Skywalker--Highs and Lows on the Pacific Crest Trail (29 page)

It was surreal—almost like a sick joke. I honestly couldn’t believe my eyes.

“Man, this is worse than Old Station,” I lamented to Miles. “We’ve gotta’ get the hell out of here.”

Miles and I had followed the suggestion of the Forest Service and caught the bus to Burney, California. But the closer we got to Burney, the
smokier
it was getting – almost like being in a steam room inundated with smoke.
Where is it coming from?

But when we entered Burney Falls Park, we came upon a lady who had picked up a reputation as a hiker-friendly ranger.

“Is it okay to hike in this?” I immediately blurted out.

“Other hikers have gone out into it,’ she said.

“Today?”

“Yeah, this morning.”

“But the park looks abandoned?” I noted.

“Yeah,” she said. “But some of the PCT hikers hiked out.”

That was not the answer I wanted to hear. Nonetheless, I reluctantly set off north on the smoke-filled PCT.
This is the strangest thing I’ve ever done.

I reckon a lot of hikers would make good poker players. By its very nature, long-distance hiking carried certain existential risks—snakes, bears, hypothermia, getting lost, serious injury—that your average person didn’t confront regularly. A stiff upper lip was almost a like an unwritten code. I was trying to get there myself, but had quite a ways to go. And hiking with forest fires raging in the vicinity was a new danger that I simply wasn’t mentally prepared for.

After two miles, Miles and I—along with a third hiker, Miner—arrived at Britton’s dam, where scores of dam workers were hard at work. An especially black halo of smoke flared up somewhere over the top of the hill we were fixing to ascend.

“Excuse me, sir,” I rushed up to a group of the dam workers. “Do you think it’s safe for us to hike north from here?”

“You see this ravine here,” one of them pointed further downstream. “A
1300 degree
fire just jumped the banks. It was down in the water one minute and all the way at the top of that hill up there fifteen minutes later.”

“How did you get it out?” I wondered.

“That’s what we’re doing here—releasing the bladder of the dam to drown it out.”

“So I take it you don’t reckon it’s a good idea for us to continue?” I said, speaking loudly so that Miles and Miner could digest this. Several of the dam workers shook their head. The three of us stood there on the dam looking up at the hill where the PCT went. There was smoke (and obviously a fire) on the other side of this hill. But how far over the hill, we didn’t know.

“I’m for turning back,” I finally said. Perhaps that was predictable. I wasn’t going to win the Intrepid Hiker Award. But this wasn’t a junior-high spend-the-night party, either.

“Think about it,” I reasoned. “We walk up there and the fire quickly spreads and engulfs us. Probably isn’t gonna’ happen, but it could. Okay. What happens then? In my case, my mother would investigate what happened and surely it comes out that a bunch of dam workers had explicitly warned us not to walk towards the fire. And what did we do? Walked straight into the inferno. So now my mother has to live with the fact that she raised not only a fool, but also a hopeless idiot.”

“Yeah, I hear you,” Miles said. “I don’t want to go down in history as the guy who walked straight into a fiery death.”

“But how do we know that fire isn’t two miles over that hill?” Miner dissented in game fashion. Some hikers had been put off along the way by Miner’s tics and quirks. But the more I had gotten to know him, the more I had started to like him. He was as authentic as the day is long.

“You’re absolutely right,” I said. “We don’t know. But I’m not for finding out, either.” I started backwards. Of course, a leadership role in the woods is rare for me, and this was a dubious one. But the other two slowly followed, although Miner kept looking back seemingly in a state of existential angst.

All the hotels in Burney were booked from firefighters coming in from all over the state; so we commenced looking for anywhere to stealth camp behind an office building or wherever.

“Any luck?” I asked when we ran into one of the firefighters in town.

His face said it all—utterly down in the mouth. “Wow,” he finally admittedly. “it’s got us on our heels pretty good.”

Chapter 32

The Art of the Possible

T
hings happened fast.

“Some people talk about doing things like the PCT,” the driver announced over the bus intercom. “Others do it.” The other passengers looked at us like we were Roman gladiators as we piled out of the bus in the pouring rain. What our adoring audience didn’t know was that one of was mud-pieing at this latest turn of events.

We had been planning to catch the bus 80 miles up the PCT to Castella. There we would re-supply to get back on the hopefully fire-free PCT, tomorrow. But the bus driver had other ideas. When he had seen us with our backpacks back at the station, he had immediately begun sermonizing on his long-lost ambition to hike the PCT, himself.

“I’ll drop you off under the interstate right by the PCT,” he volunteered.

