The Assault

D Minus 3

Inspired by the need to survive in the wilderness: salads at lunch, cutting beer consumption, and stairstepping thru 'Ally McBeal' has lost me 10 pounds in 2 weeks.

D Minus 2

I'm in a panic - despite 12-hour days, all the essential last-minute details at work are not coming together - but this doesn't seem to bother anyone but me - (and Dean, who may have to contend with the flailing details). That nite i buy all the stuff i'll need, and pack.

D Minus 1

Go home at lunch and finish packing. At 5:15 i finish the last report and answer the last question. At 5:20 i'm on the road. At the first traffic lite i remember i'd promised to email something to Deanna. Back to the office, fire up the PC, forward the note, PC off. 5:30: finally gone. The desert along 95 is soft-glow beauty as always at sunset. I sleep in the truck in a parking lot along I80.

D-Day

Arrive Carol's about 7 am. Hug. Taking her rig & mine, we position my pickup 2-days' hike up the trail. Back home, breakfast of Eggs Caroladict (excellent!) and chocolate cake with raspberry (it's my birthday).

The trailhead's only 3 miles up the road from her house. We park her car there and at 11 am we're off. Other than the fact that California's experiencing an unusual heatwave, the weather's perfect, as it would be the whole trip.

We hike, and talk.

Carol wonders if we locked the back door to her house. I say that if we forgot, she'll return to find that the big bully squirrel that lives in her backyard will've moved in and taken over the place. Beer cans everywhere, she says, cigarette butts. Squirrelly magazines. 'Squirrel of Fortune', i suggest. 'Esquirrel', she counters.

What do you write about a hike? It was beautiful. It was hard work. It was worth it. Most amazing were the flowers - the meadows and creeksides full of them, yellow, white, red, orange, pink, dark purple, light purple, combinations, small ones, tall ones, often arranged in most wonderful bouquets.

I try my new water filter (essential for survival) for the first time. (The VERY first time - never even tried it out in the sink at home. Good thing it was a simple UI.) Works. Cool. Then climbing up the creek bank i slip, drop my full plastic water bottle (smashing a corner, creating a pinhole leak) and stomp hard on the filter (which survives). Must be more careful.

Pass a CCC crew. Must be 90 degrees and these young folks are out there in the sun in full work clothes hauling rocks and logs and doing the most intense physical labor, surely for near-minimum wage. And seemingly generally enjoying themselves.

We reach Carson Summit, which was the first day's target. Saturday hoards of hikers. Carol discovers that the key to her car, which had been in our map bag, is no longer there. Damn.

We push on. Everyone's headed to/from various lakes, but the PCT heads off into the mountains and we leave the peoples behind. 5:30, we find a nice stream fed from a glacial snow patch and 'make camp'.

('Make camp' means leaning the packs against a tree, rolling out the plastic, rolling out the sleeping bags. Done.)

Before the sun retreats behind the hill, we sit on a fallen log in the sun and Carol supplies a fine dinner of french bread, camenbre cheese, and pesto torta.

If Sam Clemens had traveled with Carol, he never would have written Roughin' It.

For my part, i produce a bottle of St Chappelle Chardonay. "And the fine crystal?" she asks (our code for plastic cups). To her surprise, i pull from the depths of my spare park service socks 2 authentic (unbroken) wine glasses.

Later, glancing up at the snow bank, she's startled to see a white wolf silently watching her. But there are no wolves in California. About that time, two hikers pass and their husky follows.

There were a few bugs and only for a while. The nite was too warm and the ground too hard.

I slept fitfully, debugging in my dreams.

D + 1

Up at 7, i struggle with Carol's bad matches and finally start a small fire to boil the water for mocha & late. Ruffin' it. We finally are off at 9. Hot, exposed, no shade, other times cool, breeze, trees. Trail confusion each time we come to a road or areas accessible to vehicles along lakes.

