Skywalker--Highs and Lows on the Pacific Crest Trail (8 page)

We soon passed Kung-Fu alone on the side of the trail.

“How about coming along to help us not get lost,” I suggested.

“Well, I’ll hike with you for awhile,” she said grudgingly. These women out here sure were a different breed from what I had grown up with in the Deep South. In place of charm and subtle calculation, you often got bluntness and fierce independence.

Perhaps trying to assert my own self, I bolted ahead of the group down a long, sandy straightaway.

“Skywalker, Skywalker,” they all suddenly were shouting.
Oh God, snake!
I started frantically high-stepping as fast as I could for about twenty yards. But they all kept screaming my name. I turned around and looked at the ground, but saw nothing. Instead, all my amused comrades were pointing to the fork in the trail I had just missed.
Be careful.
Rattlesnakes were bound to give anybody this side of Huck Finn the creeps. But the lack of landmarks in the desert probably makes getting lost the greater threat. Every year there are hikers that pick up the trail names Wrongway or Backtrack.

The trail angels and hiking community, having spoiled us at the Kickoff, apparently decided to slowly wean us. When we got to Kitchen Creek Road at mile ten, a couple of trail angels from the Kickoff had pulled up in vans. Coolers full of ice-cold drinks and snacks were laid out for us.

The best part, though, came when a guy named Hector interrupted my reclining reverie. “You’re next, Skywalker.” Hector was famous in PCT circles as
The Foot Doctor.
He had me soak them in some concoction for a few minutes and then propped them up in his lap to examine them.

“Wonderful calluses,” he said approvingly. “These things can take some punishment.”

Heck, telling a hiker he has great foot calluses at the beginning of a twenty-six hundred mile hike, is the greatest possible benediction.

The vague, Hollywood-inspired image many of us had of the desert was of a hot, flat cakewalk. Immediately, we received a jolt, however. The trail wound its way almost three thousand feet up a mountain. The sun was dipping below the horizon when we got near the top.

“I believe everybody is headed to
Cibbet Flats,”
St. Rick said. That sounded pretty good—lots of people. Dave should be able to make it there. And Cibbet Flats should be flat. Right? Not even close. When we turned the corner, there was a hiker’s version of a mob scene. Worse yet, Cibbet Flats was a ravine, with a filthy-looking stream bisecting its banks. Nonetheless, people were planning to stay here, and the least angular spots were already dotted with pitched tents and sleeping bags.

“I’m gonna’ give this a miss,” St. Rick said in British parlance.

“Oh wow,” I moaned. “This is Dave’s first time ever camping, and we’re already leaving him behind.”

“Yeah, I feel bad, too,” agreed Ralph.

“First night out here—you two guys abandon him and he gets eaten by a cougar,” St. Rick piped in with his very correct English accent. But as I had long known, long-distance hikers do habitually leave each other behind. I was no different. We had a long journey ahead.

It was getting cold and windy and we were faced with an exposed climb to try to get to Burnt Rancheria Campground. I left word with a couple hikers to tell Dave that we were moving on. Dave ended up hiking until dark and made it to this last ravine. He had then attempted to set up camp on this incline for the first time in his 66 years. In the middle of the night his tent blew down and he spent the rest of the night keeping it erected. His troubles were just beginning.

Ralph, St. Rick, and I headed up the mountain, trying to beat dark. Unlike a couple nights before, we made it to the campground just before dark. However, the wind dominated the landscape, and the three of us ended up pitching our tents hundreds of yards apart in the most bizarre places. Oh, how I missed the shelters of the AT.

After 22 miles I reasoned I deserved a hot meal. I pulled out my old alcohol stove and tried to generate a flame. But one time after another, the cold wind harassed the modest flame my stove could generate.
Hmm. So this is how all these forest fires get started out here?
I finally gave up and ate cold food.

This trail is going to take some getting used to.

Chapter 8

Trout Lily

“M
an, you should have seen this Mexican dude,”
she
exclaimed. “He just came out of nowhere and started begging me for water.”

“In spanish?” I asked.

“No, perfect english,” she said in wonderment.

“You should have asked him to hike with you,” I suggested.

“I thought about it. I swear I did. But I don’t want to get in any shit with these border officials.”

Some people just have star quality, pure and simple. This girl had it from the get-go. I say girl. She was 29, but probably got carded every time she ordered a beer due to her youthful bounciness.

