside campspot, below. I had privacy, not that I had anything to engage in that required it -- it's not like I was washing or anything. But the little nook I'd found between huge boulders was comforting and snug in the fashion of an outlaw's last redoubt.
But nothing's free in this life, and my hideout had the disadvantage that I had serious trouble finding my way back out. Hiking in exhausted after dark appeared to have had the same effect on me as a blindfold during pin the tail on the donkey. I walked down off the rock outcropping in one direction and found a stream and a eager fan club of thousands of mosquitoes: Nope. Returning to the campsite, I used the sun as a compass, which made me feel proud of being a Boy Scout but also told me nothing, because I had no idea what direction I needed to go in.
I eventually lucked onto the trail and started the engine. Legs up, legs down, breath in, breath out. The trail started climbing up and down in an erratic fashion, diving in and out of canyons. These were not like the epic, 3,500-foot ascents and descents of the Sierras. They were quick jabs of elevation, episodic, sporadic, but always there. Our quest for mountain enlightenment had been replaced with high intensity interval training. No longer did John Muir perch on my shoulder muttering about the range of light; this was Richard Simmons country.

People fetishize Yosemite. Lots and lots of tourists from other countries come to see America, and when they want to see the beauty of the west, they take a bus to Yosemite. But honestly, when it comes to this part of the park, it's not easy to see what the hubbub is about. True, it is green trees and grass, black soil and grey rock, white snow and blue sky. But all of those elements have been diced up into small portions and scrambled together into a swamp. The trail bolts up and down like an ant over wide-wale corduroy. It's a wilderness of half measures.
Yes, sad but true, I suspect the northwest backcountry of Yosemite has inspired very little poetry. My ant metaphor may be the grandest homage to date. 

More probably, it inspired the formulation of DEET. Because those mosquitoes? They are real, man. Very real. "Fierce," "implacable" and "siege mentality" are the words that most readily comes to mind in this context. It's hard to convey the phenomenon without having you, dear reader, out to experience it yourself; it's kind of one of those things you must experience to comprehend, and yet simultaneously have no desire to experience. 

I wore long sleeves and long pants all day, although it is really too hot for such attire. I'd place your headnet on, same reasoning. Before eating, which requires removing the headnet, I'd apply DEET to my face. Ah, but when I lifted the veil, a mosquito -- probably like the Olympic gymnastics gold medal winner of her swamp -- manages to dart in and land on your eyelid, a place you cannot use DEET. I now had to drop my food to swipe at her, compounding my anguish.

All day it's like this up here.

There's no real use in getting upset about it, though. I try not to expend mental energy becoming incensed at the LITTLE DAMN THINGS AHHHH. Instead, I try to reframe them. For years, I tried to think about them as weather. Sleet is awful to hike in, yet I do not rage at sleet. No point. Aren't mosquitoes just like sleet?
No, because sleet isn't possessed of an evil intelligence. 

So I have taken this exercise in reframing one step further. I have decided that what mosquitoes are is love. And not just any love; mosquito love is the truest love. Some people will love you for your looks, others for your wit. But the love of a mosquito for a hairless mammal is an eternal love, a love for the ages. 

Love.
Some will die for it. Other will kill for it. Still others will be forced to wait outside my tent all night just for a chance at it. These little ladies I call my "entourage." They follow me wherever I go, just steps behind me. Do I take a swim in a lake? They will wait at the shore. They're dying to talk to me, whisper in my ear, fly into my mouth and die in that rank, peanut-butter-scented cave. I did not ask for this fame, my friends.

My escape that night involved a hasty, eyelid-swatting dinner and a campsite once again up in some rocks next to a long, damp, green swale and a thin ribbon of creek. True happiness for me was shutting the screen door on my tent. The star shuts the limo door, peace reigns, and the blood meals are over for the night.

Walking with John

June 27

The walk into Tuolomne Meadows the next morning was fast and easy. Any trail is easy when you're hungry and there's some fresh food ahead. Well, fresh-ish; the restaurant at Tuolumne is kind of a hamburger stand, and all the ingredients come out of a Aramark truck. Heavy and I ate a lotof National Park food when we were on the CDT, and we took to calling it an "Aramark burger" -- always the same odd brown disk of meat, same condiments.
Still, it beat anything in my pack, or that has been in my pack, or that will be in my pack in the foreseeable future. The breakfast menu was still in play when I got there, so I ordered a couple sausage and egg sandwiches. They handed me my receipt with the order number on it, which I immediately crumpled and threw in the trash. I am so, so bad at town sometimes. My reflex to throw the receipt away is grounded in solid hiking instincts -- fieldstrip everything, and never pass a garbage can without emptying your pockets.
But now I had to get back in line, and once up at the front, explain to the counter staff that, no, I wasn't placing another order, it's just that I threw away my receipt, so could they keep an eye out for my order of two sandos?
"You ordered two sandos?" asked the woman behind the counter.
"Yeah, like ten minutes ago. Not trying to rush you! I just feel stupid that I tossed the receipt. I don;t know what my number is."
"Let me check that order for you," she said. She poked her head into the back, had a chat with the chef, and came back out.
"Really sorry, seems like we lost your ticket lost in the shuffle. What was your number?"
"I lost my receipt."
"Oh, right. Well, I ordered you another one." I stepped back to salivate by the condiments.
The next hiker up ordered a soft-serve ice cream, and only remembered upon seeing the cone that he wanted a chocolate and vanilla twist. The counter staff (and I mean they were saints in there, dealing with idiots like us) gave me the mistake vanilla cone, much to my delight.
Then right away my order came up, with a ticket. The chef had it the whole time.
Then my rush-job replacement order came up, the extra one the counter staff had made him make.
So I walked out with four sandwiches and a rapidly melting cone of soft serve, making me the richest person on the plant, thank you very much. I ate the sandwiches and half of the ice cream before pawning off the rest of the cone on a JMT hiker. He looked like he was eating it to win a bet with his friends or something.
There's a post office at Tuolomne, so I sent my ice axe and fishing rod home. This lightened up my pack considerably -- I took a quick stroll across the parking lot with my stripped-down kit and was quite please with myself. There is also a pretty great store there, so I decided to buy irresponsible amounts of food. Thus ended my pack's ten-minute Lightweight Period, and ushered in yet another Age of the Lumpy and Ungainly. But it also meant I could hike on past the next road crossing -- Sonora Pass -- and push on to South Lake Tahoe. And I was into that.
Here's the thing: Town was not as tempting as it used to be. On the CDT, and for that matter on the PCT in 2008, I was a total bar-bagger. ("Bar-bagger" being one who wants to enter and experience, or "bag" as many bars as possible.) But now I just want to hike. More often than not, I want to be out with the wind and the moss, certainly more than I want to be with young macho dudes swilling Coors. So I stuffed my bearcan to the brim and figured, what the hell, it'd be light within days. I was just beginning to consider the process of psyching yself up for an eventual depature when I spied a very skinny dude with a Hawaain shirt and an infectuous smile. It was John Z!

aloha, john!

