Trail Reflections 3: Sierra Nevada mountains

My husband, Chris, and I are attempting a Pacific Crest Trail thru-hike and are now in a ski resort town below the Sierra Nevada Mountains called Mammoth. Here we stop for a day to resupply our food for the next section of the trail, wash, and do laundry. We have just spent 12 days on the trot up in the mighty Sierras, covering 8 passes and the Mount Whitney summit. It was the longest and most transformative period of the trail so far for us, which we started on May 13th on the US-Mexico border in Southern California. Here are some of my trail reflections:

Anonymity and thru-hiking

Over the past 57 days on trail I have not spoken to other hikers about what I do back in the ‘real world’ much at all. I have actively avoided conversions about ‘what you do’ and if I’m honest it’s not a common topic of discussion that I’ve overheard. There is an immediacy to the concerns of thru-hikers. Discussions primarily centre around where you plan to camp tonight, where you camped last night, how the route was over the pass, or where you plan to next resupply. Due to this, and being out of mobile connectivity for long periods (ah, the blissful void of emails!), I’ve felt a curious distance within myself.

Ordinarily, when meeting new people one of the first ways to ‘place’ or ‘define’ them is through their work/profession. Knowing this information both helps you understand what they spend most of their time doing, as well as their likely interests and goals – it’s a convenient way to define and ‘confine’. Reciprocally, when you speak of yourself in the same way over and again in relation to your job, you craft a narrative about yourself that becomes quick, reliable and reusable. This is useful and practical, but also limiting. Settling into this new liberty I’ve been contemplating what happens to my imagination of self and the future I want to create when those narratives fall away and become redundant. What new possibilities can I imagine for myself?

I don’t know the answer to this yet, but I have noticed that without the ‘what’s your job’ information people relate to me differently. For the past 10 years of my life I’ve been running small businesses in the yoga and travel industry. Ordinarily, people hear ‘yoga’ and immediately place me – veggie, vain, pretentious, loves hugging trees and posting about it on social, superficial, not ambitious or professional (you add to the list yourself). Prior to that I was in research and academia completing a PhD in History – serious, thoughtful, boring, bookish, committed, etc. Now on the PCT I’m just Nina from South Africa, hiking with Chris from South Africa. This is all the information I’m willing to give, but also all the information people need. I’ve found it so liberating and I feel refreshed not being boxed in by others and myself.

To take this dimension of anonymity one step further, many thru-hikers in the US go only by their trail names.  There is a cultural/tribal habit amongst the thru-hiking community in the US of ordaining others with a new name. This name is worn as a badge of pride; it means you have been initiated into the tribe and that you’ve been seen for some habit or practice that is uniquely ‘you’ as a hiker. Once you have this name, this is automatically how you introduce yourself, how you sign the trail register, and your profile on the map/navigation mobile application everyone uses. These names then become another veil distancing yourself from your off-trail self.

Many of these names immediately and obviously connect to something trail related – Pace, Torque, Mango, Speedgoat, Rabbit, Detour, Cowboy, Trail Chef. Others I am surprised people accepted them (you can be given a name but don’t have to accept it unless you identify), like Big Girl, Ball Sack (a girl!), Free Lunch (how could you ever make friends with that name?) and the French couple who go by Ice Cream (when I asked who is Cream and who is Ice, they said they didn’t understand the purpose of my question). Then there are the names that people obviously gave themselves, like a little Italian man known for stealing free mayonnaise and mustard sachets from restaurants to snack on (‘free calories’ he said!) who is called Phantom Opera, an unlikely and grandiose designation if I ever heard one!

Curiously, trail angels also commonly have trail names. These too create a distance between the ‘everyday self’ and ‘trail self’. For example, there was a trail angel who told us that he felt protected by his trail name because his business – a campground and hiker shelter in the desert – was 100% illegal and “if the Feds ever came looking for me, I’d pick up the next backpack and walk out saying, ‘who’s the owner of this place? Old McDonald you’re looking for? Don’t know him! I’m just a hiker called Avocado!”

