Our next stop was at Castella on Day 103, when the smoke from forest fires added a little anxiety to our lives. Forest fires often close sections of the PCT, forcing thru-hikers to skip sections and then return later to hike the burned-over trail after the fires are out. One morning, we had awakened to find a fine layer of white ash sprinkled over our tent from a distant conflagration. But the fires never came close enough to stop our forward progress.
Soon after we left the trail at Mile 1,506 for the side road into Castella, a gentleman named Ted gave us a lift to the post office in his pickup truck. (We weren’t as lucky later in the day. No one offered us a lift back to the trail, so we had to walk the 2 miles or so.) That night, Mary wrote about the stop in her journal:
Day 103: Castella has very good burritos and a multitude of cats on the store patio. Afterwards we walked a few more miles with food-laden packs.
A master of understatement, that girl. The burritos at Ammirati’s are justifiably famous in the backpacking community. One is a meal and two are enough to fill up even a thru-hiker. The well-equipped store provided us with several bottles of Gatorade and plenty of other goodies. “The Guys”—Vice, Spreadsheet, and Dumptruck—were there ahead of us, and we joined them on the store’s shady patio. The shade was important—that day was a real scorcher. Even the half-feral cats stayed out of the sun, occasionally deigning to play with Mary. We picked up a nine-day supply of food in Castella, which made for very heavy packs.
Castella—at least the small part of it we saw—seemed like a pleasant little town, with a good location, right next to Castle Crags State Park and its magnificent scenery. But the town, like the surrounding area, was dominated by the noise of Interstate 5. It was amazing. Long before we got to town, we could hear the freeway, and long after we left, we could still hear the constant hum of traffic. It was downright strange to be hiking and camping in surroundings that at least appeared to be remote, and yet every time I stopped to think, I was aware that thousands of vehicles were rushing by not that far away, their drivers completely oblivious not only to my existence, but to the natural beauty that lay all around. The only thing comparable was our experience in the southern Sierra, where, for several days after leaving Kennedy Meadows, we were frequently bombarded with the noise of military jets zipping in and out of the peaks and canyons. We rarely saw the planes, but commercial aircraft don’t behave like that. My guess is that they were pilots from Edwards Air Force Base honing their skills at the expense of our eardrums.
Fortunately, there were very few sonic booms. A low-flying plane breaking the sound barrier can knock rocks and ice loose, as had happened to us a few summers earlier on a perilous stretch of trail leading up to New Army Pass. We were climbing that pass in the southern Sierra because Mary and Gary wanted to give me a chance to bag my first “fourteener”—a peak of 14,000 or more feet above sea level. Mary had already conquered two fourteeners: 14,162-foot Mt. Shasta and 14,026-foot Mt. Langley. Langley was easy to reach from Highway 395 on our way home from attending a wedding in Long Beach, California, so we took a side trip up to Cottonwood Pass and hiked into a backpacking area at about 12,000 feet. We spent a day getting used to the altitude, and the next morning headed up the rocky switchbacks toward New Army Pass. We were about a quarter of the way up when a plane came over, low and fast, and we heard a sonic boom. Within a minute, we heard some rattling on the cliffs above the trail, and we looked up to see a block of ice coming down. One of the pieces that broke off was the size of a bowling ball and could have killed someone easily. Gary yelled at the guy in front of us to get behind a rock, and then he yanked Mary down behind a big rock. I also dived behind a boulder, but the other man remained motionless until it was all over.
My quick reaction to the threat probably stemmed from a scary mountaineering experience Gary and I shared before Mary was born, when we were on Mt. Shasta making an unsuccessful attempt at the summit. We were strapping on crampons at the bottom of a snow field a little way above Helen Lake when Gary heard a noise and pointed up the slope. A dark brown boulder about the size of an oil drum was bouncing down through the rocks and heading straight for us. We both scrambled for cover, handicapped by the fact that our crampons were only halfway on. The boulder stopped short, but it looms large in my mind whenever I’m on similar terrain.
