Off the JMT (to Lone Pine, LAX, BTV, ADK)

My pitch site behind the bear-sign wasn’t ideal, but I got into my sleepwear and my bag and my pyramid tent and my beanie hat with an inbuilt headlamp (thanks dear fiend LJF) and tried to feel optimistic about my foodless hike to the highway then hitch-hike to anywhere plan for the morning. 

I heard the grizzle-growl of a truck engine, revving hard up the road to the trailhead. They drove past me to the tight turnaround full of empty parked cars. Honked the horn a few times. I was startled and a bit scared – vehicles generally mean noisy stress and speed, and I’d been away from engine noise for a long enough stretch to not expect it in the background. There’s also the physical disadvantage of being a hungry, squishy, barefoot pedestrian lying on the ground, versus probably-a-dude in a 4,000-pound metal truck. They turned, headlamps sweeping over my tent, honked again. A dude yelled “hello?” All my abs I cannot see clenched and I shrank down into the sleeping bag, one hand on my orange emergency whistle, the other on my hiking pole with the sharp metal point at the end. 

Another turn, another honk, and a voice yelling into the dark, “Say Something!” I got out of my sleeping bag. I shoved my Hokas on over my Injinjis and tied the shoes tight so I could run or kick. I felt keenly aware that my sleeping leggings were quite transparent and my sunflower-patterned pants were quite likely visible beneath in the bright headlights. I stepped out of the tent, whistle and pole gripped tight. “Hi!” I belted, a bit too loud to prove I wasn’t scared. 

“Did you call a shuttle?” asked the man, who turned out to be the legend himself, Lone Pine Chuck. His wife was in the truck (a lifted FJ Cruiser with external scene lights) – they had brought me water and snacks and would drive me back to Lone Pine. “I’m sorry I said no when you called”, said Chuck. “After we spoke, I went to do some computer work and I was just feeling so bad about you being here on your own without any food… this is the worst trailhead of all and the worst approach road”. 

I packed up all my gear haphazardly and hurriedly, dumped it in the trunk and hopped into the passenger seat. I timed mouthfuls of granola and water between jolts and bumps on perhaps the third-roughest road I’ve ever travelled in a vehicle. It took about half an hour to reach pavement, and another half hour down the highway to Lone Pine. Chuck insisted on stopping at a taco truck that was still open this late, while I waited under fluorescent light for a cheese quesadilla in a styrofoam carton. I carried it into a faded retro motel room and was once again alone – rescued, relieved. 

As with post-trail or post-peril food, the hot quesadilla felt like the best thing I’ve ever eaten. I had plumbing and electricity and cell signal and cable TV I set to channel showing competitive rodeo footage as I took two consecutive showers to get the trail off my skin, out from under my nails, out of the weft of my hair. When I was done there was a high, thick tideline of grime and lost hair around the tub. 

The next morning I walked out to the diner across the street, already hot in valley sun, and ate a giant burrito and a mountain of homefries. Bought a double-XL Lone Pine/Highway 395 t-shirt and scissored it into a dress. It felt incredible to not be wearing the filthy shirt-skort spandex I’d sported all down the JMT. It felt incredible not to carry my backpack, to dunk the plasticky detritus of all my carefully-bagged trash into a real-life bin, to scrub under my nails and have them stay clean. 

It felt incredible to sit on the bus, watching out of the window as the high desert mountains slid past. In Lancaster, CA I sat and ate a coconut ice-lolly. Riding the upstairs of the train to LA was also peaceful and interesting in a way I don’t find in my usual high-mileage solo-driver days and nights. On arrival into Los Angeles Union Station I was hungry again, so ate a large portion of tacos with my hands out of a carton.  I washed the sourcream and tomato residue off my hands with real running water and unlimited pump soap. 

I booked a one-way flight from LAX to BTV while I was on the bus to the airport, stayed a night in a just-opened, plastic-bannered motel near the airport. Paid cash for a really cheap room. I strode out on flat, boring pavements to a Target off the airport. Where I wanted everything – a soft, plain blue XS v-neck tshirt, a large soft cream sweater with ochre and egg-blue flecks, a pair of dark blue jeans two sizes smaller than usual. A tiny bottle of cucumber and mint hair conditioner. Essie nailpolish in a soft dusky pink, the circular sticker on the bottle cap printed “breathe in, breathe out”. I wanted discounted gold-plated earrings with a hoop and a dangling “V” of graduated-length columns hanging from them. I wanted a fox-brown backpack that would fit under the aeroplane seat in front of me, no chest straps no hip strap no desert grime or exterior straps. I bought them all. The new outfit was a cross-country hug all the next day. 

