5.18.18

Sitting at Grumpy Bears’s at Kennedy Meadows and things are more or less in order...I think. Walk into the place and you’ve got a bar with motocross above the beer display and to the left a kitchen which serves some of the most satisfying food on the trail i.e. they know what hikers want. Protein, protein, fat, on a bun of some sort. Add bacon. Add avocado. Breakfast is called Hiker Breakfast and has two eggs, two bacon, a heap of home fried potatoes, and a pancake a foot wide. Coffee is free as well as extra pancakes if you’ve got the appetite. To the left of the kitchen in the same room is a shower. You pay 2-3 bucks depending on who’s running your card and get about 5 minutes. Turn the hot water on full blast and don’t touch the cold water...just enjoy those five minutes. Complimentary Irish Spring and an array of shaving kits and painkillers behind the mirror if you look.
Down the street a few minutes is the General Store. This is where most of the packages come in for resupply and the store is stocked with all the things you’ll be thinking of before heading into the Sierras. Across from Grumpy’s there’s another setup just for hikers run by the publisher of the Yogi Handbook and her fellow, both life-long outdoorsmen. Jackets, ice axes, crampons, and all the food essentials. You’d be surprised by how many hikers just crave Murunchan Ramem by name at the end of the day. I cannot exaggerate the satisfaction that comes with a mouthful of hot noodles, sodium, and Cholula at the end of the day. Plus, it falls in the ‘ultra-lite’ category.
Right now my pack is hanging from a tree branch outside and hopefully drying after a full disinfectant via Lysol and shower. 700 miles and daily sweat against the back of the pack have rendered some bizarre odors so today was the day.
The rest of the contents have been gutted, spread across three tables, reconfigured, reassessed, and repackaged, ready for a streamlined osystem of instant access in whatever temperature as we climb to 10,000 ft tomorrow and summit Whitney within four days. From all reports, which are scant, everything above 9,000 ft is covered in snow. Mt Whitney is possibly a great block of ice as well but we are prepared. A group of 6 left this morning but I was still trying to track down my resupply boxes from ABQ. It was filed under the wrong name so it’s been 24 hrs of deducting where it could have actually gone and how much money I was about to spend if it didn’t get in this week until I got the tracking number from Travis (thanks friend) and saw it had been delivered on the 2nd. After some to-do I had my mountain boots, jacket, and stove mount. I picked up a set of micro-spikes from the General Store and an axe from Triple Crown Outfitters. Some have said the axe isn’t necessary. Probably true-to me it’s like bear spray. Chances are I won’t have a bad encounter with a black bear. They’re skittish and avoid humans as best as they can...but turn a corner and encounter a mom with her kids and you’ve got a situation. There’s plenty of snow coverage and we’ve already heard one report of a fellow having to self-arrest so these are just things you do. Also, a bear canister is legally required for a good portion of the Sierras so I had to pick one of those up too. You stuff as much food as is humanly possibly in this canister and put it in the bottom of your bag. I have about 50 miles until it’s legally required so I’ll try to eat through as much food as possible in order to fit the extra jerky and freeze-dried dinners sent from my mom and Randy (thank you guys-you’re amazing as always)
We are at mile 704. 49 days in. It’s almost impossible to describe the ‘level’ of things. All those expectations vs reality. The songs that get stuck in your head. The memories that pop up. The pace of time. The type of exhaustion that goes so far beyond anything you’ve called exhaustion before. Feeling so physically spent that you’re dead-sure you can’t go another 1/2 mile, only to look at the maps and realize you miscalculated earlier that morning and you’ve got 3 more miles to go. The brain switches off. Emotions go on the back-burner, all physical exertion becomes mechanical and it’s an interesting process to watch yourself go through, especially when you know you’re going to feel that way at some point almost every day. at the same time there’s zero sense of boredom at any point. All decisions are grouped into a few categories which revolve around food, hiking, and sleep. It makes things so easy when you’re on the trail...the mind and body know what’s in the mail. The moment you get to a town the inverse occurs and it’s suddenly a mess of money and deadlines and social media blah blah blah. The odd thing is that I’m excited to get into town and find whatever nutrients and sleep my body has been craving and I’m equally excited to get back to the trail after a couple days.
