Badass is when you traverse the Sierra High Line trail on skis.
Badass is when you hike and bike up Mount Diablo twice a week.
Badass is when you hike Apache Peak on San Jacinto Mountain in snow and ice with an ice pick and trail runners arriving in Idylwilde after midnight.
Badass is when you hike the Pacific Crest Trail one year after major surgery to get back in shape.
Badass is when you ride a bike for the US Olympic Team at the Mexico City Olympics after taking up cycling just a few years before.
Badass is when you summit Mt. Baker at 72-years old while long-jumping crevasses and passing younger climbers.
I could go on, but that might embarrass my new friend HikeNBike who I met last year in Belden while hiking the PCT. You see HikeNBike is not a bragger. It took me several months of knowing him to learn these few nuggets about him. It turns out we live only a few blocks from one another in Berkeley.
There aren’t many PCT hikers my age on the trail. In fact, HikeNBike has a little more seasoning than me, but he’s a nice guy and slows down to my OG pace. We were walking the Hat Creek Ridge just north of Mount Lassen. This is usually a brutally hot and dry stretch but fortunately we were trekking in early June and it’s cool and cloudy. We talked traveling. He’s traveled, hiked and climbed on just about every continent, including some 20,000-foot peaks in Nepal and the Carpathian Alps in Romania, a place I’ve been trying to get to for years. We talked philosophy. He completed all the graduate work for his PhD in psychology, but instead of making it a career, he steered into construction instead and became a master carpenter which gave him an outlet for his artistic talents, and the time to indulge his passion for climbing and hiking.
Back in Berkeley, he’s invited me on some of his “easy” hikes, like the Burma Road trail on Mount Diablo which heads up 4,000 vertical feet in less than four miles…in other words very steep. He does it as a training hike, and likes to run some sections. I call it cruel and unusual. I prefer training that involves carrying my clubs on a round of golf.
So, if you’re hiking Mount Diablo or Mount Tam and you see a guy cheerfully chatting to an OG behind him whose sweating and breathing heavy that’s likely to be HikeNBike and Pak Dave. Give him a high-five. Give me oxygen.