Zero Days Page 7

  Unlike many in the outdoor recreation community who can only dream about such a life, Caryl and Brian quit working to spend all their time bicycling, hiking, and traveling the world. They gave up their engineering careers in the aerospace industry several years before we met them, sold their home, and determined that by careful budgeting, they could turn their passion for bicycle touring and outdoor recreation into a full-time experience. Since then, they’ve covered most of North America on two wheels or two feet and have seen much of South America by bus as well as bicycle. Another bicycle trip took them through Portugal, Spain, France, and the Alps. After that, they began planning a unique approach to the Continental Divide Trail: hiking the southern half of the CDT and bicycling the northern half of the more-or-less parallel Great Divide Mountain Bike Route one year, and then the next year, hiking the northern CDT and bicycling the southern half of the bike route. Caryl calls it their “thru-hike-bike.”

  CHACOMAN was standing on the bank of Whitney Creek, a few miles from Mt. Whitney itself, on June 26 when a clumsy female hiker slipped on the rocks and fell into the water directly in front of him, with a tremendous splash. That was me. As I scrambled out of the stream, my first sight was of a pair of sandals, next a pair of thin legs, and finally all of a very slender thru-hiker. “Sorry about that,” Chacoman said, as though thru-hikers were always falling at his feet into rushing mountain streams. I felt like an idiot, but my embarrassment soon disappeared. Chacoman turned out to be one of our favorite trail people. A young computer programmer between jobs in Ohio, he was fun to talk to, made friends with Mary by treating her as an adult, and was unfailingly calm and polite. That ability to remain tranquil served him well at the end of the trail, when he tackled the notorious reroute around Glacier Peak in Washington state, and then had to wade through waist-deep snow in the North Cascades. And all this in his namesake pair of Chaco sandals.

  Chacoman had a trail name without even realizing it at first. Another hiker named Kat recognized the tracks left in the trail by the distinctive tread of his Chaco Z1 sandals. After seeing the tracks for a while, she declared, to the disbelief of her hiking partners, that someone was hiking in Chacos. From then on, they referred to the unknown hiker ahead of them as Chacoman. Later, they caught up with him at Pioneer Mail in southern California, where Kat immediately looked down at his feet and declared, “Look, it’s Chacoman.”

  Like us, Chacoman hiked the PCT three years after the events of September 11, 2001, which made Americans more aware of the porous U.S. border with Canada. Although the rules hadn’t officially changed yet, word on the trail that year was that hikers should have a birth certificate in addition to their driver’s license in order to get across the border. But by the time most of us heard about that, it was way too late. For Chacoman, serendipity eased his journey from Canada back across the border.

  “I took the bus back to Seattle,” he recalls. “When we approached the border, I moved to the front of the bus so I would be the first one in. That way, if I got pulled aside, there might be a chance they would finish with me before the bus was ready to leave. When I got to the immigration official, I put down my driver’s license and told him I had just found out I was supposed to have my birth certificate.”

  This is how their conversation ensued:

  Official: Where were you born?

  Chacoman: Ohio.

  Official: Where in Ohio?

  Chacoman: Marietta.

  Official: I’ve been there.

  Chacoman: Really? That’s a small town.

  Official: I’m originally from Youngstown.

  Chacoman: Really? Cool!

  Official: Now just step up to have your pack checked, and welcome back to the U.S.

  Chacoman: Thanks!

  “Then I just put my pack through the machine, and I wasn’t even asked to take anything out of my pockets,” Chacoman says. A fine end to the trail.

  CROW was named for her habit of picking up litter the way a crow will gather shiny items. Her partner, SHERPA, was named for her willingness to carry extra weight to help Crow while she recovered from the broken wrist she suffered a few weeks into the trail. They met Gary at Horseshoe Meadows, a popular entry and exit point for the High Sierra. Gary had walked down to a bear box at the campground there to retrieve a nine-day supply of food we had cached three days earlier on our way back to the trail after our three-week break. Crow and Sherpa had decided to skip part of the Sierra because Sherpa’s knees were bothering her a lot. Much of the southern Sierra resembles a series of giant, rock-strewn staircases—very hard on the knees. We hooked up with them again in northern California. Crow and Sherpa, despite their youthful appearance, had raised five daughters between them, and Mary immediately recognized a pair of surrogate mothers. She and Crow, especially, took a liking to each other and enjoyed hiking together. When I checked in with Crow and Sherpa a couple years later, they had moved from Colorado to Washington state. They were studying and working at Evergreen State College, Crow in a tree canopy lab and Sherpa studying climate change and its effects on the marine environment. They, too, have the long trails bug, periodically leaving behind the comforts of home for another adventure.

