8/18 It's Not "Goodbye." It's Just "See You Later."

This is a difficult post for me to write. This is my announcement that I am leaving the trail for the 2015 season. I have wrestled with this for a very long time, and while I know it is the right choice for me, it has not been an easy decision to make. There was no one clear, concise reason for why I’ve decided to call it a year. It was just a lot of little reasons that led me to the conclusion that it was the right time. Honestly, and as strange as it sounds, I believe that the trail told me it was time for me to go. And I listened, because I wanted to leave the trail while I still loved it. I wanted to leave the trail with all the extraordinary, beautiful, happy memories I have of this summer intact. I wanted to leave knowing that I will return.

Let me first say that I really truly do love my life on the trail. If I didn’t love it, I would have left a long time ago. I even loved it when it was hard, when it broke me down. The trail was everything I had hoped it would be, and so, so much more. The trail has a simple beauty to it, and it challenges you to grow as a person with every step. It makes you appreciate the little things, and allows you to live on a different frequency, experiencing intense emotions and events almost as if you were moving through them in slow motion. It is life in its most potent form.

Second, I would like to emphasize that I am NOT “quitting”. Quitting implies failure, and I do not believe that I failed. I hiked 1,500 miles. I saw beautiful places that few have ever seen, places that it takes days to walk to. I made new friends and met wonderful people every day. I experienced the kindness of strangers, and learned to trust that things always work out for the best if you believe they will. I came out to this trail to try my hand at this life, and I succeeded.

Third, I would like to speak to future aspiring thru-hikers, reading this as research for their own hike. My advice to you all? Leave your expectations at home. Seriously. Leave them behind. All of them. Your expectations for the trail, for the people, and most importantly, for yourself. I had expected that I would hike the whole trail this year. Abandoning that expectation was harder than any other challenge the trail placed on me this summer.

And finally, I want to say thank you. Thank you to my mom, for handling the stress of my wilderness excursion like a champ and letting me cry on the phone to her when the trail was mean to me. Thanks to my dad for not lecturing me too much for being a bum-hippie for 4 months. Thanks to my brothers for supporting me and secretly thinking I’m cool, even though you had to pretend like I was embarrassing and weird. Thank you to the friends that I called every town to tell all my crazy trail stories to and who gave me great advice from thousands of miles away. Thank you to my friends and neighbors who sent me letters and encouraged me every step of the way. Thank you to everyone who told me they were proud of me and they believed in me. Thank you to the friends I made along the way, for a summer of amazing memories and for inspiring me every day out there. Thank you to the trail angels who helped me out and showed me kindness when I needed it most. Thank you to the trail, our Eywah, for providing the most incredible setting for this life-changing experience (and to the PCTA for taking good care of it).

A very wise friend of mine said something to me the day I left for my hike, before I’d walked even a mile of this beautiful trail. “It doesn’t matter how far you walk, how many miles you do, how long you’re out there. The minute you put your feet on that trail, you’ve won. You got yourself here. You knew you wanted something so badly, even though you didn’t know what it would be like. You wanted this, and you made it happen.”

People ask me all the time why I decided to do the trail, and I have never had a good answer for that question. All I know is that some voice deep inside me said that I needed to be there, on that trail this summer. That same voice was what told me it was time to go home. When that voice speaks, it’s hard to ignore. So I’m home now, starting my next exciting adventure. Put a pin in it, PCT. We’ll meet again one day.

8/11 SoBo Life, Castella/Mt.Shasta Back to South Lake

Little Foot and I decided it would be smartest to do our hitch in stages. The first leg of our hitch would take us to Sacramento, where we could post up near the interstate and have an easier time finding a ride for the longer second leg to Mt. Shasta up north.

