Zero Days Read online

  PATTI HASKINS caught up with us on May 6. It had been an unusually brutal day in southern California’s San Gabriel Mountains as we started our fifth week on the trail with the ascent of Mt. Baden Powell, named after the founder of the Boy Scouts. It’s a magnet for Scouts from southern California, who include its summit on their conquest of the 53-mile Silver Moccasin Trail. Ice and snow made route-finding difficult. I fell enough times that when we reached the side trail to the summit, I told Gary and Mary to go ahead, I was going to sit and rest. Gary’s feet were killing him and I wasn’t much better off. Route-finding continued to be difficult for the rest of the day, and our doubts were strong enough that when I finally saw a PCT symbol some distance past the summit, I kissed it. Just before full dark, we were at Little Jimmy Campground, all of us complaining about our problems, when we saw a headlamp. It was Patti, a deaf athlete and big-wall climber from Yosemite, out to break the 81-day record from Mexico to Canada. We had managed only 13 miles that day; she was averaging 35. We felt like such wimps! She and Mary conversed via notebook, and then in a snap she had her tent up and her food cooked. She warned us she would be getting up at 5:30 a.m., but we didn’t hear a thing. Patti finished the PCT in 105 days, but, unfortunately, she didn’t set a record.

  PINENEEDLE is a friendly pharmacist in his 30s from Memphis, Tennessee. Two years before we met him in the town of Mojave, he had hiked frequently with the Witchers, a Virginia family who completed the Appalachian Trail with two children about Mary’s age. Although he was a very strong hiker, we managed to catch up with him every few days because at each road crossing, he would hitchhike into the nearest town to get a cup of coffee and a real meal, then he’d get a ride back to the trailhead and easily catch up with us. Tall, dark-haired Pineneedle, whose green garb matched his trail name, is the good kind of talkative thru-hiker—he likes to engage people in conversation, not just force them to be an audience. He carried a Bible, and he and I discussed church music and related topics. But he never proselytized, unlike another hiker we met in southern California. (At each water cache, this other guy was in the habit of leaving pamphlets that featured cartoon characters wearing 1940s-style clothing and hairdos. The characters are always discussing the Book of Revelation while carpooling to work, and they suddenly find themselves driverless when the rapture strikes.)

  I remember Pineneedle’s brief hesitation when I asked him what he did for a living. After a short pause, he admitted to me that he’s a pharmacist—almost as though he were actually saying, “I’m a hit man.” Pharmacy is, of course, a perfectly reputable profession, but I understood the hesitation immediately. I do the same before telling anyone I’m a journalist. All too often, the moment people discover someone works in a pharmacy, they pester him with questions about which medications to use for which ailment, or they complain endlessly of the evils of the pharmaceutical industry. As soon as some people find out my line of work, they either pepper me with demands that I persuade my editors to assign a story about their particular obsession, or they bore me to distraction with their endless complaints about the failings of “the media.” By unspoken assent, we asked Pineneedle nothing about the relative inflammation-reducing merits of ibuprofen vs. acetaminophen, and he avoided telling me his opinion, good or bad, of Tennessee media outlets.

  A few months after finishing the PCT, Pineneedle reported good memories of “following Scrambler’s small footprints, your family dynamics revolving around her, and the mini-concert in camp” when Mary serenaded him with her recorder. (The recorder is a musical wind instrument, dating back to the Middle Ages. Gary and Mary carried lightweight, nearly indestructible plastic versions.) Back at work as a pharmacist, he acknowledged the transition from trail to town was difficult and that he missed “the simplicity, adventure, and challenge of the trail.” He also admitted to an ailment most successful thru-hikers face when they return to “civilized” society: The adventure of the trail makes it difficult to be content with the boredom of everyday life.

