Walk About Martinez

What a weekend for a hiker!  The ADZPCTKO (Annual Day Zero, Pacific Crest Trail, Kick Off) at Lake Morena County Park last week was a resounding success for all 600 to 700 of us past, present and future thru hikers that attended.  Feeding the folks and sharing in the excitement of sending a whole new “class” of hikers out onto the world's premier long trail was great fun, but best of all for me, it was a reunion with people I’d spent so much time with last year during my own hike.  

Walking up the road on Friday evening I ran into Shin from Tokyo, who had brought his lovely wife all the way from Japan for their vacation, only to begin it with a bunch of “hiker trash.”  He had been hiking with Double Check and Calorie before Calorie’s fall and airlift rescue on Kearsarge Pass.  Smiles and I had run miles down the  trail to clear cars out of the Onion Valley Trailhead for use as a helicopter landing site.  A day hiker had taken Calorie’s pack, but Shin had run with his own pack on his back, and the day hiker’s pack hanging in front.  The whole story is in the .  He missed everyone, and now here he was.  His trail name is now Turtle.  He must have seen the pictures of himself sandwiched between the two packs.

Flying in from the East Coast was Big Foot, whose huge feet are some of the healthiest I saw on that long trail.  He’s become a specialist in overuse injuries and had come back to see everyone and give a training on the topic, which got rave reviews.  Unfortunately, I missed it as Half Mile and I were feeding the masses at just that time.  He had hiked the Appalachian Trail several years ago and had tremendous foot and alignment problems.  He lived on massive doses of vitamin I (AKA Ibuprofen).  On the PCT however, he used almost none because of several years of work on his gait and strengthening and stretching the muscles of his feet, and probably a lot more.  What a lovely guy, albeit a giant!

Jackass and Molasses were there.  The former is a fine dining chef, a fabulous writer who can tell a tale like no one else, and a great lover of Beat poetry.  He’s hiking alone this year, but Molasses, his very sweet wife, will be working at the Stehekin Resort all summer.  Stehekin is on the upper shores of Lake Chelan in Washington, and is the last “civilized” stop before heading off into the wilds of the Northern Cascades and Canada.  Most importantly, it’s the last place for good food and pastries.  Very important at that point in the hike.  I’ll be seeing her in September when I rehike the Washington section of the trail.

Just Dave and his incredible wife, Trail Angel Jane, were there too.  They had made their home at Big Bear available to me for my last few hundred miles of desert mountains last fall.  Dave is part of Team Zero Zero.  Zero Zero is a blind hiker who has now hiked the Appalachian Trail, and the Pacific Crest Trail.  Traveling with a team member in front and one behind, he is so attuned to the sounds around him, that he can place his feet exactly where the lead person steps.  I’ve seen him in action, and he’s amazing.  Imagine the High Sierra snow pack we all struggled with, the sheer ice faces and precipitous cliffs, and then do it blind.  

The New York Times followed his hike last year, and he’s about to begin the Continental Divide Trail this year, and next year the Great Himalaya Trail, which may have National Geographic coverage.  They’re all sponsored efforts, and he’s invited me to join the team.  Quite an honor, but we’ll see. 

Two of my favorite folks from last year flew in from Wisconsin, Bacon and Meander.  We only hiked together for a matter of days in the deserts, but a friendship was created -- sustained by phone and email over the summer -- that has not diminished.  After the Kick Off was over, we all went back to Warner Springs Resort for a long soak in the hot pool and lots of catching up.  But they are ruined.  Damaged goods at this point.  All they can think about is another thru hike!  Get a life already.  It seems to be a regular malady in the hiker community. 

There were so many new people, just setting out on trail.  Koily (Kiley) from Australia will get a trail name soon, as nobody understands her when she introduces herself by her real name.  Tickette was there from Victoria B.C., an ocean kayak instructor from the wilds of Vancouver Island.  She got her trail name just a day before when a tick got imbedded in a very private and female sort of place. Voila, she’s Tickette.

Two really interesting new hikers were Justin West and Li An, his significant other.  Justin is beginning a doctoral program at UC Berkeley this fall.  He’s also starting research for the first-ever field guide to the entire Pacific Crest Trail.  This will be done as a catalogue with GPS coordinates for the plants and plant communities along the trail. The guide is expected to be published in an online version that could be brought on trail in a hand-held device, but also printed as a beautiful coffee table book.  As nothing of this nature exists now, this will be invaluable for future hikers.  Most importantly however is that this will become a baseline compendium for future studies, five, ten, fifty or more years from now, for studying the effects of global warming on the varied ecosystems from Mexico to Canada.  Now that’s significant.  