A guy who goes by Butterscotch had given us a ride back to the trail and the only fee was posing with his Mogwai stuffed animal for instagram. He was all smiles and good vibes and had actually told the mechanics and engineers at the wind-farms to pick up hikers and had said the same to his local church congregation. When people are asked why they help us out so much we often hear "because it’s the right thing to do." It’s simple kindness and as Butterscotch explained, ‘the PCT isn’t an organization as much as organism’. Everything works because you’ve got the hikers and then the whole system of trail angels and innumerable live updates from everyone that are always being sent in. The PCT water reports, the apps, the notes scrawled in the sand or left under rocks on faded pieces of paper or in trail logs. The entire organism becomes part of your life for these 4-5 months. The idea of ‘going alone’ sounds good on paper and there are certainly hikers that prefer a little more space, but it’s impossible to be isolated from the basic paradigms of the trail for very long. Information is passed around every time you walk into a campground or come across another group. Last night at Grumpy Bear’s a group we’d seen for over a month came through the door around 7. One of the guys walked straight over to us and asked about snow conditions on the Sierra. We told him everything we had heard from people who had heard from others. Some of it amounted to little more than rumors but we knew it was passable. It’d be rough and people who swore they wouldn’t take an ice axe now had them strapped to the side their bags so all we knew is that one group and a few solo hikers had made it through. Sometimes you just want to know if the post office is close to the campground. Generally when someone else walks into camp or town you give them the rundown of everything you know or have discovered up to that point, then everyone’s on their own if they want. When we headed out of Tehachapi we climbed up to a little bench put in place by the local Boy Scouts and decided to have a water break there. We only had 11 miles to do that day and there was no rush. An older man slowly came up from the north valley below and we talked for awhile. He’d just had knee surgery and was getting back into shape. He showed us his special shoe inserts for the metatarsal tendon that helps alleviate soreness up front (which we get a lot of) and told us that "Just down a ways is where the girl from that Wild movie started". People always assume that Cheryl Strayed did the whole PCT and the movie makes it intentionally vague - but she actually started just by the highway heading into Bakersfield and stopped around the Washington border if I’ve got my info right. We said goodbye and good luck and ambled down the switchbacks over some train track and over the busy highway. A car honked at us from below and I raised my trekking poles in a wave. Trail angels had left snacks and water at different locations by the off-ramp and I showed Hanne what rice crispy treats are all about . A few more miles and we were set up on a hill overlooking the highway, Mojave, hundreds of windmills, and a pink sunset that sent shadows dozens of miles across the desert below. By 9 pm it was becoming obvious that the wind was only going to get worse. Huge gusts bore down on us and slammed tentpoles and guy lines every which way. It was so loud it became impossible to sleep...so I didn’t. Hanne didn’t either and when the sun rose we were both bleary and somber, shaking our heads while the wind continued with intense wind chills. It was a slow day up and down the mountain. Every break was a new temptation to take a good long nap and by lunch we were convinced to do just that on a bed a pine needles in the sun just off the trail. My head laid crooked against my pack and the needles kept jabbing my back but I just didn’t care. Thirty minutes later we were back in the trail and stopped at two different cisterns for water.
Throughout the day we passed various hikers, old faces and new. Freebird and his buddy Red Flower has become fixtures in our periphery since Aqua Dulce and I started to realize I was in company with more Germans, Austrians, Israelis, Slovakians, and Swiss folk than Americans. It’s funny who you end up with at the end of the day...I began to wonder why I gravitated toward foreigners while the Americans tended to stick in little groups of the same age and preferences. Either way there was barely energy to analyze these passing thoughts.
If people spoke German, they and Hanne would usually dive into a fast clip of information-sharing that I could pick pieces out of and we’d continue down the trail. Sometimes people suddenly turn to me and say "How you say?" Or "What means?" But it’s never difficult to put the meaning together. There are only a few subjects worth mentioning on the trail and we go over them a dozen times every day.
The wind was still hitting us relentlessly through the morning until we got below some hills and bushwhacked to the lowest point under some trees to camp. Since we were so exhausted from lack of sleep the day after Tehachapi we made dinner, said goodnight, and were both sound asleep within minutes.
