Musings from the John Muir Trail

Spring is here, and the warm weather has me itching to get my pack back on.  There is a routine and a clarity to backpacking that I find nowhere else.  Last summer, my completion of the John Muir Trail gave me something else that has been lacking in my life: a sense of accomplishment.  Like many young people I’m making my way in the world, working a job that pays the bills, having fun and learning a lot, but hardly doing anything earth-shattering.  It felt good to have a difficult, long-term goal and complete it.  I hiked the trail with my best friend, Katie, over three sections in three summers.  The first year we really had no idea what we were getting into.  Neither of us had done more than four or five days in the backcountry, but we decided on a nine-day, seventy-five mile itinerary.  The weather was mercifully kind, but we found out just what it means to haul 40-pound packs over mountain passes at twelve and thirteen thousand feet.  Still, the experience was addictive.  The early exhaustion and tendency to jump at every noise slowly gives way to a natural rhythm and a quiet, capable confidence.

The second year we were perhaps too confident.  We underestimated the sixty-mile trip from Mammoth to Yosemite Valley.  I was ill-conditioned and bothered by painful knees the entire time.  Katie got sick and completed the trip only with DayQuil and some serious determination.  Yosemite was crowded as ever, and much of the time was spent on trails littered with donkey poop from the pack animals that resupply the High Sierra camps.  The Mammoth area to Donahue Pass was stunning, but we got a taste of a cold mountain storm that brought a morning so frigid we had to eat our oatmeal while stomping around camp to keep our toes warm in our boots.

By the time we started preparing for the last section we had gained a good deal of experience and a lot more respect for the task at hand.  The two-week, 128-mile trip was our most ambitious outing, and I was nervous.  We would be hiking late in the season: the last week of September through the first week of October.  I had gone to great lengths to be fit and to rehabilitate my knees, but was still nervous about their surviving a strenuous trip.  Once again, we got lucky with the weather and the first big snow held off until the day after we got back home.  It was a new experience for me to be so isolated and vulnerable.  We resupplied on the third day, but shortly after that we had no access to rangers or a reliable weather report.  There were few hikers after the first half, and we could go days without seeing anyone.  By the end of Day 9 I found myself thinking, “We are 50 miles from the end, and the safest way out is forward”.  The thought is intimidating, but everything is simplified as a result.  Regardless of what comes, your path is clear.  Few things in my experience are like this.  The mental strength that comes from such a circumstance is powerful.  What do I have to fear in the city when I have been a speck in the mountains reliant solely on myself and my friend?

When things upset me now, I think back to this.  I think of the calmness with which problems must be faced in the mountains.  I think of how one must simply get on with it, shoulder the pack and keep moving forward.  I think of how you keep going because you can, because you must, because you’re not dead yet.  I think of how fatigue and pain and frustration are part of the process; necessary but not strong enough to diminish the beauty of the journey.  This is why I keep going back to the mountains.  They illuminate truths that are so easily missed in the chaos of modern life.  They give me purpose and guidance.  They give me life.

Stay Wild