Bear Can Tetris
11/6 — Day 41 — 0mi / km
It had been a strange day, that day of deliverance from the desert—joyous, but also strange. We had walked the 10 miles to Kennedy Meadows on empty stomachs to leave room for all you can eat pancakes only to learn the kitchen closed at 10, half an hour prior to our arrival. We regrouped on the patio at the General Store under a sign that said “park your hoss before you sass the boss”—American small town restaurants love stuff like that. Another sign, inside the store, said “Guns welcome”, as if firearms were dogs allowed in for a friendly patting.
We went down the road to stay at Grumpy Bear’s Retreat, cramming into a people mover that doubled as a shuttle. The driver was an injured thru-hiker who’d been parked up at Kennedy Meadows for several weeks. “Climb in, folks,” she urged, even after the van was fit to burst, “the record is 21 people!”
Grumpy Bear’s didn’t have a cute sign discouraging sass, but they sold stickers featuring a disgruntled bear that said “Grumpy Bear’s Retreat: Go Fuck Yourself.” It sure was nice to be sampling American hospitality. We’d come to Grumpy’s because the laundry and showers were free, but the laundry made our clothes even dirtier, which we hadn’t thought materially possible, and Grace’s shower stopped abruptly halfway through. A shy, young Russian hiker offered to help by rinsing her off with a hose while covering his eyes. Yes, Grumpy’s was dirty and run down. Crows were arrayed in the trees around the deck making noises more commonly associated with chronic smokers. But there was decent wifi and generous servings of cheap food and this ambulatory community will overlook any hygienic deficit of cleanliness if these other conditions are met.
So, Grace had a pint sized Margarita and passed out face down in the tent at 7pm. It had been a big week: we’d walked 145 miles in 5 and a half days. I struggled to sleep, however. The person next to us, possibly a crow disguised as a hiker, had a severe coughing fit that lasted approximately for all eternity, during which time I felt annoyance, then sympathy, contempt, concern and, finally, more contempt. It’s possible to cough for so long that you effectively remove yourself from the sphere of moral concern.
Anyway, it had been a strange day, but the breakfast at Grumpy’s that next morning went a long buttery way to redeeming our time in Kennedy Meadows. It may have redeemed everything that ever went wrong in my life. Breakfast started at 7:30 and orders were taken in the form of a stampede. Then, a man with long hair and a backwards neon pink cap would bustle in and out holding plates with pancakes as big as a manhole covers, yelling like a farmer urging his stock to the trough: “Spiderrr! …Big Riiiig!” On one occasion, he came out making urgent and surprisingly convincing bleating noises, while hoisting the grotesquely large pancake high overhead like a proffered trophy. No-one responded. “C’mon Billy Goat!” he chided, “I’m speaking your language, man!” Grace and I just barely finished the breakfast, which hung well off the sides of the plate, and I saw something I thought I’d never see: defeated thru-hikers packing pancakes in doggy bags.
Redemptive pancake
The news, as we’d come to expect, was head spinning. Trump had deployed the military to stamp out protests in LA where people were walking down the streets with signs like “I want ICE in my Horchata, not in my city”. Grace and I had received a travel advisory from the NZ government not to do any protesting in the US. I talked a little with the folks about. No one seemed to be fazed by the fact the military had been foisted on a major city, just down the road, to subdue protests about aggressive, legally questionable deportations. “It’s all just drama” one of the American hikers said, “you get used to it when you live in this country. The media hypes everything up and then we all get angry at each other.”
So, the rabble of unwashed, overfed hikers sat about having a well deserved rest, untroubled by the wheeling world. An older gentleman called Perpetual Motion had to take a couple days to heal up an injury and it was proposed he be renamed Temporary Inertia. All around, people were playing bear can Tetris. Through the Sierra, hard sided bear cans are required: we had to put all our food in them each night. Getting 7 days food into a bear can is a kind of art form analogous to packing a car boot for a holiday: the right configuration makes a big difference. It felt like day one on trail again. People were packing and repacking their packs, trying to get everything in and balanced. It wasn’t just the bear can. Warmer layers, ice axes and microspikes—mini-crampons you can put on your trail runners for snow crossings—were all common additions, making packs a lot bulkier and heavier than they’d been in the desert.
