What a week. Biblical thunderstorms, mysterious nocturnal wildlife encounters, lightning fires and an unwanted break from trail thanks to shin splints. There are many words one could use to describe the PCT (plenty of which are expletives), but ‘boring’ isn’t one of them.
I had a really hard time with my unexpected hundred-mile trail skip. I was plagued with guilt because it felt like I was choosing to skip, which isn’t really the case (choosing not to get a stress fracture is more like it) – but I kept thinking, could I have powered through? Realistically, I was sacrificing a hundred miles in order to hike another thousand, but even the clear mathematical logic didn’t make me feel better. And I’m sure the ‘continuous footpath’ mafia (which, like many things in life – veganism, religion – do literally whatever you want, just don’t make me feel like a heathen if I don’t) would have plenty to say about me skipping up to Ashland rather than waiting my injury out in Etna, but there are several reasons for that:
1) sanity. Etna is a lovely town, but after 24 hours I’m pretty sure I’ve seen and done everything possible there. 2) time. Ridiculous as it was to injure myself by doing all those 30 mile days, it would be even more ridiculous to then lose all the time I gained by doing them. 3) vibes. I don’t want to lose my trail family. I can always come back and fill in the missing section, but I can’t get back the experience of hiking with these three reprobates. Funny, if you’d asked me what I would have chosen in this situation before I started, I would have picked the opposite. Me being fundamentally dumb about what I would end up valuing the most about this experience.
But why do I feel so guilty? Really, who is it for? It’s not like I’m trying to break some kind of PCT record where I have to walk every single step for it to count (and what record would that be anyway? Most cigarettes smoked on trail?). I guess this is what people are talking about when they tell you to remember your ‘why’. My goal is to get to Canada. I’d rather skip a hundred miles in the middle due to injury than risk running out of time and having to end my hike in a parking lot somewhere in Washington.
But while I can write all this down and see that it makes sense, I have a feeling those hundred miles are going to haunt my OCD, perfectionist brain, and that I’m going to waste a lot of time and money someday coming back on some kind of redemption mission. Anyway. I digress. Amazing the places your brain goes when it’s got nothing but itself for company. Clearly I need a new podcast.
Day Eighty-five, miles 1398.3-1411.3
The race to Burney mountain guest ranch was on. A self imposed race, since I was determined to get thirteen miles out of the way before I got hungry for lunch, so I could eat some real food and not the last, sweaty slice of cheddar cheese glued to its ziploc bag. The trail was easy enough, passing through a fishery and a glassy lake before turning off into a field of yellowing grass studded with pylons towards the ranch. There were osprey nests atop the pylons (which I only know because of the FarOut comments informing me so, I wouldn’t know an osprey nest from a hole in the ground), and soon the path turned into reddish gravel and I saw the low wooden buildings of the ranch, hammocks swinging in the breeze. The owner gave me a quick spin around the place and then I sat down to lunch, a pastrami sandwich followed by soft serve ice cream, the thought of which had been sustaining me for the last three days.
After lunch I caught a ride into town with the owner for a much needed nicotine run, waiting in the car while he went to, literally, every single grocery store in town to fulfil various hikers’ requests, then headed back to the ranch for a beer. After a buffet dinner where I pushed the weight limit of my paper plate beyond breaking point, everyone decamped to the pool out back where someone had unearthed a karaoke machine. An evening of memorable performances, of varying qualities but equal enthusiasm, followed, the highlights of which were a deadpan rendition of Love Shack, an earnest turn at I Will Always Love You (punctuated with much slapping of legs as the mosquitos closed in), and a particularly catchy song of someone’s own creation entitled Willy Got Laid in Utah. As the sky turned inky blue above us, a hiker turned to me and said: ‘Wait, you haven’t sung yet, have you?’ I admitted I hadn’t, then immediately yawned and ran away to bed. After all, how could I compete with a six verse canto about an ex-Mormon finally getting his end away?
