Day 152-154: Still on Trail

September 3-5; Mile 2465-2487

Day 152

Dov and I spent the day enjoying Leavenworth, a fake Bavarian town in the middle of Washington, as the air around us filled with haze from distant fires. My hopes from the night before – that the fires would burn out quickly, that I could wait them out and still reach the terminus, that I could even walk an alternate route to the Canadian border – had all evaporated in the morning light. The fire near the border had doubled in size overnight, the decision had been made to let it burn since it wasn’t threatening any towns, and the other alternate routes were all closed due to different fires burning in the area. As if that wasn’t enough, the last road crossing on the PCT – Hart’s Pass – was closed due to a mudslide. It seemed that Rainy Pass, a mere 60 miles from the Canadian border, was the furthest north that I could hope to reach this season without having to double back.

Day 153

My heart was heavy as Dov drove me back to Steven’s Pass the next morning. Hikers milled around the resort, several of them crying upon finding out about the closures. The reality set in more deeply here than it had in our room in Leavenworth; the moment I had been working toward for months, that I had envisioned from the very beginning of the trail, if not earlier… was lost.

If you were running a marathon, and at mile 24 you learned that everyone was being sent home barely half a mile from the finish line (because it was on fire), would you keep running? All those months of preparation, the pain and endurance, leading up to a big moment that had suddenly been snatched away. That was what kept going through my head as I sat with Dov watching mountain bikers ride down the hills. All I had to do was say “Let’s go home,” and the two of us could leave from there.

There had been only one other time that I seriously considered quitting the trail. Of course, the brutal heat and difficult sections had left me with several days where I didn’t enjoy any of it and thought wistfully of home. But giving up for anything other than a hike-ending injury had never been an option after the first week.

At 3:45pm I donned my pack, full of doubts about the section ahead, and said goodbye to Dov. Though I hiked less than four miles that evening before setting up camp, I was still on trail.

Day 154

The next morning I lay inside my tent, unable to gather the motivation to keep going. I kept thinking of the analogy I’d drawn to running a marathon and missing the finish line; after five months on trail what I wanted most was to spend all day lying on a couch reading a good book.

Finally I packed up and unzipped my tent door. I emerged from the tent and stopped dead. Fifty feet away, a black bear was gorging itself on blueberries. Carefully I called to the other hiker camped beside me, and the two of us watched in awe as the bear snuffled around and pawed at the bushes. It was a beautiful bear: dark fur, neither lanky nor overfed, just going about its business. The hiker next to me had never seen a bear on trail yet, and his eyes sparkled with excitement.

As I packed up my tent, I made some noise; the bear glanced over, its ears pricked in curiosity, before galloping away across the meadow to a berry patch free from human annoyances. My heart was singing and my resolve had returned. I was out here because I loved backpacking, because I wanted to see as much of the trail as possible before it burned, and because incredible moments like this could happen at any time. Going to Canada was never the point. I was stronger now than I’d ever been before, and the Glacier Peak Wilderness was the section I had anticipated almost as much as the Sierras. If ever there was a time to hike the entire 130 miles in one go, this was it.

The trail led past Valhalla Lake, and I reminisced about a snowshoe trip I had done here with a friend. Mt McCausland was framed by shining sunlight as I paused to eat my breakfast. I hiked through a huge talus field where one boulder was as big as a small bedroom. The path was smooth, crushed rock – a true delight to walk on instead of boulder-hopping.

Beautiful views of Glacier Peak dominated the north as the trail rambled along a ridgeline before reaching Grizzly Peak. Fields of huckleberry and blueberry bushes, just beginning to turn red, carpeted the slopes. Then I spotted the valley of smoke: the Irving Peak and White River fires were burning a few miles due east of the PCT, coughing great columns of smoke into the air and charring the flanks of the ridge.

I stopped for the night in a small clearing on the ridge, just a few miles shy of the camp spot where Dov and I had stayed during my tent’s inaugural outing 2 years ago. I’d only seen 3 other thru hikers all day, and as I set up I was joined by a couple doing a section hike as preparation for attempting the entire PCT next summer. We ate dinner together and chatted about the trail before crawling into our tents to escape the chilly night air.

I had been on the Pacific Crest Trail for five months, and in one week I would reach Rainy Pass and head home to begin the next chapter of my life.