  Six months later, while I was still recovering from the trail (and hoping someday I’d be able to sit cross-legged again), he reported an undying urge to do more: “I will never feel completely comfortable in society after two thru-hikes. I can function adequately but long for new adventures and experiences.” So it came as no surprise when, a year later, he hiked the Continental Divide Trail, from north to south. The CDT is harder than the PCT by several degrees of magnitude. It’s not so much a trail as a route, and backpackers spend much of their time hunting for a path, any path, that goes from point A to point B. Often, according to his journal, Pineneedle had to give up on trails and strike out cross-country, trusting to a compass heading to get him to that night’s destination. Dunkings in cold streams, scratches and bruises from tangled vegetation and barbed wire, and miles of backtracking were sometimes his fate.

  When I asked him to compare the three trails based on his own experience, he offered this analogy:

  Appalachian Trail: Painting by numbers. A social experience.

  Pacific Crest Trail: Painting with known colors and most of the picture. Equally social and solitary.

  Continental Divide Trail: A blank canvas. Solitary.

  His brief explanation of why he hikes and the rewards of the long trail reflect my own family’s experience: “The excitement and adventure of not knowing exactly what’s coming next is what drew me and drove me to complete the Triple Crown. It becomes a passion and way of life. The people, places, and things you meet and see along the way change you and your perspective on every level.”

  SCOTT WILLIAMSON, who was making his fourth attempt to yo-yo the PCT—hiking the PCT in both directions in one calendar year—made our day the first time we met him, in Big Bear City, in southern California. We were having one of those days when we all just seemed to be in a bad mood. Scott immediately elevated us several levels of happiness. We were eating lunch at BJ’s, a hiker-friendly little restaurant with good food. A tall man with a pack walked in, ordered lunch, and sat down at a table nearby. Gary greeted him by saying, “Hi, you look like a thru-hiker,” and then introduced us. Scott introduced himself and soon we were deep in a discussion of pack weights and daily mileages. Mary described it this way:

  Day 23: We had lunch at BJ’s, and met a guy named Scott. He said we were awesome, and everyone was saying good things about us (this cheered us greatly), and I was the youngest.

  Scott, who at the time was living in Santa Cruz County, not far from our home in Sunol, had heard about Scrambler from other hikers, and he was eager to meet her. The tall, handsome athlete in his 30s was frankly admiring of our effort to hike the trail as a family, and assured us we were doing well time-wise—which surprised us, considering that it had taken us 21 days to get as far as it had taken him to hike in nine days.

  This year, Scott was making exceptionally good time. He’d been thwarted before by snow in the Sierra on the return trip, but this year he was hopeful he could reach Canada and get back to Kennedy Meadows before winter settled in. If he could just reach Kennedy Meadows on the way south, he told us, he’d be home free. Ironically, he did exactly that, only to be stopped in his tracks by the deep snow left by a highly unusual, early autumn storm in the southern California desert. But he persevered, and did indeed attain his goal of being the first person to succeed in a PCT yo-yo. We thought Scott was awesome, and to have him admiring us made us feel just wonderful. A modest man, he even made fun of himself: He told us he set a record for equipment failure one year when his water container failed even before he started—on the way to the monument on the Mexican border.

  Exactly 100 days after our first meeting, we saw Scott again as he headed south. We had covered more than 1,800 miles by that day in September. Scott, on the other hand, had walked 3,500 miles—and he’d done that in less time than we’d been on the trail, even though he started later than we did. Gary was in bad shape. He had come down with an undiagnosed illness four days earlier, and was still suffering severe mus
cle and joint pains. Fellow backpackers who had seen us a few days earlier doubted we would be able to finish. As we stood on the trail in Oregon, talking in a light drizzle, Scott remarked on the many hikers who had given up, and the many people who had told him he couldn’t finish, either. He had learned to ignore them. “Your hike isn’t over until you say it’s over,” he told us emphatically. By this time, many people had hinted, or even told us outright, that we couldn’t possibly reach the end of the trail before winter set in. Scott’s remark reminded Gary that we were the only ones who could call off the trip.

