Blistered Kind Of Love (13 page)

In the summer of 1935, Clarke commissioned a survey to begin tracing the trail, heading south from Monument 78 at the Canadian border. “Their instructions,” wrote Robert Cantwell in a 1963
Sports Illustrated
article, “called for them to locate a wide, easy grade, to lay out the trail so it passed through scenic country, to keep to the summit ridge, to note all wildlife, to check good hunting grounds and to test the fishing in streams and lakes.” Five forest rangers tackled the initial eight miles of survey, diligently noting their discoveries: “a porcupine, a fool hen with chicks, a whistling marmot, eleven mountain goats and a herd of seven deer.” With this attention to detail, it's no wonder that the work of mapping and trailblazing took decades.

In part because the Boy Scouts were occupied maintaining their own trails and the Forest Service was busy counting fool hens, much of the subsequent work fell to volunteers from the YMCA. One such volunteer, Warren Rogers, caught Clarke's “footpath–fever” at the age of twenty-three and never lost it. After the initial sections of the trail had been mapped out, it was Rogers who explored them, overcoming the limitations of a body crippled by childhood polio.

During the slow spawning of the PCT, Clarke remained the project's figurehead, holding court in his Pasadena home (he was nicknamed the “Armchair Hiker”) with Rogers as his eyes, ears, and feet in the field. When Clarke passed away in 1957 at the age of eighty-four, Rogers continued campaigning for the completion of the PCT. Keeping the Pacific Crest Trail alive, according to Rogers' son, was his father's purpose in life.

Finally, in 1965, amid the sixties' fervor for everything earthy, President Lyndon Johnson announced his intention to develop a national system of trails. As is often the case in Washington, this announcement led to an earth-shattering development: the commission of a commission. The commission published a report, “Trails for America,” that recommended building four national scenic trails—the Appalachian Trail, the Continental Divide Trail, the Potomac Heritage Trail, and the Pacific Crest Trail. Some years later, President Johnson signed the National Trail Systems Act, which named the AT and the PCT our first National Scenic Trails. Still, there was much work to be done.

In 1970, eighteen-year-old Eric Ryback became the first person to attempt a PCT thru-hike—despite the fact that only half of the trail had been completed. Hiking south from Canada in blue jeans, without a guidebook and with an eighty-pound pack, Ryback struggled against hunger, exhaustion, and loneliness. Ultimately, he claimed success and documented the hike in his book,
The High Adventure of Eric Ryback
. Whether Ryback did indeed complete a border-to-border thru-hike is still a matter of debate within the PCT community. Some dispute the veracity of his claim, noting that Ryback accepted rides for portions of his trip. Schaffer et. al., the authors of the PCT guidebook, recognize Richard Watson's 1972 effort as the first successful thru-hike. Given the patchwork nature of the trail in the early 1970s, however, the notion of thru-hiking was at that time certainly nebulous at best.

Due in part to the publicity generated by Ryback's adventure, trail construction boomed throughout the 1970s. The federal agencies (the Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service, and the National Park Service) responsible for managing most of the land on the PCT's course finally agreed on some important management guidelines, and between 1972 and 1980 nearly a thousand miles of trail were built. The trail was officially completed in 1993,
twenty-five years after its designation as a National Scenic Trail and thirty-six years after Clinton Clarke's death. Work continues, just as Clarke would have hoped, and a new legion of dreamers envisions a trail unencumbered by private land restrictions and protected from suburban sprawl.

On the morning of May 21, I was roused from my own dreams by an angel's chirps.

“Happy
berrrtday
, Duffy! Happy, happy twenty-eighth! Happy
berrrtday
!” Angela repeated, delivering a compact pat to my bum. “Rise and hike,
berrrtday
boy.”

It was a comfortable morning at 7,500 feet in the western San Jacinto Mountains. We'd camped on a flat bed of pine needles under the cover of Jeffrey and Coulter pines. It was a beautiful spot, filled with an invigorating pine scent, and we broke camp in a jovial mood. We had our sights set on a birthday celebration at the Pink Motel, the junkyard trail angel refuge that Meadow Ed had described to us at Kamp Anza. It would be a twenty-one-mile hike, but entirely downhill. We were somewhat low on water—three liters for the two of us—but I wasn't particularly troubled, even though we faced a sixteen-mile waterless stretch. Of course, it would have been nice to fill up before we left, but this campsite offered no such opportunity.

The night before, I'd accidentally marinated our instant potatoes in a Dead Sea-like salt solution, and we'd each needed a liter and a half of water to counteract the brackish spuds. Angela lobbied for a two-mile detour to Black Mountain Camp for more water, but I convinced her that it was unnecessary, reasoning that we'd handled the San Felipe Hills with an equivalent amount of water and that today would be easy downhill walking. What I failed to figure into my blasé calculations was that the farther we descended toward San Gorgonio Pass and its 1,000-foot elevation, the hotter it would get. In fact, for every 1,000 feet of elevation lost we should have planned on a gain of three to five and a half degrees. In just six hours we'd drop from our comfortable mountain perch into a smoldering valley inferno.

