For more than 2,000 miles I was cautious with my food… carrying a bear canister even where it was not required or hanging my food from a tree.
Most other PCT hikers slept with their food inside their tent or used their food bag for a pillow. I thought they were dumb and asking for trouble, and in fact witnessed incidents of bears crashing tents to steal food while terrifying sleeping hikers.
But then 90 miles from the Canadian border and fed up with hanging my food every night, I decided to follow normal PCT practice, and left my food in my pack inside the tent.
The first night, no problem. Same with night two. But around 3am on the third night, I woke up to a rustling noise, and then went back to sleep. The noise woke me up again, and this time I shined my light at the pack down near my feet. A pair of green, beady eyes stared right back at me.
I stunned that poor mouse with a blizzard of cuss words. It scurried around by my feet while I slowly became fully conscious. So now what to do? Fortunately, it wasn’t raining so I pulled out my sleeping bag, pack, clothes. The poor mouse was freaking out and racing up and down the tent looking for a way out. Once all my stuff was out, I started whacking the bottom of the tent with a hiking pole. It scampered out. Now I had to figure out how it got into the tent. I found a two-inch hole which it had gnawed into my expensive Big Agnes tent, and repaired it with Tenacious Tape and then went back to sleep for a couple of hours.
What a pain. The next day at camp I was telling the tale. Another hiker had an even better story. Her mouse friend had twice gnawed its way into her tent. The second time, she trapped it in her titanium cooking pot, put it outside with the lid on so it wouldn’t bother her again that night, and went back to sleep. A true bad-ass.
It isn’t easy to reveal this stupid mistake. I felt like such a dummy, and guilty that the little mouse will need Xanax to recover from the stress of our encounter. At my final resupply in Stehkin a hiker gave me some rope and I hung my food the final five days to the Canadian border.
I was pumped. It was March 8, 2021, and after months of training and dreaming, I fist-bumped the southern terminus, and headed north for Canada. Never mind that I got lost and walked a mile out of the way before even finding the terminus. Forget that my feet blistered up after only ten miles. Just ignore that my pack was too heavy from carrying about 5 pounds of extraneous gear.
I only saw one other hiker that morning and afternoon. The sun was shining, the air was cool and the streams were flowing. I had hoped to camp at Lake Morena about 20 miles from the border that first night. But the blisters, a late start, a recent COVID vaccine and a final steep climb to the lake convinced me to camp near Hauser Creek at the 15-mile mark.
Dog-tired, cold and hungry I was looking for a tent-site when I met Dave, a huge mountain of a man with a beard to match. He gave me a jubilant greeting and told me about his first day’s hike, and how excited he was to be camping beside a veteran thru-hiker (Star) who he already greatly admired because her trail skills were top-notch as evidenced by her taut, perfectly tied-down tent fly. Dave’s tent looked amateurish by comparison.
Didn’t talk much to Dave that night, but he was up early and shouted out an enthusiastic good-morning and said he was excited because he soon would be eating a breakfast burrito at the Oak Shores Malt Shop in Morena Village. He also said he was probably the slowest hiker on the trail.
I caught up with Dave later that afternoon at the Boulder Oaks Campground. He told me a little of his story. He’s an electrician, and like a lot of guys during the pandemic, he lost his job. He also didn’t have a partner at the time, and to save money he’d left his apartment and moved in with his Dad. He was fiddling around on YouTube, and came across something called the Pacific Crest Trail. And then he began a deep-dive watching podcasts and videos from veteran trail hikers. A few days into this binge-fest, he decided that maybe this would be something he could do despite having next to no backpacking experience and being out of shape. He planned a hike on the PCT near the Cajon Pass where he ran into an experienced thru-hiker who told him her story of becoming a PCT trail junkie. He was hooked.
From that day he began to do training hikes in the San Jacinto mountains and elsewhere and to plot out what gear to buy and when to depart. Unlike me, who would have preferred a later start-date, Dave specifically chose an early date: March 8, 2021. He wanted to give himself time to work into physical shape and still reach the Sierras by Memorial Day. The next morning, a four-day snowstorm hit San Diego County. While I was trying to decide if I should just hunker down in the campground, Dave announced he was going to test his toughness and raingear by heading out into the storm. I thought he was a bit crazy, but after an hour of boredom in my tent, I broke camp too. I met Dave in the afternoon where he was setting up camp along a creek and trying to stay dry and warm in the snowstorm. It was a pretty location, but unsheltered so I pushed on to a campground about five miles north figuring if my tent failed at least I could stay warm in the outhouse. Turned out that wasn’t necessary for me, but another hiker spent lots of time drying out clothes in that five-star outhouse.
