My alarm goes off at 5:00 – and I turn it off. I roll over and sleep until 7:30. OH GOD IT’S LATE. But I have nothing to do for most of the day; it’s all just waiting until tonight. I’ll hike out around 6, walk back to the trail, and camp in preparation for the following day. Continue reading
I wake at 5:30 to help with breakfast; Mama T shoos me back to sleep. I wake at 6:30; again, I’m shooed back to bed. So I lounge and I write until I can stay down no more, and I come just in time to eat pancakes and then do dishes. And then the day is my oyster. My relaxing, nothing-to-do-unless-I’m-asked oyster. Continue reading
I’m up at 3:30, take my time about getting packed and I’m still ready to go by 4:05. It’s still super dark, darker than it was when I went to bed, or so it seems, but that’s the fun of pre-dawn “light”, or so I’m told. It’s always darkest before the dawn, or whatnot. Continue reading
When I first started this blog in the fall of 2014, planning to hike the PCT in the spring of 2015, I did so partly because I love to write and my mother I wanted a place where I could prove I hadn’t been eaten by a bear share my experiences, being human and a woman and brown and hiking.
I also did so partly after having inquired around the PCT community and scouted around and done quite a bit of Googling, finding that there seemed to be no place, no person that would tell me, as a black woman, about what to expect re: socio-racial relations on the trail. At least, not that I could find. Continue reading
It seems weird that, of all the things I have to do before I hike the PCT in a few weeks, doing something with my hair is one of my top priorities. I’ve been pretty broke too lazy to actually do something with it all winter – stuffing it into a Buff whenever it got out of hand – but when I’m potentially not going to have access to someone who even knows that black hair is different from white hair for five months of my life1, now’s the time to figure out how I’m going to deal.
Continue reading
So I’ve been doing a lot of self-reflection lately, particularly about the meanings ascribed to brownness and ladyness and intersectionality and hiking, and what I see as the tension among those things and between those things and the space I’ve carved out for myself on this blog. It’s complicated – like most things worth understanding are – so bear with me. Continue reading
In towns, it feels like I’m near-constantly glued to a screen. Mostly, it’s because I chose the wrong external battery for writing blog posts – I should’ve brought the big one – but also because I have relatively few hours in which to contact the outside world, see what’s going on, not become completely disconnected from context. Otherwise, it’s all eating and resupply and talking with friends and and and – it’s easy to just forget the rest of the world is there.
But when I heard through the Facebook grapevine that Blackhawk started the Colorado Trail, I got absurdly, unabashedly excited. Not only another brown person, but another black person! Hiking! And while he’s only slightly newer to this whole backpacking thing than I am, he’s out there! Doing it! Getting it done despite hesitations and fears and a heavy pack and all those things I’m feeling. And I’m excited for him and excited for me and excited for us and and and–
And I wonder how different our experiences will be: he as an identifiable black man, me as a visually-ambiguous brown-black woman-girl.
So a couple days ago, after Jane and Sarah’s departure, I’m walking Frisco trying to find postcards, stamps, batteries, other little odds and ends I need for the leg to Twin Lakes, and I’m made aware of folks looking at me. Staring. Doing a really bad job of hiding the fact that they’re staring, and not like “hey baby” staring, but confusion staring.
And then I realize that I’m pretty much the only brown person in town. Continue reading
Brown Girl on the NST 