A whole lot of walking; 2,655 miles of it, in fact. Some quick math indicated that this path to validating my Y chromosome would require hiking twenty miles a day for five months over some of the most isolated wilderness in the U.S. That sounded like a trip better suited to a descendant of Daniel Boone than someone actively invested in the amenities of modern life. Five months on the trail would require many sacrifices—twenty weeks without Direct TV, web surfing, or automated coffee makers. One hundred and fifty nights and none of them spent on the couch with chips, beer, and a ballgame. Over four hundred dried, dehydrated, and downright dour meals. Quite daunting, really.
At least I had one thing going for me—I’d been raised in the 1970s by parents who still believed that they were living in the 1960s. This gave me three distinct advantages over my peers: a wardrobe rich with tie-dye; a “family” van with a bed built in the back (I’m told I was conceived on this bed); and frequent opportunities to commune with nature. When my brother Chris and I were still at an early age, my parents would pack us into our earth-toned 1971 Dodge for weekend excursions. These trips often took us down Highway 1 to Big Sur, where my parents had bought ten acres of undeveloped land from an LSD-entranced local for $100 an acre and built a small cabin overlooking the Pacific Ocean. There, Chris and I spent our days scrambling in and out of steep wooded valleys and along a creek that teased its way through the roots of oaks and redwoods. Eating dinner on the pint-size cabin’s deck, we’d watch the ocean slowly suck the sun out of the sky. When the sun had set and the moon started to rise, my parents would hike down the hill to their swinging bed, which creaked below twisted oaks. Back up on the deck and snug in our sleeping bags, Chris and I would slowly drift off to sleep under star-speckled skies.
Several months after first reading about the Pacific Crest Trail, I could barely recall my initial “I’ll prove I’m a man, you puny magazine writer” response. But thoughts of the trail still lurked in my subconscious, occasionally bursting forth. Then I read Bill Bryson’s story, chronicled in his popular book, A Walk in the Woods. Similarly drawn to a long-distance hike, Bryson attempted to tackle the Appalachian Trail (AT), which stretches 2,100 miles, from Georgia to Maine. To do this, he had to overcome numerous obstacles, including a complete ignorance of backpacking and a large, flabby behind.
As unprepared as Bryson was to thru-hike (a term used to describe an end-to-end hike of a long-distance trail such as the AT), the hiking partner he recruited was more so. Steven Katz, referred to simply as Katz, was a middle-aged burnout whose years of partying like a nineteen-year-old had left him soft and directionless. Within hours of starting the AT at its southern terminus, in Springer, Georgia, Katz was wildly jettisoning provisions from his pack in a desperate attempt to keep up with Bill, who we can confidently presume was not setting any speed records. Bryson and Katz were unable to complete the Appalachian Trail–in fact, they covered less than half of it—but nevertheless their story was inspirational. If these goofballs could hike over 870 miles, then I was pretty sure I could, too. Additionally, Bryson’s account of the continuing invasion of the East Coast wilderness by strip malls and theme restaurants was a painful reminder that I shouldn’t assume that our nation’s backwoods would always be there for my enjoyment. Better to see them before they disappeared.
The inspiration was there, but unfortunately there were still quite a few barricades between the Pacific Crest Trail and me. My active enrollment in medical school and relative lack of financial resources were among these, but were trivial compared to the question of who would hike with me. I certainly had friends who would have loved to share my beef jerky and fig bars, but the problem was that they were all too busy with career-building nonsense. And there was no way in hell I was going to conquer 2,655 miles of desolate, mountainous, rattlesnake-infested wilderness on my own. There I’d be on the first night, securely wrapped in a minus ten degree rated sleeping bag with a knife protectively tucked under my parka, then along might come a gust of wind to rustle my tent and conjure up images of the mysterious finger-chopping witch in The Blair Witch Project. Moments later I’d be racing madly through the desert, stabbing at darkness. No, hiking alone wasn’t a very good idea.