Grace had also purchased new shoes—her feet had grown so much that her second pair of shoes, already half a size bigger than usual, had been rendered comically small. The lady at the store had literally laughed when she walked in. Now, freedom: “My foot doesn’t know what to do with so much space!” Grace said.
We left Grumpy’s just as a Karaoke petition started, returning to the mellower atmosphere at the general store where we spent the night in relative peace. I made a last ditch attempt to repair my side of our inflatable two-person sleeping pad, which had a slow leak that, for the previous 40 days, had scorned my many attempts to repair it. The new glue took 12 hours to dry, so Grace and I spent the night on the meagre cushioning available from our clothes, her backpad, and an old square of foam I’d carried from Tehachapi.
Hot Hands vs Inflatable Sleeping Pad, the final showdown
The Coronation of our Lord
12/6 — Day 42 — 20mi / 32km
We caught a ride back to the trail, set off at the leisurely hour of 7am, and were almost immediately detained by trail magic. Pastries! Fruit! The folks there got talking with Grace and she mentioned the buzzing entourage she’d had in the last week of the desert. “Wow,” they said, “so you’re Lord of the Flies!” There it was, Grace’s trail name. Flies for short.
By the time we dragged Flies away from the baked goods it was 8:30 and we’d gone less than a mile. “Well,” Grace said, “everyone says you go slower in the Sierra.”
At the trailhead, we bumped into three boys in their twenties, one of whom was called Carter. “Carter number 3!” I said. I’d never met so many Carters. The Carter in question reached slowly for his sunglasses. “Or am I…” he snatched them off his face dramatically, “Carter number 2!” I told him no, Carter 2 had the finest eyebrows I’d ever seen, and was unlikely to be mistaken for anyone.
We loped along the riverside, hardly knowing what to do with so much water. We filtered some and assessed how far it was to the next water source. 2 miles. After that, 2 miles. The previous section had had multiple 25 mile carries and one of those was broken up by a water source which was reported to have traces of uranium in it, so we felt like we’d arrived, dusty and parched, in the promised land.
But then we climbed up through a burn zone, which was just like the good old times: shadeless and hot as hell. There was a thru-hiking family up ahead, stalled on the hill. One of the kids was refusing to move. I understood the feeling. His older brother, kitted out in a singlet, said “You got this bro!”, made some antic monkey noises, and broke out into a credible rendition of Queen’s iconic power ballad, We Are The Champions, none of which seemed to have any effect.
We climbed over a pass to be greeted by a new world: a wide, lush meadow unimaginable in southern California. You couldn’t even see the soil, there were so many plants. In the desert, all the plants had their own space, little castles surrounded by moats of dirt.
It was early afternoon and I needed to take care of some business. I planned to dispense with said business through the application of new technology: the backcountry bidet. It involved a water bottle, a perforated bottle lid, and liberal quantities of hand sanitizer. My friend Ned had long been encouraging me to transition to the bidet method, having been converted himself during his PCT journey by a German man called Shitfinger. “Think about it,” Shitfinger had said, “if you got poo on your arm, would you wipe it with paper or wash it off with water?”
Anyway. We refreshed the day with a swim in the South Fork of the Kern River, which cut across the meadow. It was the sort of water fit for washing away sins. Under the bridge spanning the river, swallows had built a little hanging mud-city, a covert civilisation. Each bird had its own swallow-sized hut, and they sat inside with just their heads poking out. At intervals, they would drop from above, pluck an insect from the world, and cut a neat lap around the bridge back to their nests. There were about fifty of them, enough to make a real rush and bustle as they conducted the commerce of calories, which is to say, of life and death.
Winged angels of death
We started up the climb on the other side of the valley. Our packs were heavy—the heaviest they’d been so far. Our legs felt fine, but our torsos and shoulders were sore by the time we made camp in the late evening. Fifteen hundred feet below our perch, the silver river ribboned across the meadow. The land turned its shoulder to the sun, last light picking out the peaks. It was mightily impressive, but still only the preamble, the prelude, winking at glories to come.
