Ruminating over Marge’s story during the next seven miles, I felt alone and scared. Duffy’s long legs were proving capable of covering ground quite quickly, with my short stubs leaving me lagging behind. What if I fell off one of these cliffs? How many miles would it take for Duffy to even notice I was missing? What if I took a water or rest break, fell farther behind, and got lost? These worries urged me to hike faster and forego breaks, but they also made me feel as if our romantic adventure was turning into a forced march. Was Duffy succumbing to the speed-hiking mentality? This jogged my insecurities. Maybe he resented me for holding him back. I could hear Meadow Ed now, “Duffy-me-boy . . . is that umbilical cord strangling you yet?”
With Meadow Ed’s voice running through my head, I came upon a snow-patched saddle where Duffy had stopped to wait for me. He was leaning against a boulder and casually kicking a mound of snow with his toe. I tried to figure out how long he’d been there. Not long enough to take off his pack. I was relieved; I wasn’t so far behind after all.
To our right was the notoriously steep and treacherous Devils Slide trail that would take us three miles down to an Idyllwild trailhead. From there we’d head four miles, by road, into town and to the hiker-friendly Tahquitz Inn. By the time we descended to the trailhead and began trudging down the desolate roads toward town, night was falling.
Passing empty vacation homes, our trekking poles made clack-clack sounds on the pavement. My feet were burning and Duffy’s knees were killing him, the joints grinding like engine parts needing oil. For Duffy, steep descents were proving to be one of the most painful aspects of thru-hiking. Sometimes he’d stop, lean on his trekking poles, and just gasp. It was pitch dark when we finally we made it into the outskirts of town.
A young woman came out of a Mexican restaurant, got into her car, and drove forward ten yards before screeching back to us in reverse.
“Wanna ride somewhere?” she asked.
“Yes, please!” I was so relieved; we’d find the hotel much faster by car. The girl started chucking Twizzlers, McDonald’s bags, sweaters, and books off of her front seat and into the even messier backseat.
“No, really, we can walk,” Duffy said, giving me a strange look. I was puzzled. Didn’t Duffy want a ride? I sure did—enough to sit in a backseat trash bin. Reluctantly, he finally climbed into the Honda hatchback and the girl careened out of the parking lot. She drove so fast that we sped past the Tahquitz Inn twice before noticing it.
When she pulled over, onto the curb, Duffy jumped out like a jackrabbit and glared at me. “Are you crazy? I was sure we were gonna die. Did you smell the booze?”
I certainly did not. All I smelled was myself. Besides, Duffy had been looking pale with the pain from his knees. I just wanted us to find a place to dump our packs and put our feet up. It wouldn’t have mattered to me if she was drunk, stoned, or just plain insane, I still would’ve gotten in the car. After doing a twenty-eight-mile day, I was in desperate need of a bed.
At least we’d made it. We checked into a room and collapsed on its couch. We probably lay there for at least an hour before mustering the energy to shower. I watched the grime spiral down the drain in an almost hallucinogenic state, amazed at the amount of dirt coming off my body.
The next morning my feet were still throbbing. Hot spots on my heels and little toes stung and the top of my left foot sent out intermittent sharp pangs. But lying in that soft bed, on clean white sheets, the trail seemed like that sweet romantic dream again. When I got up, however, the dream shattered. My leg muscles were tight, like knotted rubber bands pulled taut, and I buckled over.
It took a couple hours of running errands, stretching while waiting in various checkout lines, and reclining in the sun while writing emails (on our handheld email device) for my calves and hamstrings to loosen up. Walking back to our room, I noticed the JourneyFilm Crew sleeping outside the Tahquitz on the grass. “They’re not going so fast now,” I smirked, and then stopped myself.
I’d been sucked into the competition. The race was on.
Pink Motel
BY THE EARLY 1930s, Clinton C. Clarke was too bent with age to enjoy backpacking. A Harvard graduate with a degree in literature, a successful oilman, and an avid Boy Scout, Clarke could still quote from Huckleberry Finn and light a fire in a blustery wind, but his hiking career was pretty much over—or so he thought. He was only fifty-eight—an age at which today’s men clutch bottles of Viagra ordered off the Internet, learn to swing dance, or head west in Winnebagoes—but Clarke’s perception of frailty left him with nothing better to do than dream of hiking and dispense advice. “Start hiking early, by eight o’clock,” Clarke instructed backpackers. “Go slowly at first. Always rest by standing in the sun (if you sit down you will lose pep.) Drink a little water, a raisin under the tongue will help.” These recommendations may seem humorously outdated now, but Clarke’s Depression-era dream of the Pacific Crest Trail does not.
