by Bill Walker
“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.
Right at dark, I was surprised to hear a familar voice.
“Is this it?” the person non-chalantly said. There was really only one person it could have been. Pretty Boy Joe. It was almost like the means justified the ends with this guy. Every other hiker on the PCT was surely hunkered down as safely as possible, wherever they had found to pitch their tent. Even Joe seemed to take this weather seriously, as he quickly disappeared into his hastily erected tent.
What followed was white-out conditions. All night. My tent leaked. All night. It’s got to lighten up. But I kept hearing channels of wind originating from seemingly miles away and gathering intensity as heavier and heavier snowflakes collided into my tent.
Snowy morning finally arrived.
“So long guys,” from Pretty Boy Joe was the first thing I heard.
When I emerged from my tent, Valhalla quietly said, “We need to get out of here.”
“There’ll be even more snow up higher?” I reminded him.
“I’ll find some trail,” he stoutly said. I hurried to get ready; following him was my best hope of getting out of here.
I knew it would be impossible to get my tent even remotely dry. But at least I could shake the heaviest snow off to lighten it up some. But when I began flailing it around in all directions one of the hooks accidentally banged up against my middle finger, just as had happened in Yosemite. Blood began flowing freely.
Frozen fingers, blood, and high elevations. Damn, damn. Bad karma? I rifled through my first aid kit and extracted several band-aids. Valhalla impatiently stood by watching me awkwardly try to wrap band-aids around the flowing wound with my biting cold fingers. It wasn’t even close. The band-aids quickly overflowed. I threw them onto the snow and desperately tried wrapping more band-aids around the thin slit. But again, bright red blood overwhelmed the contraption. Panic.
“Have you got any tape?” I asked Valhalla.
“No.”
It could take me an hour to get this wound clotted. Heck, it might not ever shut, and I could die in a pile of blood and snow.
Yeah, it sounds even more improbable than it does gruesome. But I honestly didn’t know how in the world I was going to stop the blood from cascading out of this tiny cut in my finger. How long can I survive bleeding freely?
“I’m gonna’ get moving, Skywalker,” Valhalla said.
Oh no.
I quickly looked at him and asked, “Could you just hang around for a few minutes?”
The hiking community is highly oriented towards offering help; hardly anybody ever asks for it. In fact, I would have to say directly asking a fellow hiker to stay with me was the single lowest point for me on either the Appalachian Trail or the Pacific Crest Trail. But god-dammit, I was doing my best. And I didn’t want to bleed to death or get lost in a heavy snowstorm.
“Okay,” he quietly said to my request.
The Mexican guy in Yosemite had used a pad and taped it tightly down. I rifled through my first aid kit. Thank God there was a small spool of tape that had been in my first-aid kit for thousands of miles. Who knew how clean it was, but it was the only arrow in my quiver. Unartfully, I was able to tie it several times around my fingers. Unlike with the band-aids, blood didn’t immediately appear.
“You ready?” Valhalla asked.
“Yeah.” Off we headed to a higher elevation and deeper snow.
Regardless of who the hiker was, there could be only one possible goal today. Get the hell out of this snow and cold. That wasn’t going to be possible on the actual PCT route. It was twenty miles over impassable amounts of snow. So we needed a shortcut.
“There’s got to be another way,” Valhalla said intently.
I followed intently on his heels. Economy of motion. Don’t give out.
“This looks like the Surprise Lake Trail,” Valhalla said, after we had cleared Pieper Pass.
“How can you tell?” I asked.
“It has to be,” was his answer. We were playing for keeps.
Down we went towards a frozen alpine lake on a slippery slope. The next several miles were essentially an obstacle course through the snow-filled evergreen trees. A deep arctic-like hush prevailed, broken only by our heavy footsteps. It was Christmas-card beautiful—enough to stir the emotions of even the most hard-bit soul. Some of the time we seemed to be on a trail; other times we were bushwhacking. Most of the time we were on our feet, but not always. Valhalla seemed embarrassed he was falling as much as the tall southerner hiking behind him. Perhaps that was his Nordic ego acting up!
Where to go? Countless are the times that the PCT hiker
is left with nothing but footprints to follow.
As we trekked further down, the snow lightened up. By late afternoon, we had arrived at Highway 2 in high spirits. Better—or worse—yet, Pretty Boy Joe and Giggles were standing there unsuccessfully trying to hitch. An intrepid middle-aged lady finally stopped to pick all of us up. Unfortunately, we didn’t build up a reservoir of goodwill for our future hiking brethren. When we exited the lady’s car, I looked in the backseat where the obvious remnants of a hiker’s muddy slide stained the backseat of her car.