After Castella, our next layover was in Seiad Valley, the last town stop in California, at Mile 1,662. In order to reach the post office in time on Day 111, we had 12 miles to walk, on a day when the heat felt like a hostile entity. The last 6 miles along a paved road seemed endless. But once we arrived, Cindy, the post office worker, was friendly and helpful. Better yet, she was babysitting a puppy and Mary got to play with it. We didn’t pause for showers or even cold drinks until our return box was in the mail. And then we collapsed in a rare patch of shade, guzzled down more Gatorade, and relaxed with the newspaper. At last, I could sit and reflect on the new state we had entered. No, not Oregon, not yet. Today we had entered the State of Jefferson. I knew, because it said so on the side of the post office, on people’s houses, and even on the blade of a bulldozer parked along the road going into town.
As recently as 1941, residents of this area were serious about forming a new state. Resentment in southern Oregon and northern California over neglect by the respective state governments had been festering for a long time, with a State of Shasta and a State of Klamath proposed even before the Civil War. Bernita Tickner and Gail Fiorini-Jenner describe those efforts in their pictorial history, The State of Jefferson (Arcadia Publishing 2005). Legislation setting up a separate state was introduced in California in 1852, when the state capital was still Vallejo. The idea of separation stayed alive, although the legislation did not, and another serious revolt materialized in 1935 in Curry County, in southern Oregon. Yreka, in California’s Siskiyou County, was designated the capital of what then would have been the 49th state (although I think it’s safe to say the movement wasn’t taken very seriously in Salem or Sacramento). By November 1941, however, there was real progress made toward a State of Jefferson, with local government involvement, a gubernatorial election, and a declaration of secession. But in politics, as in life, timing is everything. The new state was to proclaim its existence to the world in early December, but on December 7, the Japanese government bombed Pearl Harbor. The necessity of exploiting the remote region’s timber resources and strategic minerals for the war effort resulted in the construction of roads and bridges; and since better transportation was the main grievance behind the secession movement in the first place, the movement lost momentum.
In the end, the State of Jefferson got what it wanted, at least temporarily. But the problems of unemployment and governmental neglect haven’t disappeared from northern California, or from most of the rural parts of the state. Unemployment is high; incomes are low. Ranchers and farmers share realistic worries over water allocations, and residents in general find their concerns ignored because there are so few of them compared with the millions living in the major population areas. Even today, when a bridge is washed out in a storm, there’s no guarantee it will get fixed quickly, whereas when the Northridge earthquake unraveled Los Angeles’ freeway system in 1994, the entire state’s wealth paid the overtime for construction workers to rebuild the damaged roads.
The State of Jefferson movement is primarily a libertarian movement, toward less government and, in particular, fewer environmental regulations governing resource exploitation. This brand of politics is not uncommon along the stretches of California, Oregon, and Washington through which the Pacific Crest Trail wanders. But it’s not the only political ideal. There’s also the Cascadia movement, an idealistic frame of mind that envisions the area as the future home of a peaceful and sustainable community based on environmentalism and social justice. Ernest Callenbach wrote his book Ecotopia in 1975, and while the book is dated in many ways, his ideas are still popular in some coastal sections of California, Oregon, and Washington. As it turned out, tim
ing wasn’t the secessionists’ best friend in this case, either. The Cascadian National Party, devoted to a separate nation-state encompassing what is now Washington and Oregon, was launched on September 10, 2001, just one day before the tragic events of September 11.
Outside of its politics, Seiad Valley is famous among backpackers for two reasons: It’s supposed to be the hottest and driest point on the California section of the PCT, and it’s supposed to offer food that excels in both quantity and quality. It failed on both counts.
Seiad Valley was certainly earning its hot-and-dry reputation when we arrived. It must have been well over 100°F, and humidity was probably hovering around 9 percent. But that evening, Rick, who owns an RV park where thru-hikers can camp for free, mentioned there was rain in the forecast. Rain seemed about as likely as 4 feet of snow, but I told Gary, and he rigged the rain fly in such a way that it let in plenty of air, but could be pulled over the tent in minutes if needed. The next morning at 6 o’clock, I awoke to the feeling of rain on my face. Felt good, actually. Gary pulled the rain cover into position, and we went back to sleep for an hour. The precipitation slacked long enough for us to pack up, but when we settled in at the cafe for lunch, it was raining hard. We were lucky: By the time we started walking, the rain had finished falling, but had cooled things off enough that our long, steep climb out of town was fairly pleasant.