We got our first ride in minutes. Kris, a teacher from Texas on a cross country road trip for the summer, was driving to San Francisco after dropping his wife off at the airport. He told us the last thing his wife said to him was, "don't pick up any hitchhikers!" Whoops. He offered to get us as far as Sacramento, since it was on his way. We swapped stories for the whole two hour drive, stories about life on the trail, stories from his road trip with his wife. We stopped by a burger place called In-N-Out (which is apparently a big deal in California, and it was a crime against humanity that I'd never even heard of it) and bought lunch for Kris as a thank you. When he dropped us off at a gas station near the interstate, he said, "I know this is how this works, but I feel weird leaving you two on the side of the road like this." 

At In-N-Out, left to right: Kris, Happy Feet, Little Foot

We grabbed some lunch at the rest stop and then geared up for the longer stretch of road to get us up north. Our first ride, Randy, offered to take us about 20 minutes up the road to a truck stop where it would be easier to get a ride. Where Randy dropped us off, it was HOT. We stood outside the truck stop with our sign for Mt. Shasta, trying to look cheerful and not like gross, sweaty vagabonds frying under the glaring California sun. To lighten our spirits, Little Foot and I started singing James Brown and Marvin Gaye songs, being silly and dancing. People leaving the stop laughed at us and our enthusiasm, but no rides. After a bit, a semi pulled over, and a seedy looking guy motioned for us to get in. Little Foot looked at me warily. I shook my head. Not a chance. I know semi drivers aren't supposed to pick up hitchhikers, and something about the look of this guy didn't sit right with me. I waved him on. He scowled at me, but drove off. Not a chance.

We were hot. We were frustrated. We had just passed up our first and only offer for a ride, and it wouldn't be long till it started to get late. I called a hail Mary. I threw my hands up and my head back and symbolically incited the help of a higher power. "Universe!" I yelled. "All we ask is for someone safe, preferably female, and not driving a truck to get us there!"

Two minutes. That's all it took for us to meet Rita, who was driving a rental car home to Oregon and could take us the rest of the way. We sat in the back and chatted with Rita about her job, her daughters, her friends that are hiking the Appalachian Trail, and finally we dozed off, exhausted from our day of hitching and happy to be in the safety of Rita's clean, quiet rental car. Rita roused us when we arrived in Shasta, and dropped us at the diner where we'd agreed to have our trail angel Joann pick us up. We hugged her goodbye and she wished us well before driving off.

Little Foot and I couldn't believe it. More than 300 miles of hitchhiking, and we'd done it in 6 hours. We were exhausted,we were hungry, but we had made it, and in one piece. We ordered fresh squeezed orange juice and pasta dinners to-go while we waited for Joann.

We stayed two nights in Mt Shasta, one with Joann and her husband and the other with our hiker friend Rocky, who'd just finished her hike for the summer and arrived at her home in Mt Shasta the morning after we got to town. We cooked, we showered, I got new shoes, and we waited out the thunderstorms. The next evening, Rocky drove us to the trailhead, and the three of us walked southward for a few miles before we hugged Rocky goodbye and headed on.

Left to right: Happy Feet, Rocky, Little Foot

It felt weird, to walk south. I kept getting confused, thinking I was headed north and wondering why the sun was where it was. I had to check my compass pretty frequently to keep my head on straight.

Wait...which way are we supposed to be going?

Little Foot and I guessed that we wouldn’t see any of our friends for at least a week or so after starting south. We didn’t know any hikers in Castella. But to our surprise, we started seeing our friends right away, even that first night. Some days we would see next to nobody at all, familiar faces or not, and we could walk 25-30 miles uninterrupted. Other days, we would bump into someone we knew every 15 minutes or so, and on those days we barely walked 15 miles. We would get asked a thousand times a day “wait…why are you walking the wrong way?” We told our southbounding story so many times that we got sick of it and started making things up. Northbound hikers who didn’t know us often mistook us for true southbound thru-hikers, coming from Canada (which would mean the two of us had been averaging anywhere from 25 to 40 miles a day to have made it so far so quickly). They looked at us as if we were gods.