  Patti Haskins and Scott Williamson joined forces at Vermilion Valley and pretty much hiked together until the Canadian border. We eagerly scanned every trail register for their signatures and for Scott’s motto, “Onward to Canada.” (Mary speculated that he would change it to “Backward to Mexico” on the way south, but he only changed it to “Onward to Mexico.”)

  STEVE AND SARA were the only father-daughter duo we’ve ever met on long trails. Both Canadians, they were friendly, intelligent, well-informed about both Canadian and American culture, funny, and inspirational. Sara, who was in her late 20s, had cut off her long hair—all of it—before beginning the trip, and donated her tresses to make wigs for children who had lost their hair during chemotherapy. Even without her hair, she was a pretty woman, and well-spoken, whether in English with the other hikers, or in French with a batch of foreign tourists. Steve, whose short beard showed some gray, was a lawyer specializing in securities. We were delighted to catch up with them at Kennedy Meadows, where we spent a rainy afternoon chatting with them, Pineneedle, and another hiker named Hoosier on the porch of the store there, a well-known gathering site for thru-hikers getting ready to tackle the Sierra.

  VICE and his boyhood friends and backpacking companions, SPREADSHEET and DUMPTRUCK, had the greatest affinity for water of anyone we met on the trail. Every chance they got, they’d get into a stream or lake, clean up, and even wash their clothes when possible. We, on the other hand, were probably the filthiest hikers on the trail; our relatively slow pace didn’t allow time for bathing, a time-consuming chore in the wilderness.

  As it happened, we were very clean when we met Vice the first time in late July. We had just returned to the trail from my sister Carol’s home, and my father had dropped us off where the PCT crosses Highway 49 near Sierra City, California. After he drove away, while we were adjusting our packs, Chacoman stepped out of the woods, and we sat down to talk a while. Chacoman was in no hurry, since he had to hitchhike into Sierra City on what turned out to be a fruitless quest to pick up new Chaco sandals. He kept having them mailed to him, and they kept not being there. He finished the hike in the same raggedy pair he had started out with. Anyway, as Chacoman headed down the highway to find a more visible place for putting out his thumb, two young men—Vice and Spreadsheet—emerged from the woods, looking freshly scrubbed from their dip in the North Yuba River. We all ended up camping at Summit Lake. We saw them off and on through Belden (where they showered and laundered, despite not staying there), Bear Creek (the only place where Mary was able to get into the water for any length of time), and Humboldt Summit, where we all ended up taking the wrong trail and having to backtrack. They got ahead of us on the correct route later that day, and very considerately left a note for us with directions to a tiny stream along the Carter Meadow Trail, the only water source for miles around. The next time we caught up with them was at Old Station, California, where Dumptruck joined them after having taken time off to allow shin splints to heal. Again, they were clean and shiny, while we were hot and sweaty.

  At Burney Falls State Park in northern California, “the Guys” (our trail name for them) dipped their shirts in the pool at the base of the falls, much to the amusement of the crowd of tourists at the popular site. We caught up with them the next day while they waited for Dumptruck’s trekking poles to arrive. At that point, Gary and I were so crippled up that we didn’t even bother to visit the base of the falls (which we had toured extensively just two years earlier), contenting ourselves with the view from the top. Later that very hot day, we stopped to filter water at Rock Creek. When the Guys arrived, they provided the entertainment with their plunge into its chilly waters. Mary waded in the stream; Gary and I just sat in the shade. Although they hiked faster than we did, we caught up with them fairly often because they would take long breaks at water sources, such as Moosehead Spring in Section O, or hitchhike into towns for resupplies (and showers). We saw them last at Seiad Valley, where they arrived in blistering heat and left—of course—in a downpour.

  The Guys, all in their early 20s, had attended the same San Francisco schools since kindergarten. After high school, they went to different colleges, and now were back together on the trail. As a group, they had been christened the Stupid White Men, which was especially funny considering they were highly intelligent and attended top-notch universities. Vice, whose real name was Willie, was the organizer and informal leader of the Guys. He based his trail name on the number of vices he’d had to give up. Good-looking and gregarious, the last I heard of him, he had joined the Peace Corps and shipped out to Africa.