Foreplay
Memories and Monuments
13/6 — Day 43 — 20 mi / 32km
We woke early, and it was frightfully cold. I discovered that the combination of my preternaturally cold hands (my trail name, Hot Hands, is somewhat ironic) with the additional rigidity of a frigid bear can, made it effectively Carter proof. After some trial, we found that we could get it open using my hiking pole point and my full body weight.
The sunset broke upon the range as we came over the shoulder of Olancha peak. Before us was a wide, undulating expanse with peaks and ridges hung with snow bunting and arrayed around forested hills and narrow, wavy meadows that looked as if they’d been excerpted from a golf course. It was gorgeous, and not just because I used to love golf.
On the way down, we found our Kiwi acquaintance, Bounce-box, sitting defeated beside her bear can. We showed her our trick, and half an hour later helped Grand Theft Auto in the same manner. GTA was a Korean-American girl kitted out in a pinstriped shirt and baggy pants who was taking time off before grad school, where she would be doing investigations in chemistry into the origins of life. This nerdy occupation made it even better that she’d got her trail name when she broke into a car with a cooler in the back, thinking it was trail magic.
Crossing a meadow that morning, two fighter jets ripped through the quiet. They flew just a couple hundred feet overhead and turned upside down as they did so. They did several more laps over the course of the day. It felt almost as if we’d wandered onto the set of Star Wars. During this time, we made our way rather more slowly than the jets up a long climb that took right up to the high eastern edge of the range. A lady we passed flashed us a dispirited look. “This altitude is kicking my ass,” she said. We were over 10,000 feet, and peaks all around kicked up higher still.
The Sierra Nevada is a half-open trapdoor. The low, hinged side starts in the west and rises as you move eastward until the range falls off a huge escarpment into the Owen’s Valley. That afternoon, we stood above that precipitous drop, gazing steeply at the dry, alkaline valley below. It had once been a kind of paradise, that wide valley, home to a Native American tribes who called it Payahǖǖnadǖ, “place of flowing water.” Then, in what was simultaneously one of the great infrastructural achievements and most dastardly resource heists of modern times, all that water was siphoned off to LA in the early years of the 20th century. We’d actually walked over water from this area when we’d hiked along the LA aqueduct all the way back in the Western Mojave. Now, the Owen’s Valley looks like a ragged wound, coloured off-white with red grey gashes, dry, and gridded here and there with squares of poisonous pink ponds. For all that, it had a kind of palsied beauty, as many things do from high above, as if beauty were merely a function of distance and perspective.
Site of the ecocide
We followed the ridge, winding between blunt fingers of fractured stone, then dropped back down among the lakes and meadows cradled in the granite palm of the Sierra batholith. Many of the meadows are full of obsidian carried up by Paiutes and Shoshone during the last ten thousand summers and knapped to make arrowheads and tools. Haunted places, for all their verdant welcome. We passed foxtail pines—the only tree I know of more impressive when it is dead. Its bark falls away to reveal a spiralling whorl of trunk, often yellow, red and orange, that twists upward like a pillar of flame and makes a monument of itself, quite as if Augustus, upon dying, turned to marble in the middle of the Forum.
Horizontal Kin
14/6 — Day 44 — 24 mi / 38km
Mount Langley imposed on the sky line as we climbed through the morning. It was the first 14,000 foot peak we’d seen in the South Sierra, a high-altitude envoy. All about us, water. It looked as if it had never snowed—just water, everywhere, running across the trail in streams and creeks and forming lakes. We found a particularly appealing one of the latter that morning: the inelegantly named Chicken Spring Lake. The three boys were there before us, sampling its waters. While we undressed around the corner, we heard a splash, followed immediately by “Fuck!” and panicked noises of evacuation. A bluebird took fright and flew off, looking like a mobile patch of sky. It was really cold. We swam naked, our bodies fish-belly white except for our hands and calves, which were tanned and leathery as a cow-hide saddle. With all the swimming, Flies had become a lot more appealing, visually and odoriferously. For large portions of the day, her face was free of grime and when we got into our tents at night the atmosphere was surprisingly tolerable.
