Walking uphill is hard

Cow Creek was just a trickle, but James and I stopped and took off our packs. This was as far as he was going….

We had left our camp at seven and descended from Deer Ridge to Monache Meadow and a bridge over a fork of the Kern River. James walked north with me for a couple more hours, for about four miles, to the small creek. He didn’t want to go back, he wanted to keep on with me, and I wished he could have too. We do well together, even after all these years of living so far apart. We first backpacked together in 1980 on the Appalachian Trail in Virginia, just overnight. A friend named Tim Stapleton came along too, and midway through the first day I was surprised and impressed when Tim pulled a six-pack of Budweiser from his pack. Later James on I backpacked in Olympic National Park, along the coast, and one spring break in Zion with mountain bikes….

Before he left he hugged me and held on and said a prayer for me, to keep me safe and happy, and I just barely held it together. And then he was gone, running back down the trail (he planned to jog back to the car, fifteen miles; he’s in rather better shape than me).

I stayed by Cow Creek for a while, looking at the maps, eating some muesli….until another hiker came along, a gray-haired man in his sixties, his pack bristling with accoutrements. He introduced himself as Swiss Army, and he was a thru-hiker;  having started at the Mexican border, he was aiming for the Canadian, a 2700 mile walk. On the Pacific Crest Trail, the thru-hikers take or are given trail names, and they use them. I felt silly using the names, but I’d only been on the trail for two days…. I wasn’t a part of the fraternity, the people who had bonded on the long walk, 700 miles so far, across mostly desert over the last month and a half. Swiss Army tossed a long tube into the water and pumped a water filter attached to one of his shoulder straps; the water fed directly into a bladder inside his pack.

I would see him a couple more times during the course of the day. He was moving a bit slower than usual, he said; he’d just returned from the trail after two weeks off to nurse an infected blister. “It’s still a little troublesome,” he said, and then witnessed for the advantages of taking off one’s shoes at each break. I already do this myself, but most people don’t. “You gotta air ‘em out,” he said. The feet are the most vulnerable part of the anatomy for long-distance hikers….

The next five miles of trail was tough. I gained 700’ elevation in the first mile, 2300’ over the full stretch. The temperature had risen into the 80s, the air was dead dry, the trail dusty and hot…. I had to stop often to let my heart rate subside, to get my breath…. My chest hurt, I supposed because of the elevation, and I hoped I would acclimate soon…. I took me five hours to make the climb to a high ridge at 10,500’.

I felt a lot better going down the other side. Walking on a level is best, downhill is mostly fine though tough on the knees and toes sometimes; but uphill…. I guess I‘m a Minnesotan, because climbing is a struggle…..

I dropped down 1500’ to Death Canyon Creek, just a step-across trickle of less than savory looking water…. I’d come fifteen miles, and though three hours of daylight remained, I decided to leave the climb out of the canyon for the next morning.

Swiss Army had stopped at the creek, as well as two other thru-hikers. They were making their dinner but planned on hiking further after eating. One of them had already eaten and was about to move on. He introduced himself as Challenger, and when he asked me to stuff a hat in his pack (which he was wearing) I quickly complied. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man, well-tanned, maybe forty, and with the striking good looks and charismatic presence of a movie star. The sort of person it’s hard not to stare at….

But he soon set off on up the trail (carrying a massive pack). The other hiker was a fortyish man named Cowboy, named for his headwear, yes, he said, but also because he had grown up on a ranch in Washington state; more recently, he had just retired from the Marines. He and Swiss Army spread out their cooking gear near the creek and made dinner. I felt a little shy, and they had taken the likely spots, so I cooked my dinner in the dirt by a nearby boulder. They had their cooking routine down, after hundreds of miles on the trail, but it was my first meal and my ministrations were awkward and inefficient.

I made couscous, and put in a packet of salmon, but I could eat less than half of the meal. Swiss Army said, yes, you don’t have much appetite for the first week or so; I was discovering that I had brought much more food than necessary.

I was also discovering equipment troubles…. The steripen I’d brought for treating water had stopped working earlier in the day (but luckily I had chlorine dioxide drops too, though I don’t like the taste), and then my stove stopped working just at the end of cooking the couscous. When I mentioned the stove troubles, Cowboy pulled out a small alcohol stove. “I’ve been carrying this around as a back-up, I don’t know why,” he said, and offered to me. I didn’t have any alcohol, but I did have a small empty bottle, and both men contributed some of their alcohol, filling my bottle. 

After he finished eating, Swiss Army cleaned his cooking pot, then put in some more water and shaved. 

Another thru-hiker arrived, a young woman named Just a Test (“You can call me Test for short.”). Swiss Army filtered some of the rather brownish water for her, and I got him to fill one of my bottles too.

Soon Swiss Army and Cowboy set off, but Test made camp a hundred yards up from the creek, to get away from the mosquitoes. I put up my tent in an opening lower down, amongst several big pale boulders.  I got inside just after sunset, exhausted again, and read for a short time before passing out.