Skywalker--Highs and Lows on the Pacific Crest Trail by Bill Walker Read Free Book Online Page B

Office. By the time I got there it looked like hikers had formed a sit-in inside the post office. Stove, clothes, cameras, food, shoes, tents—you name it, people were sending it either to a post office further up the trail or all the way home. In some cases people had bought the wrong thing. Others were shedding weight as fast as they could. Worried about setting the desert on fire, I bounced my stove 660 miles forward to Kennedy Meadows.
    Unfortunately, one of the hikers tooling around the post office had a different mission. Just Jack was 68 years old, and coming off a gutsy southbound thru-hike of the AT the previous year, that had taken him eight months. This year he had shown up at the Kickoff looking to pull another rabbit out of the hat. Unfortunately, an asthma condition was driving him nuts in the desert.
    “The desert’s not for me,” he simply said.
    “Hate to see you go,” everybody sincerely told him. He had already distinguished himself with his delightful cracker barrel sense of humor.
    “I’m not going anywhere,” he said. He bought a car and started following the bubble of hikers to the various trail towns, and soon was the most popular person on the trail.

     
    The PCT considers shelters a sissy, East-Coast thing; the trail figureheads take great pride in their bootstrap philosophy. But if there is one single place on the entire trail they ought to build a shelter, it’s at the Pioneer Mail Campsite. It is dominated by gunshot winds that come barreling over the horizon.
    There was absolutely nowhere else to camp here that remotely offered any protection from the wind. Trout Lily and another girl sought cover in a ditch down the hill, even though they were unable to set up their tents down there. Thereafter, anytime she was in a bad mood, we accused her of being ditchy.
    I tried pitching my tent in a different ditch from the one where Trout Lily was hiding. But it wasn’t even remotely level, and I finally decided to erect it right next to St. Rick’s tent, hoping his would create a windshield. However, it was impossible to set up alone, as the wind bullied the various parts of the tent all over the place.
    “Hey Rick,” I called into his tent. “Could you just help hold this thing in place for a second.” It was embarrassing to ask for help. But I was a realist. St. Rick jumped out of his tent, hammered away at some stakes, and was back in his tent within a minute. He always played it smart.
    All I could do now was jump in my tent, put on my maximum of seven layers, and hunker down for a sleepless night. The dominant melody of the evening was these gunshot winds moaning a dreary tune.

     
    Was the desert ugly or beautiful? That quickly became a matter
    of heated debate.
    I got my first taste of truly high desert the next morning, and it rocked me big-time. The minute I cleared the ridge from the campsite, I was confronted with a breathtaking landscape. A cold wind clobbered me for miles while walking on an exposed ridge. Nonetheless, after hating the desert all frigid night long, I was suddenly enraptured. Mesas, canyons, red cliffs, and arid tablelands extending out into the distance stood out in high relief. To me, it is these vast open spaces that give the American West the overwhelming feeling of unbounded freedom.

     
    The high desert proved very different from my
pre-conceived image of the desert.
     
    After several miles I descended again to the more familiar low desert. About the only thing they had in common, as far as I could tell, was their overwhelming aridity. Fortunately, there was a well. But the water looked grotesque.
    “What the hell,” I said peering down into it.
    Big John came over and examined it. “Yeah, all the muck has risen to the top.”
    “But look at the bottom,” I said. “There’s crap everywhere down there too.”
    “I guess you just have to get it out of the middle,” he said good-naturedly. I pulled out my filter, carefully placing the tip of the