I hiked through two-feet of snow on the trek to Mt. Laguna where I got off the trail for a couple of nights to let the storm blow over. With two additional storms on the way, I flew back to Berkeley for three weeks to let the weather improve. That morning, I met Dave headed out again for the trail. The sky was clear but another storm was predicted to hit in two-days. Dave was concerned but thought he would soldier on.
I didn’t know if Dave had made it safely through the March storms and the treacherous San Jacinto Mountain. I re-started my hike from Mt. Laguna on April 5th. About a month later I walked into a spring just south of Tehachapi, and heard this booming laugh and their stood hiker Dave. There was much less of him now. He had lost weight and he was looking lean and strong. We caught each other up on our respective journeys. He had acquired the trail name, Tortoise. But I noticed when I walked with him over the next few days that he was anything but slow. However, he was still telling folks about how his pace was like…well a tortoise.
Tortoise and I were destined to meet yet again. This time I was walking southbound just before the Lincoln Chair Lift at Sugar Bowl. And who turned down the northbound switchback but a big, lean bear of a man, named Tortoise. He was strong but seemed a little tired from his journey through the Sierras and was planning to take a week’s vacation to the beach with his brother. I never saw Tortoise again. I hope he was able to get through California before the Dixie Fire blocked the path. But I bet he did because he was one determined dude, and after three months on the trail, in very difficult conditions, he proved he had the grit and the experience to finish.
A place dreaded by PCT hikers is the 20+ mile stretch hiking along the Los Angeles Aqueduct through the scorching Mojave Desert where there are no water holes and the sand burns through your shoes. But I wasn’t having any problems at all because I was deliriously high off the fumes from the more than 1,000 pot farms in this area.
Hiking along the aqueduct is a weird diversion from the single-track trail I had walked on up to this point. The big pipe sucks water from the Owens Valley into thirsty Los Angeles, destroying wildlife habitat, tribal lands and communities in its wake. But who the hell cared because even though the air smelled skunky, I was hiking like a maniac, and giggling at my own jokes and eventually feeling a bit peckish. So, I sat down on the cement road topping the aqueduct and pulled out my food bag. I was ravenous, and ate not only a tortilla and tuna appetizer, but also two freeze-dried meals (Meat Ball Ravioli and Pad Thai) followed by a dessert of chocolate and trail mix.
Los Angeles Aqueduct
I gained some elevation after my feast and began to see that the desert had been invaded by dozens of white plastic greenhouses. It was sobering. I kept walking as night fell and the stars emerged, but then the spotlights turned on, and the desert became a forest of brightly lit shopping malls. And then the trucks arrived. About every 15-minutes you could hear an engine roaring as a truck careened down the dirt road next to the aqueduct. I later learned the trucks were hauling fertilizer to the farms, and taking the finished product to market. Fortunately, because of the engine noise and the glare from the headlights, I had plenty of time to jump off the road to avoid being hit. These drivers could give a rip, and their commercial mission was far more important than any collateral damage they might cause to a careless hiker.
More than 1,000 pot farms are environmental hazards
Hikers aren’t the only collateral damage these illegal pot farms are causing to the desert environment and the communities here. California legalized weed a few years back. Farmers are supposed to obtain permits to grow pot, obey environmental laws, and pay taxes to local and state governments. That’s not how it gets done for much of the weed grown, sold and smoked in the state. A Los Angeles Times story reported that there are more than a thousand unlicensed cannabis grows in this part of the desert. They are causing havoc. It takes a lot of water (150 gallons) to grow one pound of weed, and each of these farms cultivates thousands of plants. Add that all up, and these weed growers are sucking up tens millions of gallons of water from the desert…which by definition is a place where water is scarce. They also wantonly destroy wildlife habitat in their thirst for profit threatening critters like the desert tortoise. And if you live or walk by these fields you are assaulted by the skunky stench.
Weed grows threaten the Desert Tortoise
What’s even worse than the environmental degradation is how many of these growers treat their workers. According to the Times story, many of these grows shanghai workers from south of the border and force them to labor in despicable conditions. In fact, many of these illegal operations are run by the same gangs who run the drug trade in Mexico. Criminal organizations from Russia, Laos and Cambodia are also getting in on the action.
