Skywalker--Highs and Lows on the Pacific Crest Trail (2 page)

When her mother had arranged a hiking partner for her, it was probably just this type of situation she had in mind. But in this case it was just as necessary for
me.
For starters, we were in one of the most isolated areas in the entire United States. Any kind of civilization was days away in any direction. The biggest problem, though, was that—due to a post office glitch—I didn’t have any maps.

“Could I take a quick look at your maps?” I asked Lauren.

“Pat borrowed them last night,” she said.
She doesn’t have any maps either.
We exchanged worried glances.

“Well, this must be Helen Lake,” I motioned at yet another gorgeous, but frozen, alpine lake. “My data book here says it’s only a half-mile from the summit.” “Good,” she said, sounding relieved. But after another half-mile of humping through the snow, lo and behold, another open expanse of frozen water appeared. The silence was pregnant.

“I guess this here is Helen Lake,” I finally said in resignation.

Beautiful alpine setting. Hard to believe it is July.

“Well, at least we know we’ve only got a half-mile to the top,” she said matter-of-factly.

“As long as we don’t get lost.”

Of course, that was just a fallacy. We had been effectively lost for several miles. Sure, we were following Pat’s footprints. But Pat was obviously improvising, himself, given that the PCT was completely invisible under the snow. Finally, we followed Pat’s footprints up to a steep precipice that led off a cliff. I stepped back and looked at Lauren in disbelief. But not because of the steep dropoff.

“I don’t believe it.”

“What?” she wondered in wide-eyed fashion.

“Helen Lake,” I mourned.

“Gosh, I don’t know,” she said, temporarily flushed. But quickly she led us down the precipice to better treading.

“Oh, there they are,” she said in work-womanlike fashion, when she spotted more footprints. The grades became steeper, which was further confirmation that we were well off the PCT. Then we came to a steep ravine bisected by a rushing creek.

“Look at those footprints up on that icy ledge,” I said in amazement. “Those look like Pat’s footprints,” Lauren said.

“Man, he could have bought it right there,” I said with a sense of dread stirring.

I quickly dropped my backpack and ran off to look for another route. But nothing revealed itself.

“Anything?” Lauren asked, when I got back.

“Nope.”

“What if we cross that creek down there,” she suggested.

“Then what?”

“Well, let’s just see.”

We scurried down to our right, where rock-hopping across the stream proved to be easy. Soon, we were laboring heavily in a snow field heading straight up the face of Muir Pass. Good breaks are rare this deep in the mountains. But we got one, when we came upon a modest-sized stone hut at the top of Muir Pass.

“Hey, did you know there was a hut?” I yelled back excitedly to Lauren.

“No,” she answered.

“Forty-nine percent chance Pat is waiting in there,” I ventured.

Fat chance.

Lauren and I sat there feasting on mediocre hiker fare within the friendly confines of Muir Hut. Suddenly, she blurted out, “This might not be the summit.

“Why would they build the hut here then?” I quickly countered.

“But look ahead,” she pointed straight north up the PCT. “Those mountains out there look like they might be higher than where we are here.”
This might not be the summit. My God.

Silence reigned.
If this isn’t the summit it might take hours to get to the real summit. We’ve already been told there is heavy snow for at least the next three miles. There may not be enough time to get down today.
My disaster-prevention instincts were now on high alert. It was time to broach a delicate topic.

“Maybe, the safest thing would be to just stay right here for the night,” I said gingerly. Silence.

“I don’t know,” Lauren finally said in downcast fashion. This young girl was a hiker, not a pretender.

I didn’t fancy staying here above 10,000 feet in a damp hut either. I knew the way my long, thin physique would react—shivering and miserable. My heart was for getting out of here. But my head said something different. If we headed out, we were going to be exposed for hours and our chances of getting
completely
lost were prominent. One regularly hears reports of hikers getting stranded in snowy mountains, followed by search and rescue operations that arrive too late.

