Skywalker--Highs and Lows on the Pacific Crest Trail (37 page)

“T
he
northern Cascades
are the most primitive and roughest terrain in the contiguous United States," said PCT founder, Clinton Churchill Clarke. Indeed, we were leaving the more pliable southern Cascades behind, and entering a landscape of steep peaks, narrow gorges, and sharp angles cut by ice and snow.

Valhalla and I entered Rainier National Park, where the towering presence of Mount Rainier loomed off in the distance. Fortunately, the PCT designers were sane enough to not route the trail over this towering eminence. Rainier has years it actually gets up to 1,000 inches annually of snow. Its summit has more
glacial ice
than anywhere else in the continental United States, and is completely uninhabitable by anybody not carrying technical climbing equipment (and, to be perfectly accurate, quite a few that are carrying it). But such are the vicissitudes of weather patterns in the Northwest that the eastern side of Rainier was bone dry. When Valhalla and I finally located a narrow bluff overlooking the valley to set up our tents, I had to lend him water to tide him over.

The PCT hiker draws inspiration from Mount Rainier
without actually having to risk the summit.

It was hunting season, and we were right in the middle of it all. It was a novelty to me for the simple reason that, despite being from Georgia, I’d never been hunting.

“What is that sound?” I asked Valhalla when we heard a high-pitched squeal. “Hear it?”

“Yeah,” he laughed. “It’s a, uh, I don’t know how to say it in English—kind of like a moose.”

Finally, we came upon two hunters at a dirt road.

“Excuse me,” I asked. “Do you know what animal keeps making that buzzing sound?”

“Shhhh,” he said, conspiratorially. “Elk.”

“Man, that sound is really weird. It sounds like a power line malfunctioning.”

“Yeah, it’s mating season,” one of them said.

I never got to see one—perhaps because three’s a crowd this time of year—but they sounded enormous. Lewis and Clark’s expeditionary members survived the winter of 1806 by shooting and devouring 131 of these elk. Hunting them looked like gut-wrenching business, but I make no moral judgments. I don’t shoot them, but I’ve sure eaten ‘em.

I doubt I’ve ever eaten any bear, though. Apparently people do, however. The next day at the top of a hill, we came upon two more hunters clad in dark green outfits. My morale had just been restored at the bottom of that same hill when we had passed by a pickup truck with several bottles of water lying in the back. Since I had been running low on water, I had dropped a dollar on top of the container and grabbed one of the bottles.

“Elk hunters?” I cheerfully asked the twosome.

“No,” one of them answered cheerlessly. “bear.”

“Oh,” I raised an eyebrow. “Do you eat them?” I asked excitedly.

“Quiet.” They then commenced a FBI-style interrogation of us about bears in the immediate area.

“You didn’t even notice the footprints leading up the ridge back there?” one asked in disbelief.

“No.”

“Well, what have you seen?” the other guy asked, getting impatient.

“Actually, we thought this was more like Big Foot country,” I piped in.

My sense of humor was vastly under appreciated, and they walked away impatiently. But when I started yakking with Valhalla, I was reprimanded again for talking too loud. My stereotype of hunters had always been of gregarious, swashbuckling types. However bear hunters, at least, seem to fall in the category of humorless zealots. And boy was I glad they hadn’t seen me take that bottle of water from their truck.

Valhalla and I continued through hunting country, and within a couple more days were following the trail straight down the face of some ski slopes into the small mountainous village of Snoqualmie. We were making good time and the momentum was with us. It was a magnificently clear Saturday afternoon and, as was usually the case when arriving in a trail town, morale was high. Better yet, the lone hotel had an IHOP attached to it. This meant tonight’s dinner would be olive oil-free.

When we looked over at the town’s lone gas station, we caught sight of Pretty Boy Joe. It appeared he had diversified his self-sustenance activities beyond dumpster dives. He was hopping around from car to car, washing their windows. We went over to chat.

“What’s the matter—no dumpsters in this town?” I lamely joked.

“This is unbelievable,” he laughed, with his rakish smile. “Two ladies have already given me $20 each. Another one invited me to a party at her house.”

“For God’s sake, follow your motto and spread the wealth,” I rejoined.

Unfortunately, our buoyant moods were quickly arrested when we ran into Dirk outside the hotel.

“Have you heard the weather forecast?” he asked quietly.

“No.”

“Big-time storm coming this way,” he said quietly. “Gonna’ last a while too.” Nobody said much of anything. Our lives for the next week had just changed dramatically.

Other than wait a week, which was unfeasible this late in the hiking season, the only possible course of action was to hike out tomorrow as planned.

