Day 0: Starting a Day Early

Memories from April 20, 2016

Tonight, coyotes are intermittently singing me to sleep. Yesterday, I fell asleep stressing over the unfinished contents of my pre-departure ToDo list. I like tonight better.

This morning an unexpectedly harsh 5:00am alarm jolted a reminder through my head: I’d forgotten to shave. A true trail beard should start from a clean slate if it is to truly represent one’s accomplishments. Departure for the airport was delayed for a frantic 15 minutes of face scraping. An electric hair cutter, three disposable razors, and one band-aid were used in the process.

The information desk in SAN helped me figure out which ticket to buy from the MTS Compass Card vending machine. Unfortunately the machine was broken so they sent me to another terminal and gave me a $5 food voucher. The info desk in the other terminal pointed out that it was cheaper to just pay cash for the bus ride and changed a $20. It turns out that there isn’t really any food at SAN for $5 or less.

Got in touch with two friends who expressed interest in hiking in the Sierras with me. Maybe they can resupply me instead of paying $70 to get a bucket shipped by boat and donkey to Muir Trail Ranch which doesn’t open for resupply until 4 days after I’m scheduled to get there. Of course, I still need to coordinate details with only a smartphone and intermittent service. Did logistics just get easier or harder?

I met Daniel and John on the MTS Rural 894 bus. Daniel is doing about a week on the PCT and John is going to Canada. We hit it off. John has a 60lb pack but has 14 days of food and 8 liters of water. Daniel appears to have the kitchen sink but only 5 liters of water for 3 days. We talk him into buying more.

My permit starts tomorrow (4/21/2016) so I look to kill an afternoon in Campo. The railroad museum is closed. A museum in a stone building is closed. The old mill is 2 miles away and also closed. I eat lunch, check e-mail, and try to find AAA Li-Ion batteries. The grocery store sends me to the hardware store which doesn’t have them either. I still need to kill time so they send me to the bar.

The bar is actually a VFW (officially Veterans of Foreign Wars but a guy at the counter also calls it Very Few Women to which the female bar tender responds that Thursdays there are a lot of women and so they call it Very Fine Women). I am not a veteran, much less of a foreign war, but I’m welcome as long as I’m respectful and pay my bill. Maria is the bartender. I never got the name of the first guy but claimed that Campo is for people who don’t like town. I try to counter that Campo itself is a town to which they point out that it’s just a two stores and an VFW. I ask about the local industry and eventually receive a marijuana, meth, cattle, and Camel Back assembly in that order. Eventually the four other patrons leave except for Oso who takes the seat next to me and we make smalltalk and he tells stories. I’ve concluded the Bellevue needs bars like this. Mug Shots is the only thing in the same category and it just doesn’t cut it. Eventually I decide that it’s cool enough to walk and so I’m starting whether my permit lets me or not.

The Southern Terminus Monument is very anticlimactic. The scenery is actually quite pretty but the border wall, accompanying road, power lines, and smattering of trailers just doesn’t meet my expectations of a holy, sacred place whence great journey are birthed. Also, border patrol drives by and asks whether we’re planning on leaving soon.

The first few miles of the PCT are so close to Campo that they seem more like a walk in a city’s trail system than a wilderness experience. The area is chaparral which is the same environment in the hills south of where I grew up so it seems familiar.

I hike as the moon rises and try to use my GorillaPod for a long shutter exposure which captures the serenity of the scene.

Finally, here’s where I camped for the night.

Trekking in India

How I wound up in a glacial valley which my guide, Narendar, called Harkidun on May 14, 2013 is sufficiently ridden with misadventure that I’m not quite sure where to start. Starting from Dheradun, the state capital to which I flew after a business trip in Hyderabad, there’s missed e-mail, missed bus, all day cab ride which ends with water rushing across the road which the driver won’t cross, getting picked up by a bus I was told didn’t exist, a nice local who helped me find a guide but to whom I had to explain that I didn’t want a porter or cook, a night in a half-finished hostel on a cliff, and a jeep ride blocked by a rockslide. That was just to get to the trailhead. Also, I didn’t have a map. As my boss’s boss later pointed out, an Indian co-worker who’d moved back to the India office and was therefore the best prepared the likely success of my trip, was visibly concerned.

P1000384 — Bridges are key to connecting the several villages on the hike.