She was hot. Okay, everybody’s hot in the desert, right? No, she was the real deal. Great figure, a million dollar smile, a southern accent to make you swallow your heart, and—it also seemed like—cool as hell. I had seen her razzing around at the Kickoff (who hadn’t!) and wondered if she was a hiker or a partier. She was both.

“I’m Trout Lily,” she introduced herself to her mostly male audience.

“Where are you from?” I asked, resume talk being the domain of the lame and unimaginative.

“Memphis, but I live in Hood River, Oregon.”

“Wow, everybody I’m meeting is from Oregon.”

“Yeah,” she laughed. “we’re all escapists.” Good line, even if it is true.

“My parents were totally pissed when I told them about this,” she confided to this crowd of theretofore strangers. That quality of openness would serve her in good stead in the reigning trail culture.

“I move back home to Memphis every few years, decide I can’t live there anymore, and then head off with my dog in my pickup truck to places like Asheville, Hood River, or
Antarctica.”

“Antarctica?” I exclaimed. “What the hell did you do there?”

“Worked in the kitchen?”

“Did you like it?”

“It got boring,” she said. “All people did was drink and have sex.”

“What’s so boring about that?”

“I mean,” she laughed, “you just had to see it. They filled the jars in the men’s
and
women’s bathroom with condoms. The janitor told me she had to refill ‘em every morning.” So far, Trout Lilly was checking all the boxes of the perfect trail iconoclast.

“Have you ever hiked before?” I asked.

“Yeah, I did the AT a few years before.” That figured. I’d already spotted her on the trail a few times and wondered what she was up to. One place you’d see her jiving with people; the next time she’d be galloping along.

“I’ve only done three miles today,” she said. “I’ve gotta’ get goin’.” That was her style—entertain a little while and then get on with it. She was bound to be a formidable presence.

Everybody took a side trail at mile 44 to get to the Mount Laguna Post Office. By the time I got there it looked like hikers had formed a sit-in inside the post office. Stove, clothes, cameras, food, shoes, tents—you name it, people were sending it either to a post office further up the trail or all the way home. In some cases people had bought the wrong thing. Others were shedding weight as fast as they could. Worried about setting the desert on fire, I bounced my stove 660 miles forward to Kennedy Meadows.

Unfortunately, one of the hikers tooling around the post office had a different mission. Just Jack was 68 years old, and coming off a gutsy southbound thru-hike of the AT the previous year, that had taken him eight months. This year he had shown up at the Kickoff looking to pull another rabbit out of the hat. Unfortunately, an asthma condition was driving him nuts in the desert.

“The desert’s not for me,” he simply said.

“Hate to see you go,” everybody sincerely told him. He had already distinguished himself with his delightful cracker barrel sense of humor.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said. He bought a car and started following the bubble of hikers to the various trail towns, and soon was the most popular person on the trail.

The PCT considers shelters a sissy, East-Coast thing; the trail figureheads take great pride in their
bootstrap philosophy.
But if there is one single place on the entire trail they ought to build a shelter, it’s at the Pioneer Mail Campsite. It is dominated by
gunshot winds
that come barreling over the horizon.

There was absolutely nowhere else to camp here that remotely offered any protection from the wind. Trout Lily and another girl sought cover in a ditch down the hill, even though they were unable to set up their tents down there. Thereafter, anytime she was in a bad mood, we accused her of being
ditchy.

I tried pitching my tent in a different ditch from the one where Trout Lily was hiding. But it wasn’t even remotely level, and I finally decided to erect it right next to St. Rick’s tent, hoping his would create a windshield. However, it was impossible to set up alone, as the wind bullied the various parts of the tent all over the place.

“Hey Rick,” I called into his tent. “Could you just help hold this thing in place for a second.” It was embarrassing to ask for help. But I was a realist. St. Rick jumped out of his tent, hammered away at some stakes, and was back in his tent within a minute. He always played it smart.

All I could do now was jump in my tent, put on my maximum of seven layers, and hunker down for a sleepless night. The dominant melody of the evening was these gunshot winds moaning a dreary tune.

Was the desert ugly or beautiful? That quickly became a matter

of heated debate.

I got my first taste of truly
high desert
the next morning, and it rocked me big-time. The minute I cleared the ridge from the campsite, I was confronted with a breathtaking landscape. A cold wind clobbered me for miles while walking on an exposed ridge. Nonetheless, after hating the desert all frigid night long, I was suddenly enraptured. Mesas, canyons, red cliffs, and arid tablelands extending out into the distance stood out in high relief. To me, it is these vast open spaces that give the American West the overwhelming feeling of unbounded freedom.