Clarke dedicated his final years to the vision of a border-to-border trail along the mountain ranges of California, Oregon, and Washington, “traversing the best scenic areas and maintaining an absolute wilderness character.” Why did Clarke devote the sunset of his life to the promotion of a pastime he could no longer enjoy? Maybe it was because he had made his fortune squeezing black gold from the ground and wanted to repay his debt to Mother Earth, or maybe all that Mark Twain had gone to his head. Whatever the reason, Clarke worked until his last days to preserve a slice of the American West from man’s meddling. The Pacific Crest Trail, first proposed to government officials in 1932, took six decades and millions of dollars to complete. Clarke didn’t live to realize his dream, but given his altruistic dedication, this seems somehow appropriate. His tombstone might as well quote from Twain, “Always do right, it will gratify some and astonish the rest.”
The initial foundation proposed by Clarke and his supporters to federal officials for the PCT was a link between two existing northwestern trails, Oregon’s Skyline Trail and Washington’s Cascade Crest Trail, and two California trails, the John Muir Trail and the Tahoe–Yosemite Trail. But with the country in the midst of the Great Depression and lacking a popular mandate for long distance trails, the response from Washington, D.C. was tepid. At the time, the potential costs of trail construction, mapping, and rights-of-way across private land were beyond the will and thin wallet of the federal government.
Very gradually, though, like a glacier receding from Yosemite Valley, the idea picked up steam. Clarke founded the Pacific Crest Trail System Conference in 1932 to lobby for and map the trail; its founding members included the Sierra Club, the Boy Scouts, the YMCA, and a young photographer named Ansel Adams.
In the summer of 1935, Clarke commissioned a survey to begin tracing the trail, heading south from Monument 78 at the Canadian border. “Their instructions,” wrote Robert Cantwell in a 1963 Sports Illustrated article, “called for them to locate a wide, easy grade, to lay out the trail so it passed through scenic country, to keep to the summit ridge, to note all wildlife, to check good hunting grounds and to test the fishing in streams and lakes.” Five forest rangers tackled the initial eight miles of survey, diligently noting their discoveries: “a porcupine, a fool hen with chicks, a whistling marmot, eleven mountain goats and a herd of seven deer.” With this attention to detail, it’s no wonder that the work of mapping and trailblazing took decades.
In part because the Boy Scouts were occupied maintaining their own trails and the Forest Service was busy counting fool hens, much of the subsequent work fell to volunteers from the YMCA. One such volunteer, Warren Rogers, caught Clarke’s “footpath–fever” at the age of twenty-three and never lost it. After the initial sections of the trail had been mapped out, it was Rogers who explored them, overcoming the limitations of a body crippled by childhood polio.
During the slow spawning of the PCT, Clarke remained the project’s figurehead, holding court in his Pasadena home (he was nicknamed the “Armchair Hiker”) with Rogers as his
eyes, ears, and feet in the field. When Clarke passed away in 1957 at the age of eighty-four, Rogers continued campaigning for the completion of the PCT. Keeping the Pacific Crest Trail alive, according to Rogers’ son, was his father’s purpose in life.
Finally, in 1965, amid the sixties’ fervor for everything earthy, President Lyndon Johnson announced his intention to develop a national system of trails. As is often the case in Washington, this announcement led to an earth-shattering development: the commission of a commission. The commission published a report, “Trails for America,” that recommended building four national scenic trails—the Appalachian Trail, the Continental Divide Trail, the Potomac Heritage Trail, and the Pacific Crest Trail. Some years later, President Johnson signed the National Trail Systems Act, which named the AT and the PCT our first National Scenic Trails. Still, there was much work to be done.