The culinary journey

Once Chris and I had confirmed our PCT permits and successfully obtained our US visitor visas, we started telling family, friends and colleagues about our big thru-hike plans for 2025. One of the first things people who know me well asked was, what will you eat? How will you survive as a vegetarian who loves fresh fruit and veg in rural US (infamous for poor quality fast food) for 5months? My answer was, I’ll make a plan (rice, beans, oats, dried fruit and nuts, cheese) and I fully anticipate that my 2025 PCT thru-hike will just not be a culinary experience, it will be a wonderful journey in many ways, but I’ll just set aside my expectations for quality fresh food. Well, the reality on trail has been that all Chris and I talk about, think about, plan for, dream about and spend our money on is food. It has been every bit a culinary journey!

Firstly, other than hiking and sleeping, we seem to spend all our time planning meals, making shopping lists, packing and provisioning. Resupply missions are such a big part of thru-hiking, especially in remote regions like we’ve just been through in the High Sierras. Chris and I walk into large American supermarkets and often stand in a daze, overwhelmed by the choices. I often wonder, how is possible to have so many options and flavours and varieties of one thing and still be sane and satisfied; you always could have chosen differently so are you always to some degree lacking?

When in towns to resupply we also eat often and hugely, trying in vain to satiate our bottomless hiker hunger. I have eaten more diverse and delicious things so far in Californian towns than I could ever imagine! As the budget drains down, we just get hungrier!

Then, on the trail we demarcate the day based on meals and snacks. As soon as a meal or snack break passes, I’m focused on the next, thinking lustily of that protein bar or noodle packet. I now regularly dream of food, or eating food; food is also the main protagonist in my subconscious at the moment it would seem. I wonder if this is because I enjoy food more than ever before in my life now. I eat with pure gratitude and pleasure, hoping to get as many calories out of a day as possible, which is a refreshing and somewhat healing experience for a woman. I certainly spent much of teens and twenties trying to be thinner and limiting my food intake. I look back at this now with some sadness, and move forward excited for how I might integrate this changing relationship with food into the everyday post-hiking.

Finding presence and time pressure

I’ve noticed a curious malleability in how slowly or quickly time passes whilst walking on trail. My default mental disposition is to be ‘looking forward’, as mentioned above with regards to food, but also more broadly. I am always focused on the next thing, ‘just 2km / 24 min at this pace and we will be  at the river, then the climb starts’, I tell myself.  Then, I get to the river and the mental dialogue is, ‘OK, it’s a 400m ascent, focus on the first steep 250m, then you can take a short water break and complete the last 150m’, and so it goes on. I’ve noticed that the more desperately, or keenly, my mind is trained on the future event, the slower and often less enjoyably the present moment passes. Maybe everything I see and move through is less enjoyable because it’s not where my mind is straining to be ‘at’.

Sometimes however, I’m graced with a period where I’m out of the mental default and dialogue, and I’m just moving, looking, being. These are the sweetest moments on trail and they pass by in an effortless flash. It’s not that this ‘flash’ goes by me without a porous reciprocity and communing with the beauty of the scenery and path. Quite the opposite. In these periods I’m very attuned to everything and maybe experiencing what might be called a pure presence.

In the Sierras, arguably the most dramatic and scenic section of the whole PCT, Chris and I often discussed whether as thru-hikers we were rushing the trail. We pondered whether we could, and how we could, linger in places that struck us, or take a slower day. We wondered whether we’d look back on our precious, once-in-a-lifetime Pacific Crest Trail and go, ‘shucks, why did we rush that magical time!?’

Obviously we can’t know the answer to this with certainty now, but what I have learned from the Sierras is that a thru-hike of this magnitude – if done with a serious intent to complete it faithfully to the best of your ability in one go – comes with certain conditions and limitations, and that these conditions and limitations are distinct from other trails and hiking endeavours. If we are to make it to Canada before the snow renders Washington’s mountains impassable for the winter, we have to move, and we have to keep moving. The beauty and challenge in this hike is finding the balance for yourself in terms of the pace that can viably take you 2650 miles in one season, and the joyful lightness in your mind and body at that pace. I’ve  begun to drop the regret I was initially feeling at looking at section hikers, or John Muir Trail hikers, who can walk slowly and linger on long breaks in warm sun by a lake. The reality is that as a PCT thru-hiker, you have to walk, and you have to walk all day and you have to keep walking north. This doesn’t mean you can’t digest the path and the majestic landscape you pass through, but you have to do so whilst moving.

I have begun to start thinking of our journey in terms of a hummingbird (a colibri as its known here):  A light mover, stopping frequently but only briefly to eat before moving on, ablaze with the colours of the sun and rivers and mountains.

* This post was typed on a mobile phone so I apologise in advance for any typos!