Malt Whitman
03/05 — Day 2 — 22mi / 35km
Like a mother doe nosing her slow-stirring fawns awake, dawn nuzzled the sleeping hikers out of their tents. Soon the camp was astir with the as yet unpracticed ritual of packing down and moving on that would be one of the sole fixtures of their lives in the weeks and months to come.
The tear in the sleeping pad that I’d repaired prior to the trip had un-repaired itself overnight with the consequence that I’d made fairly intimate acquaintance with the ground. But the excitement of the occasion more than counterbalanced the fatigue and Grace and I climbed up out of Hauser canyon in buoyant spirits. Clouds wafted through the groove of the canyon, and we stumbled along giddy with the newness of it all.
After an hour and a half climbing up to the shoulder of the Morena Butte we dropped into the little township of Lake Morena and beelined for the famous Malt Shop. The PCT involves a lot of walking, certainly, but there are also a great many opportunities to partake of America’s subtle and refined cuisine. It is not merely a very long hike but is also a gastronomic odyssey of epic proportions, undertaken in the context of exponentially increasing capacity to ingest unconscionable quantities of calories. But at this point we had only walked 20 miles, so we shared a single Malt—but what a Malt! It was blueberry cheesecake flavoured and delicious enough to make you want to return to the border and restart walking just to order it again.
While Grace and I slurped, Tristan applied liberal quantities of sunblock to his pasty legs—fresh out of a Canadian winter—squeezing it out of the bottle in squiggly lines from calf to thigh. “White man hot dog!” he said.
We set off back down the lane, past a big “Take America Back” flag on the porch of a ramshackle home, rippling above the head of a sleepy golden retriever, and made our undulating way over a saddle and down into a valley, where we filtered algae-filled water from a creek under an overpass. It was heating up, but the next few miles took us through a pleasantly grassy meadow to the Boulder Oaks campground where we were greeted by the camp host who, during her years of service to thru-hikers, had been dubbed “Everybody’s Mom.”
Everybody’s Mom was a veritable faucet of knowledge, and informed us on matters as various as: the inbound northerly; the merits of the various campsites in strong winds; where to get the best breakfast in Mount Laguna (Pine House Café); and how to get an extra large portion at said Café (order in French). At one point, a crow cawed in a tree overhead. “That’s Bones” she said. “I keep crows.”
Our posse set off for a distant but sheltered campsite at Long Canyon Creek. Getting there would require us doing a 22mi/35km day that included several thousand feet of elevation gain. Water, which was sparse through this section, was also a motivating factor. A shorter day would mean a dry camp and carrying lots more water. Water is indispensable but also, from the perspective of the thru-hiker, unforgivably heavy.
The wide, cloudless sky and sparse vegetation offered no protection from the big bad beamer as we laboured uphill. Before long we all had salt stains on our shirts around the perimeter of our packs. An older PCT hiker with a heavy pack passed us as he retreated back down the mountain. “Too hot up there” he said. “Way too hot. The lizards, at least, partook gladly of the heat. One of them took up residence atop a rock, did a series of push-ups, and chased a disinterested female into a bush.
At a certain imperceptible time in the day, the sense of unreality that had been so prevalent subsided and the rhythms of walking started to feel routine. We walked at talking distance from each other—close—and chewed through the whys and hows of our being here and our lives generally. Tristan expressed his disdain for the imperial system of measurement, Katie told about her job advocating for people who have received asylum in the UK, and all the while out chatter floated in a wide silence dimpled by birdsong.
We crossed a road and found some day hikers in denim. “You guys seen any Mountain Quail?” they asked. “We drove for an hour to get here so we could see mountain quail.” Over the shoulders of the hapless bird-watchers twin highways curved through the hills like ski tracks over moguls. Tall spears of yucca poked up out of the waist-deep scrub and windfarms turned slowly on the hills. It was late afternoon and we still had several hours walking to go.