Day Eighty-six, miles 1411.3-1426.2
After a slap up breakfast (I added a second paper plate for structural integrity, with successful results) we rode into town to do our resupply and go to the post office, where I rescued my rain jacket, vowing to hold onto it until Canada. Fool me once, weather. We caught a ride in another pick up truck, with Tofu and I lying flat on our backs in the bed so the cops wouldn’t pull us over, and passed the time by making up songs about Tuna Sensations. Our lives are very small.
The first five miles were hot and exposed, hiking through dry brush, but we soon made it to Burney Falls, a stunning waterfall made even better by its proximity to a cafe. We hadn’t had town food for at least four hours, and we were all jonesing hard, so we looked at the waterfall for perhaps a minute before rushing to the cafe for ice cream sundaes. I bought a postcard of the falls to justify my presence, then made short work of my bounty. ‘I don’t want this to end,’ I said, referring to the ice cream, or perhaps on a deeper level (not that I have one), to a time when I could extract such joy from something so simple. It was the happiest ten minutes of my life.
We trekked on another six miles to a huge dam that bridged a staggeringly beautiful valley, then posted up to camp in a wooded grove, still boiling hot at six in the evening. For the first time I wished I was a cold soaker, having no desire to eat something warm. I cooked my dinner and let it congeal to room temperature (yum) before heading to bed.
Day Eighty-seven, miles 1426.2-1455.6
The morning was humid and muggy as I made my way through the forest, stopping for a snack break with an amazing view of Mount Shasta, snow streaked and towering. The trail was super overgrown, and I spent a while carefully trying to push the vegetation aside with my hiking poles, before eventually giving up, closing my eyes and just shoving through with my arms outstretched, tripping over invisible rocks while branches whipped at my face and arms. Oh well. The gorse scars on my legs had started to heal, so I needed a new injury to complain about.
The trail was uphill all day, and the water sources all required detours, so it was a tiring afternoon. I misread a FarOut comment about the last water source and was too exhausted to backtrack, so I made the somewhat risky decision to tough it out with only a litre at camp. I chose the dinner that required the least amount of water, meaning my first ever ramen bomb, the ingredients for which I’d purchased at Aquaman’s insistence, would have to wait for another day. Such a shame.
Just as I was falling asleep, there was a huge crashing sound from the bushes on my left, branches snapping and trees swishing. Then from my right, some kind of wailing, snarling noise. I called out to Dracula, asking what it was, but he obviously had no idea either, so I lay stock still and hoped whatever it was didn’t come and snack on the unsuspecting hikers camped six feet away. It was the first night I’d been truly scared on the PCT. But one good thing about these thirty mile days we’re doing – I was so wiped that even in my terrified state I fell straight to sleep. We never did find out what the noise was.
Day Eighty-eight, miles 1455.6-1472.3
This morning was some of my favourite hiking so far on trail – a gentle descent on a soft wooded track through quiet, shady forest. I really hope this is a preview for Oregon – I’d love nothing more than to spend two weeks smashing out huge miles in this terrain before facing Washington, aka the final boss, breaker of hearts and minds. I stopped to get water and was joined by a doe and her ridiculously cute fawn, who were not remotely scared of me. I’d heard the deer in this part of California were a menace, making a racket all night long and stealing anything you left outside your tent for seemingly no reason other than to be jerks (what would a deer want with toe socks? They wouldn’t even fit), but these two seemed benevolent enough, and I followed them down the trail for a while before they skittered into the trees.
As the morning wore on, my shin, which had been bothering me for days, turned from moderately painful to abject agony, and I spent five miles wrestling with my judgement before making the difficult decision to get off trail at a parking lot up ahead and go early into Mount Shasta to rest, skipping thirty miles of trail. This turned out to be an absolute ordeal. I’d hoped the parking lot would be full of cars, but it was eerily empty, remote and fifteen miles from the nearest town. I figured if I followed the road then before long I’d see human life. Ha.
Underestimating the length of my detour, I set out, idiotically, with less than a litre of water, and after half an hour of hiking along an abandoned, unshaded road without seeing a soul, I started to worry. I had no phone signal and no idea how long it would take to get to town. At least on the PCT I’d known where I was. Worse, I decided to eat the coffee cake I’d been saving, but when I opened the wrapper it crumbled out of my hand and into the dirt. A bad omen.