Justin is asking for donations through “Kickstarter,” and his web page and video are good.  http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/866011503/writing-a-field-guide-to-the-pacific-crest-trail?ref=live

An effort of this nature is worth supporting, and they’re both great folks.  I’ll be following their efforts as the summer progresses in this column.  Heck, they’re going to be in Berkeley, and that’s local enough for me to pay attention.  

There was Nowhere Man from Ashland, Buckeye and Swift, Piper and Trail Hacker from Santa Barbara, and the names, faces and friendships just kept on coming, but finally there was Hurricane.  I couldn’t believe he was at the ADZPCTKO.  Hurricane is a Kiwi who had hiked the trail last year partly because his wife told him to “hike that trail and get your smile back.”  He’d hiked it all right, but I never met a person as mad at the trail as Hurricane.  By Northern Oregon he had cursed it and stomped on it, and wanted to go home to his wife and family, but couldn’t stop without finishing it first.  

I never thought I’d see him again, but there he was, as big as life.  I yelled at him, “What are you doing here Hurricane?  What kind of fool are you?  You hated the trail. The last time I saw you, you swore you’d never hike again.”  He looked kind of sheepish, as only a Kiwi can, and told me that he’d been really glad to get home, but by Christmas he couldn’t think of anything but hiking another long trail.  He said he’d really loved the trail after all, and the experiences and people with whom he’d hiked and camped. He was setting out on the Continental Divide Trail as soon as the Kick Off was over.  I still couldn’t believe it.  Just another person who had been “ruined” by the trail.  Thank God! 

It’s a strange fraternity of wonderful, caring nature lovers, persons who choose to live an existence for a time that is probably closer to our origins as a species than any other readily accessible to modern people.  To the many past thru hikers who worked so hard to put this wonderful weekend together, sincere thanks.  To all the folks setting out on the adventure of a lifetime, I wish them health, strength, courage, friendship, stamina, tons of fun and lots of good luck.  Have a wonderful summer like you’ve never had before! 

Next week we’ll be back with a local hike: Muir Heritage Land Trust’s Fernandez Ranch.

Pacific Crest Trail Stories: June 18th, 2010, and we had summited Mather Pass, the most difficult of the High Sierra Passes, after a long day and a very dangerous climb up the face.  Our elation and relief left us rolling and hugging each other in the snow, but our dog pile of joy lasted only long enough for Smiles to catch her breath and for all of us to take in the incredible scenery.  It was late in the day, and many miles before we would reach dirt and a good camping spot below timberline.

Behind us, the basin of the South Fork of the Kings River opened out, a vast depression where a glacier had been born and then sat for thousands of years, slowly flowing over and down, chiseling mountains and canyons alike, scraping the land into existence and digging the great Canyon of the Kings. Eons later, during its demise, it would leave rivers in its place and moraines damming countless lakes in this High Sierra wonderland.  In the distance, Split Mountain, Cardinal and Striped Mountains, and several more peaks over 13 and 14,000 feet crowned the horizon.  Pinchot Pass, which we had summited so early that morning, was at the end of the long basin.  

Far down the north face of Mather Pass, Palisade Creek began, sliding out from under the deep blanket of snow, forming Palisade Lakes just before it turned sharply west and plunged toward its ultimate meeting with the Middle Fork of the Kings, miles away.  

But our goal in the long shadows of a snowy evening was to find a place to camp, and it became clear that we would not make it below timberline before dark.  A mile or two down the north side, we found a rock island that could fit one tent and me cowboy camping.  Smiles and Mango would pitch their tents in the snow.  This was a dicy proposition for Mango, who relied on a Neo Air blowup mattress -- which had a slow leak -- for insulation from the cold ground.  He’d been struggling with this since the deserts, and had a new one coming to Toulumne Meadow, but that was still a week away at least.  He’d find himself having to blow air into the mattress three or four times during the night.  Not ideal when camping on snow.  

We were exhausted, but the night was clear and filled with stars.  The effort to get up into the high country is never wasted. It is to see the world in all its glory, in the day, during a storm, or in the fastness of a cold, starry night.  God it’s beautiful.  

Every morning in the Sierra, we would pack up all we could before putting on our solidly frozen shoes, because once they were on you had to hike to warm them up.  Frozen socks and shoes were not a problem as long as we were moving but were painful when we stopped for any length of time.

Mango had not loosened his laces the night before and woke to find his leather boots like blocks of ice. He pulled and stretched them, banged and squeezed them, but still couldn’t get his feet in. Finally Smiles, Little Engine and Plain Slice all left; they had to as they’d already put on their shoes.  They wouldn’t go far, but they had to move. I waited with Mango. We geezers have to stick together.  After 20 minutes of struggle he proposed lighting his stove and heating the boots to get them to open up, but thankfully he finally got his feet in rather than frying them for breakfast, and we headed off and down, following the prints of our team.  After this, he carefully molded his wet boots before bed to be able to get his feet in them in the icy mornings.