There are many things for a novice hiker to worry about when setting off on a distance hike, most of them involving the prefixes “hyper-” and “hypo-.” To start with, there's hypothermia, hyperthermia, and hypo-nutrition. Then there's hypo-hydration, hyper-exhaustion, and hyperextension (of mission-critical joints). And finally, there are hyper-high falls, hyper-intense bear encounters, and, for a boyfriend like me, confrontations with my (occasionally) hypersensitive female. So far, we'd been lucky and avoided any serious, nonestrogen related exposures to anything from the “hyper-”–“hypo-” family. We'd covered nearly two hundred miles unscathed. But while some of my fears had been alleviated, there was one menace that still loomed large. Snakes. Snakes with rattles . . . and sharp fangs designed to deliver poisonous venom.

Rattlesnakes are members of the pit viper (crotalid) family of poisonous snakes and come in sixteen speciated flavors. Although these sixteen species vary greatly in size, skin pattern, and behavior, they all share three basic characteristics: dry, hollow segments of tail skin that make a loud, scary noise when wiggled; heat-sensitive organs located on the sides of their heads that allow them to locate and track prey; and erectile fangs, often over half an inch in length, that can inject a complex soup of destructive proteins.

And while one or more rattler species can be found in each of the forty-eight contiguous states, California is fortunate to be home to six species—the sidewinder, the speckled, the red diamond, the Pacific, the western diamond-back, and the Mojave green.

I've never liked rattlesnakes of any specie. In fact, ever since a pre-adolescent encounter, I've been deathly afraid of them. Perhaps this is because our seminal meeting occurred when I was at the unfortunate age of eight. I say “unfortunate” because at eight, I was neither particularly brave nor very rational. Rather, I was enormously impressionable and harbored an exaggerated fear of animals, both wild and domestic. Large family dogs with wagging tails would sometimes cause me to turn tail and flee. And
wild
animals such as bears, crocodiles, and rattlesnakes, well—I considered them to be deadly efficient boy-killing beasts. To make matters worse, I was well aware of the
presence of rattlesnakes in my native California and was sure that if I were ever bitten by one I would face a grotesquely painful death.

I saw my first rattler while hauling gear down to my family's Big Sur cabin. He was a five-footer and percussed loudly. I was duly petrified—and that was even before he started advancing up the trail toward me! Desperate, I threw my sleeping bag and screamed shrilly, but my assailant wasn't deterred. He kept slithering right for me. Did he mistake me for a gigantic lizard sandwich? I continued to scream and was just about to wet my Underoos when my father, right behind me on the trail, came to the rescue. He lobbed a number of large rocks at the snake, nearly hitting him dead-on. After about the fourth rock, the rattler got the idea and retreated. He'd never been close enough to
physically
hurt me, but psychologically, well—that was a different story.

Twenty years and a medical-school education later, I'd evolved a more complete understanding of the rattlesnake. Now I knew that a rattlesnake bite is not instantly fatal and that up to forty percent of bites are completely dry of venom. According to the
The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy
, more than eight thousand people in the United States are bitten each year by poisonous snakes, but fewer than six actually die. Most of the fatal bites occur among children, the elderly, and members of religious sects who handle venomous snakes. Rattlesnakes are likely more afraid of people (especially those in odd religious sects) than we are of them and are usually anxious to avoid confrontations. In fact, the majority of bites in the U.S. result from people's attempts to prove that they are faster than the snake—which, considering that a rattlesnake can strike in 1/256th of a second, means the only thing these folks prove is that they know how to end up in an emergency room. Wilderness experts will tell you that if you give a snake six feet he won't bother you, but, as my childhood experience taught me, this isn't
always
the case.

Before starting our hike, I'd educated myself on the proper treatment of rattlesnake bites. The treatment algorithm goes like this: First, grab a Sawyer Extractor and start sucking. The Sawyer Extractor, if used correctly and within the first five minutes after a bite, may remove up to thirty percent of envenomation. I say “may” because the Extractor has never been shown to be of
any definitive benefit to humans. In essence, though, it remains a safer and more attractive option than the technique glorified in pop culture—having your friend suck out the venom by mouth. Next, apply a compression wrap (not a tourniquet) to the affected extremity (most bites are on the hands, feet, arms, or legs) with an Ace bandage. Finally, the victim should be evacuated to an emergency room for evaluation and immediate treatment (if necessary) with equine antivenin or the synthetic Crofab. These antidotes bind to and neutralize the venom, preventing or lessening tissue destruction and clotting abnormalities.

So, yeah—now I knew a lot more about snakes, and knowledge
is
power, but in my case not powerful enough to overcome boyhood terror. Especially not after reading in the guidebook that rattlers can be found virtually anywhere along the California section of the PCT. Landmarks with names such as Rattlesnake Canyon, Rattlesnake Springs, and Rattlesnake Trail didn't help much, either. The guidebook described Rattlesnake Trail as “little-used.” Gee, I wonder why?

During our first two weeks on the trail I'd vigilantly scanned the ground for rattlesnakes, and during those two weeks I hadn't seen a single one. It was ironic, then, that I should hear my birthday “gift” before I saw him. The sharp and loud percussion came from my right as I rounded a curve in the trail. I skipped quickly to my left, darted forward, and spun to face the menace. I looked at him closely for a second: His fork-shaped bubblegum-pink tongue was flicking rapidly and contrasted severely with the tire-tread darkness of his coiled body. He was a Pacific rattlesnake and sat tucked back against a collection of boulders, hidden from view to those coming down the trail. Fortunately, his position was slightly off-trail, and I'd been able to move safely outside of his six-foot striking range. Angela, however, was rapidly approaching.