 Remember John? Last seen sprinting up Muir Pass for a little night-time snow hiking? He told me he'd been unable to do all of the Sierra High Route in snow without any snow gear (what a wuss) so was back down on the old, garden-variety PCT for a bit.
It was far more awesome to see him than I would have guessed. We discovered some mutual friends (Carrot and Amanda, your ears must have been burning) and agreed we'd see each other down the trail. I bugged out from that land of dudes drinking morning IPAs and trucked down the trail.
He caught up to me by the time I'd made five miles. He is just way, way faster than I am. But he graciously slowed down enough for us to talk, and so we did. It was a real, old-fashioned guy talk session. We talked about the explosion in hikers on the PCT, about how reckless people are on snow, about gear, about relationships and fidelity, about the girls we like (or in my case about the woman I am in love with and engaged to). He's also a Triple Crowner, and he agreed that the trail was not what it had once been.
"If this doesn't work out," he said, "I'm going to Colorado." He meant: If the PCT does not turn out to be the hike I should be hiking.
"What will you do in Colorado?" I asked.
"I've been looking at the Colorado Trail," he said, "and I'm pretty sure I could get the FKT." FKT is hiker talk for Fastest Known Time. I loved how casual he was about this.
Now I am not an FKT kind of guy. In fact, it's kind of cool in the long-distance world to look down on FKT culture, because they have to focus on mileage so much that, the theory goes,  they do not properly enjoy the trail. But John really humanized that world for me. I could see in him great joy at being fast. It helps that he looks a bit batty, all smiles and wacky hair. It wasn't masochistic, I realized. He was like a part of me that had been taken to its logical conclusion.
"To try and hike a trail that fast," he said, "you really have to love it. You sort of have to sacrifice yourself to it." I could totally understand that.
We walked into the dark, wet canyons of northern Yosemite. Just talking it all over.

Life inside a beer commercial

We parted ways the next morning, both of us in tacit agreement that our one-night-stand hiking partnership had gone pretty badly. I trundled along, down to Shadow Lake and past huge Garnet Lake and Thousand Island Lake. Around noon I was finally back within the Friendly Confines, which took me up to minor Island Pass, and then finally to Donohue Pass, the border with Yosemite National Park. Donohue Pass is also the closest you get to Lyell Glacier, the largest glacier in Yosemite. Just in case you're feeling too cheerful today, it's worth noting that the glacier has retreated by somewhere around 70 percent since the 1880s, and is in fact no longer a true glacier but an icefield (as it no lomnger flows).
And in case that was too depressing, let's remember that Donohue Pass is also the head of Lyell Canyon, one of the most beautiful spots on the PCT. The trail took me down from snowfields bordered with rock to a thick, cool forest before opening out onto the greenest meadow I have ever seen. I come here about once a year when I am not thru-hiking to touch base with the wide open valley floor, the smooth granite boulders, the winding course of the glass-clear creek.
I stopped at the creek to do some fishing. It was a hot day, a perfect summer day in California. The sand on the bottom of the creek showed yellow through the light-blue water, and little gangs of trout loitered in the eddies like juvenile delinquents in a '50s alleyway. You can see them coolly observing everything that the current brings their way. The little ones dart out first when there's an object of interest, and only if they like what they see do the big ones race over to steal the prize. They were squibs of mercury made conscious by that sun and the manufacturers of Panther Martin and Rapela lures. It wasn't easy fishing, but it was compelling. Spooked from under a log, I followed one trout to a hole in the middle of the channel, and from there to a deep spot where a bank had been undercut, where I finally got him to bite, only to lose him when reeling in.
Finally tiring of the game, I collapsed my pole. It would be for the last time, as I was mailing my fishing rig home the next day from the Tuolomne Meadows post office. It's been a good run, baby, I thought, sadly putting my Panther Martin away. I'll see you when I'm done with the trail.
Teary goodbyes completed, I trudged down the trail, intending to hit Tuolomne Meadows (and its restaurant and store) by dark. But my angling had eaten too much time, so I posted up at a flat rise on the west side of the creek. I found my friend BFG there, as well as Diesel. BFG had built a campfire -- very decadent -- so I sat down and cooked there, then walked a safe distance away to set uo my shelter.

the meadow along lyell canyon

I am, I reflected as I fell asleep, living inside a beer commercial. The past three days has brought me roaring streams of snowmelt, limitless trout, an actual bear. This on top of the fact that I was drinking beer. How is it inside our cold, refreshing, American wilderness dream (with a clean, crisp finish)?

Crowded.  

The Attack of the Giant Death-Racoon

June 25
The veil of sleep was parted for me by a small terrier. He appeared to be of that tribe of small dogs who have the emotional equilibrium of a mimosa-drunk George Constanza bred right into them. Having taken up a secure position in the rocks some twenty feet away from my camp, he was firing his bark-ray directly at my shelter. I crash-landed into consciousness, got up and started making breakfast and dirty looks at the dog. This seemed to enrage him. Then again, everything seemed to enrage him. This included the next event: His owners, a dark-haired, pale, vaguely yuppyish couple that looked as similar as siblings, came over to make peace.
"He really doesn't like strangers," the woman said, one hand on her irate dog's heaving flank.
"Makes him scared," the man explained.
"Great dog for the woods then," I replied amicably. Well, I was trying for amicable, but my aim may have been a bit off.
The bezerking dog and his support team of owner/apologists retreated to their tent for their own breakfast. Soon enough, though, the dog returned, this time in stealthy double-agent mode. He snuck from rock to rock until he was finally almost close enough to touch. I offered him my hand; he smelled it and recognized me as an ally, then apologized for the unfortunate friendly-fire incident. I know he meant it, because he ate half of my grits before I could get the bowl away from him. Not all dogs belong in the woods, I thought.
I, of course, immediately ate the rest of the grits. That's my food! Didn't even occur to me until later that you're not supposed to eat a dog's leftovers. I guess not all humans belong in the city, I mused.
The trail took over a little notch in the bowl surrounding the lake, and then down past Purple Lake. It traversed a valley wall north of Fish Creek, then wandered northward past a big burn toward Red's Meadow Pack Station.
Red's Meadow, accesible by bus from Mammoth Lakes, is an extremely popular launch point for hikers. The trail was choked with hikers, many or most of them weekenders. Seeing so many non-thru-hikers was a jolt. Most striking was their dress. There were a lot of older men in costumes that approached the paramilitary, including some pretty crazy knives. One dude looked like he was trying to recreate a stillsuit from Dune -- all I could see of him was cloth, sunglasses, and the tube from his hydration pack in his mouth. There was a tribe of women in long flowing cotton dresses, and a tribe of younger men in earth tones and keffiyehs. I shudder to think what might occur if the young men dressed in jihadist drag and the old men dressed as commandos were to meet while night hiking.
None of it was really very practical hiking gear, but I cannot judge them too harshly. When we enter the wilderness, we do not dress based on what the challenges we will face therein; we dress based on our fears of danger and our hopes for our own identity. So the paramilitarists dress to defend themselves against brigands and bears, and they return home having conquered the mountains during their night out at a lake. The young men dress in the hopes that they can use nature to stop participating in a capitalist/imperialist/racist system, and return to their dorms having gained a romantic reverence for nature (which, they hope, might even get them laid). The women in flowing dresses? I... I just don't know.
And what do our clothes say about us, as thru-hikers? We may not dress for an action movie, but we are still showing our fellow humans our worldview: We like a full range of motion and care little about hygiene. But if you go one level deeper, our dress and comportment is also a way of expressing our own aspirational identity. I mean, we do not actually go feral, we just let our shirts get so dirty that it looks like it. We are all about simplifying and paring down, but don't you dare criticize my ice axe. And long-distance hikers are keenly attuned to the fashions of our fellow travellers. Big packs signify one thing (neophyte), tiny packs another (smugness), mylar umbrellas a third (unbearable smugness).
There is a difference, though. I don't often get on a soapbox about gear, but: Less gear does mean you more closely experience the wilderness. The things we carry into the wilderness help define what we are once we arrive. And the less you carry, the less you are imposing your own vision on the wilderness. If you doubt that, try sleeping under a tarpfor a while -- you really live immersed in the wild when you get rid of your last zippered door.

***  

I pulled up on the lawn outside the store and cafe at Red's and dropped my pack (thus deftly switching from my hiker costume to my homeless-guy costume). The cafe was happy to see me and served me a great $12 reuben and a $7 chocolate malt. The store was likewise grateful for my business, which consisted of a six-pack of beer. Heck, I thought, it's a Saturday night. I'm going to take this beer for a walk.
The trail splits right outside the pack station; you can take the official PCT, which looks pretty flat from the maps, or you can take the John Muir Trail, which is a bit more scenic. (The two trails rejoin 14 miles later.) I opted for the JMT, and half a mile later, I found myself staring up at Devil's Postpile.