Chapter 41
Northwestern Hospitality
Eastern Washington Bumper Sticker:
HUG A LOGGER. YOU WILL NEVER GO BACK TO TREES.
You couldn’t imagine two more different places than eastern and western Washington State. Latte-drinking, vegetarianism, environmentalism, and trendy causes were for the secular intellectuals in coastal Seattle. Much further inland here, they were replaced by a more traditional fare of God and guns. And mountains, I might add. But not many people.
Into this vacuum in the isolated hamlet of
Skykomish steps a doughty lady named Andrea Dinsmore and her cigar-chomping husband, Jerry. Running a hiker hostel this far up the trail was a thankless task. After all, most hikers have dropped out by here. But that only magnified the Dinsmore’s role. Theirs was a kind of northwestern hospitality.
“You shouldn’t try hiking this next section,” Jerry Dinsmore flatly told us.
“Why?”
“No tellin’ how much snow they’ve gotten up there on Glacier.”
Indeed, there was no telling. It kept dumping day-after-day as we cooled our heels in an enlarged room the Dinsmores had retrofitted for hikers. Our initial joy at having successfully weathered the snowstorm soon turned to sullen anxiety.
“My six-month visa expires October, 12th,” Valhalla muttered. “I must skip this next section.” That immediately put me in a funk. His map-reading skills would be at an ever greater premium.
“If we get out by Saturday,” I ventured, “you could make it to the border on the 12th.”
“They might send me to Guantanamo,” he corrected me.
I tried several lines of rebuttal, but he always went back, albeit in droll fashion, to the same thing, fear of being put in Guantanomo.
“How about it, Backtrack?” I said. “We’re roughly the same speed. You wanna’ set out together this next section?”
“I can’t commit,” he quickly said. “Your tent and sleeping bag are not appropriate for these conditions. It could get me in trouble if just the two of us are out there.”
A car pulled up and a surprise foursome entered the hiker quarters. Luna and Waffles, followed by Five Dollar and Pink (What happened to Hollywood? Has Five Dollar pulled it off!). They walked around passing out hugs to everyone. What’s going on?
“It’s too late to finish,” Waffles said. “We’re going up to Manning Park (Canada) and hike out to the PCT monument.” More hugs and promises to fill in the missing sections next year, and so forth. I didn’t like what I was seeing.
I turned to Giggles. We had had running debates on a range of esoteric subjects along the way
Me--“These damn cell phones—you could never make a movie like Casablanca again. Cell phones would be going off at the critical romantic moments.”
Giggles--“You’re just a Luddite, Skywalker.”
Me--“No, I’m an enlightened technophobe!”)
Most of these scrimmages had ended in stalemate. But here in this cramped hiker hostel in northern Washington with our backs up against a wall, we came to a meeting of the minds.
“Hey, why don’t we go out together, Giggles,” I suggested.
“I’m up for it,” he said.
“We’d have to agree to stay together just to keep from getting lost,” I said.
“Oh yeah. In each other’s sight the whole time.” This quickened my pulse to be sure. Nonetheless, there was a speculative quality to our conversation.
Then the door opened again. In walked a surprise face. Bob-Rob. We all had seen him at several points all along the way, but nobody had really known what to think about him. He clearly preferred solitude. But make no mistake—he was a hiker and of the all-weather variety. Now, though, as he entered the room with all eyes on him, everything about him looked different.
“How’s it going?” I asked.
“Not,” the soft-spoken Washingtonian answered pithily.
“What’s it like out there?”
“Unbelievable,” he said, pointing to his waist. “Snow up to here for three days. I had no idea where the trail was half the time.” He almost seemed like he was trying to convince himself of what he’d just gone through.
A cursory glance at his equipment and clothes revealed everything was well soaked-through.
“Are you gonna’ wait,” I ventured, “and go back in in a few days?”
“No,” he said unhesitatingly. “I’m done. I’ll come back next year.”
The whole thing was beginning to have an end-of-the-season feel. But I wasn’t from this part of the country and didn’t want to feel obligated to come back next year. Walking to Canada in some form held out great allure for me.
The only realistic way to do that at this point was skip this snowed-in section and get to the last trail town of Stehekin. One problem, though. Stehekin is a native word meaning, “the way through.” It may be the single most isolated community in the entire continental United States. There are only two ways to get there. Hike several days over a snowy mountainous range. But we had all just ruled that option out as impractical. The other route was by ferry.
