Zero Days Read online

  Because Mary slept so soundly once she got into her sleeping bag, and because I lost so many nights of sleep thanks to aching joints, I assumed Mary didn’t have any problems of that nature. What I didn’t know was that she endured aching muscles and stiff knees just as I did, she just did so in silence. A 10-year-old doesn’t spend much time agonizing over what might happen if her joint problems get worse, or if a scratch becomes infected; she deals with the here-and-now. As with so many of the conditions that arise on a major outdoor expedition, the anticipation that things will get worse can be as bad as the immediate problem. Mary trusted her parents to deal with any issue that might arise, from bears to blisters, rather than wasting mental energy worrying about the future.

  Aside from his feet, Gary didn’t suffer any major problems until we reached Highway 49 in northern California. My older sister, Carol, met us there and took us back to her home in Carson City, Nevada. We stayed the night, and the next day borrowed her pickup truck to run errands in Reno. I exchanged my trekking poles for a new pair at the REI store, where we bought socks and a few other items. That evening, Carol hosted a barbecue, and the rest of the family gathered around for a big dinner. We went to bed with full tummies, eager to hit the trail the next morning. But Gary woke up nauseated, dizzy, and thoroughly sick with what I suspect was some kind of inner-ear problem. He curled up on the floor of the guest room—even climbing back into bed was too much—and lay there for hours. I was alarmed, but Gary refused to see a doctor, rationalizing that he wasn’t capable of moving very much anyway. So we delayed our departure, and I spent the afternoon brushing out Mary’s hair with the help of an entire bottle of detangler. And suddenly, about 5 p.m., Gary got better. Not entirely better, but well enough to finish packing. The next morning, we were back on the trail.

  As Gary recovered from whatever hit him in Carson City, he started having serious trouble with his knees. They both hurt badly at times, and the right one was especially troublesome. A stubbed toe meant agony; the pain traveled all the way up. And sometimes his knee would give way and he’d fall. He came close to dropping out at Burney Falls State Park at Mile 1,423. The previous day, we had hiked 25 miles through part of northern California’s notorious Hat Creek Rim—known for heat, lack of shade, lack of water, and overgrown brush. At one point, the thermometer on Gary’s altimeter watch read 107°F. My heat-addled brain seemed to have forgotten simple arithmetic, and I miscalculated the distance to our first source of water. We didn’t run out, but the frustration added to the general agony of the day. After 13 miles, we reached Rock Spring Creek, where, if anything, the heat felt worse because we walked past a large water pipe with a leak in the top, causing water to spray out in a fountain. Mary and I fantasized about abandoning our packs and running through the spray, like children with a lawn sprinkler, but with another 12 miles between us and our evening’s campsite, we couldn’t linger. All three of us were having foot trouble. Gary had a splitting headache. After filtering and drinking water at Rock Spring Creek, we traipsed over rocky tread before finally reaching the backpacker camp at Burney Falls. I’ve rarely seen Mary so tired. She fell asleep literally the moment her head touched the bundled up pile of clothes she was using for a pillow.

  The next morning, Gary could hardly stagger out of the tent. He barely made it the few yards to the picnic table. “I don’t think I can go on,” he told me. He turned to our daughter. “Mary, I might have to drop out.” We had often discussed what to do if one of us became disabled. We all agreed Gary was the keystone. I could keep going with him if Mary dropped out. Mary could keep going with Gary if I left. But any idea that Mary and I could keep going without Gary had disappeared in the first few weeks of our trek. Whenever I found terrain too confusing to choose the correct route, or fell while crossing a rushing stream, or began shivering uncontrollably in bad weather, I realized that I wasn’t equipped to lead the expedition. Thus, Gary’s announcement was really alarming.