The next day was another study in contrasts as we were instantly enveloped in thick mists, more or less in the middle of clouds on the high crests, climbing higher and higher throughout the morning. It went from windmills and desert shrubs to an almost northwest feeling of damp grass, mossy rocks, and tall pines with branches hanging silently in a subdued midday grey that hung around for hours. We walked quietly and took pictures and appreciated the stillness after all the mad wind we’d been through. We came upon a hiker called Yoga Bae sitting on the side of the trail reeling from shin splints. "Look at this ankle. Does this look different than the other one?" I put his ankles together to look. It was the same problem I’d had back around Julian. Muscles above the ankle going haywire trying to compensate for the extra stress. I dug into my pack and gave him the ankle brace my parents had sent to Big Bear a few weeks before. You could walk off shin splints if your were careful but some people didn’t know how to slow down. We told him to just take it easy and shorten his mileage until it healed...we walked on. An hour later he passed us, charging up another hill. A couple hours later we caught up to him and Young Buck at a public campground by a spring with two outhouses that were probably the most offensive things I’d encountered on the trail so far. We made a fire and looked at the stars and poked the embers and talked for awhile and fell asleep.
The next day we started out fast. Slowly the new Asics I’d bought we’re allowing my joints and muscles to heal and I was getting my original pace back. Hanne shattered one of her trekking poles a few miles in and we were both in moods...what we sometimes called "processing". I’m still surprised where the mind decides to go between 20 miles of walking. 15 of the 20 can feel like a frustrating mess until the mind literally gives up trying to control the various outcomes and ‘whatifs’. Other days it’s the opposite. The first miles are a breeze and everything crashes in the last two or three. The body shuts down. Everything goes into auto-pilot. Words come out in mono-syllabic mumbles. You stare down the trail hoping your destination is around the next corner. You stop looking at your GPS because around mile 200 you realized it makes those last two mile drag on and on while you count tenths of miles for the last hour. That day started out moody, but we took an hour long break early in the morning and talked about everything. All the things that build up over the miles. Things you thought you left behind. Things you didn’t deal with before you left. Things that might never get resolved...but things you can talk about. Sometimes over the miles, with the extremes and nothing but the sound of the wind, birds, and footsteps, the mind starts looping. The same songs start the same melodies in your head. Rhythms happen arbitrarily: 1-2-3-4. 1-2-3-1-2-3. I even had a tough time with the trekking poles from Hiker Heaven because I couldn’t get the meter of their tap, tap, tap next to my footsteps right. I kept feeling like I had to subconsciously keep time with everything. This is probably just a musicians problem but it took a good two weeks until I stopped looking at the poles like long strange instruments. And the good thing about the tough times is that the trail gives and takes. This is a great truth we’ve come to trust. An hour later we came over a hill and a couple guys with a pickup truck full of trail magic were parked at a cross road with cold drinks and snacks. Another German named Tom and Red Flower were there along with three Israelis Sam, Slo-mo, and Dodo. Dodo was down from Lyme disease and recovering in Lake Isabella down the road with Slomo but they’d been driving a rental car for the past couple days for Sam who was a retired computer scientist with a couple PHDs. We all met briefly, enjoyed the snacks, thanked the Trail Angels, and moved through hundreds of Joshua trees, leap-frogging Sam here and there. He’d hiked over 8,000 miles all over the world since retiring. So the trail gives and takes again and soon we were trying to stand upright and climb through vertical sandy stretches with more gusts coming at us with 60-70 mph, literally knocking me off the trail while I tried to brace myself and lean into the wind at the same time. I was worried about getting blown sideways into a Joshua tree and getting impaled by one of the spines. Our movements were slowed to such a degree that all we could do was laugh through the worst of it. At one downhill where the wind was coming directly at me I put my arms out like wings, leaned forward, and let myself fall into the wind...the sustained gusts were so strong I felt like I was almost floating as I careened down into the valley. For two more hours the wind didn’t stop for one second and got most intense at the passes until we got to the other side of the mountain and ran into dozens of startled cows that stared and darted down the hills in front of us on the trail. We were beyond spent but just by luck came across a campsite guarded by a tree and some rocks. The wind was low enough to get tents set up and get some sleep-our Asian friends down the way were not so lucky we found out the next morning. It started with another massive climb and we passed them less than a mile in and spoke excitedly about the approach to Kennedy Meadows. The entire trail was beginning to subtly change. The spaces between passes seemed farther. The light was different. The air smelled different. In the far distance we could see massive snow-capped peaks and wondered aloud if these were ‘The Sierras’ or another range before them. We began talking about snow, ice axes, micro-spikes, and how far