Day 66: Mile 767.0 - 782.5
Technically, today started clean: I had a plan to get to the base of Forester Pass--about 12 miles away--then assess whether I could get over Forester today or would have to wait until tomorrow. Forester Pass is the highest pass on the PCT at 13,200 feet and it's intimidating; the usual advice is to treat it similar to Mount Whitney: it should dominate the planning of that day. And it did: I left early, and would see what time I reached the base of Forester. If I reached it by 2-3 pm, say, then I should have enough time to cross and get to a campsite on the other side. If not, then I would camp there and leave Forester for tomorrow.
A good, reasonable plan. But once I got on the trail, things just broke down.
I just had too many things clashing in my head. This Forester plan, play it up as you will, at base was just another push, bringing up the old debate of being consumed by miles and the relentlessness of the trail on the one hand, or taking it easy and enjoying the trail on the other. And I know I should do the latter--it's better for my mental health--but the former always intones in the back of my mind: you gotta go, you gotta go. You gotta make miles. You're behind, you're not going to make it. And it's hard to put that voice away, because I have no counter-argument for it: it's *right*. So I'm going, and I'm pushing. Only I know this isn't healthy, so I come up with a counter-balance: there are two kinds of thinking, I argue, thinking while in stillness, and thinking while in motion. Both are good and, when pushing, I have plenty of the latter. I simply need some of the former to balance. So I'll put aside some time today to just sit and do nothing, maybe work on converting some initial-lines that have popped into my head into actual-verses. Yes, that's how I'll justify pushing, and it'll be good and I'm looking forward to trying it. Only now I'm checking my progress, and I've gone barely 4 miles in 3 hours--that's 1.3 mph, extraordinarily slow! Today I just don't have the speed; there just won't be time for "thinking while in stillness". So my idea is stillborn, and I remain unbalanced, and I need to go go go, only go go go today isn't fast but slow, so slow. And now people are passing me, people I recognize from the Crabtree Ranger Station, and they're flying past me. Forget globally with respect to the "bubble" or the "pack", just locally with respect to people I saw yesterday--I'm objectively behind. And I'm pushing to catch up, but even small ascents--the trail is just little rolling hills until Forester--are taxing, and for all my straining, I don't have the speed.
And did I mention that Terry let me know last night that Ian's dad, unfortunately, didn't make it and passed away? And I know I should contact Ian, but what should I say? What can you ever say? And I don't want to say "sorry for your loss" or "my condolences", for someone so dear, nothing so pat, and isn't figuring this out more important than my internal bickering and perpetual push-vs-enjoy seething?
And this mental junk seeped into everything. Along this stretch there are some wide vistas: openings to huge granite mountain ranges, yet when I saw this supposedly majestic views, I felt not a thing. And I remember thinking to myself, *this* is the crown jewel of the PCT? And I know that Ron loves it, and I respect Ron; and I know that Emily loves--she decried the missing wildflowers, the dry headwaters--and I respect Emily; and I know that Chief loves it--she said the Sierras are tough and they hurt oh so much, but they're so beautiful you don't care--and I respect Chief; but if this is the crown, then give me the rabble. Give me the trash, the spat-upon, the part that everyone hates: the desert. The desert was more meaningful than anything these vaunted Sierras have to offer; the desert had something to say if I could but listen, but these Sierras are nothing but bluster and reputation with no substance. And by the time I approached Forester Pass, where the trail walks up a wide valley ringed by tall granite peaks on three sides, I looked up and thought, this is just the desert gussied up by a bit of water, but just as empty and--unlike the desert which knows what it is, and is what it is, nothing more and nothing less--pretentious. These mountains are nothing but old gray men, locked in their defunct ways. And the young try to change, they introduce water, but it's literally drawn from stone, and small, a mere trickle against these old men, and even the green it inspires is dusty, and the water collects into pools edged in bracken yellow and bottomed in befouling mud. This, this is the Wasteland--maybe Eliot's, I don't know--but one perhaps once rich and vibrant, but now old and dying, drying and calcifying. The emporer has no clothes: these old men, these mountains, may hold their heads in majesty, but in reality they stand naked, with nothing but wrinkled flesh over dry bones. Strikezone--another PCT hiker--passed me in this section and, turning to me, said the standard line: it's so beautiful. Is it?, I countered, then laughed my seriousness off as a joke when he, confused, said, yeah, it is. If it was, I couldn't see it.