In 1970, eighteen-year-old Eric Ryback became the first person to attempt a PCT thru-hike—despite the fact that only half of the trail had been completed. Hiking south from Canada in blue jeans, without a guidebook and with an eighty-pound pack, Ryback struggled against hunger, exhaustion, and loneliness. Ultimately, he claimed success and documented the hike in his book, The High Adventure of Eric Ryback. Whether Ryback did indeed complete a border-to-border thru-hike is still a matter of debate within the PCT community. Some dispute the veracity of his claim, noting that Ryback accepted rides for portions of his trip. Schaffer et. al., the authors of the PCT guidebook, recognize Richard Watson’s 1972 effort as the first successful thru-hike. Given the patchwork nature of the trail in the early 1970s, however, the notion of thru-hiking was at that time certainly nebulous at best.
Due in part to the publicity generated by Ryback’s adventure, trail construction boomed throughout the 1970s. The federal agencies (the Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service, and the National Park Service) responsible for managing most of the land on the PCT’s course finally agreed on some important management guidelines, and between 1972 and 1980 nearly a thousand miles of trail were built. The trail was officially completed in 1993, twenty-five years after its designation as a National Scenic Trail and thirty-six years after Clinton Clarke’s death. Work continues, just as Clarke would have hoped, and a new legion of dreamers envisions a trail unencumbered by private land restrictions and protected from suburban sprawl.
On the morning of May 21, I was roused from my own dreams by an angel’s chirps.
“Happy berrrtday, Duffy! Happy, happy twenty-eighth! Happy berrrtday!” Angela repeated, delivering a compact pat to my bum. “Rise and hike, berrrtday boy.”
It was a comfortable morning at 7,500 feet in the western San Jacinto Mountains. We’d camped on a flat bed of pine needles under the cover of Jeffrey and Coulter pines. It was a beautiful spot, filled with an invigorating pine scent, and we broke camp in a jovial mood. We had our sights set on a birthday celebration at the Pink Motel, the junkyard trail angel refuge that Meadow Ed had described to us at Kamp Anza. It would be a twenty-one-mile hike, but entirely downhill. We were somewhat low on water—three liters for the two of us—but I wasn’t particularly troubled, even though we faced a sixteen-mile waterless stretch. Of course, it would have been nice to fill up before we left, but this campsite offered no such opportunity.
The night before, I’d accidentally marinated our instant potatoes in a Dead Sea-like salt solution, and we’d each needed a liter and a half of water to counteract the brackish spuds. Angela lobbied for a two-mile detour to Black Mountain Camp for more water, but I convinced her that it was unnecessary, reasoning that we’d handled the San Felipe Hills with an equivalent amount of water and that today would be easy downhill walking. What I failed to figure into my blasé calculations was that the farther we descended toward San Gorgonio Pass and its 1,000-foot elevation, the hotter it would get. In fact, for every 1,000 feet of elevation lost we should have planned on a gain of three to five and a half degrees. In just six hours we’d drop from our comfortable mountain perch into a smoldering valley inferno.
There are many things for a novice hiker to worry about when setting off on a distance hike, most of them involving the prefixes “hyper-” and “hypo-.” To start with, there’s hypothermia, hyperthermia, and hypo-nutrition. Then there’s hypo-hydration, hyper-exhaustion, and hyperextension (of mission-critical joints). And finally, there are hyper-high falls, hyper-intense bear encounters, and, for a boyfriend like me, confrontations with my (occasionally) hypersensitive female. So far, we’d been lucky and avoided any serious, nonestrogen related exposures to anything from the “hyper-”–“hypo-” family. We’d covered nearly two hundred miles unscathed. But while some of my fears had been alleviated, there was one menace that still loomed large. Snakes. Snakes with rattles . . . and sharp fangs designed to deliver poisonous venom.
Rattlesnakes are members of the pit viper (crotalid) family of poisonous snakes and come in sixteen speciated flavors. Although these sixteen species vary greatly in size, skin pattern, and behavior, they all share three basic characteristics: dry, hollow segments of tail skin that make a loud, scary noise when wiggled; heat-sensitive organs located on the sides of their heads that allow them to locate and track prey; and erectile fangs, often over half an inch in length, that can inject a complex soup of destructive proteins.
And while one or more rattler species can be found in each of the forty-eight contiguous states, California is fortunate to be home to six species—the sidewinder, the speckled, the red diamond, the Pacific, the western diamond-back, and the Mojave green.