Little Foot and I had a lot of fun hiking together. We joked that we were “moonwalking” the trail, and spent a lot of time dancing and singing while we walked. We’d laugh until we couldn’t breathe about trail gossip and inside jokes. We told northbounders that we had invented our own religion, and we were now vehemently worshipping a deity we fondly referred to as Eywah (yes, like from Avatar). We braved thunderstorms, nearby forest fires, and dry stretches together. We had real talks about life, the trail, and our hopes and dreams and all that. We went skinny-dipping and would hike without our shirts on whenever possible. We did laundry only one time in a month. We called ourselves goddesses of the trail.

I spent my time in Northern California enjoying absolute freedom. A primary draw of trail life is its potent freedom, but I felt I had taken it one step further in the 20 days that I walked south back to Tahoe. Little Foot and I stopped caring about miles entirely. We walked however long we felt like walking. We took breaks in beautiful places, and fully embraced the concept of naptime. We ate well, never skimping on our resupplies or worrying about weight, and even packing out little bottles of wine on occasion. We didn’t stay in a single hotel, didn’t eat in more than a couple of restaurants, but mostly we met wonderfully kind people who opened their homes and their hearts to us. We especially met some really powerfully strong and loving women, who inspired us greatly. We spent as much time as possible focusing on appreciation for all the trail had to offer us. 

Verdict? Flip-flopping* was worth it.

1,300 miles? Please. Give us something hard to do.

Stormy skies

I missed alpine lakes, thank you Desolation Wilderness!

Eywah lovin'

Lion King on Hat Creek Rim

Our girl Mt. Shasta, stealing the show in the back

Partying in South Lake Tahoe!

Um...that's chocolate right?

Feeling fancy? It's wine and cheese night!

Butterflies at the swimming hole!

Aloha Lake in Desolation, last day, so beautiful

*"flip-flopping" is a term used in the hiking world to describe a hiker who hikes part of the trail one direction and then "flips" to hike another part the reverse direction

7/20 A Decision In South Lake Tahoe

Brain rant:

How is it fair that you can walk 1,000 miles, and still not even be halfway to your destination? It's demoralizing at best. I mean, what's so great about Canada anyway? It's about the journey, not the destination right? I am really looking forward to hiking through Washington state in particular, but unless I speed up quite a bit, it's going to be cold, drenched in rain, or worse, blanketed in snow, by the time I get there. And if I speed up, how will I even have time to see, much less enjoy it? I'm supposed to be trying to stay emotionally present out here. Barreling down the path trying to make it to the end doesn't sound very present to me. And anyway, I don't like the idea of hiking big miles all the time. Walking is hard. Sure, I can do it, but I don't want to keep doing it like that. One week of hard hiking is all well and good, but a month? A whole month of averaging 20, 25, 30+ miles a day? Two months?? Not for me, no sir.

Sigh....

But...I want to do the whole trail. I wouldn't have come out here if I didn't want to walk the whole thing. And it would feel so good to finish in one season. Think how badass it'd be to post that picture on Facebook of you at the Canadian monument in October! You'd get SO many likes. No one would ever question your badass-ness ever again. If anyone even tried, someone'd be like, "Oh that girl? No she's definitely a badass. She walked to Canada. It's pretty far." There's probably some kind of sign you could wear all the time so people know you're unquestionably a badass. Plus, there's all these totally non-superficial reasons for wanting to hike the whole trail, like the fact that it's absurdly beautiful out there in the wilderness and the absolute freedom of  living a nomadic, minimalistic lifestyle. How often in life do you get a chance to have an incredible adventure like this? You love the trail. Why wouldn't you want to do the whole thing?

I dug myself into a mental trench running over these thoughts again and again while I spent a few days resting in South Lake Tahoe. (And for the record, trench-digging is not a restful business.) While I was in town, I met another hiker who was feeling a lot of the same pressures as me. Her name was Little Foot.

Little Foot is a big-ass-section hiker from Colorado, and she loves the PCT. She grew up in San Diego, and started hiking the PCT with friends a few years ago. She had already completed the first 100 miles, and decided that she would add the next 600 over the course of this summer. She did it. And then she quit her job, broke her lease, and kept going. Aside from the similarity of our trail names and our generally silly dispositions, Little Foot and I bonded over our new-found hatred of the pressures of "CANADA". We found the general conversation among our fellow hikers, all about miles and worry about not making it, to be largely exhausting.