  GREEN BEAN AND WOOLY MAMMOTH (a.k.a. Jeremy and Courtney) are a young married couple from Decatur, Georgia, whom we met at Aloha Lake near Lake Tahoe. I admired Green Bean because he continued hiking despite an injured foot. He was wearing a walking cast, and was experimenting with variously textured substances on the bottom to keep it from slipping. At that point, he was trying a piece of old bicycle tire. He gained his trail name on the Appalachian Trail in 1999, thanks to his green T-shirt and shorts and generally tall, skinny physique. “His hiking partner told him he looked like a green bean,” Courtney told me. “The name stuck—perhaps because he was afraid of ending up with a worse trail name like the one he gave his partner: Numbnut.” Good decision, Jeremy.

  Ironically, Courtney acquired her trail name in the desert, an unusual place for her namesake animal. “My trail name almost became ‘Juicy’ due to the three layers of blisters on the bottom of my feet, but I didn’t really like that name; it just seemed a little gross,” she says. Jeremy already had his name, but Courtney was still looking for a name when they hiked out of Pioneer Mail. Because they started out early and a chilly wind was blowing, she forgot to put on sunscreen. By the time they took a break to put sunscreen on at 10 a.m., it was too late. “By 3 p.m., my hands and thighs were covered with big red blisters that just burned like mad when the sun shone on them,” Courtney recalls. She covered her hands with bandannas, but she was wearing a skirt and had no cover for her legs. She tried duct-taping Green Bean’s pants legs to her skirt, but they didn’t stay on. “I was never so relieved to see a big ugly tank of water (yes! water!) in the middle of some chaparral that signaled the end of our day,” she says. “Well, the next day was just as sunny, but we had to hike on. My only choice was to wear my long wool underwear and gloves to cover the burned spots on my thighs and hands.” For two days, Courtney hiked in this get-up in 100-plus-degree heat. (They registered 108°F in the sun at Scissors Crossing.) Luckily, it worked, and with the help of some Neosporin, the burns healed quickly.

  “The next day, I was hiking along (finally sans long underwear!) and listening to some tunes, and up comes a song by Widespread Panic called ‘Big Wooly Mammoth’ that just seemed to exemplify my plight,” Courtney says. “The song is really about evolution, but the chorus is about the big wooly mammoth having to wear his coat in the desert in the middle of the summertime. It is a great hiking song with a quick rhythm that makes you want to boogie and puts a little spring in your step.” At lunchtime, Courtney told Green Bean she had found a trail name. “He didn’t like it at first, but when I played the song for him, he laughed and agreed that it was appropriate,” Courtney says.

  Courtney’s decision to do the trail with Green Bean reflects the philosophy of many thru-hikers. “There is just something wonderful about seeing nature close
up and personal, and about getting a better understanding of ecosystems and how everything in nature is connected,” she says. She also appreciates what she calls the juxtaposition of the reality check and the escape from reality. “The reality check is that you really don’t need much to live a happy and fulfilled life—no car, no designer labels, no gourmet meals. All you really need are a few essentials and the knowledge that you can rely on yourself,” Courtney explains. The escape from reality? “No cell phones ringing, no bills to pay, no blaring TV commercials, no telemarketers, no job, no schedule to keep. Your time is yours to use how you want. You don’t even have your mom calling, telling you what to do (unless you’re Scrambler). It’s hard for non-hikers to understand how such grueling exercise is actually relaxing,” she adds.

  A couple years after we met Wooly Mammoth and Green Bean, they had a baby girl who was immediately christened with her own trail name, Pollywog. Within a couple months, she experienced her first backpacking trip, just as Mary did at that age. I foresee great things for little Pollywog.

