From campsite at PCT mile 2446.40, elev. 5528, Walked 10.94 miles (plus 2 mile "excursion" walking in wrong direction and backtracking) to campsite at Lake Susan Jane PCT mile 2457.34, elev. 4577. Total up/down: +2682/-3240 (plus extra for my excursion!)
Just for fun:
My whole PCT hike done in sections starting March 2013:
Campo to Bucks Lake Crossing - 1275.40. Up/down: +236,521/-233,919
Burney Falls to Stevens Pass-1045.73 miles, +182,102/-281,021.
Grand Total for Riv's 2013-2015 PCT Hikes--2320 miles. Up +418,623; down -514,940 ft.
And for the 2015 section hike
Burney Falls to Timberline-678.59 miles. +108,668/-105,598
Chinook Pass to Stevens Pass-140.58, +31,958/-33,342
Slightly less grand total for 2015 hike: 819.17 miles, +140,626/-138,940.
Dear Trail Friends,
Because I tend to emphasize the pieces of the trail that I did not do -- the 187.5 miles from Stevens Pass to Canada and the 157 from Bucks Lake to Burney Falls, I thought it would be good to look at the 2320 miles I actually DID HIKE and celebrate that together. (The numbers don't quite add up right to the 2650 total, but they're the numbers the app gave me so I'll go with them. My two apps are constantly measuring the distance between two points differently. So, per Emerson, "consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds ")
I accomplished something I did not think I was capable of. I experienced things, places, people, degrees of happiness that have changed forever my sense of what is possible in life. Now, isn't that something? And I've discovered that writing can be a way of connecting with people who care, and receiving their support, in a way that can expand possibilities.
I actually wrote those two paragraphs last night (Monday). Now it is Tuesday morning, 10am, I am sitting by a small gurgling stream 5 miles into my hike. I am seriously considering sleeping 4 miles outside of Stevens Pass. Why should I hurry? I ask myself. Who knows when (or even if) I will sleep in the wilderness again?
I recall my friend Judith Cope asking me if the magnetism of the earth was something I could actually feel. I thought of that just now as I stretched out my legs beyond my little folded foam sitting pad and I felt the physical contact with the earth. I don't know if it is magnetism I feel, I don't know what it is. It reminds me a little of the strange inexplicable magic of sexual attraction: how physical contact with a particular person creates waves of sensation that the same contact with another person would not. What does that sensation consist of? I don't know. But contact with the earth feels both soothing and comforting, on the one hand, and energizing and exciting on the other. Ever since I was little girl I knew that the earth and trees were good places to be for me. I could feel held and loved in the womb-like space underneath our little juniper shrub in our front yard in San Diego. Everywhere I went I would find a "special tree" I could turn to for solace and a sense of belonging. The earth itself -- lying on the ground--felt similarly.
I am reading a blog-based book called Thru/Hiking Will Break Your Heart, by Carrot Quinn. I am interested to hear her describe a similar sense of connection with trees. I wonder how common it is.
I am sitting in the sun. Listening to the soft flow of the stream. Hearing insects buzz. Wondering why I would want to rush to town and sleep in a room. I am not that hungry for hot food. I am not that desperate for a shower and clean clothes. I would love to have cell coverage to check in with Chris but couldn't it wait one more day? (I have been disappointed that in all the "promised" places, per the cell coverage report, coverage has failed to turn up. )
Photo 1. Just after my first climb this morning of about 1500 feet, I walk through a pass (with no cell coverage - wah!) and look down on this like. As I hike the rim trail above it I watch hundreds and thousands of little seeds (wearing white puffy star-shaped wing/parachute gear) drift up and down,this way and that way. Once again I think of how letting go and relinquishing is part of catching the next new wave. Since my retirement,hiking the PCT has been my guiding passion. It has given beauty, meaning, structure and focus to my life.
I think of how Chris asked me to experiment with living without dogs -- an immensely difficult letting go,for me. And yet, from that relinquishing I floated like one of those seeds on its puffy star to the Camino and then to the PCT.
When I was a little girl I wondered how spiders (who could not fly) were able to build the bridges between limbs that made their webs possible. I read that they attached one end of the threads and let go. They went wherever the wind took them, to attach the other end of the thread.
Whether I hike the remaining small sections next summer or not,I am starting to let go of the PCT. I would dearly love to try a thru-hike,to spend five to six months out of doors in the wilderness. I would love to attempt another wilderness trail.
But I would also like to discover and live shared dreams with Chris. The PCT has taught me that I am tougher and more persistent and resilient than I knew I was. I can face,now,the daunting challenges of Chris and my aging with a new kind of confidence. Yes I will make mistakes, just like I lost things (including the trail itself) innumerable times. But I am capable of refraining from blaming, refraining from arguing with what is, and focusing on what needs to be done. And just as my abilities were enough ( with a lot of luck and help from the human and non-human universe) to walk over 2000 miles, they may well see me through the walk ahead through the losses and beauties of aging to the very edge of the mystery: death. The last letting go, when the seed truly drifts off into whatever winds blow.
You notice I am sitting here for a hour beside this creek writing when I could be walking?philosophizing about letting go while doing all that I can to prolong my sojourn in this enchanted land? We humans are nothing if not creatures of contradiction.
Photo 2. This little stream crossing the trail, beside which I sit, writing.
Time to walk now. For awhile. It is such an exquisitely delicate time, this time of consciously ending. Learning to let go. How comforting to listen to the flow of the stream and let it bring to mind the cartoon I imagined when I chose (or was chosen by) my name: the cartoon of a river, trying to reach out and cling to her banks.
I have been thinking about the Joyce quotes I recall from my high school years, and revising them.
"Nothing is more loathsome than the self-loathing of a self one loathes" becomes "Nothing is more wondrous than the self-wonder of a self who inspires one to wonder. "
"The sentimentalist is he who will not acknowledge the indebtedness incurred by a thing done" becomes "the wise woman is she who can acknowledge the indebtedness incurred by a thing - or a being- truly experienced. "
Then there is the quote I used in my valedictorian speech in 1965, half a century ago: "what have I learned? Of them? Of me?" Now all these years later as I prepare for my 50th high school reunion (very much a sequel to this hike), I know what I have learned. That we are each a mystery to ourselves and each other. That no one can be fully known. There is always the possibility of new discoveries, wonders, unknowns. It is possible at any moment to fall in love with the perceived enemy, or to want to fight to the death with the perceived beloved. That there is always so much more to be learned.
You notice I did not get up and go, even though I said I would. How much of our actions emerge from consciousness, really, and how much from the workings of that more vast and silent self we call the unconscious (and I call the "foot soldiers" on this hike)?
When that self decides to get up and go, I will go. Mostly she takes orders from the general (the brain) though it isn't entirely clear that those orders truly originate in the conscious brain, much as the general would like to believe they do.
To be continued in Day 61, Part 2
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