  Spreadsheet (a.k.a. Jon) was the quartermaster for the Guys. He spent so much time planning (and charting) every last detail of their trip, that he got his name even before they started hiking. “My trail name came from the admittedly dorky Excel spreadsheet I created for our trip and carried around in my journal,” he explains. The chart listed the number of miles and the elevation gain between resupply points. He programmed the spreadsheet to determine a target pace in miles per day based on the average grade of a section (a slower pace for steeper sections, of course). “Then—and here is the dorky part—I had the spreadsheet calculate the amount of food, in pounds, we would need for each section,” he says. “The number was based on (a) the number of days the section would take to complete at the target pace, (b) the number of calories three 22-year-old men of our heights and weights were expected to burn daily, given nine hours of backpacking (around 6,000 calories per person per day), and (c) the assumption that we could pack an average of 125 calories per ounce of food, a number I had determined in a separate spreadsheet that listed the calorie efficiencies and relative amounts of the types of food we would be eating.” Spreadsheet’s affinity for details and numbers will serve him well in the profession of architecture, which he hopes to pursue.

  Dumptruck (a.k.a. Austin) acquired his trail name after the Guys’ worst morning on the trail. The night before, they had feasted on macaroni and cheese, followed by an indulgent dessert of candy and Oreo cookies. By the time they finished eating, it was dark and cold, and they were so exhausted, they elected not to hang their food. Instead, they stuffed it into Austin’s backpack, which they wedged into the crook of a tree. Then they went to bed.

  They awoke early to a chilly morning and unzipped their tent door to get started on their day. “Spread before us was a scene of total carnage,” Austin recalls. “Wrappers and bags and crumbs and jars covered the ground. My backpack lay slumped and torn off to the side. It’s hard to say exactly how long we sat in the doorway in shock, but it was long enough to take stock of the entire situation: Our food was gone, we were stranded in the middle of a five-day section, my pack was destroyed, we had a huge cleanup operation to complete, and our stomachs were growling.”

  You might be inclined to think, as I did, that Austin earned the trail name “Dumptruck” because of all the trash he had to carry out of the woods that morning. But, as he put it, “To brand me with a name to remind me of that moment of shock would have been cruel, especially for a community of people that understood the importance of food.” Instead, “Dumptruck” came to be because of the one detail of that episode that made him laugh—and helped him and his growling stomach hike the 38 miles to resupply in Vermilion Valley. “In the center of the carnage was a gift from our visitor that could only be understood as a final, taunting gesture,” he says. “Clearly the result of dige
sting the very food it had stolen, the bear had left a present for me that was, by the estimate of our peers, so big we would have needed a dump truck to move it.”

  Dumptruck has a philosophical perspective on the role his name eventually played in their travels. “Faced with two days without food, something about that steaming pile cracked me up and made everything seem less traumatic,” he muses. “I laughed every time I told the story of my trail name, which is what a hiker needs to get through the tough times. More important, though, was that my name emerged when we overcame hunger and distance and pain—and our own stupidity—by relying on each other, our humor, and the thru-hiker community.”

  WALKS ALONE spotted us one morning as we were breaking camp in Nance Canyon in southern California. He stopped briefly to be friendly and to read our copy of the water report. We caught up with him in Idyllwild, where we had adjoining rooms in the Tahquitz Inn. When he departed early the next morning, he left a couple pears for us, which we appreciated greatly, and then he dropped off a bag of pretzels at the top of Devil’s Slide. Unfortunately, he didn’t stay on the trail for much longer. On the way into Idyllwild, a few hours ahead of us, he had faced the same choice we did when he found the trail was covered with snow. He chose to stay on the official route, whereas we opted for an alternative after I fell several times trying to stay on the PCT. It was a bad choice for Walks Alone: He fell on the icy snow, broke his collarbone—which he didn’t realize for several days—and had to drop out.