By 2 pm, we've reached my truck. A tire's flat. Damn. And the friendly tire shop man has put the lugs on so tight that i can't get one off. A jeep happens along and lends a star wrench, which does the job. It's hot sun, dusty, rolling in the dirt to place the jack and retrieve the spare, and i find the flat tire won't fit where the spare goes, and i don't have the key to the camper shell, so it rides in the passenger seat. The hike plus this unexpected effort about absolutely exhausts me. (Carol on the other hand, is much more fit than i. Besides living at 6500 feet, she runs marathons at 6500 feet.) She's in a rush to go - she has to work the next day, plus get my tire fixed - plus break into her own car. I suffer a serious bout of demoralization. I don't want to go on alone.

But i hoist my heavy pack and head off down the shaded trail and instantly feel better. It's what i learned from the lesson of that long lonely hike 25 years before: As long as you keep moving, it's OK. (Woody Allen: "Love is like a shark - it has to keep moving or it dies." Just thought i'd throw that in.) Don't stop because this seems like a pretty spot, or because you've done enuf miles that day, or because you really ought to save this next steep stretch for the cool of the next morning. For me, the path to failure is in my mind, not the legs.

Rising high up, it's silent and empty and stark. I keep going to 7 pm, finally stopping near a rushing steam in a steep canyon amid avalanche debris. I wash off the dust, eat some cereal, then barely have time to make a few map notations before it's dark.

In the dream i'm trying to run SAD & SECSHost - wait, this doesn't make sense - i'm not networked! I'm in the wilderness for godsakes! OK, well let me check thru the files and the directory structure on my c: drive then. Surely i can do that. I mean, how do you plan the next day or even get to sleep without your files? And this happened over & over.

D + 2

Up about 6, on the trail at 7. My thoughts are almost solely about calculating mileage, goals, measures of progress. I devised a hundred different ways to assess how i was doing, viz. when i reach Ebbetts Pass midday today i'll be 3/10 of the way there; 2 days later at Sonora Pass, half-way there, so to get to Sonora all i have to do is do again what i've already done, and at the point do again what i've done to THAT point, and i'll have done it. Etc.

Travelling mid-morning in the direct sun, i got some very minor but very this-should-never-happen chest pain, and it was clear i was pushing too hard. The problem was altitude. We'd started at 6500, advanced to 8800 on nite 1, and had been in the high 8k to low 9k ever since. Generally i was fine on the level and downhill stretches, but the uphill stretches were seriously oxygen-depleted, a fluid anomaly which NOAA should investigate. I resolved to rest more, go slower, eat more, drink more water.

I had no appetite, but i couldn't get enuf of the water. Judging by urination (which is how the military does it - i read it in a Tom Clancy book) I was clearly dehydrated.

12:40 pm: Ebbetts Pass. Half a day ahead of schedule. I realized that in 48 hrs i'd gone 42 miles. Oh my.

Keep going.

Mid-afternoon - steep 500-foot climb to Noble Lake at 8900 feet. Bright hot sun, no shade, the volcanic terrain was a moonscape, no trees, narrow gravelly slippery trail, this was a slow step-by-step thing and i didn't want to stop til shade - but around each bend - there wasn't any! Nightmare! Struggle! Finally made it to the lake, flopped down in the shade, considered a new policy -- maybe hang around here for the rest of the day, then go on.

Stayed an hour. Moved on.

The climb was another 400 feet to the pass, but i was rested and it was cooler and shady. Made it up OK...

...then it was a long shaded descent, finally to a lake, stopped about 6:30. Spent some considerable effort scooping out shoulder & hip holes in the soil to improve the bed, but it didn't help, the area in between was too high. Couldn't figure out how to run the program that would make me sleep. Wasn't i a computer? Surely a human body didn't just 'go to sleep' - i tried to remember if that was somehow the way it was done, and couldn't imagine.

D + 3

Mornings are always wonderful. Complete optimism. Cool. Sun not showing yet. Initially staggering to my feet on sore legs was a struggle, but once they got limbered i was fine. No significant blisters. Hips sore, shoulders sore, calves sore, but that's all to be expected. Nothing debilitating. No sunburn, thanks to Banana Boat.

But I was finding even 200-300 foot rises a struggle. I'd slow to a crawl, one step at a time, overwhelming whole-body exhaustion, yet top-out and i was fine. Resting more was certainly necessary but also a real hassle because getting the pack on/off always threatened to rip the skin off my right knee, sitting-down/getting-back-up was a sore struggle, and once i got going agian there were all sorts of clothing/pack-strap adjustments that had to be made.

