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.