Zero Days Page 16
One of our biggest surprises came near Cienega Creek Ranch. We had camped a short distance away from a dirt road one April evening. Here’s what Mary wrote before she went to bed that night:
Day 20: We’re in bear country now. We had yet more uphill into a saddle. In the saddle there was a great campsite me and Mom found. Later this evening, we heard weird groaning noises. They might be BEARS.
Mary was sincerely frightened, and it didn’t help any when Gary and I debated in front of her whether they were bears or cougars. Mary was feeling a lot more cheerful when she wrote in her journal the next night:
Day 21: We walked DOWN this morning to a private zoo with bears and tigers!
Sure enough, there behind bars were the kinds of big predators normally seen and heard—in zoos.
Animals that live around popular campgrounds and trailheads become dependent on human food. And they become downright demanding. We became adept at chasing away the rodents and birds that came to beg, borrow, or steal. But nothing prepared me for the birds at one road crossing in northern California. It was a hot day (as was almost every day in northern California) and when Gary called a rest break, I immediately got out the food bag and my water bottle and plunked myself down on my pack. I had barely unwrapped my candy bar when a bird tried to grab it—right out of my mouth! All I saw was a flash of feathers, but Mary saw the entire scene. She said the bird flew in on a banked turn, like a stunt pilot at an air show, as though intending to grab my Baby Ruth bar with its feet. I was scared half out of my wits when this thing flew in my face. Gary and Mary were merely amused, and Mary quipped that only a birdbrain would try to steal food from a hungry thru-hiker.
The grandest animal thieves of all are at Drakesbad, a century-plus-old resort within Lassen Volcanic National Park in northern California. Mary calls them chipmunks. I think they’re golden-mantled ground squirrels. Whatever they’re rightfully called, these animals were on top of their game. At Drakesbad, where the food is excellent and plentiful, these critters don’t even bother begging. Once the other customers had been through the buffet line, we were invited to chow down at half price. It had been days since our last shower or change of clothes, and we smelled pretty bad, so in consideration of the other patrons, we sat on the patio. In a flash, the rodents were on us. The cutest little robbers in the world, they were incredibly impudent. At first, I brushed them away from my plate with the wine list (which contained some pretty fancy choices for a resort smack in the middle of one of the lesser-known national parks). Here’s what happened next, as Mary described in her journal:
Day 94: One even got to licking up Dad’s mayonnaise off his plate—until Dad threw it! Then one (I don’t know if it was the same one) waited till he left and stole an entire cookie of his!
Gary told me later that when he realized a rodent had the effrontery to steal a thru-hiker’s food right in front of him, he instinctively grabbed the little pest. But then in the next second, it flashed through his mind, “I’m holding onto a rodent! What do I do now?” As the words “bubonic plague” flitted through his head, he gave the creature a robust toss. It landed several feet away, apparently unhurt, and promptly returned to the fray. The stolen cookie must have weighed as much as the thief did. The resort’s other guests could only stare as Mary and Gary pursued the animal all the way to his hidey hole, which was too small for his booty.
A flock of educable birds lived in the chaparral near Highway 18, not far from Big Bear City. We were walking away from our campsite one morning in late April and listening to the birds sing a simple three-note call. They’d been doing it all morning. Gary imitated the bird call until he got it just right; he would whistle, and a bird would whistle back. Then he added another note—and the bird imitated him. For quite a distance, Gary kept up his avian school. I was a little regretful when we reached the highway and had to leave Gary’s musical disciples behind. I sometimes wonder: Did any of the birds keep up the new call?
Always, in the backs of our minds, was the chance of running afoul of small but dangerous animals: rattlesnakes, scorpions, black widow spiders, centipedes, and wasps. Our first close encounter with a rattler came early. Mary’s journal entry reads:
Day 2: Today we saw a RATTLESNAKE! It was rattling like crazy and it was coiled and reared up! I was really scared, but my Dad took a picture of it!
