John Muir Trail Day 19 – Highest I’ve Ever Been pt 2 (Mile 132/211)

After last night’s bit of hypothermia, I lolled around until I felt warm and ready to hike. This meant leaving camp at around 10:45am. At home, I usually set my aggressive alarm for 4:44am, so this is just another of many ways trail life is different to home. A state of not-hurrying is an absolute luxury, and one of many reasons I am hiking alone. The pre-dawn of my first on-trail sleep, a group were leaving camp to get up Half Dome on schedule. One member of the crew was lagging. “I’m Trying To Hurry!” she keened, losing a contact lens in the dirt. 

The high-elevation lakes were, as so often on the JMT, completely gorgeous. I watched sparkles scattering across emerald and azure mirrors, steel wind smudging the surface. Looking down, the water would get so clear you could see boulders all the way to the bottom of these cliff-sided ponds. I climbed slowly (by this point in the blog, you have likely realised this is the only way I climb). I sat on a warm boulder and ate a PopTart and watched a marmot organising itself. I pointed it out to another hiker who thought it was cool. At Wanda Lake I felt completely peaceful (again, you may have intuited this is not my normal baseline) and made chocolate cheesecake in a bag with lakewater. 

The hike up to Muir Pass was the most altitude-sicky I’ve felt on this trip, huffing on the thin air and feeling a bit woozy. I took aspirin 325mg, and a PCT hiker recommended “pressure breathing” – the description of how to do this was a bit unclear (“you increase your respiratory rate and get more oxygen!”) but it reminded me that I could increase my own PEEP. Through the long climb, sun – of course – blasting from a bare sky, I made longer and longer exhalations against pursed lips. The thinking behind this is that the alveoli stay open (exchanging oxygen for to-be-exhaled CO2) for longer than they would with a regular-length exhalation. It made me feel better, though who can say whether through Science or just feeling like I was doing a helpful thing for my lungs and self. 

Crawling higher, up above 12,000 feet and the landscape was barren and lunar again. I could see the stone nipple of the Muir Hut up top of the pass, always more distant than it seemed it should be. I felt peevishly annoyed with it, and used that grumpiness as fuel for the last grinding bit of ascent. 

The hut was really cool, and I felt bad for having glared and cursed at it all the way up. Another hiker was breaking open a celebratory packet of Skittles he’d carried for this moment. A couple from Japan asked about the things I had clipped to my right chest strap – the InReach 2 (a million thanks, dear friend RK for this), and the the orange multi-function whistle. “What does it do?” they asked. “Well, I can blow the whistle if I need rescue – and it’s probably louder than my voice”. They nod. “There’s a compass on top… and it unscrews so there’s a signalling mirror on the other side. So I can flash a signal? And then I keep some lipsalve inside it – that’s the only thing I’ve actually used”. They say, “oh, we don’t have any of those things”. I say, “Well, you have each other. Which is probably better”. 

We all head down the south side of the pass, which is rubbley and jagged and involves mincing across many rushing creeks on sharp rocks, the trail in places indiscernible from the general mess of land-slip-and-slide. The vibe of the landscape in (of course) impending gloom is sort of malevolent, unverdant Yorkshire Dales. Residual glaciers hug the slopes – I look at one that is 10 ft high – rust surfacing through its roof, its veiny cliff-face having calved a triangular snow-blob the size of my tent. 

And then the trail crosses a snowbank, on a steep sideways slope. I am not scared, but I’m tired and wobble-legged and still carrying a convincing pack weight, clad in short-sleeve short-legged rubbed-thin spandex and trail runners that have seen a lot of tread-eroding trail already. If I’d come across this bit of snow on a day hike, I might have turned back. But the hundred-odd miles of JMT I’ve already covered have a cumulative heft, a gravitational pull that keeps me pushing south, onward. People have walked across this snow already, dimpling a high road and a low road across its ice-crusted face. I step onto the low road, test its slipperiness. It is pretty slidy. I remind myself the Canadian said I had “good legs”, and engaged all their muscles to stay as symmetrical as possible as I shuffled across the 45-degree (ish) incline. 

And in trying not to think of a polar bear, of course halfway across the snow I couldn’t stop thinking of my not-good leg earlier this year. How I’d hugged the wall of the local ER on the way back to my hospital bed, declining a wheelchair but accepting the solidarity of a sturdy paramedic who slipped her arm under mine and human-crutched me down the hallway. How I’d hobbled into the MRI trailer in outsize elephant-grey scrubs, but had to watch as the two taciturn techs lifted my unbelonging left leg into the machine because it was dead to me. 

But that was Spring and this was Summer in California and my left leg was doing its job just fine. It was my right, downhill, one that took a little slip at the midpoint of the snow. As I was thinking how I’d try to kick-kick-sit-stab the snow with my pole spikes to stop a slide, I recovered balance and – without a second thought – trod the last dozen steps to the border of snow and rock. Back on rubbly trail, I told the glacier “No Thanks” and refused to look back at it. 

You don’t know which rocks will roll until you test them with weight. Sometimes the flat, sturdy ones in the middle of the river are the ones that are keen to weeble-wobble. Northbound hikers were looking for someone who’d got separated from his desperate, weeping girlfriend on or off the trail. She had the only InReach; they were all passing the word about his height, race, attire, name. I’d crossed paths with someone who fit the description a few hours earlier, but had only asked general questions about how he was doing, not his name.

I decided to index-card identifying details of all other hikers I passed (in lieu of having friends on trail to talk to, this seemed interesting and distracting). There were a lot of 160-200lb white males with green shirts or beige shorts and blue or black packs; I forgot who had the occasional flash of teal or purple or some distinctive ink. I paid attention to beards and sneaker colours and unusual hats. I refused to entertain the notion that others might be likewise assessing me – the indeterminate-age girl-woman with a big pack, orange donkey shirt, disgusting grey skort, distressed UPS hat, confusing thigh tattoos and the stench of a non-recent corpse. 

In the last hour of light I was looking for campsites. They were variously too high, too exposed, too small. I crossed paths with the Japanese couple, then with my shuttle buddy’s Mum. She’d lost the trail up in the creek crossings, had been navigating off-trail with her InReach and phone, and contact with her daughter who’d already gone ahead and set up their camp for the night. I scuttled down the hill and let the daughter know her mum was coming in right behind me. Pitched near them in a big flat space, the daughter appraising my tent with “you could fit a king-size mattress in there – it’s a castle!”. 

My water properly boiled to boiling – after last night I did not skimp on fuel tabs. Mac’n’cheese in a bag, and a flask of hot tea to clasp through the night, were delicious delights after 24 hours of stress and peril. Although the minutiae of the trail can be grinding grime and grumpy climbs, those hours are the price of admission to the moments of absolute joy, euphoria, peace, delight. It’s all worth it.