Walking Home

📖 The Scoop

Curveball laughter and reflective insights, a Lively bucket-list adventure

The reality of hiking day after day on the Pacific Crest Trail is brought to life with comic insight as challenges on this 2,600-mile footpath are met with imagination and often dubious creativity. But just as important are the moments of candor. Walking Home chronicles not just a lifelong dream but invites us all to examine the relationships and responsibilities we have as friends, parents, citizens, humans. We all can benefit from this experience of shouldering a backpack and taking it outside for a long, good walk. Written by a former climbing instructor and guide, Walking Home is a great read for the armchair adventurer and is liberally sprinkled with practical tips for backpackers as well. From the book..

.. written on the landscape here was thirst. No creeks, lakes, ponds, swamps; no water-bearing terrain anywhere I looked. It occurred to me that it was a pretty shabby trick that I had acquired, honing my water finding abilities at home as I did, in landscapes that were liberally drenched in water. Now, I had found Jack Springs the only way I was able, with the phone app, and I was on my way there now.
A wildfire had burned the forest around Jack Springs the year before, and the side trail leading to it petered out into ankle deep ash. The fire that had gone through had been hot, hot enough to burn all the bark off the trees and everything on the forest floor, and even the dirt a ways under it. Foresters use the term 'mineralized' to describe what an extremely hot and destructive fire does to a forest's floor. To me, it looked like it had been cremated.
When I felt a breeze come up, I worried that any of the blackened trunks could topple onto me and thought how backwards it would be if it happened. If no one found my body, it wouldn't be cremated, but would lie there to decompose on soil that had been.
A light flurry of little yellowed needles started falling. When the fire raged through the year before, it hadn't reached the tops of the tallest trees, and tragically, these uppermost parts hadn't realized that they had been killed until now. I walked on, thirsty, through a forest of black skeletons under yellow Christmas trees reluctantly dying above me.
I had assumed that Jack Springs would be a little green oasis, providentially spared by the wildfire. I imagined falling to my knees, and scooping limpid cool water, double-handed over my head the way it happens in the movies. But it wasn't like that. The fire had burned right over the springs and had cremated it like everything else. What was left of Jack Springs was a hole in the ground, about the size of a kitchen trash can, lined with burnt-off wooden posts. At the bottom of the hole was an inch of black ash water, little thinner in consistency than a milkshake. I was able to dip it out with a Ziploc stuck to a hiking stick.
I poured the slurry onto a handkerchief held over the mouth of a water bottle. Then poured that into another bottle, filtering it through the bandana again. Still, the water was nearly black and tasted like charcoal.
I hiked back up through the ankle-deep ash, between the skeletons and under the dying Christmas trees, and thought that I should remember this moment, having just reached what should most likely be my lowest point of this Trail adventure. And there was no better way to memorialize it than by throwing myself a pity party. A well-deserved one, I thought. I had no doubts that I could finish the trail. I just didn't want to.
Now here I was, foul-mooded and alone, acrid smoke in the air, socks filled with ash, and dead yellow pine needles itching down my back. My food sack was filled with the usual proto-crap, and my water bottles were filled with the fluid you're supposed to drink between rounds of swallowing ipecac. I put my head down and trudged on.

Genre: Travel / Special Interest / Hikes & Walks (fancy, right?)