Down past upper and lower Palisade Lakes, the snow finally became patchy, and the trail appeared.  Dirt, our favorite thing.  We did our dirt dance and our PCT dance.  A trail and patchy snow!  This was real hiking.  Enough of this mountaineering stuff, we were just lowly thru hikers, not an Everest expedition after all.  

To show us that trails weren’t all that they’re cracked up to be however, we next hit the Golden Staircase. Thankfully, we were going down it.  This is a feet of engineering trail work that will last a million years, or until the next glacier scours it from the face of the cliff it’s built into. The Golden Staircase descends what seems like a thousand feet of sheer wall in huge granite steps, some of which were so big, we had to use our hiking poles to help lower ourselves down.  But it wasn’t just a stairway; at places it was a river of stairs -- not metaphorically, but literally.  The snow melt was so great that it was running with water, each step a waterfall as it switchbacked deeper and deeper toward Palisade Creek.

The lower we got, the greener everything around us became. Grey, Black and snow white were softened by the coming of spring, and meadows spread out below, dotted with purple shooting star and young corn lilies.  Bracken unrolled their fronds and the aspen leaves shimmered in the wind, silver green.  Lunch was in a small meadow surrounded by full-grown fir and lodgepole pines, a sure sign that we were now well below timberline. Time to break out the shorts.

The trail along Palisade Creek continued west for most of 10 miles from Mather Pass, eventually meeting the Middle Fork of the Kings.  It was time to turn north again. The forest got thicker and hiking on a trail again was delightful in spite of having to climb over recent blow downs.  A mere log and a jumble of branches couldn’t stifle our happiness at being off snow.  

We were entering LeConte Canyon, one of the most breathtaking smaller canyons in the Sierra.  In beauty, every bit as spectacular as Yosemite or Kings Canyon, only smaller and more intimate, and there was nobody there but us thru hikers.  

Many years ago, at the end of the‘70s, I set off with my brother-in-law to hike what is known as the North Lake-South Lake loop out of Bishop.  It was early season and we left from North Lake and found deep snow over Paiute Pass.  We postholed over the pass, but eventually made our way to Evolution Valley and a very swollen Evolution Creek.  As we sat on the bank weighing our options we saw a small figure appear on the other side of the stream.  While we watched, he stripped off everything he had on, stuffed it in his backpack and put it all in a large plastic garbage bag.  Pushing the bag in front of him he swam that stream without a thought for the cold or the cascades that began just below the ford.  

Struggling out of the ice water, he shook himself like a dog (as he didn’t have a towel), put his clothes back on, and rearranged his gear. He told us that he was thru hiking the PCT to Canada.  He was the first thru hiker I’d ever met, and he seemed superhuman to Paul and I.  He was Japanese-American, not very tall, and his pack looked as big as he was.  Typical of a thru hiker, he didn’t hang around, but answered all our questions in the short time we had him.  We learned that he had been on snow for a long while over Muir Pass, and had used crampons, which we didn’t have.  But the most important question for me, considering my own thru hike years later, was what did he eat?  “Mac and Cheese!”  “How often?” I continued.  “Every day!”  And with that he barreled on down trail.   

Only now do I realize why he didn’t stay to chat. He was freezing, and the best way to warm up is to hike, and hike hard.  As for Mac and Cheese, it’s been my favorite trail dinner for years, and it’s all his fault.  I’ve associated that lowly repast with a sort of superhuman stature since that meeting.  That’s as good an excuse for eating junk food as any I’ve heard.

Paul and I turned around in the face of fording that really cold and dangerous stream, and at the prospect of miles of snow on Muir Pass.  We hightailed it back over Paiute, which was probably just as snowy as Muir, but I didn’t know that then.  The other thing I didn’t know was that a quarter-mile upstream the creek widened and became slow -- deep, but slow.  

Several years later, I solo hiked in from South Lake, over Bishop Pass into Dusy Basin, and saw what for me is the most gorgeous view in the Sierra, looking over the great gouge that is LeConte Canyon.  The mountains rise above the rim of cliffs and jumbled crags, and waterfalls cascade into the deep from all sides.  The granite is neverending.  We camped that night at the bottom of my favorite view, infinitesimally small in the dramatic scene.

“Wander a whole summer if you can. Thousands of God's blessings will search you and soak you as if you were a sponge, and the big days will go by uncounted. If you are business-tangled and so burdened by duty that only weeks can be got out of the heavy laden year, give a month at least. The time will not be taken from the sum of life. Instead of shortening, it will indefinitely lengthen it and make you truly immortal.” -- John Muir