  I fixed Gary’s breakfast (translation: I handed him a package of chocolate frosted Pop-Tarts and refilled his water bottle from the tap). We packed up and headed for the hot dog stand a few hundred yards away, sparing a glance along the way for thundering Burney Falls. “What a waste of water,” I thought as we surveyed the beautiful cascade. Why wasn’t it around when we really needed it the last few weeks? Gary, shuffling along behind me, was more vocal. “I can barely walk,” he moaned. “My knee’s killing me. We might have to get a ride out of here. What’s the nearest town?” At one of the tables in front of the drive-up eatery, our trail buddies, Vice, Spreadsheet, and Dumptruck, were relaxing in the sun, filling their stomachs and waiting for FedEx to arrive with a new set of trekking poles. We joined them for a second breakfast, and somehow, Gary’s knee began to knit. When we finally got going in late morning, we moved slowly, but we moved.

  Gary’s knees continued to give him considerable grief as we traipsed through the infamous Section O, an 83-mile stretch of trail that is overgrown with tough, chest-high manzanita and poison oak and that is exposed to the broiling sun for much of the day. However, we were all feeling pretty good when we got to the well and its big pump at South Brown Mountain Shelter early one afternoon in late August. This stretch of trail in southern Oregon is severely lacking in natural water sources, so we were pleased to find that the well was functioning. Mary didn’t like the look or taste of the water, but Gary told her to drink it anyway. Water from a developed well, we figured, should be safe. To set a good example, Gary drank a lot of it, I drank less, and Mary just drank a little. (This was one of those times when we should have paid more attention to her opinion.) The next day, we all had some indigestion, especially Gary, who went to bed that evening with an upset stomach. He awoke at 5 a.m. feeling terrible: nauseous, weak, with a headache and severe joint and muscle pains. By a tremendous act of will, he managed to pack up and stagger several miles down to Mazama Village in Crater Lake National Park. I rented a room there and Gary hobbled inside. He turned up the heater as high as it would go, and spent the next few hours huddling in front of it with severe chills.

  In spite of our bout with stomach sickness, we three had the good fortune to avoid giardia, a debilitating illness caused by microscopic protozoa that results in diarrhea, abdominal cramps, and general wretchedness that occasionally felled other backpackers on the trail. It was so widespread in 2004, and so concentrated in southern Oregon, that yo-yo hiker Scott Williamson came up with a name for it: the Crater Lake Curse. On a cold, drizzly day in southern Oregon, a few days after Gary had become really ill, we ran into Scott, who was heading south. We recognized each other right off. (To be honest, we were pretty recognizable, being the only threesome on the trail that included a 10-year-old.) As he headed south from Canada, Scott had met about 100 backpackers—and about a third of them had reported getting sick. Of those who had bothered to get a diagnosis, all confirmed that it was giardia. And they shared one or two things in common: They had all drunk the well water at South Brown Mountain Shelter, or the water at Mazama Campground in Oregon, or both. (Scott himself managed to avoid the giardia epidemic on this trip, but in 2006, during his second PCT yo-yo, he spent five days severely ill with giardia, losing 25 pounds from his already lean frame.)

  Although Mary did the best of us all physically, she didn’t get a free ride. What worried me the most was when she tripped and fell. She took some nasty falls, usually while walking on perfectly safe tread. Not paying attention, she’d catch a toe on a rock or a root and land face first on the trail. We finally realized that her habit of hooking her thumbs through the shoulder straps on her backpack kept her from catching her balance, so we banned the practice. It was a hard habit to break, but she fell less that way, and if she did trip over something, she usually caught herself.

  More than the falls, Mary remembers a morning near Horseshoe Meadow in the southern Sierra, when she got sick. “I’m the only one who ever threw up on the trail,” she told me later, with some pride. We had camped at a
trail intersection where Gary could run down a couple miles to a parking area where we had cached nine days’ worth of food in a bear box. The next morning, Mary felt nauseous and threw up a little bit. Then she had dry heaves for a couple minutes. Finally, she felt a lot better and ate something. In fact, she felt so much better that 10 minutes later, she was balancing on a log while playing her recorder, the flute-like musical instrument she had brought along for entertainment

  The toughest part of the trail for Mary was the weather. She suffered from the temperature extremes more than I realized at the time. When I asked her later about the hot days in California, she replied, “Heat is miserable.” She remembered how thirsty she became in the heat, as well as how hungry she felt in the cold. There were plenty of times when the only thing that made up for her misery was the occasional lovely view. And even that wasn’t always enough in Washington’s snow-choked North Cascades. “The worst thing,” Mary recalls, “was that we’d be walking through snow and big chunks of snow would get in our boots, but they wouldn’t even melt because our feet were so cold.” On another day in Washington, during which we walked 26 miles through deep snow and finally camped shortly before midnight, Mary recalls that her dad’s boot laces were so frozen and matted with snow that he couldn’t untie the knots. He had to cut the laces to get his boots off.

