Germany’s Betrayal of Faith
4/6 – Day 34 – 12 mi / 19km
All trail angels are appreciated, but trail angels with hot tubs deserve a special place in heaven. Grace and I had soaked our desert-beaten bodies in Joe’s spa at his place up in the hills of Tehachapi with several other hikers—Takeout, Pippin and Oreo, the last of whom was living up to her name and packing out a pound and a half of Oreos for the next section. Joe came back in the evening to find us bubbling away happily. “Want any church dogs?” he asked, hoisting a plastic bag. Joe was a thoroughly nice guy. Takeout took him up on the offer, despite having already had copious quantities of… takeout.
Accidentally did some money laundering
That was the previous evening. On day 34, prior to hitting the trail the following afternoon, I had to write a blog and Grace had to consume a large but indeterminate quantity of pastries at the famous German bakery. Grace is one of those people who gets unduly excited about pastries, baking, chocolate, or basically anything with a high sugar content. But especially pastries. And everybody loved the German bakery in Tehachapi. Hikers and locals both mentioned it without preamble. You’d be talking about something else, and they’d be like, “yeah, hey, have you been to the German bakery?” So try to imagine Grace’s disappointment when we pulled up that morning, having caught a lift across the wide sprawling town expressly for that purpose, and discovered it was closed on Wednesdays. Who the heck closes on a Wednesday? She barely spoke for an hour, and I knew it was going to be a long time before she forgave that bakery, or Germany, or even Wednesday.
We relocated to the library where we met and farewelled Cobbler. His shoes had done the dirty on him and abraded his feet to the point where they were unwalkable. Blisters everywhere, including a nasty blood blister on the bottom. He was going to skip the 145 miles between Tehachapi and Kennedy Meadows by catching a ride to the latter location. He would rest his feet there, at the gates of the High Sierra. Grace’s feet were in pretty bad shape too, but mostly just aesthetically and odorifically. I’d like to see the foot fetish that could survive the PCT.
We enlisted another trail angel to get us back to the trail, a 15 minute drive away. The trail angels in Tehachapi really were superb. En route, we saw some sheep and a shepherd chewing straw, just like home. There are five times as many sheep as people in New Zealand, but sadly not every person has five sheep. Like money in America, the sheep in New Zealand are concentrated in the hands of a few.
The trail from Willow Springs led through yet more wind farms, massed in Tehachapi Pass like the Spartans at Thermopylae, bristling against the onslaught of the wind. An enormous cumuli sailed down the broad blue sky. Concrete mines cut jaggedly into the hills. It was a good afternoon for walking—or heavy industry, if that’s your preference.
We walked along a trail proudly maintained by Boy Scout Troop 135 to highway 58 causing an anxious stampede among a couple dozen cows who didn’t realise we were vegetarians. The calves had been freshly branded, C.K., possibly having been earmarked for the new range of Calvin Klein’s leather underwear.
On the other side of the highway, we stocked up on water—it was nearly 20 miles to the next source so we needed four litres. A hiker can never quite forgive water for being so heavy. One kilogram per litre—ridiculous. Surely someone could make a dehydrated version of water, a desiccated powder, like with the expensive backpacking meals people buy. Alas, Grace, whose grasp of science far exceeds mine, said it was not possible. The consequence of this inadequacy was that our packs with their six days worth of food and 20 miles worth of water were the heaviest they’d been all trail.
Be not afraid, O bovine brethren
We had six days of food, about 3500 calories and 1 ½ pounds per day, because we were skipping a resupply option and barrelling straight through to Kennedy Meadows. A warm up for the long food carries in the Sierra and a big romp to celebrate finishing the desert.
Anyway, the day darkened as we headed uphill to camp and in the gloom out over the Mojave pulses of lightning lit up the thick canopy of cloud. It was all go up there. In the clear sky above us we exclaimed as a string of lights hurtled into space. We checked online—more Starlink satellites. The night sky, once so still, had caught the contagion of our restlessness.