“Yeah, that would be great,” Miles said. Great, that is, if you have enough food. But the thing that worried me even more was it began to pour rain hard for the first time since we had begun the PCT. The firefighters had gotten a break. But had we?

Underneath the interstate bridge, I pulled out my wallet and convinced Miner to sell me some food. Then we took off on a hundred mile stretch with nary a town in between. Immediately, the specter of hypothermia appeared on my radar screen, as we climbed 4,000 feet up an exposed mountain. Taking care of one’s extremities is extremely important in these situations. That’s why my mind was on the Lake Tahoe Post Office, which was 400 miles back. I had sat there with a package open, agonizing over whether to send my gloves forward to Ashland, Oregon. Finally, I had reasoned that it was blazing hot and I needed to get my backpack weight down. So I had put them in and saved myself two ounces.

In northern California with Miles, who got my nomination for the PCT True Gentleman Award. Why is he only wearing one glove?

“What an idiot I was,” I said to Miles, “sending my gloves forward in Lake Tahoe.”
Hint, hint.

“You can have my mittens,” he offered.

Problem solved. At least, solved for a few miles. The trail continued winding up to even colder, more exposed areas. By now, I had on several layers. And Miles’ mittens.

“Any way we could share those mittens you’re wearing?” Miles asked me self-consciously.

“Are you kidding?” I said embarrassed. “Take ‘em. Thanks.”

“No, no,” he said, “we’ll share them.”

It would have been nice to have absolutely insisted that he take both his mittens back. But I needed it and rotated the mitten from one hand to the other for the next couple hours.

“Hey, Skywalker,” a girl yelled down the hill.

“Hey,” I said squinting my eyes at the girl crawling out of her tent. “Oh,
Poet.
What are you doing camped up there?”

“I couldn’t quit shaking along this ridge yesterday,” she said plainly.

“You alright?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “I definitely think I was at least a little hypothermic.”

“Come hike with us,” I suggested.

“That would be great.”

It was good timing.

“I was 95% sure I was quitting when I got to town,” she said. “I’ve been alone practically the whole time the last 500 miles.” As it was, she and Miles hit it off immediately, and were destined to hike together the remaining 1,200 miles.

Poet was in her late twenties and lived in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, where she worked for the Fishing and Game Service. The temperature never exceeded the mid-fifties on this outer island, but she was sturdily built. I had wondered if she was gay, and she quickly removed that mystery in one of our free-flowing conversations.

“I’m not a Christian anymore,” she said, “because they’re the reason I can’t marry my girlfriend.” While I came down on a different side of that issue, we were able to discuss it rationally. Actually, from what I’ve seen, hiking trails are pretty good places for gays in general. Narrow-minded bigots are an endangered species out here.

You never saw such a mismatch. On the one hand, you had a couple dozen members of a historical society. They had car loads full of
food
and beer, and were well-rested and clean. On the other hand, there was a group of famished, dirty hikers that hadn’t seen town in several days. Who had the advantage? The hikers by a long-shot.

Miles, Poet, and I had hiked our 25 miles and arrived at the Scott Mountain campsite just before dark. This group of Shriners had camp all set up as they tossed back beers. Barbecued chicken, corn and potatoes were being cooked. We didn’t say anything to each other. Everybody instinctively knew what to do. Develop camaraderie. Quickly.

“Would ya’ll like beers?” one fellow soon asked us.

“Oh gee, if you’ve got an extra.”

“Sure, we’ve got plenty.”

They riddled us with one question after another, and our answers sounded like they came out of a travel brochure. I was reminded of how a wolf attacks a pigpen. They come up and begin licking the pig’s ear warmly to draw it out of the pen. At that point the wolf goes for the kill. We weren’t quite as ruthless.

But soon one of the more inebriated members mouthed off, “You know, we brought lots of chicken. We might have some extra.”

“Golly,” I said as if it had come as a surprise, “that would be incredible, but please don’t feel obligated.”

I had one concern, though. It was a selfish one and completely out of the spirit of the PCT. We had passed a foursome called the Dog Pack that morning. Their names were Five Dollar, Strider, Oz, and Waffles. They often slept cowboy style in the middle of the trail. This morning, we had stepped over and around them to get past. This young foursome had become legendary for a couple different things: hiking very long distances at a time and chasing women in trail towns like there was no tomorrow. They were erratic, and you never knew quite where they were going to show up.

Right as the Shriners were counting out the number of hikers and pieces of chicken, the Dog Pack showed up. They sidled up to me and Five Dollar whispered excitedly, “Hey Skywalker, who are these guys?”