I’ve never liked rattlesnakes of any specie. In fact, ever since a pre-adolescent encounter, I’ve been deathly afraid of them. Perhaps this is because our seminal meeting occurred when I was at the unfortunate age of eight. I say “unfortunate” because at eight, I was neither particularly brave nor very rational. Rather, I was enormously impressionable and harbored an exaggerated fear of animals, both wild and domestic. Large family dogs with wagging tails would sometimes cause me to turn tail and flee. And wild animals such as bears, crocodiles, and rattlesnakes, well—I considered them to be deadly efficient boy-killing beasts. To make matters worse, I was well aware of the presence of rattlesnakes in my native California and was sure that if I were ever bitten by one I would face a grotesquely painful death.
I saw my first rattler while hauling gear down to my family’s Big Sur cabin. He was a five-footer and percussed loudly. I was duly petrified—and that was even before he started advancing up the trail toward me! Desperate, I threw my sleeping bag and screamed shrilly, but my assailant wasn’t deterred. He kept slithering right for me. Did he mistake me for a gigantic lizard sandwich? I continued to scream and was just about to wet my Underoos when my father, right behind me on the trail, came to the rescue. He lobbed a number of large rocks at the snake, nearly hitting him dead-on. After about the fourth rock, the rattler got the idea and retreated. He’d never been close enough to physically hurt me, but psychologically, well—that was a different story.
Twenty years and a medical-school education later, I’d evolved a more complete understanding of the rattlesnake. Now I knew that a rattlesnake bite is not instantly fatal and that up to forty percent of bites are completely dry of venom. According to the The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy, more than eight thousand people in the United States are bitten each year by poisonous snakes, but fewer than six actually die. Most of the fatal bites occur among children, the elderly, and members of religious sects who handle venomous snakes. Rattlesnakes are likely more afraid of people (especially those in odd religious sects) than we are of them and are usually anxious to avoid confrontations. In fact, the majority of bites in the U.S. result from people’s attempts to prove that they are faster than the snake—which, considering that a rattlesnake can strike in 1/256th of a second, means the only thing these folks prove is that they know how to end up in an emergency room. Wilderness experts will tell you that if you give a snake six feet he won’t bother you, but, as my
childhood experience taught me, this isn’t always the case.
Before starting our hike, I’d educated myself on the proper treatment of rattlesnake bites. The treatment algorithm goes like this: First, grab a Sawyer Extractor and start sucking. The Sawyer Extractor, if used correctly and within the first five minutes after a bite, may remove up to thirty percent of envenomation. I say “may” because the Extractor has never been shown to be of any definitive benefit to humans. In essence, though, it remains a safer and more attractive option than the technique glorified in pop culture—having your friend suck out the venom by mouth. Next, apply a compression wrap (not a tourniquet) to the affected extremity (most bites are on the hands, feet, arms, or legs) with an Ace bandage. Finally, the victim should be evacuated to an emergency room for evaluation and immediate treatment (if necessary) with equine antivenin or the synthetic Crofab. These antidotes bind to and neutralize the venom, preventing or lessening tissue destruction and clotting abnormalities.
So, yeah—now I knew a lot more about snakes, and knowledge is power, but in my case not powerful enough to overcome boyhood terror. Especially not after reading in the guidebook that rattlers can be found virtually anywhere along the California section of the PCT. Landmarks with names such as Rattlesnake Canyon, Rattlesnake Springs, and Rattlesnake Trail didn’t help much, either. The guidebook described Rattlesnake Trail as “little-used.” Gee, I wonder why?
During our first two weeks on the trail I’d vigilantly scanned the ground for rattlesnakes, and during those two weeks I hadn’t seen a single one. It was ironic, then, that I should hear my birthday “gift” before I saw him. The sharp and loud percussion came from my right as I rounded a curve in the trail. I skipped quickly to my left, darted forward, and spun to face the menace. I looked at him closely for a second: His fork-shaped bubblegum-pink tongue was flicking rapidly and contrasted severely with the tire-tread darkness of his coiled body. He was a Pacific rattlesnake and sat tucked back against a collection of boulders, hidden from view to those coming down the trail. Fortunately, his position was slightly off-trail, and I’d been able to move safely outside of his six-foot striking range. Angela, however, was rapidly approaching.
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