Day 8: Mile 77.3 - 91.2

Tried out the leg this morning and it felt ok walking from the cabin to the bathroom, and from the cabin to the main office. So I decided, yeah, let's get back out on the trail. Hitched a ride with Rayangel--had arranged the possibility yesterday, but went with Dean and the Four Horsemen--got to Scissor's Crossing, and headed on out!

There's a desert valley here, doubtless with a name but I don't know it, and the PCT crosses from the mountain range south of the valley to the mountain range north of the valley. Today was the climb up the northern range. To be fair, the climb was in the beginning and not that bad, aided by the cool breeze that would whip down the valley, occasionally gusting but nothing too severe. It reminded me of the Altadena Crest Trail, although if the Altadena Crest trail is an ankle-biter of those mountains, the PCT here is a calf-biter: higher up, but not severely so. And definitely more smoothly graded than the Altadena Crest (which likes to climb up, just so it can climb down and repeat it all over again at the next turn).

But the amazing thing was looking out over the desert valley, at the mountains to the south, imposing, commanding slopes, and thinking: wait, I crossed that? That's incredible! How the heck did I do that? Yeah, yeah, one step at a time, but how the heck did I do that? To be fair, that's one of the great things of hiking in general: looking up at some indomitable peak and thinking I'll never get there, then slowly, ploddingly, walking up the trail until, wait a minute, you are there! And the dual: climbing and climbing, then stopping and looking back and seeing just how far you've come and thinking, man, but that looks far! Both great motivators, both things that experience doesn't dull, but if anything makes it all the more surprising: I've been in this situation before, I've done this look up or look back so many times before, but it still never fails to astonish.

I took an easier day today, to rest up the leg: just shy of 14 miles from Scissor's Crossing to the next water at Third Gate. This is a pallet--a literal two pallets, in fact--of water, about a half mile off trail, generously provided by trail angels. They drive up the road from the other side, and consistently replenish the cache. It's pretty amazing: jugs upon jugs of water, still plastic wrapped, seemingly bought from Costco, all provided under a big blue tarp. Quite thankful for it: without it, the next water is a further 10 miles, meaning a 24 mile trek from Scissor's to water, which is doable, but is quite a ways!

The leg felt better today: from the near-injury pain of two days ago, it became a nagging sort of pain over the first few miles, then morphed into more a lower leg issue. Almost a circulation issue, but those I've never figured out how to fix other than letting the body figure it out on its own. But at least it's--more or less--out of the injury-pain regime, and that's good enough for me. I'll continue babying it tomorrow--today I made sure to take a more casual pace and not charge ahead--keep the distance shorter, keep the pace slower, and try to think up of more songs to sing along the way. (Singing uses breath, which in turn slows pace, my desired effect. Or at least that's my story and I'm sticking to it! Hey, at least I'm singing into the wind, so no one can hear me!)

And that was the hike!

- charlie

Previous   Next

Some notes:

-- Today I met Young Chang, who's tucking in bits of the trail between the demands of his full-time job. He was surprised: I was the first other Asian he'd met on trail--I guessed he must have missed Andre? (Have I written about Andre here yet? If not, I'll have to at some point.) He's quite active: had originally started with a plan to run a marathon in every of the 50 states (and did quite a few, including the Midnight Sun up in Alaska), then when that didn't pan out (injury) took up soccer, then when *that* didn't pan out (injury) took up hiking. And has been doing that the past few years. He plans to do the entire PCT, just a little bit at a time when he can: a weekend here, a day off for a long weekend there. It's actually pretty inspiring: getting in the thing you like to do, while still maintaining a job and career (he's a lawyer, but really, he says that he couldn't imagine retiring and not having anything to do all day). He's better balancing than me: I just quit the career! 😋 He's also a big fan of Taiwan--especially the xiao long bao--so maybe that helped me seem more interesting, but we ended up talking for more than a few miles. 

-- Today I met Lobster and Teya at the Third Gate water cache. Turns out Teya recently finished a biomedical engineering program at Johns Hopkins, and is soon starting a PhD program at MIT in Computer Science. So we ended up talking about her previous research (in modeling the electrical networks of the heart, and using that to better advise doctors using ablation to treat arrhythmias) and seeing the extension to her upcoming work (she did either a major or minor in Applied Math, so that's the ostensible connection to CS). She's quite ambitious, honestly: I thought she would focus on applying CS theory to biomedical problems--a classic low-hanging fruit, PhD approach that was discussed even back in my day--but no, she feels biomedical applications are unique and rich enough to warrant their own CS theories in and of themselves, and she's going to find them. Yeah, like I said: ambitious. But that's good: somebody needs to be! For me, it was just a reminder that it *does* feel good to talk technical, to exercise that speculative engineering side of the mind. Granted in this case there's no consequence--this is just the standard "cocktail party" conversation--but still, lest I forget, it does feel good. It's not a career, of course, but when I get back, it may be something to keep in mind.

-- Lobster's pretty impressive too: he lives in Seattle half the year, doing odd jobs, then spends the next half year on the trail. Whether the PCT, the Arizona Trail, the--some other trail in Montana that I can't remember right now--anywhere that walks in the woods and takes a while. To balance those two is quite a feat: an admittedly different balance than Young struck, but it just goes to show there are many ways.