Fight you for it
5/6 – Day 35 – 25mi / 40km
We woke early and lugged our heavy packs up the hill—magically, they felt light. Joe’s hut tub had restored our bodies, its enveloping liquid heat allowing them to assimilate the physical trauma of the previous week, making us stronger than ever. We walked without effort through semi-arid hills in which fervid spring had yielded to languorous summer. Tadpoles pulsed in the trough where we were to get our water, which came through a pipe out of a meagre spring, drip by drip—apparently there were at times queues of thru-hikers half an hour long here, but it had been an uncannily quiet day on trail. We were the only ones at the water source except for a deer who nosed quietly through the woods and a guy in his tent who laughed sporadically for no apparent reason.
After another few miles, we stopped for a long siesta in the high heat of noon under yet more wind farms, which sluiced the air and made a pleasant, white noise like a waterfall. Don Quixote would have had a field day in the wider Tehachapi region.
Into the evening we walked, noting a subtle shift in the mountains. During these 145 miles we would be transitioning from the desert to the lofty Sierra Nevada, and intimations of that other world came in the form of the occasional granite buttress and a wide shallow valley that had to be glacial.
As we neared camp, we passed a couple of girls and asked where they were headed for the night. “That meadow in 3.5,” they said. “Same,” we said. “We’ll fight you for it” the smaller one said. She was about a head shorter than Grace. We arrived at camp first and set up under an oak. The girls arrived soon after and told us to ready our defences. We obliged by arranging a few rocks on our exposed side, but the onslaught never came.
6/6 – Day 36 – 27mi / 44km
Dawn did come, though, and it came like an advertisement for a new world. The earth lay soft below the pastel sky. Grace said she felt like curling up in the foetal position, however, so we stopped and had a potent coffee in an attempt to revive her enthusiasm.
We resumed. Yes, the day was glad. The hills around us were cloaked in green, rife with oaks and pines alive with the furtive movements of chipmunks and squirrels and the rapid percussion of a woodpecker. Amidst this edenic scene, I came across a mouse on the trail which seemed less skittish than it should have been. I realised its back legs were dragging—it had been half stood on. It was a pitiful sight, the mouse trembling and mad with fear and pain trying to drag itself into the grass with only its front legs. It couldn’t quite do it. I thought to pick it up and place it somewhere safe but it was already so frightened. Perhaps the best thing to do would be to kill it swiftly and mercifully, but I could not. Its little black eyes were blank with terror. I moved on, feeling this paradise was a facade concealing untold lives fractured by the indifferent boot of fortune.
Some beings fared better that morning
We clambered over some minor blowdowns and made our way up a dirt road past a some-time club hut in the hewn log style. Not far along from the hut was a large sign announcing God’s Ten Commandments. Hikers had defaced the sign in several places. By the first commandment, ‘Thou shall not have any god before me’, someone had scrawled, ‘Hail Satan!’ in vivid. Beside the 10th, ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbours wife’, someone had written ‘Fuck bitches get money.’ Now, I appreciate sex and dolla bills as much as the next Western liberal, but sometimes I feel secularism entails a spiritual lack. What if there is more to life than bitches and money? But those are the qualms of another century.
We walked through a pine forest studded with granite boulders that could easily have been in the Sierra, until we came upon our afternoons water source, another spring. We collected water and lay down a while in the company of a half-dozen hikers all taking time out of the heat. One of them, a girl with her heavily taped feet up on her backpack, said in a German accent to no one in particular, “I’m so fucking ready for the desert to be over.”
Even the rocks were without modesty
A silver Sprinter van drove up to the adjoining campground pulling a trailer of motorbikes. Revving started soon after. “There goes our repose” I said to Grace. We lay in the thin shade of a Jeffrey pine. Someone started shooting a pistol at a tree. Outdoor recreation can take so many forms.