Seiad Valley’s pancake challenge is nationally known (as seen on TV!): Eat three of these monsters and they’re free. We knew eating three was out of the question for any of us—we’d heard how big they were—we were just hoping for some good food, and lots of it. But the meal we were served the night we arrived was so disappointing that when our waitress saw Mary and me standing on the sidewalk the next morning, she insisted on paying us back out of her own pocket. I was using the pay phone, deep in a discussion with my sister Liz, when the woman drove up and hurriedly parked. She jumped out of her car, ran over, and said, “I felt so bad about your dinner last night—here, take this,” shoved a $20 bill into my hand, and rushed off before I could react, much less give it back.
Sunny California. Rainy Oregon. I never dreamed these stereotypes would be so true for us. The rain really began for us the day before we reached the California-Oregon state line, a day I described in my journal as cold, wet, and miserable. The next days were worse. Much of the trail was overgrown, which meant pushing through waist-high vegetation all day, and getting our pants soaked. It was worse for Mary, being shorter. We got warm and dry again on Day 116 at Hyatt Lake Resort, near Mile 1,750, and from there pushed on to Mazama Village in Crater Lake National Park on Day 120, at Mile 1,830. There, we took an unplanned zero day for Gary to recover from his chills, nausea, aches, and general wretchedness. The staff—mostly retirees making enough money as seasonal workers to keep up their RV-oriented lifestyles the rest of the year—treated us very well. They may have been a little slow-moving, but they made up for that by treating Mary as though she were their collective grandchild. Our next stop was Bend, Oregon, named for its location on a double curve of the Deschutes River. When Californians talk about moving to Oregon (as lots of Californians do; it’s sort of a state hobby), Bend is the city they name if they really don’t like fog and rain. (The fog- and rain-tolerant ones talk about Ashland and Portland. People who simply adore fog and rain fantasize about moving farther north to Washington and living in Seattle.) Bend is about 30 miles away from the PCT, but our retired-ranger friend, Lipa, picked us up at Mile 1,958 and drove us there for a much-needed rest. Our Bend experience is nicely summed up in Mary’s journal entry:
Day 128: Today we hiked in and met Lipa. We drove down to a motel room next to the laundry. McDinner!
Detroit, Oregon, also is nowhere near the PCT, but it turned out to be one of my favorite town stops. We got a cheap but comfortable motel room right across from a restaurant that offered both good food and good service. The town had a clean, cozy, welcoming feeling to it. Everything about Detroit combined to sooth our nerves, frazzled by too many days of cold, wet conditions, and uncertainty about how much worse they would get.
We didn’t visit Detroit on Day 136 because we had a sudden desire to sleep in motel beds and eat restaurant food. Well, OK, we always had a more or less constant desire to sleep in real beds and eat real food. But it wasn’t an intensification of that desire that sent us off to Detroit. It was an intensification of the rainfall and the creek depths along a section of the PCT already notorious for difficult stream crossings. Specifically, Russell Creek and Milk Creek had reputations that made us think twice about fording them with Mary along. A man hiking near Pamelia Lake with his chocolate Labrador retriever showed us on his map how to hike out to Highway 22, follow the pavement 7 miles to Whitewater Creek Road, and follow that 4 miles back to the PCT. Quite a long detour, but we were really worried about those two creeks.
Once we got to the highway, we hitched a ride into Detroit with a ski patroller from Bend on his way to the coast to learn sea kayaking. Soon we were sitting comfortably in the Cedars Restaurant, warm, dry, and well-fed, watching a light rain fall and reading The Oregonian. And what I read in the newspaper made me wonder if we should ever go back into the woods. Oregon, I discovered, takes a liberal position toward people with physical handicaps who want to obtain hunting licenses. Based on the policies set forth in the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission had some years earlier decided that residents confined to wheelchairs weren’t the only disabled individuals who should be able to enjoy the pleasures of hunting. Oh, no. The enlightened commissioners decided that blind and sight-impaired people are just as entitled as anyone else to take a powerful weapon capable of shooting a bullet at 3,000 feet per second and head into the forest.