We crested a hill and saw Lake Morena, 15 miles distant now, ashine in the evening light. Katie intimated that her pinky toe had been squished to mush so we stopped to wrap what remained of it in a short, pink silicone tube that Grace’s aunty had given her for blisters: “the toe sausage.”
We made it to camp just before dark amidst a chorus of relief. It was the farthest Grace had ever walked in a day. On the horizon a roiling sea of cloud had flooded the lower terrain and swallowed up Lake Morena. Grace went for a pee and had an unfortunate encounter with the local Poison Oak, which yielded several suggestions for trail names, such as “Rosy Cheeks” and “The Scarlett Squatter,” which she declined. Tristan passed around his cork massage ball, and we yielded to the sweet beneficence of sleep.
French toast and freezing faces
04/05 — Day 3 — 20mi / 32km
It rained overnight, and the temperatures plummeted. Grace, the coldest sleeper I know, shivered in her quilt as if all the goose down in the world would not protect her. We set off early into the cold wet with a hot breakfast for incentive. A few short miles through moist pines—“real trees!”—had us at the tiny town of Mount Laguna and at the door of the ‘French-American’ Pine Hill Café. A woodpecker regarded us dispassionately from a branch overhead. We stepped into the bosom of warmth. Thru-hikers tenanted most of the tables, a pile of packs in the corner. It was all log cabin and pine cones in the windows and wine glasses hanging above the counter; it smelled like happiness. For some reason Christmas decorations were still strewn about, in May. We sat and gave our orders to a man with an aggressively colourful shirt and French manners. ABBA piped brightly through the speakers.
French toast and Eggs Benedict piled up on the table in front of us. Grace ate with slow abandon, and subsided into a kind of narcotized stupor. Tristan said he was tracking our progress with an app that correlated our mileage to Frodo’s journey to Mordor. We all drank weak filter coffee with unlimited refills and floated on a tide of caffeination down the trail. Not unrelatedly, I stopped to dig my first cat-hole. Grace proposed we call our tiny shovel—branded as “The Deuce of Spades”—Doug, for short.
The wind picked up, scouring the huddled desert plants with cold. I asked Grace how she was enjoying the desert and she said “I can’t feel my face.” Tristan and Katie receded into the mist behind us as we barrelled onwards through the weather like geese beating their wings home to roost. Our friend Cecilia had said this section was stunning: we beheld a blank canvas for our imaginations. We needed to find a spot sheltered from the wind. A few hikers were hastily setting up tents in a dry creek bed. “Hopefully it doesn’t rain too much!” they said. Finally, as the mist darkened around us, we found a nook surrounded by chemise bushes and settled in. Katie arrived not long after, but Tristan was nowhere to be seen.
Camel Up
5/5 — Day 3 — 16mi/26km
Grace and I warded off another cold night with the alpaca wool balaclavas her Mum, Janine, had made for us. We broke camp in shivers and set off into the clag. There were hopeful signs of the weather opening up, the land below us showing a dark smudge through the mist.
We met a Taiwanese girl with short Berlin bangs called something that sounded lot like “eating”. We said our names. “Grease?” She said. “Is that a trail name?” Grace laughed. “Grace,” she said, “like, the grace of God?” Eating looked confused. She kept walking.
Eating had a tiny pack, the smallest we’d seen so far—about 25l. More incredibly, she was sporting toe socks and flip flops. She explained she’d walked the 3000 miles of the Continental Divide Trail in them. I asked if she’d heard of that classic Taiwanese guy who’d walked the PCT with a 20L pack and worn 2 rain jackets from Walmart for warmth. “Yeah. That’s my boyfriend,” Eating said.
We caught up with Tristan on a rock as the sun peeked out a little. He was regarding an electrolyte concoction he’d just put in his smartwater bottle. “Looks like frothy, proteinacious urine”, he said. His feet were killing him so he’d had to pull up short of us the night before. We dried our tent in the bushes and had our breakfast of cold-soaked oats, a chia seed riddled gelatinous slop that we’d actually made on the first morning and been unable to finish.
