Out There

by Chris Townsend

  My planned route, which I mostly followed, looked like a child’s scribble or a tangle of thread thrown on to the map as I joined up the 517 dots. The logic of a linear route from A to B was lost and during the walk I would head in every direction of the compass whilst slowly progressing northwards. Ben More on Mull was my first summit, chosen to get that awkward (in terms of a continuous round) island Munro out of the way, and Ben Hope in the far north my last. There were no options for taking easier routes in stormy weather or more direct routes if I was running out of time. Every one of those dots had to be visited.

  On the 18th May I set off up Ben More on a bright cold day with a strong south-west wind. 118 days later on the 12th September I reached the summit of Ben Hope on a bright cold day with a strong north-west wind. In between I’d covered 1,770 miles (2,850km) and climbed 575,000 feet (175,250 metres). The weather had been mixed with rain on 64 days and cloud down on 174 summits. The longest period of sunny weather was just six days. Given the popularity of the Munros a surprise was the lack of people. I had 463 summits to myself, though I did meet people on the way up or down. This unexpected (and to me welcome) solitude was a result of this being a backpacking trip in the long daylight hours of summer. I was often on summits before day walkers had set out or long after they were off the hill.

  The walk proved to be one of the most strenuous and challenging I’ve undertaken, even though it was in the accessible Scottish hills rather than the remote wilderness areas of North America. In the Highlands the difficulties came from rugged terrain and the weather rather than remoteness. Averaging 5,300 feet (1,650 metres) of ascent per day (leaving out my ten rest days) was far more than on any walk I had done before (or have done since). Having to reach summits even in strong winds and rain made for many arduous days, and camping was often a challenge as I searched for pitches that weren’t too waterlogged or windswept at the end of long tiring days.

  My recollections of the walk are not of aching legs, storm swept summits or disturbed nights though. These fade with time, leaving the high points, the bright moments, the great joys of a summer in the hills. With any long walk I find that many of the rewards come afterwards as the experience deepens and becomes part of me. To spend a summer in the mountains is a privilege I will never forget but there are specific memories that have become important. Some are fleeting momnents - the otter I watched by a burn in the woods above Loch Lomond, a brilliant sunset over Rannoch Moor. Others, such as the day I traversed the seventeen summits of the Mamores, are days when I just seemed to flow over the hills and it seemed to be so right, so natural, to be there.

  Many camps, splendid and wild, hang in my memory too. Pitched not far from the summit of Glas Maol in the southern Cairngorms I watched mist fill Caenlochan Glen and send white tendrils crawling up the hillside towards me. Many weeks later I was camped near the lip of the Cadha Dearg between Eididh nan Clach Geala and Seana Bhraigh in the north-west Highlands watching the sun set over the Coigach hills. That’s what the walk was really about.

  An 800-km walk in the High Sierra

  Yosemite Valley. Shining golden cliffs. Great waterfalls pouring from invisible heights. Tall pines. A winding placid river. Green meadows. Mule deer. Black bears. The spiritual home of John Muir. So far, so good, but also: roads, cars, buses, crowds, campgrounds, hotels, cabins, shops, restaurants, bars, visitor centres. The roar of engines, the smell of petroleum, the hustle and bustle of a busy holiday resort. Wilderness this isn’t.

  The first sight of the huge cliffs rising into the deep blue sky is always inspiring and exciting, but if you want to experience the real High Sierra you have to leave the valley floor and head into the forests and mountains.

  The Sierra Nevada range stretches 650 km up the centre of California, a mountain barrier rising high above the desert lands of the Great Basin to the east. The highest peaks and most rugged terrain lie at the southern end of the range. For a distance of 150 km the main crest never drops below 3,350 metres. Unsurprisingly, no roads cross the mountains here. Indeed, south of Highway 120 in Yosemite National Park no roads cross the Sierra at all, leaving a vast wilderness made up of three national parks – Yosemite, Kings Canyon and Sequoia – and several designated wilderness areas including the John Muir and Ansel Adams Wildernesses. The range here is from 30 to 100 km wide with an abrupt escarpment on the east that drops precipitately to the wide semi-desert of Owens Valley. To the west the range gradually fades into wooded foothills.