The landscape as we crossed over into the Kings-Sequoia National Park was impressive, but still largely devoid of severity—it felt open and welcoming. All around the noble conifers drank the golden elixir of the sun. It was nice not to begrudge the pines, which is a civic obligation back home in Aotearoa, where many pines have been introduced from North America and now upset the delicate balance of our island ecosystem. Likewise, deer, such a problem back home. There was one in a meadow as we dropped down to Rock Creek, unfazed by our proximity, placidly blinking its long black lashes. Regarded independently of their destructive browsing habits, they are elegance on hooves, with a natural grace such as smelly, bustling sheep could never hope to match.
Not half bad after a thorough rinse
Marmots, most noble of the minor mammals, were also out that afternoon, poised regally atop rocks and warm in the rugged luxury of their pelts which ruffled in the wind like Brad Pitt’s hair in the Hollywood movie Troy. Unlike hyperactive, anxious squirrels, marmots regard human passers-by with a level gaze, the gaze of equals, and they regard sunsets and mountain views with the appreciation of connoisseurs. Theirs is a life to merit envy, a hard, clean spiritual life, flensed by cold, passing the seasons in high terraced homes where predators are few and the rent is cheap and the views are as austere and beautiful as acts of renunciation.
All our horizontal brothers and sisters, making do in the wilderness without help or support, asking only to be left to live their lives without interference among their rivers and mountains, the sacred infrastructure of their high city. Wildernesses are protected from exploitation by inconvenience, first of all, but as our technology and our appetites become more powerful, finally only by our reverence. Reverence for something other than our own wants, for the lives of trees and wending rivers and animal people and rocks that sermonise about deep time, a time before people walked on two feet across this continent. What better than meeting the gaze of a wild animal to alleviate the loneliness of our precocious, anxious species, this strange species which looks so ardently for life in the vast emptiness of space and yet trammels and destroys it here at home.
We crossed Rock Creek and found a man in his forties dressed entirely in neon pink, tuckered out: he was asleep with his head resting on his backpack, which was also neon pink, on the side of the trail. We climbed another fifteen hundred feet to a saddle below Guyot peak—a bit of a kick in the teeth at the end of the day, passing a woman who sat dejectedly on the side of the trail. “The Sierras are messin’ with my miles!” she said, plaintively.
We were knackered too—the miles cost more here than in the desert—and it would have been lovely to curl up on the side of the trail. But we wanted to get to the foot of Mt Whitney that evening so we could climb to the highest point in the lower 48 states for sunrise the next day, and that meant walking 24 miles today, through the valley of weariness and over sore-knee saddle. As always when tired, the intricate present is veiled by thoughts and fabtasies of other times and places. Sometimes you can barely see through the gauze of distraction where to put your feet. But then we rounded a corner and were arrested by loveliness: Crabtree Meadow, finely curated as a zen garden and bracketed by mountains that sheered up into the limpid evening sky. Nearer to hand, shapely granite boulders full of feldspar were splattered pale green and black with lichen like living paint and the path was fringed with penstemon and purple heather. Here was music for the eyes, a scene to make you forswear the low realm of cities and roads and enterprise, calling you to seek refuge in remoteness.
Sacred places have guardians, however, and in mountain sanctuaries those guardians are, invariably, biting insects. Anyone who wishes to reside there pays a blood tax. Like taxes of the regular variety, the burden falls unequally on the population. In America, if you’re wealthy enough to have agile lawyers and accountants, you need hardly pay tax at all. In the Sierra, tax avoidance depends on agile feet. When Flies and I arrived at the wide Whitney Creek, I skirted across on a series of rocks downstream. Flies, unwilling to risk falling in, stopped and took off her shoes and socks and walked across. The mosquitoes took their chance, and half a pint of blood, while she desperately reshod herself on the other side. I rejoined from downstream. “Can I be of any assistance, Madam?” I said, walking in a wide circle to thwart my winged pursuers, “Kindly, fuck off,” Flies responded.