As we made to leave, one of the motorcyclists skidded into the clearing by the spring and flipped up their visor. “Hikers?” She said. Her name was Cinnibun—a trail angel, about 60. She looked like a stunt double for Judy Dench. “We gotta whole lotta water at the next two caches, folks! You drink up now. Been eight rescues for dehydration and heat stroke this last week. It’s hot!”
We were greatly relieved—without the caches it’d be a 35 mile water carry to the next spring, a stretch even a camel would have been hard pressed to traverse.
Cinnibun: a high-octane trail angel
Into the evening we walked through purple lupines and flannel bushes in full flower, tossing in the wind like yellow flames. Lizards saw us approach and scurried like spies down the alleyways of rocks white and round and pocked like the moon. The moon itself was afloat in the pale blue sea of the sky.
We came upon the first cache, a hoard of big blue jugs glowing in the late light like sapphire gems and packed out a few litres, knowing the cache in 15 miles could be relied upon. An Australian hiker called Werewolf had apparently packed out nine. For the last few miles of the day we climbed up to a wide, barren plateau and camped under a Joshua tree. It looked, with its radiating spikes above us at night, like a comic book explosion in the Milky Way.
Hikers be thirsty!
7/6 — Day 37 — 24 mi / 39km
In the night, a small animal fell out of the Joshua tree and onto my chest with a little woomph. I jerked up as it scurried into the safety of the dark. Grace said, “wah?” and rolled over. So did I. It’s crazy what you get used to.
In the first minutes of walking we hit another milestone—metric, even! 1000km. It felt good to have our ambulatory accomplishment ratified by a system of measurement that made practical sense.
We floated along the range in the early morning. These were cool, precious hours, and it was beautiful in the desert, the landscape smooth and pale and corporeal. Pablo Neruda’s horny love poems came to mind: cuerpo de mujer, muslos blancos, blancas colinas… Our bodies didn’t look half so nice as that—but this morning they felt good. It felt like they were walking themselves. “Hey,” I said to Grace, “we’re fit!” Only took a thousand kilometres.
But then the big bad beamer got up to his old tricks and before you could say electrolytes we had been reduced once again to sweaty blobs of recalcitrant flesh. Heat returned to bludgeon the sand and its sorry inhabitants. What happened to that soft, serene world with its smooth curves? What was this shadeless, arid expanse with knee-high vegetation that looked like day-old stubble? We saw the black dots of hikers strung out across the desert like the followers of Moses wearily journeying to the promised land: the Sierra Nevada.
Hot
Poles clacked behind us. Up came Propel, a famously speedy hiker who, unrelatedly, had the only nose we’d seen on trail that rivalled my own. He was part Sicilian. True to form, Propel hurtled past with a friendly smile, his nose parting the air as the prow of a boat parts water. “How do you go so fast with such skinny legs!?” I called after him, but he was already receding into the hazy distance.
We refilled at the cache and slogged uphill to our proposed lunch spot on one of the many hills fortified by crumbling citadels of granite. It was forested only on its top half, dwindling to scrub below like someone wearing a dress shirt and underwear. Once we cleared the far distance, beyond the serried ranks of the Scodie Range, we could see snowy peaks: the Sierra Nevada had finally come into view. 70 miles lay between us and all the water you could ever want, water so abundant you could swim in it, or host an all you can drink buffett.
Over a lunch of pesto on crackers, Grace and I talked about Edward Abbey, the great curmudgeon of the desert. He was something of an arsehole and a misanthrope, but you can tell he was also kind of sensitive. We thought maybe it was the fate of sensitive men who have been disappointed by the world, to become curmudgeons and retire to remote locations where they can gripe about the misguided masses in peace. Like the prickly, leathery plants of his favoured region, however, Abbey’s prose sometimes flowers a vibrant pink or purple, an efflorescence of tenderness from a desiccated heart. Anyway. I attempted to persuade my body that it didn’t need more calories, but ended up dealing some serious post-lunch damage to our snack supply. It was becoming clear that we were short if we wanted to get to Kennedy Meadows. Pippin had run out of food already and hiked an indeterminate number of heat-stricken miles down a miscellaneous dirt road to re-provision.