I didn’t know any of this until after I had left the trail. Frankly, looking at the farms, it was an interesting diversion from the tedium of hiking day-after day through the desert. Around midnight I felt tired, and found a spot far off the road to cowboy camp for the night. I could still faintly hear the trucks, but no lights were visible and that allowed me to see the night sky. It was universe showtime with constellations, shooting stars, and the dense Milky Way.
How important is the number 108? Here are just a few examples from an article that appeared in HimalayanYogaInstitute.com
The distance between the moon and the earth is 108 times the diameter of the moon.
The distance between the earth and the sun is 108 times the diameter of the sun
The Sarsen Circle Stonehenge has a diameter of 108 feet.
There are 108 double stitches on a baseball.
108 is “Nature’s secret code,” governing the dimensions of everything from the Great Pyramid at Giza to the iconic seashell called Nautilus.
Please add a comment if you know of other examples.
I’m told that ancient yogis believed that we could attune ourselves to the rhythms of creation by completing practices in rounds of this sacred number. More importantly, my teacher Jeffrey Armstrong, requires his students to chant mantras precisely 108 times. This is not terribly difficult when you’re sitting down in a quiet place and use a mala (prayer beads) which has exactly 108 beads. It’s much more difficult on the trail while maneuvering around rocks, roots, snakes, snowfields, landslides and being diverted by breath-taking views.
I worked very diligently trying to chant a mantra 108 times. I achieved a C- grade on this test by the time I arrived in Canada. I used my fingers to keep track from 1 to 10 but remembering whether I was on 50 or 60 or 90 often eluded me. That’s because a steep trail section required attention, I stopped to talk to a fellow hiker or my memory sucks because I’m old.
I’m not sure if I received the truly auspicious benefits from chanting a mantra 108 times, but I found belting them out did provide some specific benefits:
Shiva statue in our garden
Om namo shivaya om shakti ma: Asking Shiva for strength helped power me up those 2,000-foot ascents.
Tryambakan ya ja mahe….Also invoking Shiva, this medicine song helped heal aches and pains from shin splints, plantar fasciitis, blisters and other assorted aches and pains.
Om aing namo dewi Saraswatyai namaha. Invoking Saraswati helped me to listen more closely to the sounds and rhythms of the forests, deserts, and other places I wandered.
Om aing namo dewi Parvati namaha. Singing to Parvati helped me find peace when I was scared.
Om aing namo dewi Lakshmi namaha. A tribute to Lakshmi and all the mothers in my life.
The Nashringa mantra.. This invoked the mighty Nashringa, the incarnation of Vishnu as both a lion and a human to ward off evil spirits.
Jesus Loves Me..This simple nursery rhyme helped me communicate in a very powerful way with Jesus.
And many more. Because after all I hiked 2,200 freaking miles.
I thought I was a bad ass for staring down a mountain lion at Peavine Creek on the Pacific Crest Trail. But then Sati rolled out their story faking out sidewinder rattlesnakes with rope and then jumping over them in three-foot wide box canyons in the Escalante Wilderness. That forced me to go to the time in Nepal when a Tibetan monk held a knife to my throat. Melody countered with their adventures para-gliding from the Uluwatu cliffs in Bali, Indonesia. I reached back several decades to the story about when my pack busted and I nearly drowned crossing the Waimakarere River in New Zealand. They both shared their adventures jumping off peaks in the Sierras in their para-gliders. And that was before we finished the first bottle of wine and the lemon and saffron chicken dish that Melody had prepared.
Captain Melody on the river
And on it went through dessert. We had a great time. Melody and Sati are educators and family friends who now live in Mount Shasta. I fortunately found them at home, and they generously agreed to be my trail angels for the night. They had hiked 700-miles on the PCT, and they knew exactly what hiker trash like me needed: A shower, a good meal, a change of clothes while my laundry dried and a trip to the grocery store.
Yikes
They gave up para-gliding a few years back because they were taking too many risks, so instead they are now leisurely rafting the rapids on the Klamath, Rogue, Snake and other western rivers.
Bad Ass Trail Angels that cook like…angels (PakDave & Sati)
The next morning these two adventurers were off to the Klamath River for a shakedown trip with friends. I put on my pack and headed towards the Trinity Alps with a full belly, a treasure trove of new stories, and warm thoughts of good friends and BAD ASS TRAIL ANGELS.