As we walked on, the sun burned off the last of the cloud, revealing the view it had obscured for the last day and a half. Our mound of granite and sand tapered downward steadily to a long, low basin crowded on either side by mountains that reached up into the pastel sky and fell away from themselves, row on row, dwindling into distance, each range growing fainter in the haze.
The head high yucca stood guard left and right of the trail, flush with flower or dead and dried to the colour of bone. The ground beneath us changed from quartzy gravel to red, terracotta earth and we loped along easy trail with gentle hands on the tiller of our minds.
While discussing mindfulness and mediation, Grace and I overshot the crucial spigot that provided the last water for the section—the only available water in a 20 mile stretch. I gathered up all our water bearing vessels and pushed back up the hill. A half dozen hikers, sat around filtering, snacking or, in Tristan’s case, looking in despair at his shoes, which were bludgeoning his Achilles. “Do you have a sharp knife by any chance?” He asked. He took my opinel and started carving at the heel of his Altras, taking a clean inch off the top. Several people cheered. He tried it on, walked around, and made sounds of soft animal contentment. “Thank god, he said, “that’s a relief.” As he operated on his other shoe, the punters bandied about possible trail names: “Achilles Heel”, “Shoe-sassin”, “The Cobbler.”
I filled the bladders at the spigot, a kind of wide-mouthed brass hose operated by a lever, “cameled up”—sculling as much as I could bear— and walked back down to Grace with enough water to make a dromedary proud. Her quilt was hanging across some bushes and she was crouched, goblin-like, in its shade.
The sun, having dispatched the cloud, turned on us its unblinking eye. We completed a descent and started making our way back uphill. Katie said she liked the uphill, how it wasn’t quite so jarring. Tristan and I concurred. Grace sweatily disagreed. “I’m a downhill gal.” “We can’t be happy all at once,” Katie mused. “One of us must suffer.”
Tristan’s mood was buoyant after resolving the shoe situation. He said he was considering the array of names before submitting one to the registry.
After a lunch spent sprawled in the sun, we walked along the flank of the range and the wide expanse of Scissors Crossing opened up: a flat-bottomed valley of unvegetated sand bisected by two roads in a scissor shape. Barren, blond hills kicked up on the other side, hills we would follow after our stop in the town of Julian. They looked awfully hot.
The beaver tail cacti were beginning to flower, finding within their, dry, leathery bodies flamboyant, pink foliation, like wizened old men who harbour a secret and fantastical kink. To the west over the mountains, a flood of cloud was suspended in the act of pouring into the basin.
We camped between some handsome granite boulders, round and firm and somehow parental. Another thru-hiker was there engaged in a fiendish complicated puzzle that involved decoding a paragraph in a made up language. She introduced herself as Skybird. She was going 8 miles a day on account of a herniated disc and reading Proust in English and French. Many are the people on the trail with whom you would be friends but for differing mileages and it is surely the same on the formless path of life, which we hasten or saunter along as our temperament and bodies decree.
As we tucked into bed that night Grace said, “I feel kind of… Hikerly.” I agreed. She looked filthy, her face begrimmed, her smell unmentionable—all the hallmarks of a budding thru-hiker. I hadn’t seen my face since we started, but I knew I was much the same. With startling rapidity the desert had naturalised us: we were rights-bearing citizens of dustville, no doubt about it.
Trailer Trash
6/5 — Day 4 — 4mi / 7km
The next morning we awoke before sunrise and sat on a rock and watched the dawn unfold its measureless petals over the arid land. We polished off the last few miles into Julian, greeting the other hikers emerging from their tents in the melting morning light. The last mile we walked through leaning ranks of upthrust agave. “They’re like a disorderly squadron of matchstick soldiers” I said, evidently feeling the effects of our morning coffee. Grace said, “Ok.” We were silent for a while. “Or something more generic, maybe… like… the bristly efflorescence of life in unfavourable circumstance?” Grace said, “They look like giant asparagus.”