It's an impressive stand of volcanic pillars, each of them geometrically regular pentagons or hexagons
in cross-section and fluid along their length. One of those "weird, huh?" kind of interactions with nature; less awe-inspiring and more like something you'd expect to see explained in a copy of an AARP magazine in a dentist's office. The other humans on hand were all Korean tourists, dutifully trooping to the top if the postpile and then back down again. I am not sure what they made of the smelly guy with the backpack and can of beer in his hand. It is apparently legal to drink beer while gazing at a Novelty of Nature, or at least the uniformed ranger who walked past me chose not to comment on my beverage.
The trail continued, past the foot of a beautiful meadow and then a few lakes. I continued as well, slowly sipping my way through my liquid bread. About an hour before dark, I was joined by another hiker, a guy I'd met for an hour the week previous. For the purposes of this post, we'll call him the other Guy, seeing as there are only two humans in the story. He explained that he had become separated from his "crew." He looked kind of anxious to get another one, like maybe he wasn't accustomed to sleeping alone in the woods. (It can take some getting used to.) We weren't really couple material, if you catch my drift-- he was too loud, I am too pickily misanthropic -- but somehow he established that we would be camping together that night.
I was most of the way through the beer by now, and feeling kinda gregarious. I was certainly not in the mood to outhike him or tell him off. So I agreed. We made camp under a tree some thirty off to the northeast of the trail. I made myself dinner, tucked the bearcan away, and fell right asleep.
I woke right back up. The Other Guy was saying something in a quiet, urgent voice:
"Bear. Bear. Bear."
"What?" I asked.
"There's a bear right there."
I snapped right into bear mode, yelling "HEY BEAR! HEY BEAR! HEY BEAR!" with my most authoritative voice.
"He's gone," the other guy said.
We got out of our tents and surveyed the situation. The bear had been snuffling around right where I cooked. I had left a stuff sack out, and it had been ripped to ribbons by Mr. Bear. He'd obviously examined my bearcan, some 50 feet away, but hadn't found anything useful to do with it. The Other Guy had stored his own bearcan right next to his tent, an oversight he immediately remedied. It was a kind of amateur move to cook in camp while in the Southern Sierra front country, but then again, I've done it a zillion times with no consequence.
"Well, let's hope he doesn't come back," I said. This is the nightmare scenario: Black bears tend to return to the scene of potential human nutrition again and again, like raccoons.
"Do you think he will?" the Other Guy asked in terror.
"Maybe! But there's not much we can do about it," I replied as I climbed back into my tent. And then I promptly fell asleep.
It occurs to me now that if the Other Guy had hoped for some safety in numbers or moral support, he was gravely mistaken. After all, what could be more disquieting then having your campmate suggest that the return of the Giant Death-Raccoon was likely imminent -- and then listening to him snore? In my defense, bears are part of life in the mountains, and there really isn't much use to worrying about them. They might make your life miserable, although they usually do not; they certainly do not listen to reason. Put another way: I figured that if the bear was going to come back, I should go ahead and grab forty winks winks before he did.

The friendly confines

June 24

Unsurprisingly, we awoke well before the youngsters next to us. I was ferried back to VVR by Lily and Marcia, where we once again ran into He-Man and Zuke. Their maildrop had arrived, they said, so we were able to repossess most of the food they'd taken the day before. (I noticed the Twizzlers didn't make the return trip, though.)
I was pretty sad about saying goodbye, but I was also pretty excited about what was coming up: We were pretty much out of the snow, meaning the hiking would start easing up. What's more, there appeared to be some good lakes on the trail, meaning trout for me. I had scraped together a fishing kit from things Lily had in her Kia, and even added some olive oil, salt, and -- this was the big one -- a skillet. No more transforming beautiful mountain trout into gelatinous chunks of whitefish for me, I thought. Now I'll be cooking them like a real adult human.
So I waved goodbye to the little green Kia, sighed a deep sigh, threw a baleful glance at the cooler full of beer and ice cream in the store, and shouldered my pack. No beery ice cream afternoon for me. I was going to hike right out of there.
And I did, although I could not immediately figure out how to do so. I had hiked in on a side trail and now needed to find the side trail back out. I ended up just kind of skirting the lake for a while until I finally found the access trail.
As always, I was relieved to be back on the PCT. The "friendly confines," as I think of it; the phrase originates as a description of Wrigley Field, a quaint, green place to spend one's summer. It fits the trail perfectly -- the trail keeps you on a very predictable, narrow trajectory. But its limitations on autonomy are welcome. By virtue of keeping your travel restricted to one northward dimension, it simplifies life. Rather than a maze of choices, my thoughts toggle through profound essentials:

• Does it matter that we are motes in the eye of God?
• Should I eat all my candy right now? 
• Is it time to pee yet?

Also, when I was ten, why did I try to breakdance in public? I didn't even give myself the benefit of practicing first.
The trail took me up over Silver Pass, another non-event in terms of technical snow travel. It was just a place to get my feet wet in some snow. It then wended down past a series of lakes with darkly embarrassing names -- Squaw Lake, Chief Lake, Warrior Lake, and then of course the Lake of the Lonely Indian. Given that we white people tended to name natural features for Native Americans after killing or displacing them, I have a hunch as to why that last guy was lonely.
I ended the day at Virginia Lake, set in a granite moonscaped bowl. It was a weekend, so there was a haze of campfire smoke and a din of dog barks, but still plenty of space for a bearded emaciated weirdo like myself to set up camp. I rushed through setting up the tent and climbed down to the shore, put my trusty Panther Martin spinner bait on the line, and immediately landed the biggest trout I have ever caught.

not the biggest but one of the prettiest

I cast again and immediately caught another fish. And again, and again. It was complete fishing satisfaction. I cleaned a couple and started them frying while I caught more and released them. The evening cooled, my hands numbed, the light grew grey, and I kept pulling in and releasing beautiful rainbow trout. It was an immensely powerful feeling of being in the right place at the right time. Off to my right, I could see another angler with a fly rod. He too appeared to be executing his pastime to a degree approaching perfection. Because he was fly fishing, this meant he exhibited the grace of a swan in flight while casting and cursing softly to himself.
The fried fish was excellent, by the way.