Before long, rattler-sightings were frequent enough that we didn’t bother recording each one in our journals. We had seen plenty of the creatures before we started the PCT, and we knew that bites commonly occur when young, (usually) inebriated (usually) men stupidly pick up snakes and then get bitten on the hand or arm. But we also knew that there is no good backcountry treatment for snakebites, especially for someone as small as Mary. Trying to get a straight answer from the “experts” on what to do if Mary suffered a venomous snakebite was the most frustrating part of our first-aid preparations. Every source said the exact same thing: Get the patient to a hospital as quickly as possible, preferably within an hour. Yeah, right. What if we’re halfway through Section I and three days from the nearest road? We took a snakebite kit, figuring that trying to remove the venom from the wound with a small suction device would be better than nothing. (Gary and I knew that the old treatment methods we had learned growing up—cutting the wound and sucking out the venom, or applying a tourniquet—have since, fortunately, fallen out of favor.) Snakes, along with smaller creepy-crawlies, are the main reason we always used a tent in California. Sleeping outside “under the stars,” as people say, sounds wonderfully romantic, and on really hot nights, it’s probably more comfortable than being inside a tent. But I wouldn’t be able to sleep, wondering what might decide to creep into my bag or, worse, Mary’s. Besides, I’m a living mosquito magnet. The nasty critters invite their second and third cousins to the party when I’m around. Let the ultra-light types go with a tarp, or less. For me, a tent is just common sense.
One of my biggest concerns was anaphylactic shock—the potentially fatal reaction some people have to the odd insect sting, foodstuff, drug, brush with latex, and even bout of exercise. If one of us suffered severe breathing difficulties as a result of an allergy, death could occur before help could be found. Luckily, the only bite or sting that caused a bad reaction occurred close to Belden Town Resort.
It was Day 90, and some mysterious bug stung Mary on her wrist, which proceeded to swell suddenly and painfully. We had just held a circle cheer for having exceeded 25 miles the previous day, and had sat down on some handy boulders for a snack break before descending the steep hill to our next resupply. (Circle cheers are how we celebrate a major accomplishment. We hold hands, jump up and down, and shout, “Hurrah!” I sometimes wonder what the neighbors think.) Mary put her hand down on a rock and immediately started screaming. We could see a red dot where something had bitten or stung her. Gary spotted a wicked-looking black insect, perhaps some kind of wasp, but he couldn’t be sure it was the culprit. The pain was bad, but much more alarming was how quickly Mary’s wrist became puffy and red, so swollen that she had trouble moving her hand. I half expected her to develop trouble breathing. However, she seemed all right otherwise, the pain gradually subsided, and by the time we reached Belden, her wrist hurt just a little. The stiffness, however, lingered for days.
Nature provides the PCT with an amazing variety of plant life. We were fortunate enough to hit the wildflower season at its peak in the southern California desert and again in much of the Sierra Nevada. We saw scores of different flowers, only a few of which I could positively identify. Most we just admired as we walked by, but some stood out for their beauty or unusual setting. Some were notable for their rarity, others for their abundance.
In the far south, the Mojave yucca was in bloom, with its yard-long clusters of white flowers guarded by stiff, spiny leaves. Like many desert plants, the yucca comes equipped with spikes, thorns, or needles to fend off browsers. I refer to such blood-drawing vegetation as carnivorous because I’ve donated my share
of blood and flesh to them. Also fully adapted to hot and dry conditions is the ocotillo, a shrub that looks like a giant twig broom sitting in the desert upside down. After a rain, the leaves suddenly spring to life, and the red flowers on their tips bloom briefly. Closer to Palm Springs, we began seeing the brilliant red of the vermilion phase of the desert mariposa tulip. Shaped somewhat like California poppies or sego lilies, these silky red flowers on their short stems stand out like drops of blood on snow. It was near a cluster of these flowers that we paused to watch a colony of ground-dwelling bees. Another desert flower bears the delightful name of pussypaws. This strange little plant stretches out on the ground, with the pink cat’s-paw flower clusters forming a circle.
