Blistered Kind Of Love (34 page)

In a section of
Beyond Backpacking
, Jardine explains how a more experienced hiker should introduce backpacking to a neophyte. “Teach beginners how to enjoy hiking and camping by ensuring that the experiences will be pleasant.” Does hiking twenty waterless and heat-exhausted miles through the desert count?

“The person with [genuine outdoor skills] will foresee and avoid any unpleasant incidents,” Jardine continues, “he or she will keep from exhausting the partner with a heavy load and a fast pace.” And finally, some words about how to react to a novice, “lend gentle encouragement while extending illimitable patience. Ignore the inevitable mistakes, and give recognition to the many accomplishments.”

Because Duffy and I jumped on the PCT without either of us having much backpacking experience, we missed the opportunity to “avoid unpleasant circumstances” or “keep from exhausting [ourselves] with a heavy load and fast pace.” And certainly, because we'd been so focused on learning the basics, we hadn't had enough time or energy to provide each other with encouragement. Despite our ignorance of such matters, however, we'd managed to muddle through and in the process discovered that, as Jardine says, “Each failure teaches more of what you need to know in order to succeed.”

We were still miles and miles from success, however—1,055 miles to be
exact. Yet I was proud of our accomplishment thus far—of all the thousands of steps we'd taken and of the lessons we'd learned. Duffy continued to push me to go longer and stronger while doing so with more loving kindness and patience. As for me, I tried not to take the frequent moments of silence or physical distance personally. Instead of continually rushing to catch up, I trundled along as fast or as slow as my feet wanted to go.

We got back on the trail at Etna Summit on August 8, the ninety-third day of our pilgrimage north. Here in the Marble Mountain Wilderness, the PCT cuts along narrow river valleys and climbs forested ridges. Against these deep green forests, the limestone peak of Marble Mountain stands out brilliantly, like a diamond set amongst emeralds. In fact, all of the 214,500-acre Marble Mountain Wilderness seemed like treasure.

In the company of deer and wildflowers so tall they tickled my elbows, we followed the PCT across steep rock-strewn and colorful slopes into wooded valleys. Sugar pines abounded, with their spires reaching 200 feet toward the sky, the thick canopy blocking out nearly all light. Large, airy, oval-shaped cones littered the path, and we kicked them like footballs as we went. We had fifty-six miles to cover before our next brief stop in civilization, at Seiad Valley.

Our first night back on the trail we camped near a murky green lake. Hard thunderclaps woke us before dawn and we scrambled out to put on our rain fly and cover our packs with garbage bags. Lazily, we lay under our sleeping bag until nine in the morning, waiting for an end to the pitter-patter and eating several meals in the process. Finally, we realized that since Canada wasn't going to come to us, we had to eventually get moving, rain or no rain. Conveniently, soon after we packed up our gear the skies cleared.

My body was still readjusting to the thru-hiking schedule, so we made camp early that night, under a gnarled and stately pine. In the distance a black cloud giving off streaks of gray cut into a pink, sunset-infused sky. As the evening progressed the sky became entirely black. I sat on a root that undulated in and out of the earth like a sea serpent and tended our pasta. Usually,
we didn't eat and sleep in the same location. Fearing hungry bears, we typically utilized Jardine's “stealth camping” technique—cooking our dinner miles before choosing a (less established) campsite. Theoretically, this practice helped prevent bear invasions by limiting the number of tasty scents that emanated from our camp and keeping us away from campsites that bears habitually raid. But that night, because of my exhaustion and the imminent rain, we not only camped at a well-worn site but also cooked right outside our tent. At the time, we didn't think much of the indiscretion. So far we hadn't had much trouble with bears. Actually, our confidence was such that we had gotten in the habit of sleeping with our food bag nestled in the tent. I think it's part of the thru-hiker mentality to ignore conventional wisdom when it comes to bears; after all, thru-hikers tend to ignore conventional wisdom regarding a lot of things.

Since the desert I'd slept soundly in our tent, falling asleep quickly and not waking up until Duffy's watch alarm went off. But during the darkest hours of that night, I awoke—not with a start, but slowly and disoriented, wondering whether I had to pee, or was cold—why on earth was I awake? And then I heard it.

Not three feet from my head, with only a thin layer of nylon to protect me: heavy steps and snuffling. The steps were slow, the sniffing erratic, and while I couldn't see our visitor, I knew immediately it was a bear. I could tell by Duffy's breathing that he was awake, too, but neither of us spoke or moved. My foot rested on the green nylon bag that held our food—a veritable feast of peanut butter, raisins, Snickers bars, and instant pudding mix. The intruder could have it all with one swipe of his paw. But slowly, the footsteps quieted and we were left with just the rustling of leaves in the wind.

“Oh, my God,” I squealed, after I hadn't heard anything bearlike for a couple of minutes. “What if he'd ripped into our tent?”

“At least we have a tent,” Duffy said.

He was right. Even though the nylon didn't provide any real protection from bear claws, I felt safer inside.