Another zero, another nuerotic packing episode

June 23

I awoke in great company and great sprits the next day. Here I was on the shores of a large lake in the middle of the Sierra, being coached and supplied by Lily and her mom. Sun: Shining. Coffee: Delicious. Surroundings: Beautiful.
Mental state: Nervous confusion. I found myself staring at dozens and dozens of packaged food items strewn across two picnic tables, paralyzed by indecision and doubt. After nine days of living on a very enforced diet, with a specific number of calories allotted to me each day, I found myself unable to gauge how much food I would actually find useful over the next, much shorter, stretch.
The basic issue is this: It's hard to pack the correct amount of food when you are hungry, because you tend to pack too much. On the other hand, the pain and suffering of carrying a lot of food was still imprinted on my muscles and tendons like a brand, so I also wanted to walk out of VVR with John Muir's legendary resupply: A crust of bread hanging from his belt. The two competing desires do not so much balance each other as create a cacophonous din in which reason and free will are pretty well drowned out. And so it always a guess, a gamble; bet too short and you'll enter town a couple pounds leaner and crazed with hunger. Bet too long, and you'll come into town weighed down with pounds of ramen and peanut butter.
Meh, what the heck. I had another cup of coffee in the hot morning sun, gave up on reason, and just started to jam stuff into the bear canister. It was packing by rote memory: Three packets of grits and three packets of tea make a breakfast. Two packets of ramen make a dinner. Somewhere around a pound of Twizzlers make a lunch, although preferably not ingested all at once. So we'll add these Ritz crackers, the ProBars, these Corn Nuts, a soupcon of Snickers, maybe some Spam to keep my strength up, and just keep going until the backpack's weight approaches our current pain tolerance.
Finally, my task was complete: I had once again turned my sleek, ultralight kit into a portly, ungainly slob of a pack, and had zero idea of whether I had done a good job. We walked down to the restaurant and store, where the other hikers were collected. Zeke and He-Man were in a poor state: Last night they had taken to drinking bottles of wine as if they were longnecks of beer, they informed me. Their hangover was commesurate with the size of this mistake. Worse yet, their maildrop hadn't come through -- a pretty dramatic development, given the traditional California Gold Rush-style price gouging at the general store. I still had a bunch of food left over from my neurotic episode, so I let them graze on it, much to their delight.
After that, our little party of three decided to decamp to nearby Mono Hot Springs. There's a private resort and a public campground, a piped hot tub and several free, hippy-laden hot springs. We had lunch and I watched a couple PCT hikers trying to hitch out to skip ahead. They were having a tough time of it, which I relished. People wanted to know how, exactly, driving them all the way out to the western side of the Sierras was going to help them hike the PCT. It was all I could do to refrain from interjecting a "hear hear!" or "quite right!" Not sure why I judged them using the verbal forms of a Dickensian senior citizen. I know, I know, hike your own hike... but do make sure to hike on occasion. Or just go follow Widespread Panic in your dad's Ford Explorer or something.
Lily and Marcia went to explore the world of naked wilderness bathing, and I settled into a chair by the general store to blog within the tiny radius of their wifi. Soon I was joined by a teenager, using the same wifi to snapchat his friends. Then another couple arrived, then another six, until I looked like a middle-aged scarecrow with a flock of teenage blackbirds roosting on me. It was disquieting how little mind they paid me; they calmly discussed who was dating whom and who was making out on top of large rock next to us as if I wasn't there. I mean, I know I'm going to be obsolete one day, but I thought I make make it out of the decade. I was saved from irrelevancy by the ladies, who escaped the afternoon without joining any cult, being vexed by chemtrails, or whatever else it is that hippies do these days.
We finished the day eating grilled lamb and veggies in the campground while observing the college students camped next to us. They, in a classic collegiate summer vacation move, appeared to have taken lots of LSD. Or at least there was a lively discussion by clean-cut youngsters of the maggots in their towels. Goes without saying, I suppose, but regardless: To our aged and infirm but at least relatively sober eyes, there were no maggots. This lack notwithstanding, it made for engaging dinner theater.

Town Fever

June 22

"Town fever," also known as "horse and barn disease," is a syndrome in which subjects, sensing that they are close to an outpost of modern Western Civilization, focus on the upcoming interaction with said outpost to the point of obsession. Symptoms include vivid, involuntary mental images of ice cream or kielbasa (in extreme cases, kielbasa sundae visions have been known to occur), 4 am wake up times, and jogging down the trail.

And with 9 days having elapsed since Kennedy Meadows, I had the fever. I had it bad. This was the day I was going to hit Vermillion Valley Resort on Lake Edison. It was time for beer, cheese, meat, and fresh veggies. In addition, I missed my fiancé, Lily had promised to come all the way up from Berkeley to meet me, a drive of several hours.
But I still had to get there. The trail headed up and over Selden Pass. There was some snow, but it was really a total cakewalk;
not so much a pass as the head of a canyon. Up top I was hailed by a beaming grey-haired man -- Hub, I believe his name was -- and it turned out we had an acquaintance in common. We both knew Kevin Hoover, former editor of the Arcata Eye newspaper. The Eye was sort of our competition when I wrote for the North Coast Journal in Arcata, CA, from 2000 to 2002. Such a small world, etc. Hub said Hoover was hiking the PCT, in fact.

Huh. But six degrees of yadda yadda whatever, because: Town.

While hustling down the pass, I saw a couple hikers heading south, so geared up for icey mountaineering that looked like unhorsed knights.

"How's the snow up there?" one asked. 

Surveying the crampons, distress beacons, ice axes, gaiters, the technical t-shirts and shade hats, I promised them they'd have no problem. 

"Did you posthole?" he asked. Postholing occurs when your leg sinks in snow up to the thigh. It happens in soft, afternoon snow, and is pretty annoying, because you have to pull the leg back up using your poles. 

"A bit," I shrugged. 

They gave each other looks that conveyed terror balanced -- barely-- with manly courage. Postholing must have a really bad reputation these days. Maybe they should strap snowshoes onto their pack next time.
As the elevation dropped and the snow abated, the mosquitos came out in force. Now we were getting a taste of real bug country -- swarms that interfered with eating or tying your shoes. I suited up in my dorkiest gear: headnet, button-down shirt with permethrin, rain pants, the works. Then I shed it all again in stages, because who can hike like that all day? 

At the turnoff for the Bear Ridge Trail, which would take me to VVR, I met He-man and Zuke, two brothers from Danville, CA, just out of college. They were really fun to talk to, full of young man energy. We discussed Boy Scouts (a surprisingly frequent topic) and food and that sort of thing. It's like they were the coolest jocks on the football team, I thought. 

We got into a conversation about hiking while listening to audiobooks.

"Whaddya listen to?" He-man asked me.

"A lot of crime fiction, like George Pellacanos," I said. "Or old adventure novels, like the Three Musketeers." I hoped reading Alexandre Dumas didn't make me look too stuffy.

"Cool!" he said enthusiastically.

Zuke chimed in. "I've been listening to 1776, McCullough's contemporary study of that seminal year's import to the Revolution and early American Republic? Well, it's quite... entertaining. But I think it's rather short on substance."

"BRO," He-man responded, "I totally hear you! I myself have been listening to a string of presidential biographies. Yet I find the modern author to be so focused on an appearance of erudition that the work lacks rigor. I mean, great man vs societal trends -- the historiographic debate is cast aside in favor of 'readability.' Feel me, bro?"

As my mom would have said: Never judge a book by the cover.

VVR, to quickly frame this, is a collections of cabins, tent cabins, and tent sites with a store and restaurant attached. It has long had a rep for cheating hikers by padding their bills or selling $20 steak dinners, only to run out of steak halfway through dinner. I had promised myself not to buy a meal there because I resent the place, having personally experienced some pretty suspect behavior in 2008. But it is also a party and nutrition outpost after a long section without, and can be super fun.

When we walked in around 4 pm, there was a huge, drunken singalong in progress around the unlit campfire circle. Someone knew most of the chords and some of the words to all of Abbey Road, and they were determined to use them. It was festive, tipping toward crazed. A young man, very drunk, explained he was a cancer survivor who had just taken up smoking, which no one thought funny. Then someone fell down, which we all found irresistibly hilarious. 

I got a can of Olympia and ordered dinner. So much for my resolve. 

But both dinner and the staff were delightful. 

I had showered and laundered by the time I spied a green Kia Soul coming into the lot.

It was Lily and, to my delight, her mother Marcia. Hugs all around as we gushed to each other -- it had been a beautiful but very crazy drive, they said. My hike was much the same, I said. We checked Marcia into a tent cabin and grilled dinner over an open fire, she recalling her Sierra memories and I wondering if mine would end up seeming as sweet.

The world of light

June 21

The mission this morning was crystal clear: to conquer Muir Pass. Oatmeal, tea, and onto the trail. 

The snow began pretty soon thereafter, but it was blissfully crispy and firm from the cold night. It was easy going; I could skip across the crust rather than wading through the slush. I made good use of the morning hiking hours, feeling strong and nimble. My pack, so punishingly laden with food as I left Kennedy Meadows, was now light enough to lift one-armed. 

It was good that I felt that way, because Muir is a marathon of a pass. It keeps on looking like you might be at the pass, but it's just a ledge, a false pass. That's how the trail ascends: ledge after ledge after ledge. On one of the ledges, I met two college kids, far too clean to be thru-hikers, informed me that it was naked hiking day.

