My tent isn’t pitched quite as taut as I’d like it to be, and so it’s flappity flap-flap all through the cloudy night. I’m still convinced that my stupid ears won’t fit my stupid earplugs, so I deal by being vaguely annoyed. I’ve set my alarm especially early this morning, to make up for the deplorably small number of miles I did yesterday, and when that buzzes I’m actually pretty surprised to be rested up. The sun’s barely up over the horizon, and I manage to crawl out and pack and grab some water from the now-seemingly-clearer trough and hit the pit toilet and the trail by 6:05am.
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Tag: Pacific Crest Trail 2016
Day 4 – Early Magic
I say I’m going to be up and out by 6:30, but 6:30 rolls around and I’m barely out of bed. I want to get out though, want to be back out there as soon as I can be, so I’m grabbing thankfully-dry bits and bobs, stuffing them in my pack hoping, hoping that I can get a hitch back out to mile 47.5. I’ll roadwalk if I have to – it’s an early morning, and who knows who’s going to be out and moving – but that’d be a rough way to start the day.
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Day 3 – Jingle Bells
Sure enough, I wake around what a groggy look at my clock says is 2am, and it’s raining, though I’m still warm and dry. It’s raining when I wake again at 1am, and at actual 2am, and again when my alarm buzzes in my sleeping bag at 5:15am1. I listen to the rain for 15 minutes before I decide that its steady, soothing pace means it isn’t going to let up anytime soon. I look around, take stock of everything, but it seems something’s missing – oh. oh no. I did not do my idiot check last night as well as I had hoped. I peek under the vestibule, and yep, sure enough, there are my shoes and socks, sitting out in the rain, like they have been all night. Ehhhhhhhhh.
So, sighing, I pack up inside and bundle up against the cold and stuff my feet into wet shoes before dashing outside to take down my tent. It’s a Sisyphean effort to get it completely packed without getting any water inside, so I put it away on the outside of my trash compactor bag, to keep the dry stuff and the wet stuff separate. Then it’s oh-god-get-out-of-camp-or-I-might-freeze, ten miles to the Desert View Picnic Area and Mount Laguna.
Never Alone
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
Last-Minute Necessities
It’s nearly a week from my departure date, and my apartment has exploded in gear and resupply food and ziplocs, more ziplocs than any human should ever need. I’ve spent evenings surrounded by the pages of Yogi’s Guide, figuring out where to stop, where to shop, where to mail and when; squinting to interpret the initially-arcane PCT Water Report; making sure I’ve got maps in both hard copy and soft copy. I’ve also tended to a dozen more real-world things than I’ve cared to – what are taxes and car registrations and employer meetings in comparison to hiking? – but I’m not there yet, I’m here, and even though I’ve taken care of business in every instance that’s come up, I still feel as though I’m forgetting something.
Like, after getting this amazing, entirely-unexpected opportunity, paying it forward.
So I’ve decided to fundraise for Big City Mountaineers again. Big City Mountaineers is an organization devoted to mentoring under-served urban youth in the outdoors, offering over 1,000 teens per year the opportunity to participate in single day, overnight, and week-long expeditions in the backcountry. These trips are given free of charge to participants in hopes they will foster new connections with themselves, with their peers, with volunteer mentors, and with the environment. As urban youth are preponderantly youth of color, I thought it appropriate that a hiker encouraging folks of all colors to get outside support an organization with a similar cause.
So if you’d like to help me spread the outdoorsy love, please consider donating. Even a $5 donation supports a teen’s full day in the backcountry; every little effort counts. And to sweeten the pot a little, any donation of $30 or more will see a postcard from the trail in return!
…starting in about a week.
So it’ s buying smartwater bottles for their lids and buying a pack of trash compactor bags for a single one and turning local places upside down for leukotape, and then… walking.
And hoping that, with your help, I can help others experience the challenge, the escape, and the solace there is to be found in exploring the great outdoors.
Waking Dreams
I’ve been having a lot of vivid dreams recently – the type of dreams that you feel, the ones that are hard to distinguish from reality. I mean, not the suddenly changing scenery or the odd situations, but these days I often find myself wondering whether I actually did something or whether it just happened in a dream. It’s made for some interesting scenarios in the waking world, where I swear I’ve done something but haven’t quite actually managed it while conscious.
I think the exuberant activity of my slumbering mind’s a combination of the weather getting warmer and my workload ramping up and me actually getting occasional exercise and and and – life’s waking up after a long, weird winter1, and my dreams are echoing the sentiment. All my friends are waking up, too – going on adventures, doing lots of hiking, taking lots of pictures. And as soon as I get through this last hard push, I’ll be doing the same thing.
I’m not kidding. I start the Pacific Crest Trail in less than a month. Continue reading
Brown Girl on the NST 