So I didn’t finish all 211 miles of the JMT, but the trail answered the questions I’d gone with. For me, these are maybe the reasons to hike, to run ultra distances, to blunder into wilderness hopeful and stoic. What is out there at the periphery and the borders and the core of this wild world? Who and what and where and why am I/we? What will we be next? In which direction, where will we head from here? I was an open wound on the Long Trail in 2013; on the JMT I barely cried. I was scar, muscle, grit, understanding. I didn’t need to summit whitney. 

The why of it all, for me – and to quote my left-thigh tattoo – is to “keep on looking for the things you never saw”. It’s a lyric from the posthumously-released Mama Zu song ‘Safe Place to Stay’. I recorded percussion on this track in Nashville in the days and weeks Jessi was undergoing treatments, attending protests, making art — we were all so hopeful she would survive. 

The how of the journey – to quote my right-thigh tattoo – is “illogical persistance, my friend”. It’s a deliberate-typo lyric that Ceschi wrote on the back of a flyer for me in teal Sharpie, the night in Albany my clutch/cylinder died smokily and obstructively downtown. It’s from the final song on his final album (preordering here, releasing November 4th 2024) and I recorded vibraphone on it in Burlington, alone with the engineer and the fussy parts I’d made, underscoring the track. “There is a bright day, ahead of us”. 

Looking back at my pre-departure Why The JMT post, I feel incredibly lucky and grateful – I got to see the weird and extreme landscapes I was unlikely to have another chance to see. I got a break from my Adirondack life that, with perspective and distance, was unhealthily workaholic and solitary. Every day I walked and I wrote and I slept – some glorious, exhausted, uninterrupted sleep without a phone or a 911 pager or an alarm clock. I dealt with the highest altitude I’ve ever experienced, without dying or serious symptoms. 

The leg that couldn’t bear weight back in April was absolutely fine on trail. Strong, recovering. It loves walking and swimming and hates sitting and driving. I sold the car with the still-untrusty replacement clutch and drive to an online dealer. I went swimming in my favourite local lake, cold and deep. Afterwards I sat in the sun, finishing a whole book and not looking at my phone. 

The day after Labor Day I shone my boots, put on my uniform and attended the award ceremony that was the reason I left the JMT early. I hugged my patient and his wife, I sat outside the local deli in the sun with our ambulance crew and it was honestly one of the best days of my life. 

A month later, I assembled in the park with members of a local search and rescue crew for the High Peaks district. They’d accepted me as a tentative candidate, but I’d have to pass the weighted-pack test first – carrying a pack 15-minute miles without running (because running is actually easier at that pace, walking is a truer test of fitness). I made a much smaller backpack than I’d carried on the JMT weigh approximately 25 pounds by dumping in the heavies from my car – an AED, hammers and wrenches and prybars from my toolbox, a bottle of rubbing alcohol, a can of brake-part cleaner – and set off down the road in the middle of a pack of other S&R volunteers. Most had already earned their bright orange uniform shirts; I was clad in uncoordinated pink and camo spandex with a frilly sort of tutu aspect to the outfit. 

On my own, I can manage 15-minute miles if I jog or run some. On the pavement with other people smiling and joking and checking in I was okay, it felt easy. Light and bright. We made the cutoff, high-fiving a flagpole and each other, circled up in the drizzle. Another woman suggested I source a puffy jacket. I will. I went to pick up my sister across town, told her I’d passed the test and rejoined human society a little bit. 

And that was thanks, in part, to the JMT. To everyone I met along the trail who helped or high-fived or just smiled. To those miles and continents away who wrote to me and worried about me and swallowed those worries to support me. To everyone who imagines, and maintains, paths through the wilderness that we can have the precarious privilege of high-wiring along between the snows. To the Trek, for letting me write about it here. 

To you all, for reading. Going forward, I’ll be blethering on my own blog a bit more frequently than I have in recent years.