I am pretty sure that my dream of hiking the Pacific Crest Trail would have remained just that if I hadn’t started dating Angela. For the first time in my life I’d met someone with whom I wasn’t afraid to make a commitment. Sure, hiking the PCT was only a five-month commitment, but it felt like much more. Five months together in the wild would greatly, and perhaps unnecessarily, challenge our relationship. I was prepared to accept the risk. Was Angela?
Angela wasn’t very outdoorsy. She grew up in the New York City suburbs, and her parents hadn’t owned a van with a built-in bed or sponsored activities like tie-dye or communion with nature. In fact, given her upbringing, I got the sense that she considered a run in our local city park a hard-core backcountry experience. But what she lacked in practical experience she made up for in spunk. From the moment we found William Gray’s book in my boyhood cabin, the idea of a trek mobilized her infectious energy and adventurous spirit. I was amazed at her voracious appetite for long-distance hiking books, and was shocked when I discovered that she’d begun to save money for the trip.
At first I thought her interest was based primarily on the romantic notion of escaping the rigidity of her life. But as the months went by and we moved beyond the “honeymoon” phase of our relationship, talk of a trail adventure persisted, as did Angela’s hunger for a new set of technical texts on backpacking. Contrary to my fears, the more Angela learned about my quirks and the inconveniences of living in the outdoors, the more committed she became.
Later, I was inspired by the strength she displayed in handling her parents’ disapproval. Rationally, I didn’t blame her parents for withholding support; they hadn’t met me, and as far as they knew I could be as wacky and irresponsible as a high school dropout following the Grateful Dead. Emotionally, I harbored some resentment, primarily on Angela’s behalf, but also because the conflict made everything else more complicated. There was a bright side, though: As I watched Angela struggle with conflicting loyalties and emotions, my own concerns about school, money, and finger-chopping witches became less overwhelming. Things would work themselves out. For better or worse, we were going to do this.
180 Snickers Bars
I’D TRIED ALL THE LOCAL supermarkets and health food stores, but none were selling corn elbows or corn spaghetti. According to Ray Jardine, long-distance hiking guru and author of The Pacific Crest Trail Hiker’s Handbook, corn pasta is the ultimate power food. Jardine and his wife, Jenny, have hiked the Pacific Crest Trail three times and once held the record for the fastest complete hike: 2,655 miles in three months and four days. With this sort of résumé, I wasn’t about to doubt their dinner choices, a fact that resulted in me spending many futile hours searching for corn pasta.
Of all the things we had to worry about while planning a five month hike, organizing approximately 1,260 trail breakfasts, snacks, lunches, and dinners was—while intimidating—at least something I could control.
During the eight months prior to our departure, it seemed that most of our weekends were spent planning and shopping. “What do you want for breakfast during week two? Energy bars or Pop Tarts?” I asked Duffy on one of the many Saturdays when I found myself wheeling our huge shopping cart down the aisles of our local bulk food club, which sold three-gallon jars of mayonnaise, four-case packs of V8 juice, and big-screen TV-size boxes of Pop Tarts.
Monday to Friday, I worked as a writer for an advertising agency in Philadelphia. I’d worked there for nearly four years and really liked it. I also enjoyed my little single-girl’s apartment and stopping at the corner café every morning for a cup of coffee. Life was orderly and predictable. But while iced lattes and an occasional icy beer were nice, my new shiny green ice axe was so much more exciting.
An ice axe is a lightweight mountaineering tool shaped like a
conventional axe but with several key differences, including a point at the end of its shaft called a “spike,” and, at its head, a long serrated blade called the “pick” and a blunt, spoon-shaped “adze.” Due to the snowy and icy conditions often encountered by hikers in several mountain ranges along the Pacific Crest Trail, ice axes are considered to be mandatory equipment. This is especially true in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California, where the PCT climbs a series of difficult mountain passes ranging from 10,000 to 13,200 feet above sea level. Even into late summer, Muir, Mather, Forester, and other passes can be covered in knee-deep snow and glassy ice—meaning we’d have to keep our axes in hand and, if we slipped, be ready to perform ice axe self-arrest.