“Yeah, I couldn't handle staring a bad-breathed bear in the face. I'd pass out.”

“Then you'd be bear food.” Duffy tried to lighten the mood.

“I can't believe that Casey and Toby still sleep out after what happened to them.”

While our late-night visitor either wasn't hungry enough or didn't like the aroma of our MREs enough to relieve us of our heavy food bag, Casey and Toby hadn't been so lucky. While in the Sierra, day hikers gave Crazy Legs and Catch-23 a foot-long salami, which they devoured in one sitting. “The only problem with receiving the salami,” Catch-23 later wrote, “was that with it we received the salami wrapper . . . and we were in bear country.” Like many thru-hikers, Crazy Legs and Catch-23 slept with their food. On the evening of their salami snack, just as Catch-23 zipped himself up in his sleeping bag, he heard a strange ripping sound. Poking his head out he came face to face—in fact within inches—of a drooling bear. The bear was in the process of tearing into the food bag he'd just extracted from Catch-23's pack by neatly slitting it open with a single claw. In an effort to scare away their uninvited dinner guest, the Seattle boys started singing, banging on their cooking pot, throwing rocks, and clapping. After a few minutes the bear moved away and Toby rescued what was left of their food supply. But still the bear lingered in the bushes, as if waiting for them to go back to sleep. That didn't seem like a “keepin' it real” sort of scenario, so the boys packed up and left.

We didn't sleep much the rest of the night, and when morning came we bolted quickly out of camp. The trail down to Seiad Valley led us through a tunnel of blackberry brambles and tall pines. It was early afternoon and we were cruising. Rounding a switchback, our ears were suddenly assaulted with the sound of something crashing through the trees, scratching on bark and breaking branches. At first I thought it was two squirrels fighting. But as we got within ten feet of the commotion I saw something large and brown shuffling up a sugar pine's trunk. When the furry creature reached a height of about fifteen feet, it stopped and peered down at us. “A cub!” I squeaked, delighted that my first face-to-face bear contact was with a cuddly baby. His perked-up
ears stood out against the bright blue sky. Duffy whipped out the camera and started snapping photos. I cooed at the cub and called him “Cuddles.” He was on our right, and suddenly to our left we heard a much louder ruckus.

“It's momma,” whispered Duffy. “We gotta go.” As if we could hide our presence now. He scooped up a handful of rocks, started singing “Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it's off to work we go” at the top of his lungs, and began hurrying down the trail—all in the same instant. I grabbed some rocks, too, joined in the song, and scurried behind. Black bears are rarely violent, but if there's anything that can set those fangs a-gnashing, it's getting between momma and cub.

In his chillingly titled book
Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance
, author Stephen Herrero, Ph.D., provides a comprehensive review of two decades' worth of maulings. Herrero reports that between 1960 and 1980, black bears caused five hundred human injuries and twenty-three deaths. But despite those twenty-three deaths, Herrero asserts that sudden encounters with black bears don't usually end in injury. More commonly, when a person surprises a black bear, the bear will charge and swat the ground with a front paw or make loud huffing noises but ultimately disappear. That said, it's not unheard of for a mother black bear to maul a human in an effort to protect her young. Herrero cites a 1973 incident in Yellowstone Park in which a momma bear pulled a fleeing man from a tree by his foot and “proceeded to maul and bite him.” The man required seventy-one stitches.

Flying in the face of conventional backpacker wisdom, Herrero gives another (more gruesome) example that demonstrates that black bears can be just as ferocious as their grizzly, Kodiak, and polar counterparts. In 1950, sixty-five-year-old Athabascan Indian Alexie Pitka was hunting black bear in Alaska. After firing a shot, he waited to make sure that the bear was motionless before approaching. When he walked to within several yards of the downed bear, the creature suddenly rolled to its feet and leaped on him. Pitka survived the attack but the “entire right side of his face from the eye across to the nose and down to the chin was torn away. The right eye was ripped out of the socket. . . . His nose was torn off, with cartilage sticking out of raw flesh. The right check and part of the left were gone. . . . Three
teeth were left in the jaw; the rest were dangling loose.” This mauling, writes Herrero, “is a stark reminder of the power that black bears can unleash.” In fact, black bears can bite through trees thicker than your arm and kill a full-grown steer with one chomp to the neck. The most dangerous blackie, says Herrero, “appears to be one that attacks a person who has been hiking, walking, berry picking, fishing or playing during the day in a rural or remote area.”

That sounded awfully familiar. We were glad to escape the momma bear encounter without testing the strength of her bite.

It was my third day back on the PCT, and my trail legs were coming back to me. That, combined with the adrenaline released by two bear encounters in less than twelve hours, helped to speed me along. The terrain was beautiful and the weather hot—just another day on the PCT, or so it seemed. But something was different—we were walking our last California miles. A new state, Oregon, lay on the horizon. But really, we were already in a new state; we just didn't know it yet. We were in the fifty-first state, the State of Jefferson.