Sky pilot is named for its lofty home among the boulders on the highest peaks. To come upon a patch of these little blue flowers on the approaches to Mt. Whitney was a delightful surprise, and an inspiration. If such delicate blossoms could thrive in the thin air, certainly I could, too. The crimson columbine, whose red and yellow flowers I was used to seeing among the aspens in eastern Nevada, also graces streams in the Sierra Nevada. But for a change, I was treated to a hillside of Coville’s columbine, a larger, pale blue flower much like the Colorado state flower. I saw them only on the interminable hill leading down to Edison Lake; they made the endless series of switchbacks a little easier to bear. Another familiar flower alongside alpine lakes and streams was the shooting star. Once seen, it’s never forgotten, but it sure is hard to describe. Some say the lavender, white, and black blossom resembles a rocket; others say it looks like a mosquito’s beak. Lupine grows along many portions of the PCT, sometimes in bushy masses of blue and lavender, other times in white or yellow. There’s even a harlequin lupine, which sports rose-pink, yellow, and white on its sweet-pea-shaped blossoms. Lupine, which frequently provides a backdrop for orange monkeyflower or golden California poppies, is so common that I thought at first the Professor Lupin in the Harry Potter books was named after the flower. Then I remembered that the word actually derives from lupus, Latin for wolf. Just as J.K. Rowling’s Professor Lupin is unfairly feared and stigmatized, so too were lupine plants, according to my Audubon field guide to wildflowers. Lupine were thought to be “wolf-like,” devouring nutrients. But they actually prefer poor soils, and don’t deplete them further. Now you know.
One of the pleasures of taking friends on first-time backpacking trips in the Sierra Nevada is witnessing their reaction to their initial sight of two flowers that flourish in the deep shade of the ponderosas: snow plants and pine drops. These two members of the wintergreen family don’t look anything like traditional flowers. Pine drops, with their leafless brown stems and tiny brown flowers, look dead even when they’re alive. And because the dried stalks remain standing for years, hikers are likely to see many more dead pine drops than living ones. Snow plants, so named because they appear as the snow drifts melt, are a brilliant red all over. They look more like vegetables than flowers, perhaps distantly related to brussels sprouts. Imagine the tip of an asparagus spear, dipped in bright red candle wax. Now imagine that spear about 6 inches high and 2 or 3 inches in diameter, loosely wrapped with red curling ribbon, and you’ve got a picture of Sarcodes sanguinea.
With a few exceptions, the flowers petered out around the Lake Tahoe area, as the northern Sierra’s hot, dry summer settled in. One exception was the skyrocket, whose bright red, trumpet-shaped flowers defied the intense heat. Near Mt. Shasta, we were delighted by the large, fragrant white flowers of the Shasta lily, looking like Easter lilies growing on large shrubs. And in boggy patches north of Castle Crags, we came upon the West Coast’s truly carnivorous plant, the California pitcher plant. Tubular leaves grow together to create attractive traps for insects, which creep inside to get at the nectar. The intruders drown and rot, and are absorbed by the plant.
Color returned to the forest in Oregon, and again in Washington—only it wasn’t flowers, it was an amazing variety of mushrooms. I’ve never seen or even dreamed of such fungal variety. Mushrooms popped up from the ground, sprouted from fallen logs, crept up tree trunks, and dangled from branches overhead in an incredible and almost nightmarish array of shapes and colors. We don’t know a thing about choosing edible mushrooms, and as a result tried to avoid touching them, much less eating them. In the San Francisco Bay Area, where we live, someone dies every few years from eating “death caps,” an intensely poisonous mushroom that bears a striking resemblance to an edible mushroom in parts of southeast Asia. Immigrants go mushroom hunting, as they did in the old country, and end up destroying their livers by eating Amanita phalloides. We did our collecting with a camera and left the mushroom picking to the professionals. In Washington state, mushroom pickers (many of them immigrants from southeast Asia) had been making money hand over bucket a few years earlier when restaurants paid top dollar for morels, matsutakes, and other delicacies. In our year, the bottom had dropped out of the mushroom market, and suddenly pickers who had paid $50 for a Forest Service permit were regretting the expenditure. One exceptionally unpleasant day in central Washington, I saw a Russian family venturing out to pick mushrooms from the PCT trail crossing at Stampede Pass. The older woman of the group wore a calf-length housedress, heavy boots, and a scarf over her head. It was raining hard, and the high for the day was 42°F. Perfect weather for hypothermia. I felt so sorry for the old woman. At least Gary and Mary carried proper rain gear, even if they did have 18 miles to walk.