we could reasonably travel if we were post-holing the entire day. It wasn’t an ominous feeling. I was thrilled to be so close to such a major stretch of the trail...but we knew the Sierras would require a different kind of hiking than what we’d become accustomed to in the past month or so. I would say rather that the idea of the Sierras loomed. So we hiked on through a fairly fast day, passing Freebird, Red Flower, and a new girl called Snow White that we’d only seen in the trail logs. I knew she was Snow White right away just by the way her hair was cut and further down during a lunch break we ran into Israeli Sam again. He had great news: Slomo and Dodo were at the bottom of the section around Walker Pass at a day use area in his rental van and we could all get a ride in to Lake Isabella with them. No $20.00 Uber or sticking our thumbs out for an hour. We made it down in an hour and a few minutes later Freebird and Red Flower came leaping down the trail as well. We all talked for awhile. Sam told us how artificial intelligence will eventually make us slaves if we don’t get hip to coding Javascipt and Slomo asked me all about the southwest and told us which places he planned on visiting after the PCT. I basically keep telling people the same basic idea: think of each state like it’s own little country and ignore what the TV says about America. It’s all hype. People are people and most Americans will bend over backward to show you kindness. We’ve already seen it over and over again. Not only kindness but curiosity and willingness to share strategic info and their own stories and experiences. An hour later we were in Lake Isabella at an RV Park on the edge of town, thinking we’d walk down to a nice Mexican Restaurant and dig into some salsa and chile but from the first hour until we left Lake Isabella a day later the vibe was consistently strange. We both kept wondering ‘what happened here’. We got different information from everyone and after an hour and staring into the gutted floor plan of an ex-Mexican restaurant, we shuffled over to a Burger King feeling dejected and starving at the same time. I won’t tell you exactly how much fast food we ordered that night but it was so much that we confused the staff and put us into comas...the walk back to the RV Park was a guilty 2 miles and I couldn’t muster the legs for much more than a shower and sleep. The next day we kept trying to figure out what went down in Lake Isabella. It felt like something stopped in the mid-nineties, I thought maybe due to the dam up the valley. Maybe it had been difficult to insure properties and done something to their value. Needle recepticals with great biohazard stickers sat in front of grocery stores where kids walked by and storefront after storefront was shuttered all the way through town. Still, people were great to talk to and we had the best Mexican food of the trip so far. I’ve been trying to explain what constitutes a good taco, where to find them, what’s on them, what’s not on them etc. Back at the RV Park the tents were lining up. Freebird and Red Flower, Young Buck and Yoga Bae, the Asians Cherry and Leo-everyone sat in the community room talking about the Sierras. Even with a snowpack of less than 50% average it was a big unknown and people were grouping up and taking stock of gear. We headed out the next morning on a bus that drove us back to Walker Pass where we’d driven out with Sam and started climbing. We passed the Czech couple after about a mile and stopped to see how they’d been doing. They stayed out of towns for the most part and had taken their first zero day since Campo in Ridgecrest with some friends a few miles down the highway.
We climbed and climbed. Descended. Climbed some more. Wound up at a campground with a couple tents scattered by a stream. Cherry and Leo were down below our site and we all knew we’d be getting into Kennedy Meadows soon.
When we finally did it was right after mile 700. We could see some Sierras clearly now and the whole landscape was becoming more and more epic by the mile. We happened to catch some fishermen coming in from the Kern River and they let us hop in their pickup truck and dropped us off at Grumpy Bear’s restaurant in Kennedy Meadows which would be our hub for the next three days. We were given the tour by the owner Scott and his Kendra who ran Grumpy’s. Camping in the side yard. Showers for a few bucks. Laundry for a few bucks. Hiker breakfast in the morning with coffee and all you can eat huge pancakes. Down the street was the General Store where I’d sent my resupply. Across the way was Yogi’s with more gear options for the Sierras and food. All day Scott drove hikers back and forth to the General Store to get their boxes for no charge. The only problem was that the guys at the General Store couldn’t find my Sierra package so I was in limbo. I got the tracking number from Travis back in ABQ and it said it had been delivered but no one at the General Store could find it. Thicker hiking boots, stove, extra jacket etc. I couldn’t enter the Sierras without it so I waited and double-checked while the Sierras loomed just a few miles away...
I finished writing this in Bishop Ca on the 18th of May. There’s a portion including Mt Whitney and Forester Pass that needs its own blog.
Tomorrow a trail angel takes us to Lee Vining where we enter a closed access road to Tuolumne Meadows. We head into the wilderness for 13 days and end up at South Lake Tahoe.
Thank you to all the supporters. I wish I could update the blog more but I do journal every night and compile mass excerpts / notes on the phone. Service has been so spotty in the Sierras with weeks without signal sometimes. In Tahoe I’ll have a coherent narrative of Whitney etc.