  The classic walk is the John Muir Trail (JMT), 340 glorious kilometres through the heart of the High Sierra. The JMT stays close to the crest of the mountains, often at or above timberline, winding across high passes and through lake-dotted rocky basins. It’s undoubtedly one of the best and most challenging backpacking trails in the world. There are few resupply points and much of it is over 3,000 metres. Despite this it’s very popular and in high summer you’ll meet many people every day, and it is only one thin line threading its way through the wilderness. There is more, much more, to the Sierra.

  After hiking through the High Sierra on snowshoes and crampons on the Pacific Crest Trail I felt I just had to return and in the following years made several two week trips: ski touring in the John Muir Wilderness and backpacking in Yosemite National Park. I still felt as though I’d only touched the edge of the wilderness though. Wanting to go more deeply into the nature of the High Sierra I decided to really see the area by making a roughly 800 km circuit starting and finishing in Yosemite Valley. En route I would visit some of the huge forests and deep canyons not seen on the Muir Trail or on my previous high mountain trips.

  The aim of my walk was to experience everything the High Sierra had to offer, a rather ambitious undertaking but the area is conducive to bold thoughts. Experience was a key word too, not to ‘complete a challenge’ or to ‘actually get anywhere’. That’s why I planned a circular walk. I wanted literally to be going nowhere and to finish where I began to emphasise the experience rather than the statistics. I wanted to enter and feel part of the wilderness rather than treat it as the backdrop to a long walk in which completing the route was the most important factor. Speed and distance were irrelevant and I had only a rough plan, as I wanted to be free to explore as I chose and to take in all the different environments.

  After spending half a day with the crowds climbing out of the Valley to see spectacular Nevada Falls I suddenly found myself alone. With the hordes and the manicured trails went the feeling of being held away from nature, of being an outside observer. Now I was following a narrow trail into a wooded valley with no signposts, guard rails, water stations, outhouses and the other paraphernalia of the managed outdoors.

  That night I slept under the stars, as I would most nights to come. The only sound was the gentle trickling of a creek. A bright half-moon shone briefly before descending behind a wedge of trees so black it seemed to suck in the light. Above I could see stars through the foliage of a huge ponderosa pine. The night was calm and peaceful yet charged with an intense reality. Sierra Nevada is Spanish for Snowy Range, a name given by the first Spaniards to reach California and a name they gave to almost any snow-capped mountain range. I prefer John Muir’s description – ‘the range of light’ – for the quality of the light in the Sierra does seem exceptional and somehow sharper and with more variations over the course of a day than elsewhere.

  On the first few days I was captivated by the way the rocks changed colour with the passing of the hours – black, dark grey, deep red, gold, pale yellow, cream then darkening back to black- and the way shafts of sunlight lit up the shaggy red bark of an incense cedar, the way the creeks sparkled as they slid over speckled granite. Streaked pink dawns expanded into deep blue skies, the white-hot sun pounding down hard, harsh and heavy then fading into a subtle red sunset before moonlight streaked through the trees illuminating almost colourless ghostly bushes and rocks.

  There is a touch of the desert in the Sierra light, a touch of that uncompromising clarity and sta
rkness that speaks of vast space and emptiness, of an inhuman beauty and power. It’s a reminder that not far away lies the inhospitable stony wastes of Death Valley. It’s only a touch of the desert though, tempered by the flowing creeks, the myriad lakes and, above all, the throbbing green life of the forests.

  The highlight of those first days was the canyon of the North Fork of the San Joaquin River where the trail runs high above a tangle of cliffs, hollows and tree groves, a complex mosaic of wild nature. Far below, the river twisted through boulders, a streak of white, blue and grey, with the Ritter Range forming an impenetrable looking backdrop.

  Red-tailed hawks – a close relative of the common buzzard – wheeled in the sunlight, their tails gleaming gold and red. High above them a larger raptor soared, a golden eagle.

