10 Days Is Too Long

At Mile: 906

Earlier today, David and I wandered out of the woods in rough shape. We were dirty and smelly, cranky and hungry. We are covered in scrapes, bruises, and mosquito bites, our lips are cracked and bleeding, and we are visibly thinner than we were ten days ago. It has been a tough time.

To understand why, it might be helpful to first describe this section of the Sierra Nevadas. The landscape is painfully beautiful, every view looking like a stock screensaver photo. And it is remote, only populated by chipmunks and marmots and the steady stream of hikers that pass through. The section is broken up by high passes that hikers must traverse to weave their way through the mountain range. The trail is almost always climbing up to or down from a pass. Six miles up, nine miles down, eight miles up, five miles down. Up, down, up, down. The passes even have names: Forrester, Glen, Pinchot, Mather, Muir, Sendon, Silver. The approaches and descents are more steep and prolonged than the trail has been up to this point. There is still snow covering broad areas on either sides of the passes. Factoring in altitude, over 13,000 ft at times and never lower than 8000 ft, it makes for an exhausting trek.

So that is how David and I have spent the last 10 days. Heaving filled-to-the-brim packs over what are essentially really inconvenient shortcuts. Our lungs working overtime, straining to accommodate air that does not contain enough oxygen. Our average mileage dropping in the face of these challenges.

The mountain snow can change quickly, often melting up to a quarter mile in a day. If we were positioned right to tackle a pass early in the morning, the snow would be crunchy and firm from the overnight freeze. If we showed up later in the day, it was like walking on a snow cone. Postholing was common, and both amusing and frustrating, as we never knew when the ground would disappear out from under us and we would be left with one or both legs stuck up to the hip.

We navigated around brief snowy patches in some areas, scrambling on rocks until we could pick up the trail on the other side. Sometimes long stretches of trail were completely obscured by broad snowfields and we trudged around looking for any hint of a path in the distance. Sometimes we would just blindly follow footsteps made by the hundreds of hikers that have passed through before us, hoping they knew where they were going. Once, working our way up Muir pass, we didn't even make an effort to guess where the trail was and instead marched straight up the mountain, plowing our own path. And sometimes the trail heading downhill was a similarly lost cause and we had no choice but to glissade, ploping ourselves down in the well used butt grooves of hikers past, letting gravity do its thing, and hoping for the best.

But it wasn't just about the passes. We hopped on logs and rocks over clear streams swollen with snow melt. We drank from the same streams, relishing the ice cold water. We watched marmots play around turquoise alpine lakes and tried not to startle deer as they grazed. We took long lunch breaks under towering pines. We rinsed our clothes in the creeks and left them out to bake in the afternoon sun. We sat with head nets on, diligently defending exposed skin from swarms of mosquitos. I had the fun experience of being sunburnt from both the sky and the ground. We watched the smoke from a nearby wildfire drift across the valley. We learned the absolute freedom of the moments directly after fording a river, when our shoes are completely saturated with water and we no longer feel the need to hop around trying to keep them dry on a flooded trail. We complained that the trail felt so crowded, as this portion runs along the John Muir Trail, which has its own thru-hikers traveling north and south. For a few brief hours on Saturday, the sun was covered by a cloud. It had been weeks since we'd seen a cloud in the relentlessly bluebird sky.

And for the past two days, David and I thought of food. Starving but nauseated at the thought of eating what little was left in our bear canisters, our conversations were dominated by one topic. "Remember how good that milkshake from Burgerville was? I can't decide if I want to eat ice cream or chips first. How much money would you be willing to pay if someone had a cold 7up for sale right now? Should we get two pizzas in town or three? I just want to eat something that grew in the earth and has some nutritional value and vitamins."

I don't think we'll be heading out for another 10 day stretch anytime soon. The only reason we tried for the 10 day push was because the only option for resupply in that stretch included a eight mile side trail and a 40 mile hitch. We were so lazy that we carried 10 days of food to avoid hiking 16 non-trail miles. It won't happen again.

Now we're in town, being lazy and eating all the foods we were daydreaming about on the trail.