  HIKER 816, a.k.a. Chris, was a section hiker finishing up the trail after completing law school. We met at the end of a cold, wet, miserable day at Olallie Lake Resort, where we shared a cabin for a couple days.

  Chris was another one of those backpackers whose trail name was imposed on him, rather than chosen by him. He had been hiking with a woman named Veronica and a man who went by the trail name Beaker. When they went to resupply at Echo Lake, someone had written Chris’s date of arrival on his package—8/6. But the “/” looked more like a “1,” and when Veronica saw it, she asked, “Why does it say ‘Hiker 816’?” Then Beaker arrived, looked at the box, and said, “Hiker 816?” He was followed by a dayhiker Veronica had met about an hour earlier, and that man also asked the meaning of Hiker 816. “From that instant forward, Beaker started calling me Hiker 816,” Chris says. “When I sat down by a stream to get water he would say, ‘Hiker 816 obtaining H2O,’ etc. The name stuck.”

  Chris returned to Washington, D.C., to finish up law school, and then took a clerkship with a federal district court judge in Los Angeles.

  JOHN, a weekend backpacker, became part of our trail experience for only a few minutes, but he definitely made our day brighter. And it was a day that needed some brightening. Here is Mary’s succinct description:

  Day 30: Today, Ma took a wrong turn and WASTED 2.5 miles. Then we met John who gave us chicken bouillon and noodles. Then we hiked to ratty Glenwood and camped there.

  Yes, I had indeed taken a wrong turn, and we had wasted time and energy going clear out to Mt. Williamson’s summit on a spur trail. Also, we were running low on the snack foods we ate all day. Our appetites had increased even more than we expected after four weeks on the trail, and we were looking at the very unpleasant prospect of rationing our food. When we stopped at Cooper Canyon Trail Camp to filter water, we met John, who was walking out from a four-day backpacking trip and offered us his leftover pasta, raisins, and bouillon cubes. With the extra food on board, we were able to eat normally until our next resupply.

  K-TOO of Massachusetts was one of the older hikers we met, having just turned 50. He gained his name on the Appalachian Trail, where he was huddled in a shelter with several other hikers during a storm. He was one of three Kens, and to tell them apart, the other hikers named them K-1, K-2, and K-3. He altered his to K-Too.

  Friendly and gentlemanly, and with a striking white beard, K-Too had a natural dignity that I found calming. Calming is a good thing on the trail as the weather worsens, which helps explain why I was so delighted to see him in the Mazama Country Store on a cold October day with snow threatening Washington state’s North Cascades. I was surprised, too. We thought he (and everyone else) had either finished the trail weeks earlier or given up. But like us, he and a few others were determined to give it one last try despite the bad odds.

  LEPRECHAUN deserves that old-fashioned description: tall, dark, and handsome. He caught up with us at Hiker Heaven, a camping spot run by trail angels Jeff and Donna Saufley, in Agua Dulce. At first, the young man seemed standoffish, but soon we got to know him better. He took a particular liking to Mary. At 6-foot-7, he towered over little Scrambler, but conversationally, she was his match. When she asked him why he chose his trail name, he told her with apparent sincerity that it was because he was “small, green, and could hide easily.” We last saw him striding away from us at Mojave, where he had just realized that he’d better make tracks if he wanted to get to the next water source before dark. We kept track of his progress by reading his wry remarks in trail registers at post offices and resort stores, all the way north.

  MOUNTAIN TRIPPER was the first thru-hiker we met along the trail. We ran into him on a terribly hot afternoon when we reached Scissors Crossing, on Day 5. It was late afternoon, and I was totally trashed. Some trail angels had left a couple wooden chairs next to a water cache, screened from the road by tall brush. I grabbed one of the chairs, shed my pack, plunked myself down, and promptly put my head between my knees, because I was feeling so faint. But I sat up straight a moment later when a voice said, “You must be Scrambler.” A tall, muscular backpacker carrying an ice ax along with the rest of his gear, stood there, smiling at us. He’d heard about us from trail angel Laurence. We saw Mountain Tripper again a couple days later when we camped near a large water cache, the “third gate cache,” and again the next day when we reached Warner Springs Resort. He was going on ahead, while we were staying at the resort one night. We didn’t see him again that season, although we did find a hat he had left behind.

