He’s Not Like a Regular Dad, He’s a Cool Dad

My dad and I have been hiking and backpacking together for pretty much my entire life. While I was growing up, those trips tended to be whole-family affairs, but since I hit adulthood (and the associated degree of self-sufficiency/carrying capacity/ability to contribute to trips rather than just go along for the ride) we’ve done several trips with just the two of us.

He grew up in California, and I lived the first nine-and-a-quarter years of my adult life in California. Add to that the several years we lived in Washington while I was a kid, and it’s safe to say we’re both solidly west coasters at heart, just currently displaced to the east coast. Although we’ve come to appreciate the Appalachians, there’s nothing quite like the Sierra Nevada.

Enter: the High Sierra Trail.

We’ll be spending the next several months passing research and planning back and forth, taking turns taking the lead as our respective work schedules allow. By this point, we’ve both had a fair bit of practice fitting trip prep and the trips themselves around our jobs, so this one should be manageable just fine as well.

It took a while to get to this point (see the aforementioned “since I hit adulthood”), but these days we work together pretty well. Spreadsheets come into play with some regularity, as do heavily-annotated maps in CalTopo (our current go-to navigation app), as do a wide variety of links to info and route descriptions of areas we want to go. By the time we head out the door we’re both thoroughly briefed on the route, the weather forecast, who’s carrying which communal gear (and whose gear stash it came out of), who has the Garmin inReach (his is named Bob, after the autopilot on the boat we used to live on, and mine is named Clare, after Clare Hodges, the first female NPS ranger), and where we can find a Five Guys (or In-n-Out) on the drive home. All the essentials.

I inherited many things from my dad, including a deep love of the wilderness and an utter lack of directional sense. A great combination, I know. Somehow, neither of us has gotten lost and died in the woods yet.

We’re both decent (if currently a bit out of practice, at least on my part) with a map and compass, although this can get tricky in parts of the Appalachians, where a lot of the peaks look very similar in person and/or on a topo map. I’m sure there are people who are very good at playing “match up the rounded summits,” but boy am I not one of them. Fortunately, I’ve found that this is often easier in a range like the Sierra, where a lot of the peaks are quite distinctive and look different from each other. And fortunately, CalTopo exists.

To Knee or Not to Knee?

My dad had knee surgery in mid-February to repair a torn meniscus. He’s also had some issues with Baker cysts in his knees.

Knees are kind of important for backpacking.

The meniscus surgery he had, fortunately, has a fast recovery period — when I saw my dad a few days post-surgery he was already off his crutches. Still, my mom and I have him under strict orders to take good care of himself and his knees these upcoming months so he doesn’t get injured or aggravate any existing problems between now and the trail. My dad has been very active his whole life and doesn’t like to just sit around, so he’s not very excited about this, but he is very excited about the High Sierra Trail, so hopefully he will cooperate.

Wish us luck!

Feature image: Uinta Highline Trail, 2021 • photo by my sister