"But you're clothed," I noted dryly. 

They hadn't been prepared for logic. It's, like, my secret weapon.

"We, uh, will hike naked later," the female of the pair explained. "It's because this is the longest day of summer." She paused. "If you don't hike naked, the rangers will give you a ticket," she said triumphantly. 

"It's the solstice? Awesome!" I love the solstice. I love sunlight, light generally really, and this is the day with the most of it. The rest of her pitch wasn't worth the effort to destroy. It isn't that Naked Hiking Day isn't a thing; I have been hearing about since the ancient days of my 1999 AT hike. It's just that... Well... Back in that golden year of hiking, my buddy Caboose participated, only to run into a troop of Girl Scouts. It serves as a parable.  

The light. Today was the perfect day for the solstice, because I was hiking on snow, meaning I got light from above and reflected from below. Muir famously called this the "Range of Light," and on this day, he was unequivocally right. I bathed in it. 

The pass finally tops out in a snowfield (duh) with a cool conically-roofed stone hut. I peeked in and found myself in the midst of the most typical Bay Area conversation possible: rents.

"We paid $2500 for a studio in Bushwick," a woman said. "We're moving to Portland," her husband said. I participated, playing my given role: The greyback hermit.

"We just have a little basement Berkeley apartment, but it's a total steal." 

Somehow this exchange was refreshing.

The fourth person in the hut was a self-described grumpy young man named Burrito. He had spent the night in the hut. "I saw guys walking past here at 11 last night," he said. 

"I think I know who they were," I replied, remembering the badasses. God bless 'em.

On the way down into Evolution Valley I met Shepherd and Danger Noodle. They were cool and fast, and we leapfrogged until dark. The dark was a relief after the light, although the mosquitos were the worst. We slept in a little bowl of sand, along with their buddy Rambler.

Standoff on Mather Pass

June 20

I love mornings on the trail. As hackneyed as it sounds, the world seems fresh in the morning. You're more likely to see a bear, or a big deer, in the early morning. The light is still a little amber, the air still cool.

Until some dude runs you off the trail.

Yeah, it happened again. Some guy roughly pushed past me without so much as saying hello. Again, I got all pissed off. I say hello to everyone I can on trail; I may only see them once, but I want to acknowledge their basic humanity. This dude was hiking like he was the human incarnation of an Audi driver (they themselves being lizards, obvi). He clearly assumed he was faster than me, so would never see me again. But he was wrong. It's the kind of crap that just ruins your day. Again, I determined I would catch up to him, pass him, show him he had a better.

But unlike Mr. Earbuds, this guy was wicked fast. We both passed the other hikers trying for an early morning passage over Mather Pass. At one point, he veered off the trail onto a shorter but steeper cross-country route. I stayed on the trail. We both reached the final switchbacks at about the same time, but the kid just had more wind than me, and he got there first. I scrabbled up right after, panting, sweating, irate.

He was seated in a niche in the rock of the pass, smug. 

"That wasn't so bad," he drawled.

"Pro tip," I huffed, "when you pass people, say hello. You never know when you'll see them again."

His eyes narrowed. He knew I was telling him off, although not necessarily why. In his defense, I had just raced him up a mountain to needle him about his manners; it's not like we really had a blood feud.

Until then, that is. His expression got quite dark. I hiked past him and on. Because screw him and his lack of manners, his sprint to the top, his smugness. Victory goes to not the fast, but to those with stamina. Endurance. Or me, anyway, which was the important thing.

I flew down the pass, executing two glissades. (That's fancy mountaineering French for sliding down snow on your tuchus.) (Tuchus is Yiddish for butt.) At any rate: Not wanting to cede my clear (moral) victory, I raced down below snow line, only to find:

I had lost my rod and reel on one of the glissades (tuchus-slides).

Well, I thought, I totally had that coming. I was all filled with zealous victory, which is usually exactly when I overstep. What exactly had I achieved today? I had been angered, and in response had pissed someone else off and then lost my prized fishing rig. I do not really believe in karma per se; I think the law of averages tends to even stuff out, but not really that divine retribution will cost you a pole.

A couple other hikers, a man and a woman, come down and passed me while I was having this remorse orgy. Had they seen or picked up a pole? They had not.

"I'm carrying some flies, but no pole," the man said.

"Really," I replied, "because I happen to have found a fly rod two days ago and haven't been able to find the owner." True story: I had found an ultralightweight Tenkara rod and had been searching for its owner for days.

I gave him the rod, he was delighted, and I felt much better about my whole day. The Mather Pass Kid and his hiking partner showed up, and when they (quite archly) told me that they had seen my gear but not picked it up, I figured that was okay. Just fishing gear, anyway.

Well, fishing gear and a glove. That glove worried me more, because my hands got pretty cold when I was in the snow. Nothing to do about it now, I thought. 

Or rather, there was one more thing to do: Apologize to the Kid. I had come off as a grade A asshole, I knew. And we probably would be seeing some of each other, as we seemed to share a pace.

I made my mea culpa when I saw him next. He accepted my apology, and we shook on it (hikers shake by touching their closed fists these days because our hands are so gross). And in doing so, I reached a sort of grace for a moment. One that acknowledges the inevitablity of some stress in my life, some rude boys, some young men faster than me. There was a hint of taoism in this relaization; that I had been fighting the universe and should just have accepted it as it was. My reaction was far worse than the original offense. 

I even saw this extend a bit towards my immense sphere of grief over Jennifer's death; I was realizing that her death was tragic but something to accept, to let it come and go as it would, make a ruin of my day when it did, because fighting that grief it only made it worse.

I promise that I won't make this blog about overcoming grief. That book, quite famously, has already been written. But you'll have to bear with me once in a while.

The trail cruised down one creek, then back up the Middle Fork Kings River. As evening fell, I was passed by two guys with tiny packs. Having been in the game for a bit, I recognized them as some true hiking badasses. You can just kind of tell.

"You going up over the pass?" I asked.

"Yes," said the taller one, his wild hair flopping in the breeze, "AND YOU SHOULD CONE WITH US!"

"I dunno," I replied, "pretty late in the day for an attempt at Muir Pass." Muir is the snowiest of the passes by an order of magnitude, and the later in the day it gets, the softer and less easy the snow gets. Until dark, of course, but then you are night ice hiking.

Night ice hiking, it turned out, was exactly their plan. I loved them for it. I loved them for inviting me along. That's how you will know the true elite in this sport, I thought. They're so badass that they are nice. They seemed like Hawkeye and Honeycut from MASH. I learned later that the tall one was John Z, a total badass famous for his CDT video, and his buddy was I think Andrew Bentz, current holder of the fastest known time for hiking the John Muir Trail. 

I hiked until I found a, perhaps the last, shelf of flat unsnowy earth on the ascent. I shared my camp with three gregarious hikers: Fat Kathy, B Squared, and Golden Boy. They made me laugh. Fat Kathy was, sadly, not named after the comic strip. At dark, a troop of ten loud,young hikers came into camp, thought about staying, and then bellowed their way further down the trail.

All in all a good day. 

The PCT and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle

June 19
Morning came, cold again. No bears in camp, even though I had cooked trout and probably left trout bones and trout stock on the ground. The Bear Menace is much exaggerated, I thought. I hiked down along the last of the three Rae lakes, past Dollar Lake, Arrowhead lake, a trout creek. I only lost an hour to the fish hunt before hiking on into Paradise Valley.
Aptly named. Green, lush hillsides cradled a riparian corridor with stately trees and tumbling, cold snowmelt in the stream at its center. If just two days ago I had been enraptured by the harsh rock and ice world while climbing Whitney, now I was reminded of how much I love valleys, how they rival peaks for the pleasure they bring. True, it can get pretty sweltering, and my Mosquito Entourage is usually there to meet me, but the valleys of the High Sierra seem... habitable. In that, they are comforting. Like if my feet both stopped working and I was stuck there, all I would need would be an axe and some good old-fashioned American can-do spirit, and I could create a homestead.