Oh, and the mountains and the flowers, the stream courses and the meadows were awesome.

Today there were no roads to cross, it was all wildness. Having become so sensitive to elevation gain, i plotted out on the map all the high & low points and the elevation difference between. Today would be a series of 6 up/downs ranging from 200-600 feet each, followed by a 700' descent to the depths of East Fork Carson River Canyon. Whatever. But it was at this point, to my horror, that i beheld what Day 5 would bring: From 8100-foot elevation in the canyon, i'd have to climb to holy shit 10,600 feet!

This troubled me.

The day's ups & downs had their highs and lows. Some went better than others, but even the 200's could be arduous. Caught my first glimpse of Sonora Peak, 11400', whose shoulder i'd have to struggle over. It looked like loose black bare volcanic cinders, and i imagined a shadeless, sliding trail like the one to Noble Lake, only magnified 5x.

I honestly did not know if i'd be able to make it. But it was the only way out.

Plan: i'd get as far as i could today, to minimize the climb tomorrow. Water was a concern. I'd need lots of it, maybe more than what i could hold in the 2 canteens. Would there be water sources up on the high slopes? Probably, but loose volcanic debris doesn't hold it well, so it might be dry. I'd go slow, surely, maybe even having to rest as much as i climbed. And i'd have to keep tabs on the water situation - if it seemed i was at 'last water' on the mountain (or if too exhausted), i might have to stop there, then continue the next day in the cool of the morning.

I might not make it at all.

Descending to the river i kept watching for the day's target, a trail junction, didn't see it, was getting more & more discouraged, then realized, heck, tho' i'd missed the junction i must be miles past it (a good thing), as surely 2 trails would not be parallelling eachother along the river in this narrow canyon. And sure enuf, matching the map to the topography, by 6:30 pm i was 3 miles and 800' of elevation closer to the pass, 3 miles i wouldn't have to do the next day.

It must have been the challenge of the coming day - tho' i'd done 19 miles this day i felt great. I made a bed of tiny pine cones, and the prickly padding seemed to help the hips, but i'd laid it all down too close to a rock at the foot end, so my feet were up in the air all nite. I dreamed that my legs must be DLLs, loadable, unloadable, why were they needed at nite?

D + 4

This was to be the hardest day of the hardest 5 days of my life.

Studying the map like a tactician, divide and conquer. I could divide the route to the summit into 3 sections: (1) The Approach, a relatively gradual ascend of 700' in the mile-and-a-half continuing along the river, (2) The Jaws of Death, rise 700 feet in less than a mile. (3) Stairway to Heaven, the 'easy' 300' remainder over another mile to the highpoint.

There was no way i was going on to Yosemite. This had been too hard already, and the altitudes were even worse down there. Further, a chunk of rubber heel had come off each of my boots, and the sole of one had split cross-wise. Finally, so far i'd always had a road, to "bail-out" onto if i wanted, every day or so - but here to Yosemite (sounds like a Burt Lancaster movie) there was only a single highway, Sonora Pass, 3 miles the farside of my impending summit. So Sonora Pass would be it.

I picked up an unopened 2-pound bag of raisins. It felt worse than a brick.

Like a crippled airliner, i jetisoned fuel, about 5 pounds of it.

The pack seemed featherweight. I was on the trail at 7:20.

I felt great. Even tho' it was uphill, i was walking at a normal pace with no problem. I was surprised to reach The Jaws in only 50 minutes, including a water refill stop.

I looked up toward the pass and saw it for the first time...

And it was LOW. And CLOSE. And VEGETATED.

And i thot, I CAN DO THAT.

And i did. Took it slow, sure, but it was no problem. The footing was good, the trail so improved in some places that it was cobbled like a Roman road.

Topped out. Took some pictures.

The crests of the Sierra are awesome. Jagged snowy peaks, and they just go on & on in all directions.

Mostly jogged the last mile. Hit the highway just minutes after 11 am. 96 hours 'out there'. 75 miles.

So how'd i do?

Did i do something extremely difficult? No doubt 'bout that.

Lose some weight? Must've, tho' only my own scale (and time) will tell.

Do i 'still got it'? 'Fraid not. But that's OK.

I got somethin' else.