Wild

I sweated as I hiked, the whole backside of me wet where my pack covered my body, regardless of the temperature or what clothing I wore. When I stopped, I began shivering within minutes, my wet clothes suddenly icy cold. My muscles had at last begun to adjust to the demands of long-distance hiking, but now new demands were placed on them, and not only to brace myself in the constant effort to stay upright. If the ground upon which I was walking was on a slope, I had to chop out each step in order to get my footing, lest I slip down the mountain and crash into the rocks and bushes and trees below, or worse, go sailing over the edge. Methodically, I kicked into the snow’s icy crust, making footholds step by step. I remembered Greg teaching me how to do this very thing with my ice ax back in Kennedy Meadows. Now I wished for that ice ax with an almost pathological fervor, picturing it sitting uselessly in the PCT hiker free box in Sierra City. With all the kicking and bracing, my feet blistered in new places as well as in all the old places that had blistered back in my first days of hiking, the flesh on my hips and shoulders still rubbed raw by Monster’s straps.

I walked on, a penitent to the trail, my progress distressingly slow. I’d generally been covering two miles an hour as I hiked most days, but everything was different in the snow: slower, less certain. I thought it would take me six days to reach Belden Town, but when I’d packed my food bag with six days’ worth of food, I didn’t have any idea what I’d encounter. Six days in these conditions were out of the question, and not only for the physical challenge of moving through the snow. Each step was also a calculated effort to stay approximately on what I hoped was the PCT. With my map and compass in hand, I tried to remember all I could from Staying Found, which I’d burned long ago. Many of the techniques—triangulating and cross bearing and bracketing—had perplexed me even when I’d been holding the book in my hand. Now they were impossible to do with any confidence. I’d never had a mind for math. I simply couldn’t hold the formulas and numbers in my head. It was a logic that made little sense to me. In my perception, the world wasn’t a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story. So mostly I relied on the narrative descriptions in my guidebook, reading them over and over, matching them up with my maps, attempting to divine the intent and nuance of every word and phrase. It was like being inside a giant standardized test question: If Cheryl climbs north along a ridge for an hour at a rate of 1.5 miles per hour, then west to a saddle from which she can see two oblong lakes to the east, is she standing on the south flank of Peak 7503?

I guessed and guessed again, measuring, reading, pausing, calculating, and counting before ultimately putting my faith in whatever I believed to be true. Fortunately, this stretch of the trail held plenty of clues, riddled with peaks and cliffs, lakes and ponds that were often visible from the trail. I still had the same feeling as I had from the start, when I’d begun walking the Sierra Nevada from its southern beginning—as if I were perched above the whole world, looking down on so much. I pushed from ridge to ridge, feeling relieved when I spotted bare ground in the patches where the sun had melted the snow clean away; quivering with joy when I identified a body of water or a particular rock formation that matched what the map reflected or the guidebook described. In those moments, I felt strong and calm, and then a moment later, when I paused yet again to take stock, I became certain that I’d done a very, very stupid thing in opting to continue on. I passed trees that seemed disconcertingly familiar, as if I’d surely passed them an hour before. I gazed across vast stretches of mountains that struck me as not so different from the vast stretch I’d seen earlier. I scanned the ground for footprints, hoping to be reassured by even the slightest sign of another human being, but saw none. I saw only animal tracks—the soft zigzags of rabbits or the scampering triangles of what I supposed were porcupines or raccoons. The air came alive with the sound of the wind whipping the trees at times and at other times it was profoundly hushed by the endless silencing snow. Everything but me seemed utterly certain of itself. The sky didn’t wonder where it was.

“HELLO!” I bellowed periodically, knowing each time that no one would answer, but needing to hear a voice anyway, even if it was only my own. My voice would guard me against it, I believed, it being the possibility that I could be lost in this snowy wilderness forever.