  A friendly, cheerful, but inexperienced backpacker, Mountain Tripper’s name soon stopped showing up on trail registers, and we realized he had dropped out. He tried again the next year, which happened to be one of the Sierra Nevada’s heaviest snow years in decades. Like many of that year’s backpackers, he attempted a “flip flop” by hiking sections out of sequence in order to avoid impassable snow, forest fires, or other major inconveniences. He didn’t get very far, so he tried again a third year. That time, he made it as far as northern California when an early winter storm walloped the Northwest. He emailed us for advice on snowshoes, which Gary gave him, along with advice not to risk his life. Mountain Tripper decided snow conditions were rapidly making the risk too high, and he called off his trip in November. Mountain Tripper had no particular job or home to get back to—years ago, he had quit a factory job and then spent three years helping care for a bedridden uncle suffering from multiple sclerosis—and the little California town of Etna seemed like a friendly place, so he stayed. The town adopted him, and he made a living doing odd jobs and construction work, sometimes for money, sometimes for meals. That spring, he moved to Skykomish, Washington, and became part of the construction crew for the hiker dormitory being built by trail angels Andrea and Jerry Dinsmore. No doubt, he’ll show up at Campo again some year soon for another try.

  Wife and husband NOCONA AND BALD EAGLE, engineers from Dallas, were a little harder to get to know initially, but by the time we reached Oregon, we had become very fond of them. Not yet parents themselves, they seemed to enjoy Mary as an occasional surrogate daughter. Dark-haired and apple-cheeked Bald Eagle, whose real name is Andy, got his name before he began his Appalachian Trail thru-hike several years earlier. Prior to his AT hike, Andy’s friends in Huntsville, Alabama, threw him a big going-away party, during which they took turns running an electric razor over his head. As a result, he began the AT bald, hence “Bald Eagle.”

  Nocona’s real name is Karen, but she’s gone by “Nocona” for so many years that many people who have met her on the AT or PCT only think of her that way. Karen, easily spotted in a crowd with her blond hair and beaming smile, carefully chose her name from a story from the frontier history of her native state of Texas. Years earlier, she had read a book about Cynthia Ann Parker, a child in the 1830s who was taken from her settler family’s home near Fort Parker, Texas, and raised by Comanches, who at that time still ranged t
he Texas plains. Cynthia Parker’s tribe was called “Nocona,” which means “the wanderer” in their language, and the tribe member whom she eventually married also took that name.

  Karen was fascinated by the tribe’s lifestyle, but she was especially moved by Cynthia’s story. “After her abduction, she actually identified more with the Comanche way of life than she had with her pioneer family, marrying into the Indian tribe, then dying a sad death after she was ‘recaptured’ by her white relatives as an older woman,” Karen says. “I suppose because the story was true, I was more moved by it than I would’ve been by fiction.”

  Karen was torn between her affinity for “Nocona” as a trail name and the tradition of choosing or being given a trail name during the actual hiking experience. During the first few weeks of her Appalachian Trail hike, she waited to see if an appropriate trail name would make itself known, but nothing that was suggested seemed just right. Enlightenment arrived in Hot Springs, North Carolina, in the person of a thru-hiker with the trail name “Nyamazoola.” If someone could hike the AT with a trail name like that, then certainly she could choose something equally unique. So Nocona it was.

  Nocona and Bald Eagle definitely have the outdoor adventure infection. A year after we met them, they bicycled across the country, and then hiked the 300 miles of the PCT they had missed the year we met them. Somehow, Bald Eagle also managed to fit in a climb of Mt. Rainier in Washington state. A year later, Nocona and friends hiked the Wonderland Trail, the rigorous 93-mile path that winds around the same mountain. Their ambition to hike the Continental Divide Trail was postponed when they discovered they were going to become parents, but it’s only a matter of time until they add that to their list of accomplishments.