Journeys North: The Pacific Crest Trail

by Barney Scout Mann

She’d sworn days before, “I’ll crawl if I have to.”

October in the northern Cascades? You'll die if you're so stupid that you'd crawl before quitting.

Close to our age, she and her husband had set out to hike the PCT a year ago. She’d watched him walk around a bend—the next thing she knew he was dead. Near mile 300, along a steep cliff above Deep Creek, he’d fallen 250 feet.

Note to self; look up: Mile 300, Deep Creek

Just as a mariner senses the approach of dry land, the next day Blazer and Dalton felt the approach of their first serious mountain range, the San Jacinto Mountains.

Mountain Equipment Co-op.

RIP.

Donovan was an obsessive ultralight backpacker. His tent was a single-wall tarp that doubled as his rain gear, and he used socks for gloves. His choices weren’t uncommon on the PCT, but he’d reduced his margin for error—the more weight cut, the more wilderness smarts required.

Like many of our fellow hikers, Frodo and I had not been inside a McDonald’s for years.

“Long-distance hikers are different from any other athlete. We typically hike for 10 to 14 hours per day, 6–7 days a week, for 5 months straight. The amount of energy required to keep our bodies going like this is unmatched in any other sport.”

Girl Scout, Bob Reiss, and Frodo and me at the start, Joe and Terrie Andersen in Green Valley, Bill “Pooh” Pearson on Donner Lake near Truckee, the Braatens in Belden, Georgie Heitman at Old Station, Lloyd Gust in Bend, Oregon, and, finally, Jerry and Andrea Dinsmore at Skykomish, Washington,

But in 2007 no place was the subject of greater trail chatter than Agua Dulce, the home of trail angels Donna and Jeff Saufley.

IN THE DESERT, Frodo and I carried our two-pound Squall 2 Henry Shires Tarptent, but in the High Sierra and the North Cascades we would carry our bombproof four-pound Big Agnes Seedhouse SL3.

I might be going from my Rainbow Tarptent to my Nemo Kunai, which is five pounds.

PITY THE TEHACHAPIS. If these mountains had been set in Blazer’s home state, Pennsylvania, or anywhere on the East Coast for that matter, they would be celebrated, the stuff that national parks are made of. The range’s peaks dwarf Mount Mitchell, the highest mountain east of the Mississippi, by a thousand feet. The Tehachapis’ curse is to abut the south end of the Sierra Nevada, lost in its shadow. No John Muir, Ansel Adams, or Teddy Roosevelt championed these mountains.

If I wasn’t so close to finishing, I would stop and leave the trail.

This is how the sunk cost fallacy kills backpackers.

Lured forward by the prospect of the lower trail ahead, the church group hiked in a driving rain uphill toward Old Snowy Mountain. Dana’s and Margie’s cotton clothes soaked through as rain changed to sleet, and then into a freakish blizzard.

Cotton kills.

Roswell had never camped in the snow, but instinctively she dug with her feet, poles, and gloves until she had cleared a two-foot-deep flat spot. Then she painstakingly set up her tent, piling snow high up each side. She’d gotten it into her head to make her shelter a virtual snow cave.

Snow cave and that thermal blanket (and no cotton) — crucial elements in her survival.

IN A NEAR whiteout, pushing the envelope, Nadine, Chris, and Pacha safely reached the other side of the Katwalk.

Well, that's good. But back on page 14 we were told thet end up searching for Nadine…

Two nights before the Suiattle River, she’d lost a glove—now she had to make do with one.

That could be the nail in her coffin!

Blazer knew what the sign really said. As did I. As did Frodo and all the rest. There’d been no meeting of Team Snowplow; there hadn’t been any group discussion. Over pizza in Winthrop we’d each made a pledge: No one will lose a finger or toe, no one will get seriously hurt or worse. We will not put others at risk because we need to be rescued. There was only one way now to honor that pledge.

Good for you.

How amazing it would be to live so primal, having only to worry about the bare necessities: eating, drinking, sleeping, and navigating. And then there’d be the camaraderie, the experience of sharing a community without the business of the world getting in the way.

I served nine years on the PCTA board, including three as board chair—in