13. Running Ragged

How does the song go?

“Little girl, little girl, don’t lie to me, tell me where did you sleep last night?
In the pines, in the pines, where the sun don’t ever shine, I’d shiver the whole night through.”

Well, call me the little girl. As the wind howled up the mountain wall and sang in the trees, I curled a little tighter. As the night dragged on, I rubbed my chest and legs, willing my toes to feel again.

It was time to face facts. My sleeping gear wasn’t going to cut it anymore. It had been deficient for a while, but I could no longer justify the use. My foam pad was mashed flat and torn by time as though chewed on by a dog. My quilt was even worse. Years of use, over-compression, moisture in and moisture out and little holes not found in time had left the down-fill clumpy and partly translucent, a poor excuse for a sleep system.

Among many of the hikers I knew, the state of my quilt had become a joke, and my refusal to admit it was over had become an even funnier one. This began 700 miles ago.

There is an economy of mind in thru hiking, an effort to get a little bit more out of everything before getting rid of anything. The last bit of toothpaste, the last crumb of the cookie, all the way up the line to major gear. I am especially bad about this, I never want to be rid of something I can still use. This often leads me to carry too much food for one leg of the hike, because I know I’ll eat it eventually.

In the silence of dawn I struggled to pack my gear up, my stiff, bloodless fingers failing to comply with basic tasks. To warm them I put them in my armpits, against my neck, between my thighs. When enough dexterity had returned to allow me to pull a drawstring or snap a buckle, I packed as quickly as possible until the digits began to slow again. I wanted to make hot coffee but wasn’t sure I could get the burner screwed onto the canister, and either way I knew I should save the fuel. I only had one, maybe two boils left, and I knew I needed at least one of them for the special dinner I’d been saving. I had left town knowing the fuel can wouldn’t last till the next one. Economy of mind.

There is a point of no return for any piece of gear. It is true in thru hiking – as in many things – that less is more. But not enough is, well, not enough. The gear I used to keep myself warm at night was not enough. I knew that now, without a doubt.

The wind swirled around me as I climbed above 13,000 feet. Almost noon now, and I still wore my puffy jacket – a very rare occurrence. The aspen trees far below me in the valley wore bright yellow and gold, touching on brilliant orange. It was still technically summer, but mountains pay no attention to human technicalities.

At the summit I tucked down behind the windbreak, the crater-like wall of rocks built by cold hands for just such a purpose. Only then did I realize I was bleeding. The dry skin of my thumb had cracked, and the lines and grooves around the nail had filled with red. My shin also bled, a pair of tracks that ran down either side of the bone from one small scuff, something I had hadn’t noticed at the time and hardly remembered now. No matter.

Nearly all my gear had been marked by the trail, and my body was no different. My sunshirt was full of holes, and more seemed to appear by the week. My shoes had begun to break down, much faster than the last pair had, but still had some life in them, maybe a couple hundred more miles. My backpack – holiest of all gear – was on a steep decline. Five years and thousands of miles had given it the look of weathered character that I love, but now a few points of its rich history were beginning to concern me.

I hoisted my good old pack and stood, buckling it and looking down at the plains below. I could see the skyscrapers of Denver, although from this summit they hardly seemed to earn that title. All around me, the eternal blue sky. I hadn’t seen a cloud in days.

Down, down, down the long side of the mountain and then up again, to another peak of equal height. I saw friends I knew along the way. In the glow of evening, Spirit and I looked out at the vast mountain sprawl.

“Dude…”
“Yea, I know.”
She appeared almost in tears with rapturous love for the view, and I couldn’t fault her for that. “You remember how I was about the Winds.” She laughed. “Yea, I remember.”
“Well I stand by it, but I mean…”
She nodded. “Dude, you live here?”
“Yea. I mean, not here here, but yea.”
We stood in silence for a moment before she reached out. We hugged in the sunset, a motion of mutual joy at the world we inhabited, and a familial love for those we traveled with.

Everyone collapsed at the bottom, exhausted by elevation and steep terrain, rubbed raw by wind and sun and effort. There was a warming hut hikers could sleep in, but nobody did. Overhead lights that wouldn’t turn off, people from the road going in and out all night, a strong smell from the restrooms and, it was said, occasional solicitation of sex. Tents were set up in an almost defensive circle out back, and I shared one with Wonder, who was sympathetic to my frigid plight.

A day later I was walking the shelves of a large gear outfitter, being smothered by the options. An employee told me of the benefits of this one, and the great pricing options for that one, and on and on and on. Saying “I actually know more than you” to a perfectly nice person who is trying to help is not something I could bring myself to do, but in time I found the items I was looking for and bought them. A financial bummer, as these things are, but a worthy one.

I reached the high summit of Gray’s Peak and peered into the void. From within the cloud it could’ve been any time of day: the flat walls of water seemed to consume the very idea of time. Even the mountain goats had moved down to the world below. I held a rock for balance as the wind hit me again and again, and tried to catch my breath. Not so much air in the air up here. Deep breath. Down along the rocky ridge and up again, over this rock pile and the next, and the next and onward, always onward. The wind rose again and I dropped to the ground, letting it pass over me as much as I could. Already it had pushed me this way and that, and the knife’s edge I walked on would not give me a second chance if I missed a step now.

