My John Muir Trail Origin Story

Self-portrait looking toward Mono Lake, 1987

It’s July 1987. A footloose 29-year-old with a 60-pound North Face external-frame backpack (yes, they made those back then) and heavy Asolo leather boots plods his way from Guitar Lake up to the summit of Mount Whitney in California. I’m counting my steps: every fifty steps I have to stop and gasp for several minutes, trying to get oxygen into my body. Protecting me from the cold at 14,500 feet is a cheap L.L. Bean rain jacket on which I’ve slathered seam seal and water repellent lotion. And red polypropylene tights. The night before I cowboy camped on a perfect evening only 1,000 feet below.

Maroon-clad me on Mount Whitney, 1987

I finally reach the summit and collapse. After drinking in the view and taking some snapshots with my film camera and tiny tripod, I find a summit hut with a hiker box: the first I’ve ever seen in my life. Inside the box I find a mysterious thing called a “Clif Bar”: also the first I’ve ever seen. It looks like it could be a tasty, or at least edible, reprieve from the Knorr soups, oatmeal, and huge pepperoni logs on which I’ve been living the past several days while hiking northward in the High Sierra. I grab the Clif Bar – the first of hundreds if not thousands I’ll eat over the rest of my life – and leave behind the rest of my heavy pepperoni. Then I begin the long, long descent to the town of Lone Pine.

At Army Pass, 1987

My 1987 pilgrimage to Mount Whitney was part of a long, ridiculously haphazard route I concocted 36 years ago when, growing tired of being a corporate lawyer in Houston, I chanced upon a book called “A Walk Across America” and decided to quit my job and start long distance hiking. The only other backpacking I’d done in my life was in the early 1970s Boy Scouts, when we hauled along impractical things like D-cell flashlights and Dutch ovens. My gear in 1987 wasn’t much better, though: at nearly 7 pounds my pack was the third lightest thing I was carrying after my synthetic sleeping bag and three-person tent.

I’d started my walk in April near Tucson, Arizona, and wound my way northward mainly on small roads until I reached the Grand Canyon: my first experience of true solo trail backpacking. After crossing the canyon I wandered into Utah and somehow made it through several days of backpacking in Zion National Park before striking west toward Nevada. My plan had been to then backpack for two weeks along Interstate 15 through Nevada, but a day’s walk west of St. George, Utah I realized that I’d surely die attempting that: the 100-degree temperatures were already baking my feet in their cheap black leatherette dime-store boots. I turned back and caught a bus to Barstow, California, where I resumed my walk, hiking northward in the High Sierra before exiting over Mount Whitney.

I can’t remember why I left the wilderness at Mount Whitney. Maybe I simply ran out of food. Anyway, after reaching Lone Pine I kept walking north along abandoned roads paralleling Interstate 395, totally bypassing the John Muir Trail. There were rewards from my curious routefinding: I walked past astonishing Mono Lake with its bizarre mineral formations, and the silent ruins of the Manzanar internment camp where I learned what Americans had done to our Japanese-ancestry fellow citizens during World War II. I finally left the hot valley and entered Yosemite National Park, again hiking in the backcountry from Tuolomne Meadows for almost a week along the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir: a stretch where I saw more bears (three) than other people (one).

My strange but incredibly fulfilling expedition ended two months later a little south of Portland Oregon, after I grew tired of ocean breezes always blowing into my left ear as I plodded northward. I talked in more detail about my journey with Juliana Chauncey and Zach Davis on a Backpacker Radio Podcast in early 2022, after I’d retired from gainful employment and thru-hiked the Colorado Trail.

In the last two years I’ve also thru-hiked Colorado’s Collegiate Loop as well as the Benton MacKaye Trail in Georgia, Tennessee and North Carolina. My post-retirement gear now has a base weight of about 15.5 pounds: less than a third as heavy as my base weight 37 years ago. At 66, I hope that with lightweight gear and at least a semblance of fitness training I’ll be able to backpack more trails for maybe another ten years if I’m lucky. I’ve still got a bucket list of several other long-distance adventures on my mind.

At the top of my list is the John Muir Trail: a stretch of breathtakingly beautiful, rugged terrain that I’d almost surgically excised from my 1987 trip when I left the Sierras at Mount Whitney and rejoined them at Tuolomne Meadows. This year I managed to snag a Tuolomne Meadows southbound JMT permit.

To me, this three-week trek will feel like a fitting completion of my Sierra adventures: exploring the parts I’d skipped nearly four decades ago.

So, in mid-August I’ll catch a plane to Reno, then a bus to Mammoth Lakes, then another bus to Tuolomne Meadows, and start backpacking southward. I’ve been planning out my gear, my resupplies, my zero days and my options for bypassing the destroyed San Joaquin River Bridge: one of the biggest uncertainties on the JMT this year.

I’m very fortunate to be friends with three people who’ve already thru-hiked the JMT – and in two cases have vlogged extensively about it: Audrey Payne (a recent Backpacker Radio guest), Colorado Trail and general thru-hiking expert Jared Champion (his Outside Comfort Zone YouTube channel is incredibly helpful to CT hikers), and one of my CT tramily members Su Jane Ling (currently hiking the Pacific Crest Trail). Their advice has given me great comfort, as have the many JMT stories I’ve heard and read on The Trek and elsewhere.

So … you’ve just heard my John Muir Trail origin story. If you’re hiking the JMT this summer and see a slightly bewildered and more than slightly intimidated, bespectacled, bald and white-bearded fellow who answers to Rolf or (my trail name) Kinnikinnick, please say hi … and if you happen to have an extra Snickers bar on you I’ll probably be grateful for it. Or a Clif Bar, for that matter. And maybe even a pepperoni log.

I’ll write some more blog entries as I plod, scramble and wade my way southward to Whitney. Here’s wishing all the JMT and PCT thru- and section-hikers this summer wonderful adventures! And profound thanks to all the trailbuilders, rangers and SAR volunteers helping keep us safe and sound.