We were commiserating about our frustrations over beers one night at a bar in town. That night I had just booked a flight to visit family out east for a wedding in about 3 weeks. I had found a deal on a round trip flight I couldn't pass up, and had just decided I would find a way back from Reno for my flight one way or another. As I was telling Little Foot my plan to hike up and find a ride back down, she suddenly chimed in, "why don't you hitch up, and then hike back down?" Southbound?

Some gear inside me that had been off its track for a while suddenly clicked into place and started to turn.

"Oh my god. That's EXACTLY what I want to do."

I said it before I realized the words were coming out of my mouth, before I knew I wanted to say them. I actually took a mental double-take, I was so surprised.

"It is? Really? Why? Is it even possible? It's several hundred miles, could I even feasibly hitch that far? Maybe there's a train or a bus...but it might be expensive...how far up would I have to go? How far could I go? 400 miles in 3 weeks? More? Less? Maybe..."

As I was thinking all these things, aloud and in the middle of a bar, Little Foot sat and watched as a plan started to take shape in my brain. I hadn't even made a concrete decision when she quietly interjected. "Can I come?"

I looked at her and grinned. "Hell yes."

I can't explain it. I don't know exactly why I reacted that way, or how I knew with such strong feeling that I was meant to southbound Northern California with Little Foot. But that's how, less than 48 hours after that conversation, Little Foot and I found ourselves standing in front of a Chevron gas station on the main road through South Lake, thumbs out and holding a sign:

7/18 The Sierras Part 4: Tuolumne Meadows to South Lake Tahoe

As I rode the bus back up to Tuolumne Meadows from Yosemite Valley, I felt physically tired, a little sad to have said goodbye to my JMT hiking companions, but feeling much better about my walk. I was going to hit 1,000 miles in just a few days. I knew I would be alone, and the terrain coming up was supposed to be tough, with a lot of ups and downs. With my victory over the John Muir Trail under my belt, I felt ready to take on the challenge.

But the trail can knock you down just as easily as it can lift you up. The next week's emotions felt a lot like the elevation profile on my maps. Really big highs, but really low lows.

My first day out it rained all day. All my rain gear soaked through. I was frozen to the bone, my fingers so stiff from the cold that I couldn't even cross them to wish for sun.

That morning, as I was trudging through the awful weather, grumbling to myself miserably, I suddenly looked up to see a bear. I had only seen one other bear on the trail, and never up close like this. He was a big one, his cinnamon brown fur wet from the rain. He hadn't noticed me yet, too occupied with digging up grubs from a stump no more than a foot off the trail and only about 15 yards in front of me.  For a minute I stood watching him, frozen; partly from fear, partly from wonder and awe, and partly from being just plain cold. When my brain kicked back in, it reminded me that I needed to keep moving to stay warm. This bear was in my way, and I needed to get by. I was going to have to scare this bear off myself, alone. I couldn't show any fear. I had to be bigger than this bear. I had barely registered these thoughts, when suddenly I stepped forward and yelled fiercely in a voice I hardly recognized as my own, "HEY GET OUT OF HERE BEAR!!!"

The bear jumped in alarm. I guess he hadn't noticed me at all, and was now surprised to see a tall, skinny, wet, alien creature in green and blue nylon advancing towards him, waving and clacking big metal sticks and yelling at him to buzz off. He must've decided the stump he was after wasn't worth picking a fight with me, because he promptly ambled off to the safety of the trees. My adrenaline surged as I watched his scruffy wet butt running away from me. I had become the dominant animal. This sopping wet patch of dirt path was mine, and he was not welcome on my turf.