To perform self-arrest, you use your body weight to plunge the serrated blade of the axe into the icy mountainside (that you’re in the process of whizzing down). Afterward, you ideally find yourself halted midslope, clinging to your axe and eyeing the bone-crunching rocks below—relieved that you’re no longer hurtling toward them. During a brief mountaineering lesson at a nearby outdoor retailer, our instructor, Dave, remarked that while performing self-arrest, one should be careful to throw body weight behind the axe, not onto it. The greatest danger when learning self-arrest, he explained, is accidentally landing on the axe and gouging a hole in your face.
“When done correctly, nearly fifty percent of self-arrests are successful!” Dave exclaimed with a Grizzly Adams grin. One out of two didn’t sound so fantastic to me, especially if success depended upon correct technique. Preferring to avoid any similarly unfriendly statistics, I changed the subject.
We needed a camp stove, the smaller and lighter the better. Dave recommended an MSR Whisperlite Internationale and fired it up for me. The resulting roar reminded me of a jet engine and caused many of my fellow fleece-clad shoppers to turn and stare. “I’ll take it!” I yelled, expecting uproarious applause but getting only more stares.
Later that afternoon I tested our new toy. Sitting cross-legged on the driveway at Duffy’s parents’ house, I alternated between peering at the contraption in front of me and the instructions in my lap. When I was sure I’d read everything five times, I turned the dial on the stove and watched white gas trickle into its circular trough. My hand shook as I lit a match and tentatively inched it towards the hissing spout. The smell of gas grew stronger. My mind flashed to my sophomore year in college, when my roommate singed off her eyebrows lighting our oven. I leaned my head as far away from the stove as I could while still extending the match toward it. After several seconds of fearful stretching I finally applied the flame to the stove’s pilot. Nothing.
Shaking my head, I turned to watch Duffy trying to pitch our tent on the lawn. If we couldn’t light a silly stove in the backyard, how were we going to light it in a driving rainstorm? I loved Duffy like no one before, but at that moment, doubt stole in. I knew that he’d been on a couple backpacking trips and even learned a repertoire of knots during an outdoor leadership course, but it wasn’t like he could write The Definitive Guide to Surviving in the Wilderness.
“Duffy, help, please,” I whined. After fifteen minutes of tinkering, we finally got the stove lit and placed our titanium pot over the tumultuous blue fire. We whipped up some chewy wagon-wheel pasta, and as I choked it down it occurred to me that we were out of our minds.
Ahead lay 2,655 miles of wilderness ranging from parched desert to muddy rain forest. And behind? I could count on my two hands the number of miles I’d hiked in my life. Nine. Including two miles up and two miles down Turkey Mountain in my New York hometown. Not a very impressive feat, considering that a turkey can do it. I’m fairly confident, though, that your average Thanksgiving turkey cannot hike the Pacific Crest Trail.
Zigzagging its way from Mexico to Canada, the PCT crosses three states (California, Oregon, and Washington), three national monuments, seven national parks, twenty-four national forests, and forty-seven federally mandated wildernesses. Along the way it ascends more than fifty-seven major mountain passes—lowish points in otherwise impermeable mountain ranges—and skirts the shores of innumerable bodies of water—lakes, tarns, ponds, creeks, streams, and rivers. Temperatures on the route range from over 100 degrees F in the deserts to below freezing in the High Sierra and North Cascades. The trail’s lowest point is 140 feet above sea level, at the Columbia River Gorge between Oregon and Washington. Its highest is 13,200 feet, at Forester Pass in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains. All told, the PCT boasts the greatest elevation changes of any of America’s eight National Scenic Trails as it passes through six out of seven of North America’s ecozones as well as sixteen different plant communities in California alone. These include creosote bush scrub, valley grassland, chaparral, Joshua tree woodland, ponderosa pine forest, and mountain meadow. Wild animals known to inhabit the regions surrounding the trail include coyote, marmot, pika, black bear, elk, mountain goat, bobcat, and cougar.
Our northbound hike would begin about forty miles east of San Diego, amidst chaparral-covered hills and just yards from the U.S.–Mexico international border. Once home to Digueno Indians (who survived by eating cacti and yucca root), the border region of California is now populated mostly by border patrol, ranchers, illegal aliens (passing through), and, in late spring, approximately three hundred Canada-bound hiking hopefuls, many of whom—I assumed—were subsisting on that infamous and elusive corn pasta.