Which is of course completely absurd. I could not survive a month without fishing out every hole and trapping every squirrel. And even then, I would be some emaciated Atkins refugee looking guy. But it's a fun myth to have coaching your thoughts as they zoom around your head.

The descent ended at a single-track wooden suspension bridge. It swayed disconcertingly/awesomely as I walked over. I am not a huge fan of human intrusion into the natural world, obvi, but a wooden suspension bridge seemed so right, so in keeping with the environs.

Then it was back up to Pinchot pass -- both nothing to sneeze and nothing to write home about. There was snow, pretty abundant, but the route was extremely obvious because of the tracks in the snow.

These tracks finally crystallized something that had been floating around for a while. They were the most obvious demonstration of how are changing the trail just by being on it. As recently as my 2008 hike, this was a map and compass exercise, or even GPS. That meant looking at a map, figuring out which peak in your field of vision corresponded with which peak on the map. It was a different level of awareness about the terrain, one which brought history into the mix by introducing named peaks, valleys, and ranges. That valley is Dead Horse Valley; that mountain is Jenkins Peak.

Now, we just keep or he'd down and follow the path. Don't have to think at all.

I want to super clear about this: I am not blaming anyone. I am more to blame than most, because I keep hiking this trail. What I realized was that by being here to experience the PCT, I was destroying that experience. Crowds scare away wildlife; I was being deprived of seeing bear because of all the noise my fellow hikers make. But I was dong it right back to them. It is true: You cannot observe a phenomenon without altering it.

So we destroyed my 2008 hike experience; so what. The more important question is what has come in its place. I think it is also cool, but perhaps less transformative, less transcendental. And more like a house party. I see these gangs, posses, troops of loud youth banded together. By hiking together, they assure they will see no wildlife and experience no existential fear or vulnerability. But these experiences are the gateways to a better understanding of their, our, vulnerability, mortality, our place in the universe. My understanding of myself is as a small, essentially powerless mote in the nonexistent eye of the universe, and I am content with that. But that understanding, and my acceptance of it, came through my search for ecstatic truth through solitude. 

But you know what else might be going on?I'm probably just getting old. And kids annoy old men.

After Pinchot, I bounced down into a valley and back up again, ending the day in Upper Basin. Wide open meadows with clumps of trees. It was so inviting. I found a suitable copse and set up camp. 

Two passes to glory

June 18

When I wake up in the morning, I usually take a moment to examine the maps for my next 20 or 30 miles to see what delights or terrors wait me. This morning, my map study revealed that I had a choice: I could hike over Forester Pass, the highest point on the PCT, and camp in the valley thereafter. Or I could double up, climbing up to Forester, jolting down to the valley, then regaining almost all that altitude as I climbed up and over Glen Pass.

Wasn't even a choice. I laced up my shoes, ate my grits and coffee, and starred hustling.

Like Whitney, Forester has a glorious approach. You climb up a creek valley and into a steep-sided stone bowl, then climb up the side of that bowl, finally going up a rack of switchbacks to a wee little notch. You can tell where this notch is by looking for the steep snowfield that covers the last switchbacks; this snow always persists pretty late into the season. I focused on the snow and put the pedal to the floor.

If the crowds at Whitney were dispiriting, Forester was the antidote. There were few people, and they were all thoroughly groovy thru-hikers. A young man named Momento snapped my picture as I crossed that snowfield, ice ax in hand like the sensible middle-aged man I am.

Forester Pass, with Momento. You gotta zoom in on these panoramas!

It felt great to be up top. It is not like it's "all downhill from here," not even like the rest of my day was going to be downhill. But for me? I had been unsure my body would let me hike this year. I had been huddled in grief 18 months ago, too weak to walk two blocks for groceries. My friends and loved oness -- Lily, Dan, Kelsey, Ezra, Tim, Shoshana, Tobias and Madeleine -- they had nursed me back. It had taken, as they say, a village. And here I was, a fully realized person again, doing fancy person things. That was my accomplishment.

The trail down took me past the turnoff for Kearsage Pass, which most hikers use as a resupply route. When I passed it, it reshuffled the deck of hikers around me; of course I would see other fast hikers again. I strongly suspected I'd see Hoops, BFG, and CO again. I cannot remember if I've introduced them all... But they were the best company and among the fastest hikers I'd been around. But almost all the other faces were replaced by new ones.

Lots and lots of new ones.

Because the trail was really crowded. By skipping Kearsage, I had jumped ahead a day in the pack, and the afternoon was noticeably denser than the morning. It's not all bad, though; I hiked with a young man named Diesel for an hour or so, and he was great company.

Glen Pass wasn't in any way technical. There was snow, but just the kind that gets your feet wet and slows you down. It was, however, super duper exhausting, a gratuitous ladling of thousands of feet of climb onto an already long day. But I did it, making it over and down to Rae Lakes before dark. 

As soon as the trail hit the shore, I dropped my pack, got out my rod, and cast. I used a Panther Martin spinner bait, and my first cast yielded a 10" rainbow. So did my second. I probably landed 15 fish in 45 minutes, keeping the biggest four to eat. It was the best trout fishing I'd ever had. I made a stringer from a willow branch, collected my fish and looked for a place to cook, eat and sleep.

I found the place at the next lake, a bearbox and campsites. There were some other hikers there, and they watched in bemused interest as I attempted to steam my catch. I put rocks in the bottom of my pot, then some water, then laid the fish on top. It was an improvement over boiling, and I ate well. I still wished for a skillet, though.

The agony and the ecstacy

June 17

I woke as early as I could for the climb up Whitney, although the diminished tent population told me I was still "late" to leave camp at 6 am. The morning was chilly but very crisp and clear; the perfect weather for the gallery of visual delights that awaited me.
First of these was Timberline lake. It's name is obvious and appropriate, as it still held trees along its shores. While cold, the air was also perfectly still, making the lake a mirror to double the majesty around it.

Timberline Lake just after dawn, the valley approach to Whitney behind.

After the lake, the trail climbs up through a rocky valley with sheer walls. Spires dotted these walls, sentinels to my passage. Moonscapes are beautiful. Desolation and cold are the only things a body can expect in terms of creature comforts up here, but the eye and mind remain drawn. It is because we do not belong here, I thought. It is because we love that which is most different from ourselves or our tamed home environs. And this is really admirable in us, in humans. As egotistical as we are, we also revere that which is most hostile to our species.

The valley approach to Whitney

Such happy musings were suddenly and thoroughly tested as the trail, now close to the summit ridge, was joined by the Whitney Portal trail. This trail is the popular route up Whitney. Not only can you use it to do Whitney as a day hike from your car, it is also the first step in the perennially overcrowded John Muir Trail. Suddenly there were hundreds of people, loud and boisterous about their upcoming or just completed "conquest" of Whitney. Hiking up to the summit, I saw a lot of people who were spending their day as actors in their own personal movie about mountaineering: Fully teched out in steel crampons, over-the-calf gaiters, ice axes, and glacier goggles, they seemed to be searching for a perilous glacier to overcome. None obliged them. The trail passed through only a couple of short, scant, nontechnical snowfields. The air rang with the sound of people dulling their crampons on rock. At least their REI dividend will be fat, I thought.
The summit brought new personalities. The guy in full camo with a Rambo knife on his hip. He, appropriately, skulked around furtively and only ever seemed to look at things through the corners of his eyes. But it was in vain; for all his stealth, I could still totally see him. A gaggle of paunched middle-agers high fived and congratulated each other on their time. For them, this was a race course. There's a hut on the summit, and I peaked in to find like 20 people huddled in there, looking shell-shocked and seeking shelter from all the sun and beauty outside.

Muir would be barfing into his beard over this

It was just gross, and such a repudiation of my happy thoughts on the way up. People were not here to revere a hostile world, they were here to conquer it. Or worse: They used it as a backdrop for their own personal ego narrative. 