The actual trek turned out to be on a foot path down a steeply walled valley used by locals to get to their villages once the road ended. In a few places we passed teams of men and sometimes women rebuilding washed out bridges. At night, Narendar would help pitch my tarp, much to the amusement of the nearby residents with whom he kept up a rapid banter. I assume if I’d known the local idiom for gringo, I’d have heard it a lot. While I had brought dry food expecting a typical backpacking trip where you carry everything yourself, we wound up eating at little canteens, each of which had it’s own charms. The first was run by a one-eyed fellow who kept our chai cups full and visited by a Nepali forester who was so interested in my one dollar bills that after trading one for 50 rupees (the same rate I’d gotten at the airport) we repeated the trade. The next day, we ran across a canteen set up by a forester who cooked Maggi (Indian Ramen) for passerbys, in this case a group of middle school aged boys from Mumbai chaperoned by some fathers. While the most common questions I got were nation of origin, age, and martial status (nope, this Kansas anymore), I chatted with some of the dads about the open source course management system they were building. Even in rural India, one knowns a fellow techie when one sees one. I also danced to Gangnam style with one of Narendar’s friends. Globalization has a sense of humor.

P1000397 — They knew Gangam style, even in rural India.

We passed a village which looked like Rohan from Lord of the Rings, I doled out some aspirin to a guy with a headache, and after climbing several sets of rocky steps which left me huffing and puffing like the out of shape American I was (though not as out of shape as the guys from Mumbai), Narendar spoke the magical words, “Welcome you to Harkidun”. Despite there being a forester hut, the latrine options were still wilderness style which surprised me given the place’s apparent popularity. After pitching tarp snuggly under a large boulder, the forester made us dinner, and Narendar took me down to a glacial runoff stream where we enjoyed the colors as the sun peacefully set.

The next morning we visited a nearby pond which required crossing some snowfields. Schadenfreude would perhaps be the most applicable term for watching my usually indefatigable, sure footed guide slip on the banked snow in his Converse AllStars while I stepped solidly in my hiking boots. On our way back we passed the school outing from the day before en route to the pond. Without Narendar’s dexterity or my boot tread, they had formed a pitiable, if determined, series of human chains as the attempted to make their way between uncovered rocks where sure footing could be found. Later that day, we helped a team trying to move a large rock with iron pry bars to from the base of a new bridge. In the US, I’m merely average height but found myself larger than any of the laboring residents. While they probably would have moved the stone themselves, helping them get over a particularly tough spot gave me the enjoyable feeling of being a small Sampson.

P1000500 — Helped these folks move one of the stones for a better bridge foundation.

I ended the tip by giving Narendar the sunglasses he’d borrowed to help with the snow-blindness acquired during our trip to the pond. I tipped well too which was almost unfortunate given that I made it back to the US with only 40 rupees (80 cents) in my pocket having used a credit card at every opportunity. I am particularly thankful to a friendly and well educated fellow I met on the trail named Guru (Indian by birth but had majored in English and worked in marketing in an international firm and I liked him instantly just because I could understand what he was saying) who changed my remaining dollars when I began running out of rupees.

P1000519 — The jeep ride back. There were guys on top and hanging out the back. They put me inside where I couldn’t fall out.

I was pretty clearly not ready for the trip and so now that I’m back home safe and sound with a few year’s distance I can laugh. From a few online searches, the Indian trekking industry seems to have exploded since I was there. I hope the local entrepreneurs in Sankri trying to improve their tourism industry got a fat piece of it. Without them looking after me, I’d probably have wound up out of money, 10hrs from an ATM, outside of regular mobile phone service, in a foreign country where my attempts to communicate usually just reminded me that the world is a big place.

Aborted Winter Overnight at Mason Lake

We can night hike or we can try to find the trail but we probably shouldn’t try both at the same time. That was the final reasoning when Michael and I decided to turn around after the footprints we’d been following over deepening snow disappeared. This was only my third time hiking in the snow and we’d decided to overnight at a local lake. The summer the trail is a popular, well maintained climb over a ridge to a lake with well beaten campsites. At just four miles day hikers outnumber overnighters. If that’s not enough, it’s popularity can be expressed by the fact that we’d seen 8ish people despite the three slushy bonus miles we’d had to walk to the trailhead due to fallen trees blocking the forest service road. I’d been up a fork off the same trail in the early winter (my first snow hike) and the trail had still been well defined. Given it’s popularity, I’d assumed Mason lake would be a beginner friendly introduction to winter camping even in mid March. Apparently no one had been up there for some time.

While I’d been hoping for my first snow camping experience as a chance to press the limits of my comfort before entering the Sierras this summer where rouge snowstorms can ambush hikers year round, I wound up getting a chance to practice a rare skill. The best wilderness survival skill is to not need wilderness survival skills.

I still haven’t made my mind up on hiking with umbrellas. This one got destroyed by low hanging branches. Still, my pack was heavy and it was nice to have a breeze without getting rained on.