The weather cleared briefly a few times over the next couple of days, but only long enough to get my sleeping bag and clothes from soaked to mildly damp. Up on the high passes, you could see that it had snowed quite a bit. Several hikers ahead of me got caught in the white out and had to turn back. The rivers down in the canyons began to overflow and flood. I had to be careful to time my stream crossings for earlier in the day, when the water levels were lower. I walked 20 miles or more a day just to keep my blood flowing and my body temperature up. The morning I woke up and poked my head out of my tent to finally see the sun, I literally jumped for joy, whooping like a maniac. I dried my things out fully in the afternoon sun, and for the first time in days I slept in warm dry clothes and a warm dry sleeping bag.

The weather was far more pleasant from there on out, but that didn't mean the hiking was easy. Each days hike was littered with lots of hard, steep ascents followed swiftly by sharp, rocky descents. The footing was loose and I tripped a lot. The high point of the stretch was the morning I woke up and decided to hike 19 miles over Sonora Pass by 1, hiking 4mph to make it in time for lunch at the resort. The climb was starkly beautiful and exposed with excellent views.

Funnily enough, I actually had a bad fall this morning while taking a descent a little too quickly. I skidded out on the loose gravel coming down the pass and scraped up my leg up badly. I didn't have any bandages on me, so after I washed the dirt and grit out of the wound I had to just let it bleed till it clotted on its own. I arrived at the resort where my resupply package had been shipped with blood all down my leg. It looked a lot worse than it was, and it didn't really even hurt, but I'd be lying if I said it didn't make me feel like the toughest hiker on the trail, hiking with my leg all bloodied up like that. A woman at the resort asked me if I was alright, and when I jokingly told her a bear had attacked me, she actually believed me!

From Sonora Pass on, I averaged 22 miles a day. The trail was still a roller coaster of elevation gain and loss, but I walked hard and made it happen. My biggest day was a whopping 26 miles. I walked a marathon! I wasn't hiking with anybody in particular on this stretch, there wasn't anyone else to motivate me to walk so far. That was all me. I did it just because I wanted to see if I could. I've had two decades of competition and athleticism in my life, and the taste of victory over a challenge or a goal you set for yourself is still not soured.

1,000 miles!!!

But that week of pushing myself did, understandably, wear me out. By the 1,000 mile marker, I was so ready to be in South Lake Tahoe. My energy flagged hard at Carson Pass, 15 miles from town. As I walked down to the visitor's center where the trail crossed the road, I could feel fatigue finally taking me. I met some wonderful day hikers, a group of neighbors who live in the Tahoe area who reminded me a lot of some wonderful neighbors of my own back home. They were so impressed with my journey, how far I've come. They asked all kinds of questions; what I ate, and how much, whether I was alone, where I slept, how I got water, and so on. They walked with me all the way down to the visitor's center where the PCT crossed the road. A volunteer was there cooking hotdogs and offered to let me weigh myself on the scale in the cabin. I weighed myself, and was concerned to see that I had lost a grand total of 30 pounds in my 3 months on the trail. I now weighed the same as I did when I was a preteen, going through my growth spurt. Not good. That definitely explained the excessive fatigue. One of the day hikers I'd met offered to drive me to town and take me to a buffet at a casino on the state line, and I happily accepted. I hastily scarfed down three hotdogs before hopping in their car.

On the ride down, I found my thoughts were preoccupied with worry over my health. I had lost the 15 lbs that I had put on for this trip a long time ago, around mile 700. Back then I still felt very strong physically. The Sierras had taken a lot out of me. I started feeling the burnout setting in my second week up in the high country, and it seemed like I was crashing harder and harder each time I reached a town. Overtraining syndrome is extremely common in long distance hiking, and I knew I was exhibiting the symptoms. Persistent exhaustion, muscle inflammation, loss of appetite, weight loss, etc., I was moving steadily down a track that leads to illness and chronic injury. I was going to have to figure out a better way to do this, and soon, if I was going to keep going...

I spent several days in South Lake, resting, recovering, and reevaluating my situation. My schedule discouraged the time off, but it was necessary, for both my physical and mental well-being. I had some hard questions to ask myself, some complicated feelings to sort through. A change was coming my way, that was clear. That change revealed itself to me on my last day in Tahoe, and as a result my hike's course would be altered drastically from there on out.