What is that noise and why are you making it?

I took my breakfast at a campsite under big trees by small Asa Lake…. The first hours of the day had been a slow descent through a handsome forest, the air cool and still. In a glade two deer, a doe and a fawn, stopped and stared at me in alarm. Or seeming alarm. Then they went back to feeding. I see deer most mornings but never many, just one or two. All day long chipmunks and ground squirrels scuttle quickly away as I approach. I see ravens and dark-eyed juncos, robins and woodpeckers, stellar jays and gray jays (the latter the most common of all the birds and the one with most unattractive call)…. Occasionally I’ll alter my stride to avoid stepping on a black beetle; I’ve seen one snake (garter). Sometimes when I come up to a creek or lake I see small trout dart away. Humans are fairly common most days.

For example, not far from Asa I came upon a young couple having a rest by the trail. He wore an Angels baseball cap, and her hat was green camo. They had started at Echo Lake and were on their way to Mammoth. They didn’t look like backpackers, or experienced backpackers anyway—more like campground beer drinkers, ATV riders—but she said they had walked the JMT last year, so you can’t always go by appearance. When we parted, the man said to me, “Have a good hike, buddy.”

“Buddy”? I wouldn’t call any one buddy, but especially someone twice my age.

The trail rose for a stretch, up to 9300’, then descended to Noble Lake, a small, unimpressive bit of water down in an open bowl and surrounded by sagebrush…. The land had reverted to the volcanic and the next bit consisted of a tough set of switchbacks steeply down through a maze of red crumbly rock outcroppings. Halfway along I man in his 60s, coming up and heading south. He had started far to the north in Dunsmuir, and he was doing the PCT on the two-year plan, in bits and in various directions, not continuously. He said that once he reached Kennedy Meadows (about two hundred miles away), he’d only have a 120 mile section left, somewhere farther north. He had the sun-darkened and craggy face, the faded clothing of a long distance man….

These trail conversations usually don’t last long…. But sometimes it’s hard to know when or where to bring them to an end….Do you limit topics to trail distances, starting points and goals, the last night’s camp, or do you go on to hometowns and other hikes, maybe even family or a job…. Usually I’m the one that says, “Well,” and something about moving along. This time the old man said, “Well, my legs are stiffening up. I can’t stand here anymore.” And he went up and I went down.

The afternoon was hot, hotter than it has been in some days, and I soon took a break in the shade of a massive cedar…. Not long after, I came upon a man sitting beside the trail. I’d seen him ahead for a time—the country through here was open—and this was his second rest in about one hundred feet. Of all the very large packs I saw on the trail, this man’s was easily the largest. Not only did he have one of the biggest you can buy, he had tied so much stuff on the outside—including what looked like a small guitar in a soft case—that his load was double the size of the pack.  

He wore a knee brace and jeans shorts, and after a minute I was thinking he was a little crazy, though that might not be the technical term.

He told me he had been heading south, but he had just decided to go back north to Ebbett’s Pass, three or four miles away. That’s where he had started from earlier in the day, after hitchhiking up from the town of Bridgeport. But walking up for the money, gaining a not insubstantial amount of elevation, he had determined that he didn’t have enough food to make it to Sonora Pass, which was thirty miles away. I couldn’t imagine what filled his pack if he didn’t have enough food for that distance, but I kept that thought to myself…. “I’m going to hitch back to Bridgeport,” he said. “It’ll probably take a while”-- yes, it’s thirty miles, on two different roads—“and then I’ll just come back on the trail at Sonora Pass.” He had no particular trail itinerary or goal. “I’m just, you know, camping out for the summer…. Probably till the end of August, I don’t know.”

At Ebbett’s Pass the forest was more sparse, the terrain granular and sandy and dusty. The temperature was still on the rise…. I crossed the road and started climbing. Somewhere not too far off the trail to the left, someone, or some people were firing guns, and I rushed along, keeping my head down and hoping they were not firing in the direction of the trail. Roads bring in people with other and sometimes competing agendas.

After a mile and a half I came to Upper Kinney Lake, and even though it was the middle of the afternoon I was caught by a lovely campsite, on a small knoll thirty feet above the picturesque mountain lake. Smooth boulders fenced off three sides of the small site, and my tent fit right between….

I went down by the rocky verge and sat with my feet in the water, looking at my maps, reading, snacking…. Later I walked around the lake, through forest along portions of the shore, over big rock outcroppings at others. At the lower end I discovered that the lake was actually a reservoir: fifty feet of low stone walls had been built to close off the basin. From the wall I could see down on Lower Kinney Lake, a bit larger, with a big peninsula jutting out from the western side.

All around the lake I found more campsites, none quite as nice as mine, and a many a bit over-loved—trash in the fire pits, for example, a whole full carton of eggs at one site. This was not something I had seen before on the trail. The PCT and JMT hikers are careful and conscientious in following a pack-it-out ethic… But apparently here was a place frequented by other sorts of campers, probably since the lake was so close to a road.

Not long after I arrived, a group of backpackers, maybe four or five people, pulled in and set up camp near me. Coming around the lake, I met one of them on the shore, a man in his fifties, in jeans and a cotton t-shirt. He said that they had come up from the road and would be staying the weekend. The walk was short but their packs were heavy. “None of that freeze-dried junk for us,” he said. “We brought canned foods.”

Myself, I had mashed potatoes from potato flakes, and chicken from a packet. I’ve been saving the potatoes because they are the lightest of my dinners. And, it turns out, the best. I sat with my back against one of the boulders and listened to a Moth podcast while I cooked and ate….

My neighbors stayed up late, long after I had gotten in my tent. I could see their fire and hear the murmur of their voices, but they weren’t loud, not at first anyway. But then this sort of tinny banging noise started, coming from their direction… I couldn’t tell what it was exactly, but my first guess was some kid using their empty food cans for a percussion performance…. I thought I’d seen a twelve-year-old with them…. So, okay, no big deal, it probably won’t last long…. Or maybe it will.

I managed to doze off but soon woke to the continuing noise. I thought, what the hell. I got out of the tent to pee, then I stood facing their campsite with my hands on my hips, a pose to communicate my outrage to the darkness. I said out loud, but didn’t shout, “what the hell?”

I got back in my tent…. By this time, the kid-playing-tin-can-bongos theory was out…. No one had that kind of staying power….  Had these people made some sort of food can wind chimes to scare off bears? Far-fetched, I figured, but it was the best I could do…. The noise soon relented, but before long started up again…. Eventually I fell asleep again but it took some time….