That evening as we walked into the sunset, I spent some time thanking the plants of the desert: we would be saying goodbye soon. They were hardy folk, those plants, hardier than we, and even though they had been next to useless for shade for the last six hundred miles they had been good company. Most of them were flowering now, dishing out their pollen to all comers, and diffusing it through the air. There was something else in the air that evening, too, the echo of Pablo Neruda, perhaps, or the last pulse of spring’s libido. Leggy flies flew tandem in the throes airborne intercourse. We passed two lizards going at it on a rock. Grace and I stopped and exchanged a meaningful look. It seemed we stood in the very loins of the procreant world. There she was, my woman, in the full flush and ardour of her youth. “I’m sorry, Grace” I said, “you’re just too filthy to contemplate right now.” “You too, darling,” she said.
Don’t care how flush with youth and ardour she is, that right there is a health hazard
Eros had passed us by and in its wake we were gluggy with fatigue, our minds wandering into other worlds. After a long silence, I asked Grace what she was thinking about. “I was just imagining a scenario in which you’d been clawed half to death by a cougar,” she said. “But I saved your life through the judicious application of my medical knowledge.”
We pulled up to camp next to a hut with an American flag propped outside. It was accessible by 4WD and therefore rubbish and glass were everywhere. Grace and I painstakingly cleared a groundsheet-sized area of glass shards in the half-dark and snuggled in, keeping a safe distance for hygienic purposes.
Footsore
8/6 — Day 38 — 25mi / 40km
We broke camp while sunrise was still putting on its makeup backstage. We would be dropping down to Walker Pass and Highway 178, our last opportunity to get more food. It looked like we were about half a day short, but the hitch into Ridgecrest was 30 minutes each way, and it seemed a shame to go all that way just to buy a couple of Snickers bars and some instant noodles. “Either we can go a little hungry,” I said, “or we could up the pace, do a couple of 30 mile days, and voila, Kennedy Meadows!” Grace, apparently uninspired by these options, voted for topping up our supplies by stopping and passive-aggressively eating a cookie.
When we got to the highway, to our great relief, there was trail magic. Trail angels were there with sodas and fruit and useful, calorific things like Oreos which we could pack out. We were going to get to Kennedy Meadows, and we weren’t going to go hungry. One of the trail angels, a woman with purple hair and a Marvel t-shirt, was crocheting a jellyfish for a hiker’s birthday. A friend of Pippin’s relayed a series of texts he’d received late the previous night: “Dude, I accidentally walked into a festival.” 10 minutes later: “It’s crazy here, I think they’re going to wash me??”
Jellyfish clouds, too
We hiked up out of Walker Pass. Grace tucked a 7up deep in her bag to protect it from the heat—the cold water we’d filled our bottles with was warm in minutes, and even the cacti we passed looked dehydrated. My sweat smelled strange, almost vinegary. Grace said I needed a wash, and gestured to a dirt road that may or may not have led to a festival. Below us as we climbed, the Mojave unrolled its carpet for the last time. A row of large green circles stamped the dusty basin with the magic of irrigation, looking almost poisonous amidst all that sand. A military airbase launched a plane every quarter hour.
Grace had her 7up at 7,000 feet. We were now a quarter of the way to Canada: 665 miles in the proverbial bag. We celebrated with a lie down and a concerned examination of Grace’s feet. Her socks, made of the finest merino wool, were caked in dirt and had acquired the texture of a hessian sack, and the skin on her soles and around her toes had been rubbed raw. While we lay curled in fickle shade, flies crowded around her, leaving me in peace. “Take the dirt road” they seemed to be saying, “let them wash you.”