Oh, and I'll take pictures, make no mistake, and they'll be beautiful, but as Erasmus Fry said to Calliope when he sold her off--writers are liars, my dear, surely you've realized that by now?--and surely that's not constrained to just writers.
I came up to the base of Forester, took a break by the running snow stream of upper Tyndall Creek to hang with Jinx and Strikezone and Smiles and get some lunch (i.e., calories) and vitamin I (to forestall the headache I already felt coming on), then headed up. And I had been expecting tough time--someone had said it was a 1,000-foot gain in 1 mile, which is hard. But in reality it's closer to a 500-foot gain in 1 mile, which is much more doable, and although I stopped a lot to take photos of the now-revealed lakes below, all in all it wasn't that bad. And I came to the Slide, a part where there's a slide that goes several hundred feet down and the trail cuts a shelf below the lip of the slide, and it always looks so bad and scary on YouTube, but today--and maybe it was because of the lack of snow--but today I saw it and it looked a lot smaller in real life. And I crossed it without much fanfare--even stopped halfway through to take a couple shots--and continued up the small switchbacks on the other side and, before I knew it, I was at the top of Forester Pass, the highest point on the PCT.
And I looked out to the other side, and I saw the massive peaks, craggy and unapologetic, and to the left, in the distance, I saw the beginnings of a massive canyon, its floor whole forests and plains and rivers, its sides whole granite mountains, and it just took my breath away. And I laughed out of sheer joy. And I thought: oh, I get it now. *This* is the crown jewel!
And I descended down the other side, and a little ways down I saw a use trail that climbed up to a ridge overlooking that massive canyon, and I took it, and I dropped my pack and crossed over to the top of that ridge, and I looked out over that canyon in full, and its miracle was in no way diminished--if anything it only grew as I saw even more--and it took my breath away again. Even just below me: massive slants of sheer granite, with the silver lines of water running over them--it was amazing. And I laughed again because it was wonderous, and I almost cried because I was relieved that all the pessimistic thoughts of the other side had dropped away. And I took a moment there, on the ridge, and I sat, and I prayed. And I gave thanks for the awesomeness of creation, and then I prayed for people, for Ian whose father had passed, for Terry dropped headfirst into the job of resupply wrangler. For Cookie still back there, still thinking she's confined to smaller miles, for Hangn' Out still back there who's doing bigger miles, but who I felt was pushing it. That all these people should be blessed, and come to whatever better place there is for them--and I don't know what that better place is, but I trust that God does. And I felt a swell of confidence that even though I'm slow, I can make it. Even though it's hard, I can make it. Because even though I have so many inferiorities, look at Forester and realize, I came through that, I am--in my own small way--incredible.
And I realized something. That this debate between push vs enjoy, it's a false dichotomy. It's not a debate. It's not push vs enjoy, it's push to enjoy. That I push not because I'm under this relentless drive to make big miles, but because I'm eager to see what's next. Or to explain it another way: I remembered a sermon I heard a long time ago, back at CFC, during a joint Chinese-English service. There had been a guest preacher, and he had said his favorite disciple was Andrew, and he had preached on the feeding of the five thousand. It's a famous story: the multitudes are following Jesus because he's healing the sick and he turns to the disciples and says, it's getting late, shall we feed them? And they say, how can we: there are five thousand of them! How can we feed so many? And Jesus says, what do we have, and it turns out they have five loaves and two small fish, and Jesus gives thanks, and starts distributing it, and it becomes enough to feed all five thousand, and even have more left over. That's the miracle: the feeding of the five thousand. But what the preacher focused on was the part where Jesus asked, what do we have? And Andrew answered:
Another of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, spoke up, “Here is a boy with five small barley loaves and two small fish, but how far will they go among so many?” [John 6:8-9]
Now most preachers interpret this line as Andrew being incredulous--how can so little feed so many? But this preacher--who loved Andrew--interpreted it differently. He saw Andrew as not scoffing, but eager, as coming to Jesus saying, here, Lord, this is all we have, it's clearly not enough, but I'm eager to see what you're going to do with it, how you're going to make it work. What miracle will you perform next, Lord, I'm eager to see it: that was Andrew's attitude in this preacher's mind. And I don't know if this interpretation is theologically accurate. (Although there is something to be said for interpretation: we *are* talking about a religion where the main teacher taught in parables, in stories, rather than in philosophical theses or canons of laws. And stories are always subject to interpretation: their very nature is imaginative, and so can lean many ways.) But I do know that it's a way for me to break the push vs enjoy dichotomy. I do big miles not because the Sword of Damocles hangs over my head, I do it because I want to see what happens next. I'm eager to see what the trail shows us next. So I go, and I go far, because there's so much to see and I want to see it all and I'm impatient. That's how I break the false dichotomy, that's how it's not "push vs enjoy", but rather more "push to enjoy". Or even more accurately, don't push at all, but enjoy and be eager, and the big miles will fall out naturally.