Down below the ridges and peaks, down below the clouds. The low, rough alpine tundra bristled from the earth, coloring the mountainsides pink and gray and dusky green, the meadows and willows that traced the creeks blooming in beautiful yellows and reds and all the colors between them. A pair of moose watched me pass, then returned to their meal.

I pushed on till well after dark. The evening was mild and the sunset beautiful, and I couldn’t bring myself to stop. Clouds of lavender and rose crossed above me like the veins and arteries of the world itself. Dead trees lined the slopes, silver and gray, knocked over like so many bones. An owl moved silently from one to another. Full dark arrived and finally I camped high on a windswept saddle, and drifted off as the stars raced in the darkness above me.

I woke in the night. A loud crack from the forest below, a tree falling in the dark. I was glad to be above it all.

Through the morning I pushed myself, annoyed with myself and punishing myself. I was hungry. I had packed too light this leg of the trip, and had too few calories per day. Do better. I pushed on.

By evening the trail had brought me down to the land of people again. I walked past a golf course of rich green, so heavily watered I could smell it. The sprinklers ran on the decorative grasses and trees to the sides of the holes, not even on the course itself. I remembered the miserable level of the Colorado river and the moose that sniffed around the dry rocks, and I felt anger rise in my chest. Up on the mountain the streams were all dry. My bottles had been empty for miles. The fenceline was watched by cameras. The drivers that passed stared at the man walking between the golf course and the condos as though they had never seen a pedestrian before. All places like this place are really one and the same, the character and beauty that could make them unique is bleached out by the uniformity of perspective, of architecture, of occupant. I kept walking.

Back above the treeline, the high broad mountains stretched across the visible world. The joy of Colorado mountain climbing is one of the greatest in my life, and getting to participate in it along my journey south made my heart sing as I ascended. High up the walls of amber stone, the symphony of pika chirps and the melody of wind joined in.

Young aspen trees pushed their way up through the blackened earth, some brushing against the stalks of the burned trees that had come before them. Eight years ago, maybe ten. New growth beginning, the saplings making the first shade in a decade. There were bowhunters out in the forest, pairs that hiked in silence and, to my surprise, never seemed to notice me. Couldn’t they hear me? I certainly made no attempt to hide my presence. But neither did the deer, elk or moose that I passed daily, yet the hunters always seemed empty-handed and disappointed.

Two young squirrels ran through the leaves, chasing and catching one another, tumbling and rolling in the yellow and gold of the forest floor. A bear cub clung to a tree, the dark color of its fur standing out against the dappled forest. Oh shit. Where there is a cub there is a mother, and I saw her watching me a moment later. A second cub stood beside her. They were black bears – I was now well out of grizzly country – but the principle and the fear is the same. The cub on the trunk scratched its way up into the branches and the mother and the other took off down the hill. I watched them go.

A day and a night and a day of rain, constant and steady and complete. A car slowed beside me as I walked the road, and I felt crushed to have to decline the offer of a ride. I couldn’t abandon my footpath, and the rain wouldn’t break me. Cold and wet through it was, all my gear was well protected from it. Thruhiking is just a series of putting things in bags, and those bags in other bags, and everything I needed to keep going was well bagged.

In the morning I dried what was wet in the sun that glinted off the railroad tracks, and looked up at the light snowfall that dusted the upper peaks. Cold, and getting colder. The sunlight was bright but pale, somehow seeming washed out. Already many of the aspen trees had lost more than half their leaves, seeming undressed in the quiet forest.

At sunset I crossed a river, my bare feet carefully picking through the rocks and mud. Downstream a moose watched me, mouth and chest dripping.

The rains cleared and I began cowboy camping again. I stretched out under a half moon, silver and bright in the clear night sky, and I woke in frost. The iced dirt and grass crunched underfoot as I walked in the dark. Two ghostly eyes blinked in the beam of my headlamp, rising slowly from the brush, and kept rising until they hung over my head. Shit, moose! I hurried on, stepping across the creek as quickly as I could. One stone rocked under my foot, sending tremors through the thin skin of ice. The moose, woken from sleep and temporarily blinded by my light did not follow.

The golden hand of dawn climbed over the mountain to the east and daylight landed in a second. The trail ahead rolled over a windswept ridge, marked now and then by cairns that leaned from the wind, some looking like houses of blocks knocked down by a child. The sun was bright and hot, the breeze slight but bitterly cold. I shivered while my skin browned and burned. All day I rose and fell with the mountains, tucking in from the wind to eat a meal and moving on as soon as I could. The sun reached westward and dipped low, and the hungry earth swallowed it without pause. I ate dinner as coyotes squalled across the lake, and pushed on into darkness, traversing a cliffside in the night.

Cold stars blazed above me. Stars flying, stars standing, stars winking in their nests in the night sky. Stars between the stars between the stars. I didn’t have far to go to get to the road, to town, to a hot meal and a shower and a bed. I was cold, but not too cold to sleep a little longer. I would sleep some more but not just yet. For now, for this moment, I would watch the stars.