We arrived at camp as the sun sank into the sharp jaws of the range. There was a sign in rocks on the ground which read, “Carter” and an arrow pointing into the woods, so we obliged. There were dozens of tents there, the most we’d seen, and most were already silent and dim, their occupants trying to catch an early night for the dawn ascent. We found the three boys. The sign had been for Carter number 3, who hadn’t even seen it on the way in. Connor had a racoon hat on. Cody was wrapped up, from hooded head to ankle, in a replica Lord of the Rings cloak made of a light brown wool and set off with the little brooch. It looked extremely snuggly and impractical. I had to ask how much it weighed. “4 pounds,” Cody said, proudly. “I had to send my puffy home to make room for it.”
We lay in our tent and willed ourselves to sleep. Most people recommended getting up at midnight if you wanted to get up Whitney for sunrise. Flies was willing to get up at 3am, so I set an alarm, controversially, for 1:30am.
The Terrestrial Celestial
15/6 — Day 45 — 23mi / 37km
The alarm dragged us unwillingly from the pocketed warmth of our sleeping quilts into the cold dark. We ate a handful of chocolate-covered coffee beans each and raced off with what we needed in my pack: everything warm we had, our microspikes, breakfast. The beams of our headlights led the way. A thin bobbing train of little lights could be seen well ahead, trailing up the ink-dark walls of the valley. Stars turned slowly in the sky above and water rushed toward us and away down the canyon without a thought for heights and dawn light.
We moved fast, keeping warm. Flies tripped over a rock. We overtook a few people: it looked like we might make it up in time. Sunrise was at 5am and we had 4000 feet to climb over 7.5 miles. We were slowed down by little fields of snow sloping across the switchbacks on Whitney’s flank, and as we panted up the dimmest light from the east breathed dimensionality and form into the world. The mountains were chiseled and fractured, zebra patterned with alternating snow and rock. The northern flank of the valley flaunted huge flying buttresses, a gothic cathedral on a vast scale, the Notre Dame of the great American West. As we climbed its steps we gave it the incense of our condensed breath. Below us, coyotes hymned the new day with yips and laughs that bounced around the amphitheater of the basin.
Half an hour from the top, light finally spilled over the far horizon and made a great pool of soft purple in the sky. We skirted up to a jagged notch on Mount Muir, which sat below Whitney on the same ridge, and caught the sunrise there, poised on the knife-edge of the crest. (Muir was better company than Whitney, anyway, we consoled ourselves. Whitney was the head of the California Geological Survey, a bureaucrat who, in the only meaningful controversy of his life—an argument with Muir about whether glaciers or earthquakes shaped the Sierra Nevada’s extraordinary canyons—was both wrong and weirdly condescending.)
We continued up to the summit of Whitney, employing our microspikes for the first time to climb up a pour of icy snow, and then clinked and scratched our way across the rock to the summit. The Sierra in its vast panoply of peaks and ridges, lakes and canyons stood against the low slanting light. It went on forever, a world unto itself: our world for the month to come, high drama for 60 miles to the west and 200 to the north, deep-rucked stone pressed against the heavens. Rock and sky, as different from each other as the real is from the ideal, yet folded together, everywhere touching. Flies and I put on all our layers. It was 6am, 4500 metres up, and it was fucking freezing.
Lock your vehicles, it’s GTA
Lock your vehicle, it’s GTA!
Lock your vehicle
We had the summit almost to ourselves: the people who woke up at a reasonable hour were well behind us, and those who started at midnight had already begun the climb back down after sunrise. We were right in the middle. Some of our favourites remained, however: Takeout was there, and GTA. GTA had a pack of Marlboro Golds. I bummed one off her, put it in my pocket while we took photos, and then had to duct tape it back together. Forgoing the purest air in America in favour of poisonous smoke—it felt good, a species of freedom with a sort of Dostoyevskian perversity.
But it was risky, too. I’d eaten a lot of coffee beans and, having not smoked for a couple years, was risking compounding the laxative effect. This wouldn’t normally be a problem, but you’re not allowed to defecate on Whitney. You have to do it in a bag and then carry it out. Grace and I had a ziplock or two, but they weren’t exactly built for purpose, so avoiding the situation entirely was Plan A. On the way up, we’d seen a couple of bags people had pooped in and assumed they’d been left there to be packed out when their owners returned from the top.