There aren’t many scenes that turn me on like crowds of people heading up a steep mountain. It is especially impressive when it’s a Sunday afternoon, and they could be at home in a horizontal position with the remote control in one hand and a cell phone in the other.
Perhaps the Northwest is where I belong.
People are less likely to spend a Sunday afternoon in such a helpless position.

Sunday, September 27th, 2010 was an almost lyrically beautiful day. The crisp autumn air filled my lungs with that unmatchable tangy sensation. Backtrack, Valhalla, and I started the long climb out of Snoqualmie, that we hoped would get us to Skykomish in four days. Legions of day hikers were using the occasion to hike to the top of Chikamin Pass and take in its commanding view of the northern Cascades.

Maybe I shouldn’t have been so impressed, however. Once we reached the shelf, every single person except us PCT thru-hikers headed back down the mountain to their cars. Meanwhile, after stopping to admire the views, we continued north. We wouldn’t see a single other hiker for days.

Weather reminds me of the stock market. When things looks the best is usually when you are on the cusp of disaster. And given that 75% of the entire glacial ice in the Lower 48 states lies between here and the Canadian border, this is an especially fickle area. Things habitually change on a dime. In fact, a few days from now a few of our trailing comrades, including CanaDoug, would be caught in deep snow drifts in this exact spot, and facing some very difficult decisions. Things quickly got complicated.

“What the hell is that?” I wondered when we cleared a hillside the next morning and saw a heavy pall of smoke blanketing the valley.

“Looks like a forest fire,” Valhalla said plainly.

“Yeah,” Backtrack reminded us, “remember the trail is closed here.” Indeed, in Snoqualmie we had heard a section of the PCT was closed.

The Forest Service had blocked off entrance, and the signs read:
Due to forest fires the Pacific Crest National Scenic Trail is closed in this next section. Please take an alternative route.

Western fire-fighting doctrine had been radically altered ten years back. Instead of trying to put out forest fires, firefighters now concentrate their efforts on preventing the spread of the fires. That meant that forest fires like the one ahead of us was allowed to burn itself out. It also meant that once we stepped inside the roped off area, we were fair game.

“I read on the internet that people were going this way anyway,” Backtrack said. Unlike back in the northern California fires, I was in no position to bail out this time. So the three of us headed in.

The trees were burnt down to charred embers. Most worrisome, a few small fires still burned here and there. We could only hope that everything else in there was so dead, that they wouldn’t conflagrate. And
dead
was the operative word. Everything about this scene was hostile to life. Downed clumps of trees littered the PCT, and presented serious obstacle courses.

“Hey, hey. Where are you going, Skywalker? This way,” I heard Valhalla and Backtrack yelling, after I had run around a huge downed tree to stake out a route.

“Are you sure?” I yelled. “There is a decent trail on the other side of these trees.”

“Yes,” they summoned me. “This way.”

Unfortunately, a few miles later we figured out that the Danish navigator and the brainy college professor had gotten it wrong, and I had been on the right track. That meant spending the next couple hours trying to relocate the PCT. At that point the heavy clouds indicated a storm was brewing. Everyone picked up their pace.

Nobody really spoke to the others for the next few hours. Anybody who took a short break got passed without even a salute. Horrible weather lay ahead in the dark, forbidding northwestern forest.

Things changed drastically overnight. Smoke and fire were out. Snow and ice were in. Valhalla and I took an ill-advised break on the top of Cathedral Pass, where the full force and fury of this storm began to reveal itself.

“We’d better get down from here,” Valhalla agreed. However, this side of the pass had borne the full brunt of the storm, and the trail was under a thickening blanket of snow.

At the foot of Mount Daniels, we were greeted with a stream rushing off the mountain, and tumbling all the way into the valley.

“Anywhere to cross?” Valhalla inquired.

“Doesn’t look like it,” I mumbled. Into the frozen stream we went to cross
last year’s snow melt
in the new year’s snow.

Once over, Valhalla pulled out his map and began intently searching for alternative routes. I was accustomed to him saying, “Oh, here. Look at this”, at which point we would begin down some obscure trail. He did find a couple alternatives; however, none offered a hope of getting out of this bitter cold weather today. So I stayed glued to Valhalla’s heels as we continued on in the
white silence.

Finally, we came to a campsite well short of where we had planned on making it for the day.

“Big climb ahead,” Valhalla said.

“Yeah, this looks okay for tonight,” I answered, uncharacteristically pithily. After the leaking tent disaster back in Oregon, I knew what not to do—look for a flat spot. I commenced scouring the area for a moderate incline, and then set up my tent.