by Bill Walker
The rest of us mortals, though, had a critical planning calculation to make. We had to buy all the food we would need for the next 500 miles here in Cascade Locks. Adding to the complication was the fact that the grocery store here in Cascade Locks wasn’t very large. Actually, I had always found that wandering through grocery stores in trail towns was a bit of an unnerving experience. Decisions you make in there will have direct tangible effects on your physical persona and morale a few days hence. The first 2,000 miles had worked out pretty well. I had cut it close plenty of times, but never completely run out of food.
On second thought, however, maybe it hadn’t worked out so well. I was down 45 pounds from my initial starting weight of 213. How big of a problem is this?
“When you start smelling something like ammonia, you know you’re burning muscle,” one hiker had told me back in California. That had sounded just too strange to be convincing. However, a few hundred miles back, I had indeed begun emitting an ammonia-like odor that, even in my most narcissistic state, wasn’t very fond of myself.
Now, I joined other hikers scurrying around fretting over just how much food to send. The grocery store didn’t have everything I wanted, which meant improvising. Eventually, I spent $300 on just about the most boilerplate food you could imagine, including 28 packs of Idahoan potatoes.
A matter of hot debate amongst hikers was which post offices to send food shipments to in Washington State. After much agonizing, I sent out food drops to four places: White Pass, and to the post offices at Snoqualmie, Skykomish, and Stehekin (If you don’t think the Indians have any grievances, take another look at those names!).
Valhalla, however, harbored the general European prejudice against American over-consumption, especially overeating. He was betting that food would appear somewhere in this food-crazy country.
“I’m not sending any food drops,” he declared. “I refuse to believe there is anywhere in America where there is not a lot of food.” He later ended up having to “borrow” some food from me.
Valhalla, Pretty Boy Joe, and I then dodged traffic in both directions as we crossed the densely-girdered Bridge of the Gods that led over the Columbia River and into Washington State.
Oregon’s speedway quickly gave way to steeper, more jagged terrain. Autumn offered brilliant hues and bracing air. Our food bags were full and I had good hiking partners, as the northern cascade range loomed ahead. It was all perfect. Pleeeeez hold off, old man winter.
Within three days we had gone from 150 feet sea level to back up over 7,000 feet at Goat Rocks Wilderness. The sharply angular mountains and bleak landscape immediately brought to mind the White Mountains in New Hampshire. At turns, I found myself ecstatic and horrified. On the way up to the crest we came upon yet another glacier that required tortuously slow walking. It seemed so simple, yet was so icy. It didn’t take a great imagination to envision sliding helplessly hundreds of yards before careening into a backstop of rocks.
Fortunately, CanaDoug was a day behind. He always got this gleeful Canadian joy out of demonstrating his alpine prowess, and then lighting up a cigar and watching me flail awkwardly through snow and ice. Again I managed to make it through another glacier field, although my technique (deep crouch and claw for a grip) wasn’t getting any more aesthetically pleasing.
We wound and wound around to the top and beheld one of the great views on the Pacific Crest Trail. To me, singular views are somewhat overrated. The more profound experience is to walk through nature and subconsciously embrace its holistic majesty. But the view from the crest of Goats Rock Wilderness, with its sharp spine running along for miles between deep canyons and snow-capped peaks in the distance, was one for the ages.
Luna, my tormentor, but ultimately my inspiration, on Mount Whitney was on hand to enjoy it. She now had a new hiking partner. Like a lot of the girls I’ve seen on hiking trails, Luna was a pretty good picker. She had traveled long distances with two older guys who had practically maimed themselves struggling to keep up with her. Both had been on their best behavior, but 500 miles seemed to be about the shelf life of her tolerance for these followers. At that point they helplessly became personas non-grata.
What had happened was pretty simple and, if you think about it, forgivable. In Oregon, Luna had gotten what movie director, Spike Lee, might call jungle fever. She had sprung for what was probably the most impressive physical specimen of male out here. That was 21 year-old Waffles from rural Tennessee—he of the long hair and ripped physique. Luna was a handful, to be sure. But Waffles had the confidence to fill the vacuum. However, other hikers suddenly began blowing a lot of flak his way. Unfortunately, he occasionally used the n-word, which opened him up for all kinds of condemnation. As a southerner, I’m always sensitive when a fellow southerner exposes his horns this way.
“Just because you’re a southerner,” Backtrack lectured him one day, “doesn’t mean you have to be a racist.”