You ever heard of Ridgecrest, CA? Not me, even though I’ve lived in California for many decades. But I visited this desert town twice this year while on the trail. And both times Pancakes (Laura) made the experience memorable…plus I gained weight thanks to her home cooking.
The folks at TC Outfitters in Kennedy Meadows connected me with her when I was looking for a ride after walking 700 miles from Campo.
Pancakes offers reasonably priced rooms for PCT hikers, and she knows exactly what hikers need: Shower, laundry, groceries and best of all a hearty breakfast featuring sausages wrapped in her signature “pancakes.”
Pancakes has spent her whole life serving people. She’s raised many foster kids in her loving home in addition to a few of her own and adopted ones. In her spare time, she cooks up lunch and dinner for veterans at Ridgecrest’s American Legion Hall.
Pancakes & Pak Dave
From Ridgecrest, it’s possible to hitch or take a bus to Bakersfield or head south to the Los Angeles area. But the town itself is interesting. Ridgecrest is home to more PhD’s per capita in the country, mainly physicists and math wizards who work at China Lake Naval Weapons Station. They in turn help attract businesses like Red Rock Books which houses all the classics, plus big sections of science fiction and high-level math puzzle books.
I’m slow, so walking 25 miles a day takes me at least ten hours, plus another hour for lunch, breaks, socializing with other hikers and stopping to take in the views.
Most of my mornings are devoted to wildlife watching because the bears, deer and other critters are still lurking about. Around 7am they go to bed, and so I start belting out my morning prayers.
Lyell Creek, Yosemite just before dawn
I usually don’t see many other hikers on the trail in the early morning, but occasionally a hiker, perhaps freaked out by my chanting, warily passes me by. However, most of the time PCT hikers don’t notice because they can’t hear anything but the music blasting from their ear buds.
Many people have asked me if I’ve ever felt lonely hiking solo for five months. Never. That’s because I feel like my family, friends and other beloved beings are hiking right along with me. It’s what I’ve been learning in the practice of Bhakti Yoga: Chanting or singing the names of your loved ones and the deities that you cherish is a way of invoking them. It’s like my morning prayers are a chatty gathering around the breakfast table.
Okay, that last paragraph may seem weird to some of you. You may even think that it’s a bit delusional. I’m not asking you to buy into it. But it’s a Vedic tradition that’s thousands of years old with a long line of teachers and books defining the practice. I’m still a rank beginner.
It’s interesting that many of my fellow hikers take other paths to experience something similar. For example, a very large percentage of PCT hikers eat Psilocybin mushrooms to help them enhance the trail experience. They may be searching for the same place of being connected with the earth that we are walking on, the Gods they worship and, most importantly, their real selves.
I’ve never tried these magic mushrooms. Maybe eating them invokes a similar experience to what I have with Bhakti yoga, maybe not. For me, the key to whatever path you choose to build relationships with other humans and spiritual deities is intention. Do you have a philosophical concept of what you’re looking for, or is your intention simply entertainment? Come to think of it, you can enjoy these spiritual relationships and be entertained all at the same time.
But for me, it’s been helpful to be grounded in a Vedic philosophy that’s been written down and practiced for such a long time. It’s helped me to understand what’s going on during these intense energetic experiences, rather than just being wowed by the sensations, and that helps deepen things even more.
Note: Interested in Bhakti Yoga, see my teacher’s website at GitaComesAlive.com
When a guy from southeast Minnesota makes a promise, you can take it to the bank he’s gonna keep his word. Take my young friend Soda Pop. I met up with him in northern Washington.
He seemed normal enough for a thru-hiker: Lean, long red beard. Hikes faster than a Porsche. But then something weird happened. He’s pulling stuff out of his pack one day at camp, and out pops what appears to be a volleyball. “What the hell is that?” I ask politely. “It’s a ball,” he answers. Did I mention that southeast Minnesotans are quite literal?
“Got it,” I said. “But what’s it doing in your pack?” Soda Pop carries a bigger pack than most thru-hikers, about 70 liters. But even so this ball must have occupied about 30% of the pack’s total volume. That’s enough room for a lot of food, warm clothes, even a bottle of Jack Daniels.
“I promised to carry this ball to the Canadian border if I lost a bet I made with a friend in Cascade Locks,” said Soda Pop.
“Were you drinking?”I responded.
“Perhaps a little,” he answered. Two days later, Soda Pop bounced his ball back and forth between the US and Canada. Nice trick.