We put sunblock on, including up our nostrils for the reflected sun flaring off the snow. Flies had unfortunately left her sunglasses behind and her vision went a blank pink when we crossed the larger snowfield. Her pale blue eyes were more sensitive than mine, so I lent her my sunglasses. The poop bags were still there. Hard to believe adults would shit in a bag and leave it for someone else to hike out, but there you go. We briefly considered doing the dirty job ourselves, but carrying someone else’s shit 50 miles in a plastic bag apparently exceeded the bounds of our altruism.
We got back to camp at midday after a vivifying swim in a pond fringed by snow. Despite that, we were a little delirious from lack of sleep and snatched a half hour of heat-stricken napping. We woke up in the early afternoon, ate some breakfast and brewed a coffee—we still had 4 hours of walking to do. It was expected to be a rough slog. Eating breakfast in the afternoon tricked our body-clocks into thinking it was morning, however, and so we waltzed along fresh as dawn into the gorgeous, spacious basin that fronts the highest pass on the PCT. That was Forester Pass, tomorrow’s happy task.
Our tent went up by Tyndall Creek, one of the tributaries of the Kern, which we’d been following since just before Kennedy Meadows: Forester would take us over the divide into the catchment for the Kings river. We needed to get over the pass before the snow turned to mush, so we set an alarm for 3am. I’d thought that was Flies’ preferred hour, but she seemed less than pleased.
High Altitude Sleepwalking
16/6 — Day 46 — 17mi / 26km
There were hardly enough chocolate coffee beans on hand to fend off the sleep that dragged at us those first miles, but the cold eventually sharpened us to wakefulness and we climbed steadily towards mountains sharply delineated against a faintly paling sky. From its base, Forester looked horrendous. We’d approached it thinking just about any other spot on the ridge could be the pass. It was very terribly sheer and consisted of a jagged notch guarded by a steep snow chute. The rest of the mountains, the ones we didn’t have to ascend and which ringed the smoothly undulating floor of the basin, looked gorgeous in the dawn. There we were, standing amidst huge molars of white granite looking down the pink throat of god. We might even have felt a touch of that divinity were we not under-caffeinated, frost-bitten, and clad in dorky, lightweight leggings made for ballet dancers doing pre-routine warm ups.
Leaking enthusiasm
A couple of friends and even a stranger had attached themselves to us, not wanting to go over the pass alone. But foreshortening always makes mountains look a lot worse than they are and the switchbacks up Forester proved merciful and a path had been well trodden across the icy chute. So, we clambered onto the pass at 7am relatively untraumatised. The view up there slaps you in the face. “Look at me!” say the mountains. “And me!” says the deep, forked canyon. The pass fell away under snow beneath us and all around sharp ridges sawed at the air.
Forester Pass in the middle
The snow was compacted in a bum-wide strip for a hundred metres down the slope. It was early in the day, and the ice was firm, but it had to be done. I hiked up my dance pants, whispered Hail Mary mother of god, and slid off, quickly attaining a velocity that was both thrilling and definitely unsafe. I braked desperately with my hiking poles, levering them down with my body weight, and it slowed me just enough that when I hit the icy bump at the bottom my ass bruised but did not break. Flies, despite having just seen what happened, followed my lead. She accelerated down a slope as steep as fear or love, and flew off the bump at the bottom with a little yelp of pain mixed with delight.
For some reason, no one else followed. We were now in the heart of the snowfield a few hundred feet below the spur along which the sensible folk were making their way. We would have saved ourselves some good time, only various items had flown out of our packs side pockets on the way down and needed to be recouped. That done, we cut along a faint path through the snow left by other fearless bum-sliders and ended up doing some unnecessary class 2 scrambling, which may or may not have made Flies cry.
Mild trauma
Back on trail again, we found some microspikes. We’d found a sandal the day prior, and a water bottle. We were like an ambulant lost property box. We went for a sludgy swim in a high tarn to celebrate having made it over the pass, and as an excuse to take a break. We’d had about 6 hours of sleep in the last two nights, and we were exhausted. I read a little John Muir, but his boundless enthusiasm felt like a rebuke of my fatigue. Then, onward. It felt profane to be rushing through this place. Beauty invites indolence: Whitman loafing on the summer grass, Thoreau relaxing pondside, Muir himself sauntering and botanising through these very hills. But you could only carry so much food, and ours was almost out. We wanted to get close to the trailhead that evening. That was on the other side of Kearsarge Pass, which dropped steeply down to Onion Valley and the town of Independence.