Yeah, well, no one insisted you be here, Arno. I hustled myself back down the mountain, each step lessening my burden of doubt about the human condition. I guess the most important thing was to glimpse some piece of why I like desolate places. And anyway, there was food to eat, spring water to drink, a clear sky. It was a fine day.

I passed through Crabtree, picking up gear I had stashed there, and hiked down to Wright Creek. In addition to food, water, and sun, there were trout. I whiled away the last of the light catching trout, with great success this time. I caught two big enough to eat, and was therefore presented with the problem of how to cook them. No fires allowed up here, and no skillet... So I boiled them. Not exactly a delicacy, but it was fresh meat. 

First blood

June 16

I was up at 5:30 but still one of the later hikers to leave camp. People wake very early out here, and they seem to attach the same air of luxury to going to bed early as people at home attach to waking up late. Ben Franklin would be delighted.

The trail traversed, climbed, descended, just did its PCT thing. Open forests around sandy tread. I stopped to take off some layers about five miles in, and while I was bent over my pack, a nudge from behind sent me forward onto my hands. It was a hiker who had pushed me out of the trail to get past.

He hadn't said a word. Getting passed on the trail is always a touch fraught for me -- I know I am not the fastest, but I am pretty damn fast, and yeah, I am proud of that. It's like running a marathon; you are not really racing those around you, but it feels much better to be moving up through the pack than it does to be passed, regardless of what your final time is. But you know, getting passed happens. Usually I forget the ego sting before the next podcast comes up on my iPod. 

To be brushed aside, however, felt like a real insult. I was gonna hike that dumbass into the ground. 

I put on my pack, the phrase "suiting up for battle" flashing absurdly on me as I did, and set off at a very brisk clip.

He was easy to catch. Wasn't even hiking that fast. This turned out to present a new problem, though, because the dude was so plugged into his earbuds that he could not hear me ask, then yell, that I wanted to get past. Finally I ran in beside him, waving my poles frantically. 

He let me past. He did, however, do so without trying to lay some blame on me. 

"Next time," he said with a scholarly air, "just tap me on the shoulder." I imagined hauling off and smacking him on the shoulder with my pole. He plugged back in to his buds before I could answer. 

The further away I got, the more peace I found. An hour later I met two hiker dudes by a stream where I stopped for some water. The whole Triple Crown thing came up, and we talked about the CDT for a bit. They were cool. Then Mr. Earbuds showed up and joined them. I suddenly got it: His hiking mania sprang from his need to be with his herd! He was extremely nonplussed to find that his bros had accepted me as cool, and resorted to the primary tactic of most assholes: silent glowering.

Trail drama, who needs it. I moved on. 
After a long ascent, the trail topped out on a high, windy notch with sweeping views east into the dry Owens Valley. There was a tiny little wildfire going on one of the eastern slopes. I knew from other hikers that it had been reported, but there was no attempt underway to stop it. No reason to; the vegetation was so sparse, it seemed unlikely that it would spread. My goodness, O thought, I am seeing an actual healthy wildfire. After all the catastrophic ones, it looked like a wonder of nature.

Then it was down to Rock Creek. From there, I'd climb up to Crabtree Meadows, the base camp for climbing Mt. Whitney (thru-hikers do Whitney as a day hike). But while crossing the creek, I saw the darting shadows of trout, and my hike was delayed while I succumbed to my obsession.

My rubber worms were scoffed at. In fact, all manner of metal and plastic doo-dads were treated with the derision of a picky child surveying a salad of Lima beans and raw kale. So I tried some Powerbait. For the uninitiated, these are little neon green marshmallows that smell like rubber boots and old meat. (Actually, they come in many gross flavors and weird colors; garlic flavor is very popular.) It seemed like an insult to the trouts' dignity to serve them such stuff; they are as beautiful as unicorns, and you would not feed a unicorn a bluerazzleberry corn dog. 

Or maybe one would, as the trout were curious about the surreal pellets. Several ingested the bait, but then spit it out. Finally, over an hour in, one bit and held. I pulled a transcendentally beautiful sliver of fighting muscle out of the creek, held it in my hand, removed the hook and released it.

I had drawn first blood, as Dan and I would say. No matter what else happened, I had not been skunked.

Flush with glorious victory, I strutted up to Crabtree meadow. Watched by a curious doe, I set up my tent, made dinner, and lay down to the sleep of Ceasar, Alexander, and Rollo.

No problem!

June 15
It was a cold, dry landscape. Huge distances revealed themselves, snowy peaks in the distance. The trail took us through green meadows without surface water, but also without anything to distract us from the innate stark beauty. Landscapes like this prompt one to ponder deep, probably fruitless philosophical questions, like: what constitutes beauty? How is beauty related to the hostility or fertility of a landscape? Green fields are beautiful; moonscapes are beautiful. Are we drawn to extremes?

I'll leave it to the philosophy majors, I thought. 

Some things find their greatest beauty in death

The trail took me further and further up as the afternoon got deeper. As it leaked from afternoon into dusk, I approached Cottonwood Pass. In high snow years it can hold snow, making it the first test of what I'd see for the next few hundred miles. There was a wide, verdant meadow before the approach, and I paused to ponder whether I should just stay there. Hoops caught up to me, and I asked her what she planned on doing. We both pretended to consider the meadow, then hiked up to the pass. There's something so addictive about mileage; tacking on an extra three miles is hard to resist.

For some of us, anyway. In one of the switchbacks, I came on an odd couple. A young man with brightly colored glasses -- without lenses -- appeared to be comforting a young woman. On closer inspection, she was the woman who had driven the Ferrari back to Hikertown. 

"We're having a hard time," the young man explained. The woman looked defeated. 

Somehow, this inspired me to give a pep talk. A real classic/clichéd one, like something the Gene Hackman character in Hoosiers might have thought up. Lots of exhortations to never give up, and you've got this, and clapping my hands and saying "you've got this, all right, no problem!" (These are the phrases I use to regulate my own despair.)

I used to wish I could be a professional thru-hiker. Now I wish I could coach.

The pass had no snow, or just a few patches. My Groundhog Day was very auspicious. I tumbled down to Chicken Springs lake, where there were already a dozen tents. I cooked by starlight in the growing freeze of alpine night and tucked myself in bed.

Tiny bubbles

June 14
Lily and I hiked out the next morning in cool, crisp weather. The trail gently rolled its way between boulders and pine trees, me and my ungainly sack-of-potatoes pack rolling along with it. Ten days of food. Lily bade me farewell after a few miles, leaving me to contemplate the mountain range in front of me. I hoped there was still snow, because it is beautiful, but also knew full well that I's be cursing it if I ended up in it. The notion of the mountains' enormity was exciting, even as I hiked through another burn, this one I had actually seen on fire when I walked through in 2008. 

About five miles in, I stopped for some water at a spring that was being taken over for a campsite by a gang of Catholic seminarians from Indiana. Also present were one exceedingly harried horse packer and Sugar. He scrutinized me, smiles, and adressed me as "Crown." That's what I get for being such  a showboat with my T-Bomb.

The trail snook up over a little ridge and down into enormous Monache Meadows. These are a sagebrush sea, miles across, with little islands of trees on elevated pieces of land. They inspire awe and disquiet in me: there's something about their open emptiness that reminds me of salt flats or playas, something forbidding about their scale.

Tucked in along one shore of this sea is the Kern River, here just a creek, which the trail crosses by a handsome bridge. I love this spot, as hundreds of swallows nest underneath  the bridge, careening around you as you stand there. I am not alone in this love, as dozens of hikers were there, basking in the sun or yelling at one another. Someone had bathed using soap in the creek, a total pet peeve of mine. Bubbles collected in the eddies and clung to grassy shore. Putting soap into water you know others have to drink seems like the height of mannerlessness. Maybe they assume that it cannot matter, because the river can just flush it away. But there are now too many of us for that to work.