The road came out next to a reservoir, and I trekked around the edge, spotting a few empty cars but no humans to drive them. After six miles of trudging along the road, I finally saw a man getting into his car and sprinted towards him, garbling unintelligibly about running out of water and being injured and would he please, please take me wherever he was going, even if was hell itself. I can’t even imagine what I looked like to him, filthy and limping and half dead from exhaustion and dehydration. Whether out of pity or terror, he gave me a ride to McCloud, where I was able to hitch into Shasta with a lovely trail angel who told me she was taking a break from hosting hikers this year (while offering more than four times to let me stay at her house).
Once in town I booked a hotel and devoured a burger, slowly returning to my human form. As I was finishing up I got a satellite message from Dracula – he’d received an emergency evacuation alert for Mount Shasta but with no phone signal, he couldn’t tell if they were camped in the evac zone or not. With the pressure of potentially saving my trail family’s lives weighing heavy on my shoulders, I tried to line up the news with the watch duty map with where they were camped, and thankfully it seemed the fire was well south of them. Hoping I hadn’t read it wrong and inadvertently sentenced them all to death, I limped back to the hotel with a weird IPA I’d bought at a health food store and a replacement coffee cake, watching the eerie orange sunset over the mountains.
Day Eighty-nine, zero miles
The objective for the day was to move as little as possible – not my strong suit in normal life, let alone when I was feeling racked with guilt for skipping miles. I’m famously terrible at relaxing. I limped ten minutes down the road to get a burrito (disappointing) and some chocolate cake (incredible) then went back to the hotel and forced myself to sit still with an ice pack on. Be careful what you wish for, I guess. Every day on trail I dream about being in town, and now I was here I just wanted to be out hiking. I didn’t feel like I’d earned this town day.
Aquaman, Dracula and Tofu arrived in the late afternoon bearing two six packs, and my mood improved considerably. As we were making a dent in them the clouds that had been turning steadily blacker all day finally erupted into an insane thunderstorm, torrential rain and deafening thunder. We waited it out as long as possible but were a half hour walk from any kind of foodstuff, unless we wanted to eat a dinner of Nature Valley bars, so we strapped on our rain gear and headed downtown. We plotted our new schedule based on the Etna summit fire closure over burgers then skipped drunkenly back to the hotel to finish off the beers, discussing our worst moments on trail with the sublime confidence of people who think those days are behind them. Ha.
Day Ninety, miles 1502.8-1512.7
We were a sluggish, hungover bunch the next morning – we’re not equipped for 11pm bedtimes anymore – but we finally dragged ourselves out of the hotel and started walking into town, sticking our thumbs out from habit more than the expectation of a ride, and were stunned to have someone pull over immediately. Our hitch deposited us at Drizzle for an excellent breakfast sandwich – some kind of egg cheese bacon chipotle bagel situation that exploded the second I picked it up – and then began our usual circle around all the stores we needed to hit before going back out into the wild. I got some long overdue new socks and then went to the health food store, where I was ecstatic to be reunited with Bobo’s PBJs for the first time in 800 miles. Still wiping the tears of elation from my eyes, we went by the gas station, where I earned a stern look from the attendant when I opened my fanny pack to show her my ID and several hundred sachets of mayonnaise I’d stolen from the deli section fell out onto the counter. Oops.
Back on trail, we walked the road for a mile around a closure and then up onto Bob’s Hat trail. There was much discussion about what kind of hat Bob wore, with the conclusion that it must have been something hideous since the trail was exclusively uphill. A fedora, perhaps. We finally emerged onto the PCT proper, and the whole afternoon felt like Deja vu, as though we were walking up a huge spiral staircase where every floor was the same – dead leaves covering a gently sloping path down to a spring then up again, over and over and over. Eventually we escaped the matrix and set up camp in a mossy, witchy-looking forest, and Aquaman set about teaching me how to make my first ramen bomb. In full Masterchef mode, he was gesticulating wildly when his own ramen bomb toppled off his stove and upended into the dirt. Some teacher. I immediately offered him mine (mostly because I didn’t want to eat it) but he declined, unearthing enough food in his bag to make a replacement. I awarded the ramen bomb 10/10 in the stomach-filling category and a 1 for flavour.