  The trail crossed the river below a group of Western Hemlock, delicate yet massive trees with lace-like foliage and distinctive drooped tops. A bridge spanned the river between two falls, the higher a perfect curtain falling, seemingly without movement, into a deep green pool, the lower a wild rush of white water twisting down a narrow rock chute. The banks were lined with magnificent conifers – stocky red-barked incense cedar, huge stately red fir, towering Jeffrey pine with cracked yellow-edged bark.

  Glorious light, glorious colours, delicious water – it was magnificent and beautiful. Here, I felt, I had truly entered the wilderness. I knew now, already, that the walk was a success, and it took on a rhythm, a sequence that felt natural and inevitable, the rhythm of a journey in the wilds. A few times I dipped down to remote settlements to pick up supplies – Red’s Meadow, Vermilion Valley Resort, Cedar Grove, Lodgepole then Vermilion and Red’s Meadow again on the way back north plus, finally, Tuolumne Meadows. Of these Vermilion stood out as one of the most walker friendly places I’ve visited, with a free soft drink and a night in a tent cabin on offer to long distance backpackers. There’s also the opportunity to scavenge through the ‘hiker barrels’, large metal tubs containing supplies abandoned or never collected by John Muir and Pacific Crest Trail hikers. None of these places interrupted the flow. I was never in any of them long enough to feel more than a touch of the outside world.

  In places I followed the John Muir Trail and was amazed at the sudden increase in the number of walkers but also impressed by the sublime scenery, especially Evolution Basin with great rippling rock walls towering above the cold blue waters of a chain of lakes. I never felt lonely, the wilderness was more than enough to occupy and involve me.

  The canyon of the Middle Fork Kings River was a wild rock wasteland with a crashing raging creek calmed by intermittent cool green pools. Broken granite walls soared high above; the trail a narrow thread through the boulders and along cracked slabs. This exciting passage was followed by a slow calming ascent, 4,700 foot to Granite Pass. As I climbed I watched the trees change. Oak, incense cedar, ponderosa pine and great sugar pines with cones dripping with resin giving way to the dark mountain fir forest with massive red and white firs rising like temple columns. Then the gradual dominance of smaller lodgepole and western white pines and, finally, wind sculpted foxtail pines at timberline, seeming to almost crawl across the ground.

  Once up, as so often on this walk, it was down again, down steeply into the great cleft of King’s Canyon. During the 33 days I was in the wilderness I crossed 23 high passes, this constant rising and falling providing a three dimensional view of the landscape, a grasp of how it fitted together.

  Staying mostly on the western side of the Sierra I progressed south to Giant Forest, named by John Muir for its groves of Giant Sequoias. Even when looking at them I found it hard to accept them as real. I had grown used to big trees on the walk but these were dwarfed by the Sequoias. The biggest of them all, dubbed General Sherman for this short period of its, so far, 3,500 year life, is probably the largest living thing in the world, weighing some 6,000 tons and being 272 feet (83m) tall and 36.5 feet (12m) thick at the base. The Sequoias are not just massive and ancient they are also beautiful, the fibrous bark glowing a soft rust red in the sunshine.

  Walking, awe-struck, through the Sequoias I came upon a black bear, ambling round a corner. Trees forgotten I froze, as did the bear, momentarily, before it scrambled a few feet up the nearest tree, hung there a few seconds, slid back down and raced off into the undergrowth. I saw other bears during the walk, including one racing away with a food bag in its jaws chased by two semi-naked half-awake campers, but this was the only close encounter.

  The superb High Sierra Trail, which runs for 115 km from Crescent Meadow near Giant Forest to Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the Sierra, took me south and east to the southernmost point of the walk, in the deep straight trench of Kern Canyon. Here I turned north, following the John Muir Trail over a series of high passes. The only storm of the walk hit on 3,650 metre Glen Pass, a narrow notch in a steep rocky wall, making for an exciting crossing. Suddenly rain and hail was bouncing off the rocks, visibility was down to a few yards and the wind threatened to blast me off the cliffs. For the next few days clouds swirled round the peaks although little rain fell.