A huge sliding percussive whomp interrupted our metaphorical fancies. Two fighter jets had hurtled overhead, faster than their own noise. We watched them arc, almost softly, around the shoulder of the range we’d just descended.
The giant asparagus
Not long after we got to the crossing and stuck out our thumbs, a man in a cheese-cutter and fingerless gloves brusquely gestured us into his car. “Morning.” He said. “Julian? I’m the Professor.”
The Professor had just dropped someone at the trailhead. He told us as we sped along the winding road up to Julian that he spent much of the summer months ferrying around PCT hikers in his capacity as a trail angel. Somewhat charmingly, however, he was a misanthrope who plied his unremunerative trade with in an unsentimental and matter of fact manner, taking no visible pleasure in his own generosity.
We passed a big homemade sign that said “Trump has organised the ants. The grasshoppers quake in fear” and then we plunged upwards into the cloud that still tumbled motionlessly over the mountains in which the township was nestled. The Prof dropped off on the main street, which was seemingly also the only street. I went to shake his hand and he declined. “I never touch the hands of a thru-hiker. 100% chance of fecal contamination.”
The town was engulfed in cloud and freezing. The dry and cloudless morning we had down by Scissors Crossing felt like another world. Grace and I beelined for Mom’s Pies, a legendary pie shop which gave out a free fruit pie with ice cream to anyone with a valid PCT permit. It was cozily American inside, full of the smell of pastry and stewed-fruit and sugar. The menu read: apple pie and pecan pie and ‘bumbleberry’, pumpkin, rhubarb-strawberry, cherry. Grace nearly wept as she read it.
We sat and drank coffees and moaned softly with pleasure as we ate. Tristan and Katie and other hikers arrived and filled the tables. The older man we’d seen retreating down the hill sat down in front of us with a big smile. “Heatstroke!” He said. “My urine looked like Coca Cola.” He introduced himself as Brian—“or Royal if you like, someone said I should be called Royal. I used to be in the Royal Marines.” He told us about his sleeping bag, which was 40 years old. “Technology might have improved since then” Emily, one of the other hikers put in. Royal looked at her, incredulous, “Ducks still live!” Emily blinked and returned her attentions to her pie.
This was a thematically appropriate moment for Eating to arrive. We asked to try on her tiny pack. It was Grace’s turn to be incredulous; it weighed less than nothing, and was homemade to boot.
We dispersed out into the Main Street. A sheriff in a bulletproof vest and her hair in a high ponytail was chatting cheerily with a lady holding a tiny dog. You couldn’t see 50 metres down the road, barely but it was obvious that Julian had a self-conscious, old-timey charm. That was on account of having been a gold-mining town which now lived on the dollars of tourists who buy pies and shop in stores with names like “Pistols and Petticoats” for things made out of leather and wool. I have lived in this exact same town alongside a gold-bearing river in New Zealand.
We convened with Tristan at the Julian Beer Co: he had ordered an enormous pile of meat. Katie, Grace and I ordered a single large pizza from a frightfully handsome bartender and struggled to finish it. The food in America is expensive but the portion size is outlandish. The highest percentage beer was an IPA called “The PCT Panacea.” Grace got a cider called the Tragic Princess.
The four of us checked into our accomodation, an RV trailer called The Vortex that was parked in a driveway. We took turns showering in the narrow cubicle and then soaked all our clothes in the sink. Grace kneaded socks with her hands for seemingly forever, the water turning swamp-black. We rigged some shock cord up between the cupboards and hung everything out to dry over our heads. Grace said, “I feel like a 19th century washerwoman.”
I made a salad. A pink, leopard-print ankle gaiter fell off the clothesline into the salad. We ate and retreated to our corners to call family and reply to messages. When we returned Katie was sleeping face down on her book. It was 8 pm. The washing dripped periodically on the floor. Outside our trailer windows, the dark enveloped the enveloping mist and the first short struggle of our journey slipped sightlessly into the past. 77 miles down, nearly 2600 to go.