Day Ninety-one, miles 1512.7-1538.2
The day began with a gnarly four mile climb, but the early morning views were gorgeous, the shaggy outline of cliffs poking into an inky blue sky. Over lunch we chatted to another hiker who told us that the section between Etna and Seaid Valley was also closed, so we spent some time re-plotting our Ashland dates. Serves us right for getting ahead of ourselves.
Logistics taken care of, I set off again in the afternoon to find my shin pain had returned, approximately forty times as bad as before. I limped along as far as I could but had to stop a couple of miles earlier than planned at Deadfall Lakes. It was the first time I’d camped without my friends in almost three months. Though day hikers abounded, sagging tents peppering the grass like daisies, they were very benign, and I sat and read my book beneath the rusty red hills, praying my shin would feel better tomorrow.
Day Ninety-two, miles 1538.2-1561.8
I guess there’s no point praying if you don’t believe in god. There was no improvement in my leg when I got up at 4am to make up the miles I’d missed yesterday, but I plunged on into the black morning anyway, somewhat questioning the logic of hiking in the dark on an injury, scanning the path meticulously for obstacles. The sun soon came up, glowing red across the mountains, and I’d caught up to the others by 6am.
The scenery was stunning all day, misty blue mountains and towering piles of jagged, dusky rocks. Unfortunately I was barely looking at it, focusing all my energy on not screaming every time I put my right foot down. I was popping Advil like it was candy but it barely made a dent in the pain. I don’t know how I managed to hike 23 miles in this state, except that I had no choice. I staggered down the last mile in tears and collapsed in a heap at the trailhead to wait for our ride into Etna, where I planned to anaesthetise my leg by getting drunk.
Day Ninety-three, zero miles
With no improvement in the leg department, I waved the others off as they took the bus to Seaid Valley to hike on before taking my own bus to Yreka, where the closest emergency room was located. I was seriously worried I’d developed a stress fracture, so I put all my faith in my insurance company and asked to see a doctor and have an X-Ray, knowing I was potentially condemning myself to a lifetime of medical debt by doing so. After a pretty short wait I was told there were no signs of a fracture, and instructed to watch some YouTube videos about stretching. Can’t wait to get that hospital bill. I’m sure it’ll be worth every penny.
Dejected by the lack of useful advice but somewhat heartened by the notion that my hike wasn’t necessarily over, I busied myself in the hospital parking lot making plans to get to Ashland. As I flicked between hotel websites and trail angel Facebook pages, the hospital security guard kept poking her head out and asking what I was doing. What did she think, I was going to stage a stick up with my hiking poles and rob the gift shop?
After an hour or so of loitering, an incredible trail angel came to pick me up, a two-hour round trip that she refused to take any money for. We smoked in her car the whole way to Ashland, as she informed me: ‘here’s the thing about me. I cuss, I smoke, and I love Jesus.’ What a queen.
She dropped me at my hotel, which turned out to be much fancier than the knockdown price on booking.com suggested, and I tried not to touch anything in my room, unpacking my bag into the bathtub so as to not damage the soft furnishings. It’s a testament to the professionalism of the staff that they made no comment when my dusty, stinking butt clattered through the door, Bobo’s wrappers and mud dropping all over their pristine reception room. I had been looking forward to Ashland so much – weeks I’d spent reading descriptions of all the places I wanted to go – but I felt like I didn’t even deserve to be there, having been driven over the border rather than hiking there. But I still had to eat, so went out to Gil’s for a bahn mi and then swung by the co-op for a roadie and a stupidly expensive brownie, which I ate in bed while weeping disproportionately in front of A Star Is Born. I had four days in Ashland to sit on my butt and heal. Pray for me!