Awkward silence. I sensed another subtle factor. How many times had I had witnessed male hikers practically prostrating themselves as they found novel ways to hang around female hikers. Usually it was harmless, and at times actually seemed synergistic. But Lauren was attractive enough, and the breach in ages yawning enough, that my conservative instincts dictated extreme caution—especially in a setting this remote, even intimate.

“I’d rather try going, if it’s okay,” she said tentatively. One of the great things about long-distance hiking is the way sociology gets turned completely on its head. Many times I had taken my cue from much younger people, and it didn’t bother me a wit.

“Alright,” I finally said. “But, honestly, if it looks really bad the first mile, I’m just gonna’ head back to this hut for the night.”

“Okay.”

The blanket of snow was thicker than anything I’d seen in twenty years. Every so often I’d fall through the crust of ice—
postholing
—and straight down a shaft of snow reaching my upper thighs. Lauren fell behind me as she occasionally postholed all the way up to her waist.

Fortunately, we were easily able to follow Pat’s footprints. Down in the valley, Sapphire and Heron Lakes shone brilliantly in the afternoon sunshine. My mood began to lighten and I was glad we had gone.

But then we reached a dogleg in the route we were following. Streams from the snowmelt led wildly through the cavernous valley in all manner of directions. Pat’s footprints weren’t anywhere to be found. A pattern quickly developed.

“Those look like footprints over there,” our navigator, Lauren, would say. I’d drop my backpack and go ricocheting through streams or rushing water to locate footprints on a ridge, only to have them give way to another stream. It was quite tiring, and even more maddening.

Despite the failure of these reconnaissance efforts, we now needed to make the crucial decision.
Had we summited Muir Pass at the hut and, thus, should follow the valley east down towards the lakes? Or was the summit of Muir Pass these steep peaks lying straight in front of us?

We didn’t see footprints on either. More ominously, both routes appeared to disappear into a forbidding, Arctic-like wild. If we chose the wrong one we were likely stranded, at least for the rest of the day, if not much longer.

“What’s your gut tell you, Lauren?” I asked. “Up these mountains straight ahead or down to the right in the valley?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t believe they didn’t put any signs or cairns to give you some idea where to go.” Valid point, to be sure. But I was worried about only one thing—how to safely get the hell out of here.

“What about that bank of snow over there?” she wondered. “Weren’t there some footprints on that side before.” But my adrenaline-fed sloshing around streams was beginning to flag.

“Let’s go scout out that side together,” I suggested.

“I don’t want to fall in the river,” she plainly said.

“Where?’ I asked.

“
There’s a river under this snow
.”

This conjured up a horror story making rounds in the hiker community. A solitary hiker in the High Sierra had decided to camp on a field of snow. Unfortunately, and completely unbeknownst to him, a waterway lay beneath the snow. During the night, his weight and body heat combined to submerge his sleeping-bag enveloped body in the water. He had drowned trapped in his sleeping bag.

I was bent over catching my breath. Lauren had all but lost her eagle eye for footprints. Stasis had set in. This is when Lauren blurted out her question (“Is this the worst you’ve ever been lost hiking?”).

She sounded uncharacteristically forlorn. The greater part of valor would have been to give a working response that referred to various options, fallback plans, etc. If ever there was a time for a
Jesuitical lie
, this was it.

Unfortunately, my gut—or perhaps cowardly—instincts reacted decisively. “Never even been close to this lost,” I quickly answered.

Chapter 2

Why Long-Distance Hiking?

“Our nature lies in movement. Complete calm is death.”

Pascal’s Pensees

If the world has a future, it has an ascetic future.

Bruce Chatwin

W
andering is very human. We are essentially nomadic organisms and peaceful by nature. So postulated Britain’s notorious travel writer, Bruce Chatwin, in his epic tome,
The Songlines.

Chatwin had closely followed the migratory patterns of Australia’s aboriginal people. Specifically, he noted that they maintained peace with other tribes by singing different verses depending on what natural landscape they encountered. As long as all the tribes kept walking and kept singing, harmony was maintained. However, “civilization took a wrong turn,” he nostalgically concluded, “and chose the inferior option.” Instead of nomadic wandering, humans have strived to adopt sedentary lifestyles.