Oregon also decided that disabled hunters could sit in a parked vehicle anywhere but right smack on a public road, sense that a deer or an elk was somewhere nearby, and direct a companion to pick up the .30-06 in the back seat, and blast away. And he could blast away at just about any animal, regardless of gender, even when ordinary sportsmen slogging through the mud were restricted to the males of the species. I grew up in a hunting area and it was sort of understood that keen vision was a prerequisite for going into the woods and firing at elk or mule deer, so as to avoid shooting the cattle that roamed the range, not to mention the ranchers who owned those cattle. This has to be some kind of Oregon aberration, I thought, the liberal coastal element’s eagerness to comply with the ADA combined with the inland passion for hunting. But months later, I discovered that other states have accommodations for handicapped hunters, and that hunters with physical limitations are constantly working to expand those provisions. Able-bodied hunters, naturally, worry that the rules are being abused, and that hunters perfectly capable of carrying a rifle or drawing a bow are obtaining special treatment under false pretenses.
This is a difficult issue for fish and game departments all over the country. I wouldn’t want to be the commissioner deciding if a man with one arm and limited vision should be allowed to hunt deer with a crossbow and a mechanism that allows him to cock and fire it with his teeth, especially when that man has a national organization and a set of lawyers supporting his interpretation of the ADA. But neither would I want to be another hunter pursuing a white-tailed deer through the underbrush when the one-armed, one-eyed man with the powerful crossbow is out there as well. It’s easy—especially for a non-hunter like me—to dismiss people who insist on being given hunting licenses in the face of common-sense safety issues, or who try to take advantage of the system by accentuating an old injury or claiming that using regulation gear during the official season brings with it the risk of a new injury. But I’ve come to realize that for many people, hunting is as essential to their pursuit of happiness as backpacking is to mine. I’ve asked myself sometimes what I would do if I could no longer hike. Buy a horse? Invent a trail-ready wheelchair? I have to hike, and these people have to hunt.
But even so,
after Detroit, I never urged Mary to be quiet while walking in the woods. I let her talk as much and as loudly as she wanted—sing, shout even—anything to let the hunters know that humans, not ruminants, were approaching.
From Detroit, we hitched a ride back to the exact spot we’d left the day before, and walked across a bridge through a construction zone with no shoulder and high-speed traffic. In the end, it was probably a greater threat to our lives than the stream crossings would have been, but at least if we’d been hit on Highway 22 an ambulance would have arrived quickly. We were walking in the rain, and the weather steadily worsened, which made us more grateful than we might have been to get a cabin at Olallie Lake Resort, just off the trail at Mile 2,053, on our 138th day.
We were sick of walking in water. So before we left Olallie Lake, we mapped out an alternate route on a series of Forest Service roads that would take us to Clackamas Lake in a day and a half. At that point, we had taken an alternate trail a couple times, but we were determined nonetheless to maintain our thru-hike philosophy of linking up all our steps. The maps we had picked up in Detroit showed an abundance of back roads, all of which, we figured, had to be better drained than what we’d been walking on. We started out with ice and frost everywhere, and about the time the air warmed up a little, it started to rain, sometimes heavily. Late in the day, during a brief break in the downpour, we started looking for a stream from which to filter water, and a place to camp. Gary walked one way, and found water. Mary and I walked the other way—and found a cabin! We were so excited. It was like half a town stop—shelter minus the fast-food and laundromat. The sturdy, two-story structure had been built by the Mt. Hood Snowmobile Club for “winter recreation,” and I decided the cold, rainy weather we were experiencing matched perfectly what we call “winter” in the San Francisco Bay Area. Inside, there was firewood and a fine stove built out of a 50-gallon drum. I started a fire without using a single match; someone had used the stove the night before, and there were still enough embers among the ashes to ignite the cardboard I shoved in for tinder. Mary and I brought in some more kindling to dry out overnight and be ready for the next person’s use, but otherwise we stayed close to that wonderful wood stove. We slept upstairs in the loft, lulled to sleep by the sound of rain on the roof, while our ponchos and jackets dried downstairs.
Zero Days Page 21