Great consolation awaited our decision. The ferry took us over Lake Chelan, the third deepest lake in the United States (the PCT had already passed by the two deepest lakes). We sailed through an almost absurdly gorgeous scene where glaciers had carved out a steep gorge in the rugged mountains.
I honestly would have given my eyeteeth to be hoofing it over these mountains. However, I was at peace with my decision. Long-distance hiking was something to give my absolutely best effort. But as an amateur, it was not worth risking my life like a mountain climber.
It proved to be a great reunion, as well. CanaDoug, Lil’ Buddha, and others had come all the way from Snoqualmie, two trail towns back after a harrowing two days trapped in belly-button deep snow drifts, with no obvious way either forward or backwards.
“If it hadn’t been for Rocket Man,” Lil’ Buddha recounted with a tone of amusement, “CanaDoug and I might have died out there. He made us turn around and go back to Snoqualmie.” But then Rocket Man had called it a year. He had driven CanDoug and Lil’ Buddha north to catch this ferry.
We finally arrived in the tiny seasonal hamlet of Stehekin, where everybody sat down for a big dinner in the only restaurant. At trail towns along the way, we had been eating on a shoestring in places that ranged from good to bad to awful. This meal, though, was special.
“What’s your real name?” Whiskey Jet asked.
“Bill Walker,” I responded, which drew silly laughs.
“Yours?” I asked.
“Pete Schlerb,” he responded to more strange giggles, including my own.
Everybody went around saying their real names and we all cracked up like schoolkids. Perhaps it showed just what a bubble long-distance hikers live in.
Part of that bubble was an antipathy to resume talk.
“Where have you worked in the past?” I asked Lil’ Buddha.
“I worked for a couple of giant corporations,” he plaintively said.
“What did you do for ‘em?”
“I was a salesman,” he said. “In other words I was a liar,” he joked.
Attitudes toward careers ranged from indifference to just not giving a damn at all. We judged each other by the way we were on the trail, and in no other way. In this sense, you could even say hiking trails exemplify the concept of community.
“Nobody should be alone at this point,” Meaghan said at breakfast the next morning.
That was music to my ears. The 90-mile section ahead was almost completely isolated, running through the snowy northern Cascades. Serendipitously, the weather had cleared and the next five days looked good. The extended forecast, however, showed bitter arctic-cold swooping down. But if things went according to plan, five days should be enough to make it safely to Canada, and wrap myself in the warm comforts of civilization for the winter.
What great fun this should be finishing with so many of the same people I had bounced amongst almost the whole way. But then CanaDoug walked in.
“Hey, Minnesota is playing Green Bay on Monday Night Football,” he announced jovially. “It’s Brett Favre’s first game back against the Packers. Let’s stay and watch it.”
“Yeah, but there’s that cold front coming this weekend,” I countered. “We’ll get caught in it if we don’t hike out today.” To my dismay, however, one person after another began voicing enthusiasm for CanaDoug’s idea.
“Skywalker,” Lil’Buddha reasoned (picking up on the bear-related humor of the
previous evening’s dinner), “if you hike out alone, you’ll get eaten by a grizzly.” Indeed, for the very first time in my life, I would be hiking in grizzly country. The possibility of an encounter concerned me, to be sure. Heck, even the most seasoned outdoorsmen strive to avoid these creatures of virtually mythical strength and appetites. But I wasn’t obsessed by it.
“Rare as a Sasquatch spotting,” our waitress had told me the previous evening.
No, my biggest concern far and away was cold weather. From my first days on the Appalachian Trail, cold, wet weather had been my Achilles heel. Now I had a five day window to make a break for the Canadian border before possibly getting blasted again. My thoughts went back to the Kickoff last April. “Be finished before October 1,” everyone stated with unanimity. “Anything after that is borrowed time up there.”
No way I was staying back even if I had to hike out alone. But I did try to lobby a few of my colleagues to re-consider.
“I may hike out,” Not a Chance said ambivalently.
“Hey, we go about the same speed,” I said hopefully. Even she was reluctant, though.
Finally though, she unenthusiastically hoisted her backpack and headed back to the trailhead.
Twenty-one year old Not a Chance had a style all her own. For starters, she night-hiked more often than not—usually alone. One night recently, she had been walking along when she saw a pair of shiny eyes no more than twenty feet off the trail peering intently at her.
“First I thought it was a bear,” she recounted. “But then I practically shit in my pants. It was a cougar.”
“How big was it?”
“That thing was huge,” she said. “Much bigger than a dog.”
“Do you still night hike?” I wondered.
“I don’t plan it,” she shrugged. “It just kinda’ happens.”
“How far are you looking to take it today?” I asked Not a Chance, when we arrived at the trailhead.