I jumped over another creek on our way down into the valley. Flies found another route upstream over a log. It took her a while, and when she finally rejoined me on the other side, her feet were wet. Obviously, she’d not been able to find a good crossing. But, actually—I raised my gaze—her shorts were wet too, and her shirt, and her hair. “Oh no,” I said. “Yeah,” she said. She’d hit a slippery patch on a log and fallen right in. We emptied her pack to assess the situation: many things were wet, including our sleeping pad, but nothing critical had been damaged.
A thorough soaking
We bottomed out in the valley, after inadvertently chasing a panicked mother grouse halfway down the hill. We’d come across her and her chicks on the trail and she’d run pell mell for a full quarter mile. Every time we tried to get past on one side she’d tack across our path like the leading boat in an America’s cup race blocking the team in pursuit, only with a lot of undignified clucking. My estimation of grouse intelligence took even more of a hit that day than my estimation of Flies’ balance.
We climbed up wearily to the junction turnoff to Kearsarge, feeling more fatigued than at any other time on trail so far. Sometimes when walking you feel light and free. Other times it is toilsome, a burden to be borne with the mute resignation of animals. Now that caffeination had entirely worn off, even the grand surroundings could only tap bluntly at the blurry screen of consciousness.
We found the owner of the microspikes, Froot Loop, and her tramily at the junction to Kearsarge. Grace introduced herself. “Lord of the Flies?” said Froot Loop, “What, have you been sacrificing kids?”
We walked past Bullfrog Lake, where a sign said no camping and no grazing. “Damn,” I said, “we’re going to have to walk further.” “Yeah,” Flies said, “and I’m going to have to refrain from eating grass.”
We eventually found a camp by Kearsarge lakes, which were appallingly beautiful. Nothing that beautiful should be within 5 miles of a trailhead. Flies and I were too shattered to appreciate it, but still. At least I could look forward to a comfortable sleep on our pad: the repair had held, and for the first time since we started I’d spent a whole week without once having to sleep on the ground.
I made a dinner from the dregs of our food. To stretch it out, I tipped the remainder of a sachet of dehydrated potato flakes into my peanut butter ramen to bulk it out. The resulting melange was too salty to consume. I ate half and felt sick. Because I felt sick, however, I no longer felt hungry, so it sort of worked. Then, against Flies’ advice, I poured the remainder of our miscellaneous cookie crumbs into the hot chocolate. “It’ll give it a little je ne sais quois” I said. Instead, it turned into a kind of sickly sludge. “Zero for two,” she said.
Flies had been drying our half-drowned sleeping pad on a rock. Because it was windy, she’d pinned it down with rocks. Hmm, I thought. I took the pad into the tent and inflated it. It immediately deflated. I inflated it again. Same outcome, both sides. On close inspection, I could see dozens of little holes where the rocks had pierced the fabric. So I slept, once again, on the hard, rocky, indifferent ground—but at least this time I had company. I wish I could say we were so tired the decomposed granite underneath us felt almost like a soft sprung mattress, but no. Only the sleep of the dead could make that stuff feel soft. So we lay there on our flaccid sleeping pad listening to the wind outside scour the range.
Tomorrow we would climb over Kearsarge and ride down into the town of Independence. We would perforate the boundary of this mountain world and return to the lowlands, to where cars blared down paved streets and vendors peddled satisfactions unknown to these lofty canyons: fresh vegetables, feather pillows. We would go down to the place where the news reeled out of speakers in calm hysteria and men and women in the grip of self-importance span in the deadly circus of power.
High above all that, on Kearsarge Pass, the noble marmot regarded his home in the failing light: vanished glaciers, flowered meadows, and vertical brothers and sisters in flapping tents, trying to reconcile themselves to the obdurate earth.