After feeding the rest of our chewy, driveway-cooked, non-corn pasta to the dog, I moved inside to our re-supply headquarters–Duffy’s old bedroom. “Re-supply” is the term used by distance hikers to describe detours into towns to pick up supplies–often in the form of food-laden re-supply packages. For months, working in our re-supply HQ, I alternated between staring at Duffy’s tattered stuffed animals, dusty high school basketball trophies, and the backpacker’s mess hall that was oozing out of boxes, creeping over chairs, and covering every inch of carpet before me. Military Meals-Ready-to-Eat (MREs), energy bars, Snickers bars, cereal bars, instant potatoes, mac ’n’ cheese, cheesy crackers, dried fruits, dried peppers and other vegetables, dried spaghetti sauce, turkey jerky, freeze-dried meals–stuff that had been dried and then dried again, because it just wasn’t dried enough. Even our drinks were dry. There were bags of instant coffee, hot chocolate mix, powdered milk, and Tang, lots of delicious Tang. Sealing everything up into what I hoped were airtight Ziplocs, I spent four days carefully distributing delightfully dry camping meals into sixteen re-supply boxes.
But even after each box got its food rations it wasn’t nearly complete. There were more piles to be picked through—a thousand ibuprofen tablets, a thousand multivitamins, seventy-six AA and AAA batteries, thirty-six rolls of film, a twenty-four-pack of toilet paper, fourteen rolls of athletic tape, two bottles of povidone-iodine solution for our med kit, and six of the same for purifying water.
While I filled boxes, Duffy weighed every piece of gear, down to the quarter ounce. Then he began generating lists: lists of re-supply points, lists of food and equipment, lists of lists. All of these were subsequently downloaded onto our Palm Pilots—primarily for the purpose of reminding ourselves how good we were at making lists.
Other logistics also needed to be taken care of before we could disappear from normal life. Visa bills had to be paid in full if we wanted our credit ratings to survive our adventure. We needed to acquire air-ambulance and medical insurance (it can cost more than $50,000 to be airlifted out of the wilderness). Apartment subletters had to be found and debriefed. Health and dental check-ups had to be scheduled and attended (we’d heard of one couple whose hiking trip had been interrupted by an urgent need for a root canal). Duffy had to register for fall classes and I had reams of paperwork to complete regarding my leave of absence from work. And on and on.
It was all vastly annoying. The whole point was to get away from this sort of drudgery. I dreamed of savoring majestic vistas with looking-glass lakes, but instead I was explaining to Jennifer at Comcast Cable why I wo
uldn’t be watching much HBO that summer.
Worst of all, planning for a long-distance hike seemed as potentially fruitless as it was frustrating. Historically, only five percent of PCT hikers actually make it the whole way, and out of those who quit, most do so in the first couple weeks. In the past few years, with the increasing popularity of lightweight backpacking techniques and refined itineraries, success rates have approached twenty-five percent, but one out of four is still pretty discouraging.
The combination of the magnitude of the planning effort and the odds of success was disquieting. Taking care of the logistics would be immensely gratifying if the trip worked out, but if it didn’t—well, then the reward wouldn’t be a completed trip but a planned one. The result of the uncertainty was a sensation not unlike that which you might feel if you planned a wedding but were forced to accept a caveat from the groom indicating there was only a one in four chance he’d show up.
In an effort to improve our odds, we enrolled in Hiking 101 at a local community college. I figured that it would be a good practical introduction for me and, at a minimum, a decent review for Duffy. We arrived for the first class notebooks in hand and pencils sharpened, ready to learn the holy commandments of hiking. Our companions in this mission were a group of middle-aged urbanites and an instructor who was still reliving his days in the military. There were eighteen people in all: fifteen women, Duffy, our instructor, and one other guy, who wasn’t representing his gender in the most enthusiastic manner. He was a wispy gentleman with pasty skin and a half-hearted pyramid of facial hair hanging from his chin. He looked as though he might buckle to the floor under the weight of a sunscreen-filled fanny pack.
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