We weren’t quite so paranoid about berries, but there were only two that we ate: blackberries, which seem to grow wild practically everywhere, and huckleberries, which we found in Oregon. Northwestern huckleberries look rather like purplish blueberries, and they’re delicious. We ate only a few, figuring that the birds and the bears needed them more than we did. Huckleberries can’t be raised commercially, but stores and restaurants in the Pacific Northwest typically offer wild huckleberry jam or ice cream.
Trees were almost constant companions along the PCT, except in parts of the southern desert and the passes above timberline in the southern Sierra. I’ve always loved trees. Most in my childhood experience were small: pinyon pines and stunted junipers that characterize the landscape around my Nevada birthplace. Big trees were a rarity: tall but spindly aspens, with their golden leaves in autumn, and more substantial cottonwoods in the creek bottoms. Above 10,000 feet, bristlecone pines grew to 3,000 years old and older, enduring fierce winter winds and bitter cold. My youthful idea of a forest was one that was easy to walk through, with widely spaced trees and limited undergrowth. The year I spent in Maryland introduced me to the thicker, hardwood forest of the Appalachians. This forest limits the view and shuts out much of the sun, making me a little claustrophobic. But that was nothing compared to the dense forests of Oregon and Washington. Heavy rain and abundant snow create thick forests of fir, tamarack, hemlock, spruce, and pine, towering over the trail and creating a twilight effect even at noon.
One day in Oregon, we crossed a small meadow in bright sunlight. The trail appeared to plunge into a cave, the inky darkness under the trees was so complete. Even just a couple feet away from the forest’s edge, the scene gave us a Twilight Zone feel of walking directly from noon into midnight. And on days when the sun hid and a steady rain fell, the Northwestern forests brought to mind words such as primeval, monolithic, impenetrable—even hostile. But even when the forest was at its darkest and deepest, there would be some moment of startling beauty to remind us why we were out there. The day we came to a break in the Oregon forest and I caught my first view of Mt. Hood—freshly frosted with snow, with blue sky above and swirling mist in the valley below us—I knew again why I treasure backpacking as a fundamental part of my life. Having Gary and Mary along to share it with me made for a perfect moment.
One of the beauties of nature that I didn’t contemplate as much as I’d hoped was the night sky. On earlier desert trips, we would sit up late to see the stars and try to identify the constellations. On the PCT, by the time
we had the tent up and dinner eaten, all we wanted to do was climb into our sleeping bags. But in the desert, I would frequently take a minute just before following Mary into the tent to gaze up at the sky and locate the Big Dipper and the North Star, pointing toward Canada. Today, anytime I see the Big Dipper, I again experience that intense longing to reach my goal.
Weather was a constant concern of ours, but it also provided some of the trail’s most beautiful moments. We had experienced a rough night in southern California thanks to a sudden ice storm, and in the morning I was thinking gloomy thoughts about scraping the ice off the inside of the tent and drying out our wet ponchos.
Mary had a different reaction, which she described in her journal:
Day 11: When I put my head out the door of the tent, I saw ice tipping burned manzanita—like white flames! It was so BEAUTIFUL, and there was frost on the trees, too.
Snow is a rarity in the San Francisco Bay Area, where we live, and early sights of snow were special for Mary. On Day 45, she wrote,