Wild

Doug, Tom, and Greg were wading in the shallow spot where I’d cleaned up a few hours before. Beyond them, the water raged in torrents, rushing over boulders as big as my tent. I thought of the snow I’d soon be encountering if I continued on with the ice ax I didn’t yet know how to use and the white ski pole with its cute little pink wrist strap that had come to me only by chance. I hadn’t yet begun to think about what was next on the trail. I’d only listened and nodded when Ed told me that most of the PCT hikers who’d come through Kennedy Meadows in the three weeks he’d been camped here had opted to get off the trail at this point because of the record snowpack that made the trail essentially unpassable for most of the next four or five hundred miles. They caught rides and buses to rejoin the PCT farther north, at lower elevations, he told me. Some intended to loop back later in the summer to hike the section they’d missed; others to skip it. He said that a few had ended their hikes altogether, just as Greg had told me earlier, deciding to hike the PCT another, less record-breaking year. And fewer still had forged ahead, determined to make it through the snow.

Grateful for my cheap camp sandals, I picked my way over the rocks that lined the riverbed toward the men, the water so cold my bones hurt.

“I got something for you,” said Doug when I reached him. He held his hand out to me. In it was a shiny feather, about a foot long, so black it shone blue in the sun.

“For what?” I asked, taking it from him.

“For luck,” he said, and touched my arm.

When he took his hand away, the place where it had been felt like a burn—I could feel how little I’d been touched in the past fourteen days, how alone I’d been.

“So I was thinking about the snow,” I said, holding the feather, my voice raised over the rush of the river. “The people who bypassed? They were all here a week or two before us. A lot more snow has melted by now, so maybe it’ll be okay.” I looked at Greg and then at the black feather, stroking it.

“The snow depth at Bighorn Plateau on June first was more than double what it was the same day last year,” he said, tossing a stone. “A week isn’t going to make much of a difference in that regard.”

I nodded, as if I knew where Bighorn Plateau was, or what it meant for the snowpack to be double what it was a year ago. I felt like a fraud even having this discussion, like a mascot among players, as if they were the real PCT hikers and I was just happening through. As if somehow, because of my inexperience, my failure to read even a single page written by Ray Jardine, my laughably slow pace, and my belief that it had been reasonable to pack a foldable saw, I had not actually hiked to Kennedy Meadows from Tehachapi Pass, but instead had been carried along.

But I had walked here, and I wasn’t ready to give up on seeing the High Sierra just yet. It had been the section of the trail I’d most anticipated, its untouched beauty extolled by the authors of The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1: California and immortalized by the naturalist John Muir in the books he’d written a century before. It was the section of mountains he’d dubbed the “Range of Light.” The High Sierra and its 13,000- and 14,000-foot-high peaks, its cold, clear lakes and deep canyons were the point of hiking the PCT in California, it seemed. Plus, bypassing it would be a logistical mess. If I had to skip the High Sierra, I’d end up in Ashland more than a month before I intended to.

“I’d like to push on, if there’s a way,” I said, waving the feather with a flourish. My feet didn’t hurt anymore. They’d gone blissfully numb in the icy water.

“Well, we do have about forty miles to play with before the going gets seriously rough—from here up to Trail Pass,” said Doug. “There’s a trail there that intersects the PCT and goes down to a campground. We can hike at least that far and see how it goes—see how much snow there is—and then bail out there if we want to.”

“What do you think of that, Greg?” I asked. Whatever he would do was what I’d do.

He nodded. “I think that’s a good plan.”

“That’s what I’m going to do,” I said. “I’ll be okay. I have my ice ax now.”

Greg looked at me. “You know how to use it?”

The next morning he gave me a tutorial.

“This is the shaft,” he said, running his hand up the length of the ax. “And this is the spike,” he added, touching a finger to the sharp end. “And on the other end there’s the head.”

The shaft? The head? The spike? I tried not to crack up like an eighth grader in sex ed class, but I couldn’t help myself.