I would eventually come down from the ridge and continue down the north side of Forester Pass, stopping seemingly every few steps to grab another set of photos, and eventually I'd make camp at the first campsite after. But that time atop the ridge, that was the whole day. And I'll say that it's *not* a revelation--I don't really believe in things like revelations (well, for me, at least), but rather I see if more as a math proof. As my father pointed out long ago, when you get to "real" math, the math practiced by mathematicians, the math that's about beauty and aesthetics rather than just rote memorization and mechanical procedure, when you get to that math, then learning doesn't become smooth, but rather it becomes a step function. You'll work though a set of proofs, then you'll hit a wall where you don't get it, and you'll bang your head against that wall for a long time. And then suddenly, a lightbulb will go off in your head and you'll get it, you'll see it: you'll jump up a step. And then you'll continue on, blithe and happy and understanding, until bam!, you hit another wall and the whole thing repeats. So you're learning is a series of walls which you eventually surmount, your learning is a step function rather than a smooth curve. And I believe this insight is like that as well. I've been banging my head against a wall for a long time, and now the lightbulb's finally gone off and I've jumped up a step. Is this a revelation? It may feel like a revelation becacuse it's a sudden step up after a long time spent below, but no: look up and realize it's but a small step in a long long staircase. Be happy and grateful and the lightbulb went off, yes, bask in it for the day, but realize that there will be another wall coming, and I'll have to bang my head against that one for a while too. But enjoy the cruising for a little bit until I get there!
-- Crabtree Ranger Station > Wallace Creek > Wright Creek > Tyndall Creek > Forester Pass > Campsite
-- Here was the Forester Pass plan in full: everything revolves around Forester Pass today. Forester Pass is about 12 miles from the Crabtree Ranger Station. It's a huge, steep climb to 13,200 feet, narrow and dangerous; if you see the scary videos on YouTube where a hiker is crossing a snow covered shelf trail at the top of a rock slide that drops down 1,000 feet?: that's Forester Pass. It's only a mile long, and switchbacked, but that doesn't change the fact that it goes up and over an otherwise sheer wall. Measuring from the base of Forester Pass, the next campsite is 4 miles away (and on the other side, of course). So I need to get to the base of Forester by, say, 2 pm, then I should have enough time to get over--I'm guessing my speed will drop to 1 mph when crossing the pass--and get to the campsite. So here's the plan: try to get to the base of Forester in time. If I make it, I can cross and I can get into Bishop tomorrow. If I don't make it, I don't have time to cross, and I'll get into Bishop the day-after-tomorrow. Complication with that is that I only have 2 days of food left, so Bishop tomorrow is safe, Bishop day-after-tomorrow means going-into-Bishop day will be hungry. Note: this plan leverages two things: 1) no snow on Forester Pass, so crossing can be at any time (with snow, crossing should be at midday: after the night's ice has melted, but before the snow has turned to mush and postholing begins), and 2) clear skies as befits June (i.e., no afternoon storms) (like the day before yesterday). And that's the Forester Plan, in context.
-- I *do* wonder if, with the eyes I have now, the approach to Forester Pass would look different. And likely, I think, it would, and my uncharitable view would be rescinded. Although I will say, even though I can now see why this--the Sierras--might be the crown jewel of PCT, I still hold a special place in my heart for the rabble, he desert. But this jewel, now that I see it, it might be worth pursuing a bit.
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