The lesson here: If a tall red-headed guy from southeastern Minnesota makes a bet with you to jump off the Empire State Building, please, just say no.
My partner Moving Target and I met Ben in the Marble Mountains of northern California just before the turnoff to Etna. He’d been panning for gold in the streams for most of the spring and early summer. He showed us his vial of gold nuggets which he was planning to sell to a pawn shop owner in Crescent City.
Ben has been living in the wilderness for nearly a year, living off food stamps and the money he makes from panning gold. He’s a little rough around the edges socially, but who wouldn’t be if you only talked to humans every couple of months. We were a little wary at first of this wild-looking being, but Target and I weren’t all that stylish ourselves after months on the trail. He seemed stable enough, except occasionally, he’d let out a war whoop. But again, Target and I were also a bit feral.
Ben decided to camp with us at Payne’s Lake. He told us his story of being an ultra-bicycle rider doing races across the United States. He’d been injured in a race and decided to recover by camping out on the California coast for a few months. He started panning for gold at the mouth of Klamath River and said he could make a few hundred dollars by working the river silt for a few days. The price of gold is nearly $1,800 per ounce, but he only makes about $500 per ounce after the pawn shop owner or jeweler takes his cut. (According to TieDyed, you can get a much better price from jewelers in downtown LA)
Ben said he’s pared back from the lavish camping style he started with. He ditched his stove and fancy tent in a cache somewhere in Siskiyou County and now eats uncooked food out of his gold pan and cowboy camps with a tarp and sleeping bag.
Ben’s smart and articulate, but he likes living off the grid and in the wilderness. He gave us a wealth of information about long lost trails, the gold market, wildlife in the area, ultra-bicycling racing…and a few other subjects. He’s not completely divorced from society. He can use the Internet, and has the savvy to sign up for food stamps. He’s not sure when he wants to return to a bed and a job but seems to believe it will happen…in the future…on his own terms.
I just have to admire the guy. He’s walking his own walk. Not particularly caring what others think, and not at all worried that he’s not conforming to any of society’s rules.
P.S: Ben is not the only goldminer I’ve met on the trail. I don’t know if you can mine enough gold to pay for your trip from Mexico to Canada, but Trail Angel TieDyed says there’s a lost gold mine somewhere near the Walker Pass that could make you rich. Just saying.
“That bear needs to be put-down,” said the PCT hiker after a night it wreaked havoc at Lake Gilmore in Tahoe’s Desolation Wilderness. That smart ursine climbed trees to collect hung food bags, poached trail mix from backpacks, and even entered a tent where a PCT hiker was using his food bag as a pillow. In other words, one very smart, very hungry and very aggressive bear.
“You can’t have bears barging into tents and taking people’s food,” the man said. I asked: “Did you bring a bear canister?
“They aren’t required here, and besides I don’t camp in designated campsite,” the guy answered. I suppose that meant, no. He didn’t use a bear can.
“And they weigh 3 pounds,” I offered. “Yeah, that too. And the odds of a bear taking your food are very slim,” he added. Let’s be clear, after many months hanging out with PCT hikers: It’s all about the extra weight.
I also did the math. There were 20 campers at Lake Gilmore that night, only me and one other person were exempted from the bear’s rampage, probably because he was too stuffed. I think that works out to 90% of the campers provided bear food that night. Maybe not slim odds.
There are a lot of inexperienced backpackers walking in the Desolation Wilderness who have no clue how to protect themselves from bears attacking their food. You would think that PCT thru hikers who have been on the trail for months would know how to do so, but amazingly they have convinced themselves that they are immune from such dangers, and that it’s perfectly reasonable to “put-down” bears that are causing problems rather than changing their own bad habits.
And I get it. Carrying a bear canister that weighs 3 pounds is 10% of your total weight if your pack is 30 pounds. For ultra-light hikers, that canister might be 30% of their entire pack weight. (Lots of advanced math in this blog.)
Saw this young guy on the PCT just south of Chester
But you aren’t doing yourself, other hikers or the bears any favors by choosing less weight over safety in bear country. That aggressive Lake Gilmore bear may very well be killed (put-down) for its behavior. Or it will teach its cubs that unprotected human food is a more convenient diet rather than eating the old-fashioned way by foraging on berries and other boring forest food.
Bottomline: The cost of peace-of-mind in bear country weighs 3 pounds.