There were also other things in that creek, things that were caught and held my eye: trout. I tried for about an hour but without luck. Or that much skill, really. My angling was cut short by a naked long haired man in the water a bit downstream from me. He rose out in a big move of beard, hair, and 20-something hubris, pausing to glance at his girl on the bank to gauge efficacy. It looked like an overwrought scene from a PBS special about early man. The fish and I both left in disgust.

On my way out of the meadow, I saw Coppertone hiking south along the PCT. Remember him? He gave me a root beer float at Walker Pass. Anyway, he seemed to be in great spirits. He was also definitely very naked. One must assume the two are linked. Also, his name made a lot more sense now.

The air got a distinct alpine evening chill to it as I hiked up along Cow Creek, topping out at a spring. The cold forced me into the tent and bag as soon as the sun finally set.

Double O Kennedy

June 12-13

Kennedy Meadows, and in particular the General Store during hiking season, is a social biotope all its own. There is a spacious wooden deck, a harried snack bar, a giant hiker box consisting of a slouching table of unlabeled, half-filled ziploc bags. There are locals praising Trump in loud voices over their pancake breakfasts, trolling for liberals. There are dirt-bikers stopping for a bit of gas or beer. And then there are the hikers.
Hundreds of us, all over the place. Hikers who have been there for days, hikers who just stop in for a candy bar before launching themselves into the High Sierra. Lots of self-important hikers declaring that they had figured out how to beat the system and life-hack their way through the snow. Many packs of young men laughing too loud and looking a bit concerned, using each others' company to gloss over the fact that they did not know how to use any of the ice gear they had strapped to their pack.
It's a hiker scene, as Chancey would say. And I am a hiker, no doubt about it. It isn't, however, really my scene. I mean, I love drinking a can of beer in the afternoon, but I hate false bravado. And the population growth on the trail has led to social innovations that remind me of the worst facets of American high school: Jealously maintained cliques and rampant rumor-based fear mongering. Tables would eye me as i walked past, and then return to their discussion of how impossible the crevasses on such and such pass were.
But man oh man am I a curmudgeon, I thought to myself. So I finally just picked a table, sat down, and started talking to the people there. I did a puzzle, or as much of it as its remaining pieces would support. And I did find some pretty cool people. Maybe they were all really cool; maybe I just function poorly in this kind of setting. Given my disastrous social career in high school, this theory totally checks out.
As evening approached, Lily drove up. I gave her a big, beery hug, introduced her arond. Her glazed eyes confirmed for me that she was overwhelmed by the crowd, just like me. We pretty much immediately left for a nearby campground, where we cooked salmon and veggies. Zero miles, but a very good end to the day.
The next day was spent in the serious and heavily neurotic pursuit of packing my pack for the upcoming stretch. I had set my eyes on a big stretch, from Kennedy Meadows a full 178 miles to Vermillion Valley Resort. That means 12 days of food -- or after trying to fit that into my pack, I decided that 10 days would be all I would need -- as well as fishing rod, ice axe, bear can, warmer clothes. I shoved and squeezed and fretted while a very patient Lily waited. Finally, I had a backpack that was filled with everything necessary, but looked like a Jenga tower with a yard sale strapped to the outside. Probably weighed 50 pounds, made me as graceful as an ox, but it would keep me sage and fed for 10 days.
This monumental labor done, Lily and I repaired to the store, where I caight back up with Killer, Hoops, Carolyn, and Alex, the closest things I have to a social group right now. Then we headed back to camp for steak. We met an eccentric but very friendly Japanese man named Sugar, who sang us a farewell song and made us an origami crane; we gave him Budweiser and steak. "American beer very good," he exclaimed. My goodness, the Japanese are a considerate and polite nation.
I was scared of the upcoming section. What would the snow be like? Was I too old for this? Would my backpack break? But I had given myself all the advantages I knew how to: I was rested after double zero days, packed and ready. OK, Sierras. Let's go.

You'll never make it

June 10-11
The next day's hike brought me down to Walker Pass. This pass, a road crosing with Highway 178, has a lot of meaning for me. For years, this was where I touched base with the PCT when not hiking it. It is low enough in elevation and far enough south that it clears of snow months before the next PCT access to the north, at Kennedy Meadows. It also, being the southernmost part of the Sierras, has enough big-mountain character to clear out my mind over a weekend. I used to get off work Saturday at 2 pm, get in my beater truck, and drive straight down to the trailhead, getting there around 10 pm. I would hike all day Saturday and Sunday, then drive home, getting in in the wee hours Monday. This little patch of this big trail has given me so much comfort, I count it among my friends.
There was quite the crowd when I got there. Long-time trail personality Meadow Ed was there -- faithful readers may remember his Quixotic crusade against using water caches for post-coital hygiene. He promised me a grilled cheese but forgot or decided not to. I think he never did like the looks of me. Yogi, who has written the most widely-used planning guides to the PCT and CDT, was also there, a real trail celebrity. We both started playing this long-distance hiking game in 1999, hiking the Appalachian Trail that year, so we vaguely know each other, and said vague hellos. ("Arno -- I know that name," she kept saying.) A dude named Coppertone made me a root beer float. 

It was awesome.
But everything g comes at a cost, right? In this case, the price was that there were a lot of people talking at how to hike the trail, even if they'd never yet finished it themselves. (Yogi, being a really seasoned hiker, took a much quieter tone.) It culminated with Meadow Ed looking me in the eye and telling me to stay at Walker Pass and eat cookies, "because you can't make it to Kennedy Meadows in time for the Saturday night movie anyway."
Slight digression: Kennedy Meadows, my next town stop and the last stop before the high Sierra, once had a movie night on Saturday. The whole community would gather at the general store, which had an amphitheatre, eat popcorn and watch a movie. I saw the Muppet Movie there in 2002. It was awesome. The tradition was crushed when another local business called the intellectual property cops on the general store, which is about as cool as drowning baby rabbits. Back to the story:
"But Ed," I said, "the people at Grumpy Bear's ruined that movie night years ago."
Yogi, without looking up: "Grumpy Bears has new ownership."
So. It was Friday at 1 pm. Fifty miles to the store. Ed told me I couldn't make it, and Yogi told me there was a precious memory of youth to be recaptured.
"Later," I said, stuffing a couple donuts in my mouth as I left.
I"d love to say that the next 50 miles were filled with remarkable occurrences worth retelling, but it was more like an endurance challenge. The pines became more numerous, the joshua trees disappeared. I hiked with a young man named Alex who had a killer pace. I collected water from a spring some 150 yards off trail on a worn-down path through forest, and I slept peacefully beneath the stars. Mostly I hiked, fast and constant, and listened to The Three Musketeers on audiobook. Man, Dumas really likes his swordplay!
And then, at 6 pm on Saturday the 11th, I walked into Kennedy Meadows. The beer-drunk hikers on the porch applauded my approach. My triumph was complete, except for the fact that there
A) was no movie, "we haven't done that in like 15 years, what are you thinking, young man," and
B) the store was closed, so no fresh food and no beer.
Oh well. I did it, so screw you, naysayers.
The scene was kinda wacky. I dined on noodles from my pack next to a very young woman who said she had driven the Hikertown Ferrari. I hung out with a good-natured crew that had all eaten psychedelic mushrooms that day and were just calming down. I finally spent ten minutes in a teepee they have set up. Some crazy man had built a giant bonfire in the middle of the teepee, making it uncomfortably hot; a Brit was talking to an Australian woman who was talking to a Russian emigre. When a fever-eyed man carrying a can of pork and beans, two unfinished beers, and a 70s pulp novel about a grizzly bear gone wrong came in and declared "I AM CROATIAN," I tapped out. Maybe after three days above thirty miles, I could skip the international sweatlodge party. I crawled into bed and let the sleep come.