  By now I was hearing stories of a big forest fire in Palisade Valley. Notes from rangers started appearing, warning that the trail was closed. I made rather sketchy alternative plans but then met a ranger who told me that a fire crew was escorting hikers through the fire every morning, if it was safe.

  Palisade Valley was wreathed in smoke and occasional bursts of flame shot into the sky as I descended to meet the fire crew. Johnny and Todd carried shovels and wore yellow fireproof jackets, hard hats and bulky belts hung with an array of heavy tools. I was escorted four miles through the smouldering forest, a surreal experience with a fire fighter immediately in front and behind me, the forest hazy and heavy with smoke, the air hot and strong with the smell of burning. The fire was being left untouched, the fire crew told me, they were there to monitor it and escort hikers. At one point we passed a blazing tree stump hanging over the trail.

  Further north I left the JMT at times for higher diversions onto the rugged Mammoth Crest and the narrow rock ridge of Cloud’s Rest, both giving superb views. From the latter you can look down on the curving summit of Half Dome, an unusual experience as this massive lump of rock is more usually viewed from the floor of Yosemite Valley. One night below Mammoth Crest I watched the sunset and saw the golden granite walls darken into impenetrable blackness as a bright sliver of moon rose into the star filled sky. It was nearly over, the Sierra wilderness had worked its spell again.

  The Arizona Trail

  The desire to go for a long walk in the desert Southwest of the USA had been with me many years. Partly it was the thought of sunny days with little rain that appealed but, on a deeper level, I’d been inspired by the writings of Colin Fletcher and Edward Abbey. Mainly though, it was because the desert remained an alien place that I didn’t understand or even know how to understand. I’d walked through desert and semi-desert lands in southern California on the Pacific Crest and New Mexico on the Continental Divide, but these had been small parts of much bigger walks and I felt that, though I’d walked through the desert, I hadn’t connected with it, hadn’t felt any sort of rapport or closeness. Maybe I never would, but I felt that a walk with the desert at its heart was the most likely way to learn.

  After a two-week venture into the Grand Canyon I wanted to immerse myself in a desert landscape over a period of many weeks. From the North Rim I had looked south to the hazy, distant San Francisco Peaks. Walking to those summits was an appealing idea. Then I discovered the Arizona Trail, which not only linked the Canyon and the Peaks but also traversed a series of desert mountain ranges, the Sonoran Desert and the Grand Canyon itself. Even the names on the maps were exciting, redolent of the American Southwest and hot, dusty, desert landscapes. Back then the Arizona Trail was more of an idea than an actual path, which I also found attractive as it meant a more self-contained and adventurous walk than one along a well-signed, well-built trail. Also, it mostly run
s through national forests, wilderness areas and national parks where the land is fairly pristine and there are few restrictions on walking and camping.

  ‘Think water’. This short and pithy statement from an experienced desert hiker was the wisest advice I received before the walk. For safe desert walking it’s essential to know how far it is to the next water source, how reliable that source is and how far it is to the next one should the first one fail. Planning water supplies well in advance is the key to a successful walk. If in doubt, carry extra. Planning on collecting water in the afternoon and having a dry camp before walking to the next source in the morning proved a good way of reducing how far I had to carry, and I often walked the last few hours carrying up to eight litres. A few times where water was really scarce I carried twelve litres all day and on one 60 km plus section of open, shadeless Sonoran Desert I put out two water caches.

  I don’t like knowing too much about new places I am going to walk through, preferring to learn about them when I’m there, entering with an open mind rather than preconceived views. So, although I read a little about the land, and somewhat more about the logistics of the walk, I started without much knowledge of what lay ahead. I shouldn’t then have been too surprised at what I found, but I was.

  Despite my intentions I did have one fixed idea, that the Arizona Trail was basically a walk in the desert. It isn’t. Desert does feature large in the landscapes along the trail, but so do mountains, grasslands and, in particular, forests.

  The first surprise came within hours of leaving the Mexican border when I found myself breaking trail through knee deep snow surrounded by tall conifers on Miller Peak in the Huachuca Mountains. At my first camp, at nearly 3,000 metres, I had to stamp out a platform and heap snow round the edges of my tarp to keep the cold wind out.