A hot day up high

The first night camping, with James, I didn’t sleep at all; I simply rested all night. Tired as I was, I just couldn’t sleep (which actually is pretty standard for me the first night out camping). Last night I slept for the first few hours, but then woke and spent the rest of the starry night falling in and out of brief, light dozes. Both nights my chest hurt considerably, especially early on, a symptom I attributed to the elevation gain. I figured it would take some time to acclimate.

This morning I set off at 6:30. Test was still in her tent when I passed. The first four miles of the day were uphill, though not as precipitously as yesterday. Still, I took a long break at the ridge top, at 10,500’. I was sitting on a boulder reading Far From the Madding Crowd when Test appeared and set her pack down next to mine.

We ended up hiking together the rest of the day, not always within sight of each other, but taking the same breaks, getting water at the same spots, talking…. She’s from Seattle but grew up in Riverside. “People talk about the rain,” she said, “but I love it. I couldn’t bear that heat in California, I was glad to get away.” She’s maybe thirty with a round face, a bandana on her head, a short braid coming out the back. She’s been on the trail since late April. She’d never even heard of the Pacific Crest Trail until a year ago, never done any walk like this, but after 700 miles she’s a seasoned pro. Like the other thru-hikers I’ve met the last two days, she likes to talk and she has opinions.

A couple miles further along, we put down our packs and took a side trail a quarter mile downhill through the dry, piney woods in search of a stream…. But we found only a narrow, dry watercourse. Back up at the main trail Test discovered a note someone had left under a rock, indicating the stream had dried up. Would’ve been nice if we’d noticed that before….

Through this stretch there was no water on the trail, but supposed sources down off the trail, at spots. At the next opportunity we found another note, also discouraging, but then just as we moved on, we met two other thru-hikers—T-Rex and Sunshine—acquaintances of Test, and they said indeed there was water. So we doffed packs and walked down the steep slope, over dry ground covered with pine cones, and found the stream out in the middle of a sage meadow.

Afterwards, I went on alone, and the trail climbed up through an open forest of big Jeffrey pine, alive and dead, the latter stark and golden in the sun, spread out over slopes of fine white gravel punctuated by the occasional rough boulder…. The path made a faint line over the open ground, and the hot sun beat down, the temperature again up in the 80s despite the elevation…. I came to another off-trail water source and decided I needed more water…. But the stream I found was barely a trickle, an inch deep….

Test passed while I rested back up by the trail with my shoes off…. But I soon followed in her wake…. Unfortunately I missed a fork in the trail and walked downhill for a half mile before I realized my mistake. I knew the trail only went up along this stretch but I just spaced out for a time…. That extra half mile of climbing back was discouraging….

Eventually, I came upon Test again, just beyond Mulkey Pass. She had stopped to cook her dinner, on a big flat rock beside the trail, with a far view of the mountains rolling away to the south. I didn’t feel like cooking—I still wasn’t very hungry, though I’d been forcing energy bars down every once in a while—so I had muesli instead. I discovered that a mug of powdered milk is about the best tasting treat ever.

Moving on, we continued to climb steadily, from Trail Pass, up to Corpsman Creek, a lovely little stream…. We were aiming for Cottonwood Pass, actually a small tarn just beyond, but when we came to a good campsite on the north side of a large meadow, we decided to stop. Or Test did and I agreed. I was pretty much all in. I’d walked about twenty miles, gained nearly 3000’ in elevation, all under a hot sun the day long…. My long term goal was twenty miles a day, but I was still negotiating the break-in period, and those twenty didn’t come easy….

We put up our tents, I hung up my food bag, then sat on a boulder and washed the trail dust from my face and neck and feet and legs…. I got in the tent just after sunset, read a few pages before falling asleep and sleeping hard—for an hour. When I woke my chest was aching considerably, worse than it had before and not to be ignored. The sort of pain that pushes out all other thoughts and possibilities. I took long, deep breaths, thinking I needed more oxygen, but it didn’t seem to help…. I checked my pulse, but that was fine…. I’d been figuring that the chest pain was a matter of elevation, but shouldn’t I have acclimated by now? Shouldn’t it have been better at least? Of course, I couldn’t help but also wonder if it was my heart—a worrisome possibility, up at 11,000’ many miles from any sort of help.

I drank water at regular intervals, figuring I was a little dehydrated too…. I sat up and that seemed to help the pain, a little, for a moment…. For two hours I lay and sat, occasionally trying to knead the pain away, but it would not subside…. And I thought, what am I going to do? In the next two days the trail would rise higher into the mountains, until some thirty miles hence I would cross Forester Pass, at 13,200’ the highest point on the entire trail. What would happen if I kept going up?  My concerns became more immediate when the pain would suddenly collect and crescendo: what is going on? Am I having a heart attack? I was sweating in my sleeping bag, worried and miserable….

Around midnight the pain subsided to a dull ache, and the rest of the night I dozed on and off, trying not to think about what to do, leaving a decision for the morning….