Regrettably, I also had used this nefarious word on occasion while growing up. So I was in no position to lecture him, and actually got along with him pretty well. In reality, I thought there was a more basic reason Waffles was drawing fire from his colleagues.
He had scored with Luna and they hadn’t.
Valhalla and I came to a bluff described in our guidebook as bleak alpine campsites. They couldn’t have described it more appropriately.
“I think I’ll camp here and walk around taking photographs,” the sophisticated aesthete announced.
“I’d never be able to stay warm here,” I said. “Plus I need to make more miles.” With that, I headed off as fast as I could.
The best thing to do when alone is to hike. With the mindset I was in, it was inevitable I was going to hike until dark almost any day. A half-hour before dark, I would start actively looking for places to camp. But then I would get mileage greedy. Whenever I spotted a decent camp spot in the next twenty minutes, I would briefly hesitate before saying to myself, five more minutes. Hikers frequently lamented, “Every morning after I turn the first corner, I come right on a spot that would have been perfect.” The moral of the story, according to thru-hikers anyway, was to eke out every last minute of daylight until the perfect spot presented itself. But the law of averages also says you’re going to get caught in some awful places to camp with this mentality.
As dark descended here, I knew I was in an unfortunate area. After dropping sharply from Goats Rock Pass, the trail had then ascended 1,600 feet. Now I was stuck on top of a narrow ridge without tree cover or any possibility of a flat spot. I was also bone-tired, not having seen a trail town for almost a hundred miles. The only thing to do, though, was get back below tree line. Fast.
It became spooky dark, but I finally got back below tree line. I was very aware that this is the type situation that one is likely to have a surprise encounter with a wild animal. I kept banging my ski pole loudly on trees, and singing an atonal version of Otis Redding’s Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay. Finally, after going my maximum speed in the pitch black dark for about an hour, the trail came to the bottom of an undulation. There wasn’t anywhere wide enough to throw down a tent. So I just lay down on my sleeping bag and pad in the middle of the trail.
But that’s where some animals often prefer to take nighttime excursions. That keen awareness marred my night’s sleep. Valhalla, meanwhile, had enjoyed a blissful alpine afternoon, gotten a good night’s sleep, and soon caught up with my dragging keisters on the trail the next day. In this instance, at least, his less frantic European style had proven more adept than my more grasping American attitude.
“Man, what’s happened to you?” Dirk said.
“What do you mean?” I laughed.
“Where did the rest of you go?”
We had by chance run into each other at the country store at White Pass, where everybody was inhaling containers of ice cream and bartering parts of our food packages we had all picked up here.
These impromptu observations were standard trail fare. You would see somebod
y you hadn’t seen in a couple weeks—in some cases just a few days—and immediately notice part of them had wasted away. Unfortunately, I seemed to be on the receiving end of a disproportionate number of these remarks.
I honestly didn’t feel like this large-scale weight loss had affected my actual hiking, except for late in the afternoon when a persistent fatigue would set in. Its major effect lay in loss of insulation and ability to stay warm. My arm muscles had atrophied, and any chest, stomach, and shoulder mass had wasted away.
“That’s scary,” Poet had unhesitatingly said when she saw me changing shirts at a campsite way back in northern California. And the problem had only gotten more acute since then. In fact, it was reaching the stage where I was finally ready to play a wild card.
All along the Appalachian Trail, and now on the PCT, concerned fellow hikers had suggested in low voices, “Have you ever tried olive oil? It’s absolutely packed with calories.”
It sounded awful. Nonetheless, I had filed it away mentally as a last resort when nothing else worked. Now that time had come with a vengeance. At Cascade Locks, I had sent a container of olive oil here to White Pass. Despite weighing just a few ounces, it contained almost 4,000 calories. I threw it into my backpack.
I tried to view it like taking an asthma shot—something unpleasant I had to do. From here on out, I didn’t take a bite out of anything without lathering it with olive oil. I was pleasantly surprised. I had expected it to be absolutely horrible, but it was merely bad. Better yet, I could actually feel it working. It had a rich body to it that average hiker food lacks, and I immediately felt like I was gaining strength (and flatulence!).
The first thing I did at the end of the journey was weigh myself; I had lost 43 pounds, which meant I had actually gained two pounds in Washington State. Miraculous.
Chapter 40
The Northern Cascades
“The 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.