7up at 7 up
That night, we camped in the moist groin of a valley densely populated by mosquitoes. I cooked dinner in the swarm and felt like a martyr. We ate and retreated to the netted bower of our tent—the first time we’d used it in a week—and bestowed upon each other the dubious gift of a leathery kiss and turned into bed. Our bodies, after four consecutive marathon days through burly terrain, felt like some of the antique machinery we’d seen left to rust on abandoned Southern Californian farms: heavy, inert, joints glommed shut, gearboxes gone to shit.
Show me the foot fetish that could survive the PCT
The Youth of Today
9/6 — Day 39 — 23 mi / 37km
It is a source of continual amazement how the beneficent influences of sleep and coffee can coax a wrecked body into undertaking the same labours that landed it prostrate in a tent 8 hours prior, stiff, sore and sorry for itself. Turns out bodies are suckers.
As we crested the morning climb, we found a half-dozen hikers in multi-coloured party hats and various states of disarray: a big, festive trail family, known colloquially as a tramily. We asked whose birthday it was. A moustached Australian pointed at himself with his thumb. “It was actually a few days ago now,” he said, “we’re doing a birthweek!” We ate breakfast in their vicinity. One of the hikers, whose shorts had a denim pattern, climaxed a long anecdote with “and then I came on Nature’s face!” Grace and I felt like an old couple sitting on a bench marveling at the moral laxity of the youth of today.
We moved on, navigating the ridge at the top of a valley. As usual, it was hot and we were dirty, which led us to speculate about the protective value of the dirt we were caked in. Did we even need sunscreen any more? The dirt on my legs was at least SPF 30. We passed a squirrel with a feather duster tail deconstructing a pine cone—sticky, sappy business, you would think. Yet squirrels, like all wild animals, were always clean, even out here. This is a definite reproof to humans, an indication of our fallen state.
We napped in shade, once again misjudging the fall line of the sun and waking lathed in sweat in its full glare. Grace had acquired her now customary entourage of flies. Overhead, at regular intervals, we heard the whomping percussion of planes from the airbase—they were so frequent it almost seemed a war could have started. We wouldn’t know.
The afternoon saw us surmount the last hurdle between the desert and the Sierra and start a long, gradual down hill into a valley made perceptibly greener by the salutary effects of the Kern river—an actual river, so they said. The Sierra itself glinted now along the horizon, lofty, patched with white. Before descending to camp we crossed a dirt road with signs on either side puckered with bullet holes. It was the fate of all signs on dirt roads in America, it seemed, to be shot repeatedly for no reason.
We made our last dinner in the desert on a little knoll. Already, these last days, it felt as if we’d been saying goodbye, the landscape changing slowly in a lingering farewell. The moon hung huge and white as polished quartz over the rim of the land. Its light lay on the closed lids of our eyes. Tomorrow, Kennedy Meadows, the gateway to another world.
A celestial sky and two very terrestrial legs
Deliverance
10/6 — Day 40 — 10mi / 16km
Forty days in the desert—same as Jesus. I don’t think we emerged as wise as he, but I’d back our chances in a footrace. That’s an aside. The valley that green morning in first light lay bright and open as a promise. We carried light packs and light hearts toward what Muir called ‘The Range of Light,’ and in the tops of the trees the leaves caught the sun streaming over the mountains and spent those gold coins with the profligacy of children born to summer. We swam naked in the Kern in water waist deep and cold as knowledge from the hard mouth of the world. We passed the 700 mile marker and arrived at the road to Kennedy Meadows, walking the mile to the general store through heat that shimmered on the blacktop with the joyous indifference of people on the verge of deliverance. I told Grace I was proud of her. We hadn’t exactly been prancing through meadows these last 700 miles. It had been hard. An older man we’d seen in a PCT documentary had said, of Kennedy Meadows, “Everybody who walks into that place, they’ve really done something.”
We turned a corner and the store came into view. There were dozens of hikers arrayed on the deck. Suddenly, the sound of a cowbell rang out with songless abandon. The crowd lofted a long cheer into the morning and Grace and I walked with wide smiles and soft feelings out of the desert and into the arms of friends we knew and friends we didn’t.