  Sometimes the weather was so miserable, we pined for an abandoned cabin to hole up in. Unlike the Appalachian Trail, with its spacious lean-tos every 10 miles or so, the PCT doesn’t have any official shelters along the trail. But a few times we were lucky enough to find shelter. In northern California, near where Interstate 80 crosses Donner Pass, we arrived at the Sierra Club’s Peter Grubb Hut right at dusk, and we enjoyed sleeping in the loft and not having to set up the tent. In Oregon, we stumbled across a building maintained by the Mt. Hood Snowmobile Club on a rainy day after leaving Olallie, and gratefully accepted its shelter.

  In Washington, where I had to leave the trail for a time to deal with some health problems, Gary and Mary had high hopes as they walked through cold, wet weather on their way to a primitive campsite, because the map for that section included the word “shelter” in tiny type. But what they found near Suiattle Pass was a sorry excuse for a structure, open to the weather, with rat and mouse droppings everywhere. Gary broke the news to Mary that there would be no roof over their heads that night. It was quite a blow. “Mary was crying, and I had to leave her there in the dark, with the drizzle turning to snow, for an hour, while I went off to filter water,” Gary recalls. “She’s such a trouper, she got the tent up and the rain fly on, and all the bedding ready, while I was gone.” But even the lack of a shelter wasn’t the last disappointment of the day.

  Gary pulled out the little fuel canister he had purchased months earlier at Vermilion Valley Resort in California, but it wouldn’t burn properly. What should have been a strong, hot blaze instead resembled the flicker of a candle. After a long time, the water in the pot reached what might be described as room temperature, if there had been any rooms around—a far cry from the full, rolling boil needed to turn a bag of freeze-dried food into a good meal. Gary poured the tepid water into the waterproof food bag, stirred it up, waited a few minutes, and they choked it down. They didn’t have any choice—they needed those calories, unappetizing as they were, to generate enough energy to walk 20 miles the next day. Mary laughs now about the “crunchy rice dinner” they ate that evening, but it sure didn’t seem funny at the time.

  Most long-distance hikers can recall an experience in which they were struck by the enormous contrast between their struggle to survive and someone else’s blissful ignorance. Our moment came on southern California’s Fuller Ridge, when we were hunting through the dark, the snow, and the bitter cold for a usable campsite, while far below, we could see the lights of Palm Springs, where we knew most people were cranking up the air-conditioning.

  For Scott Williamson, one of those moments arrived as he was crossing the Mojave Desert near the completion of his first successful yo-yo. Scott was wrapping up a 40-mile day during an October storm that featured rain driven by winds gusting, he estimates, up to 50 miles per hour. Far to the north, this same storm killed two Japanese climbers stranded on a ledge on El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. Near a ranger station north of Agua Dulce, Scott set up his tarp alongside a road, using a few shrubs for a windbreak, and quickly ate dinner. “I was just curling up in my sleeping quilt, and the wind screaming through the power pylons was so loud it sounded like a freight train,” he remembers. “As I was falling asleep, a gust pulled off my tarp, pulled out all the stakes, and broke both the guy lines.” The tarp flew off about 100 yards. Just then a family in a huge SUV slowly drove past. “It was a couple with two kids and a DVD player,” Scott says. “They had the dome light on, so I could see inside. They were all watching a movie, and I could tell the heater was blasting.” As Scott huddled against the wind and the father in the car fiddled with the DVD controls, the contrast struck Scott as ironic, to say the least.

  Time heals all wounds, says the proverb. As the months passed after our return home, I found it harder and harder to remember just how badly my feet hurt, even though I had plenty of reminders. Ten of them, in fact—my toenails. Most of the nails were black and purple, and I continued losing toenails for months after we returned. (Even worse, the toenails grew back deformed. I’ll never wear open-toed sandals again.) At first, I suspected that if I had known ahead of time how much pain I’d have to endure, I wouldn’t have started. Now, I think I would have gone anyway. But I would have done a few things differently.

  First, I would have worn men’s boots from the beginning, instead of waiting until I had suffered the entire length of California before realizing that I needed wider footwear. Would I have switched from boots to running shoes? No. My ankles and knees needed the extra support boots provide. Also, I would have been too sore-footed in the rockier sections with only running shoes.

  Second, for stream crossings, I would have carried a pair of slip-on water shoes, the kind available at sporting goods stores for use on boats. We had debated this at length and Gary persuaded me that the extra weight wasn’t worth it. But I came close to catastrophe many times, trying to cross streams without getting my feet wet. Often, they did get wet, and I had to hike in blister-promoting wet socks and boots. I would have been better off wading streams in the water shoes, and changing back into boots afterward.

  And finally, I would have insisted that Gary filter that tainted well water and not drink so much of it. We don’t know for sure that’s what made him ill, but it’s our best guess.

  The fact is, Gary and I could have avoided a lot of problems entirely, and most of our foot trouble, if we had chosen to hike the PCT 10 years earlier. I never got blisters at all until I was 45. But then we wouldn’t have had Mary along, and it wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun.

  CHAPTER 8

  TOWN STOPS

  Day 8: We got to wonderful Eagle Rock. We took a lot of pictures. Then we came to Warner Springs where we ate at a restaurant and slept on beds! There were also two enormous pools, one from the hot springs and one cooler, that I swam in.

  —from Scrambler’s journal

  BY THE TIME WE ARRIVED at the Warner Springs Ranch resort, our first town stop, we thought we were hot stuff. We’d been on the trail a whopping eight days, and in the space of 110 miles had already braved a long list of backpacking challenges: heat, rattlesnakes, crazy drivers, alarming appearances by strangers, sunburn, and dehydration. We felt like real veterans of the trail. We were among the first of that year’s thru-hikers to stay at Warner Springs, and the only ones with a child, of course, and as such we received plenty of attention. Everyone was so curious, helpful, and admiring—we felt like royalty.

  We were gratified that our first stop went so smoothly. We reached Warner Springs on a Thursday, when plenty of rooms were available. (Other thru-hikers who arrived on Fridays and Saturdays weren’t always so fortunate
.) The thru-hiker’s discount gave us a comfortable cottage for less than we’d normally pay at a Motel 6. We got to the post office early in the afternoon, and our first resupply box was right there waiting for us. An older couple we met on the trail and again in the restaurant, the French Gourmet, took an interest in us, asking about Mary’s schooling in particular. The staff was attentive and friendly. Our waitress, Phyllis, mentioned that the resort had two big swimming pools; when Mary mourned the lack of a swimsuit among our backpacking supplies, Phyllis promptly phoned the pool staff and announced that a loaner swimsuit was available. Mary was thrilled. After supper, she and I walked over to the pools, one at normal temperature, the other about 104°F, thanks to the hot springs for which the resort is named. The pools are big (or, as Mary described them, “gargantuan”) and made a beautiful picture under the night sky.

  Warner Springs set a pattern for laundry that we followed the entire trip. I showered first, then put on my “town clothes”—spare shirt, spare underwear, and fleece pants. Then I gathered up everyone’s dirty clothes, leaving Mary and Gary wrapped in towels. Mary showered next and got into her town clothes. Gary, who takes longer showers than Mary and me put together, went last. At Warner Springs, the laundry room was in a building that housed, among other things, a small library. In between checking the progress of the washer and dryer, I sat in the library and read the first chapter of Randy Shilts’ And the Band Played On. Every 10 or 15 minutes, I would check on the clothes and take the dry ones back to our room. Eventually, everything was clean and dry, and so were we.