Starting at the end…

I’m lying in my tent at Warner Springs as the small camping area around me is filling up with hikers. There must be at least 15 tents set up, some of them 6 feet from each other, and I can hear every time someone rolls over or unzips a zipper. A great horned owl calls and the high pitched cackle of coyotes punctuates the dusk. This has been a great place for a rest day. 

I’ve hiked 109 miles northbound, NOBO, from the Mexican border, and I haven’t cried once! This trip feels so different from the way I was feeling when I got off Trail in October, so weary and thinned out both physically and emotionally. As Bilbo Baggins put it, I was “ all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread.” I knew it was time for me to get off Trail last fall, but as I go back and re-read my last blog entry, Enough, I can also hear the unintended lie in my words. It was not over for me. I needed a break, but I was not done.  

After about two weeks of resting and refueling my body, I found that my mind was already made up. I started making plans to complete the Southern California section of the PCT. I decided to hike northbound from the southern terminus to Green Valley, where I got off trail last fall. So beginning at the end, I set out on March 19 to close the distance I could not close last year. As luck would have it, Puddles, who fell and broke her wrist in the Sierra last year, was also coming back for a completion round, and we decided to start out together at least for the first couple of weeks. I had a Trail partner right from the start which made a huge difference. Not only that, but we met two other amazing women who were also completing their final sections of the PCT, something they had been working on together over many years. We named ourselves the Desert Diamonds and reveled in each other’s company.

Tomorrow morning at 6 AM we head north towards the Paradise Valley Café and the small town of Idyllwild. I’m excited and strangely, a little nervous. We will hike 18 miles to get to the next water source. Even after 2000 miles last year and 100 this year,I still get butterflies the night before beginning a new section. I know I can do it, but somehow each new section is like beginning all over again.

I was so burned out in October that it was hard for me to appreciate the beauty of this section, so in a way, I was not expecting this to be so beautiful. I am delighted to find out how wrong this assumption was. The Pacific Crest Trail follows the mountain ranges not the low desert, so we are constantly hiking up and down ridges, camping at elevation much of the time, dropping down low to come into towns and climbing back out again. People sometimes say that the desert is flat. It most certainly is not! 

We have had unseasonably hot weather in the first week, and still I managed to leave my water filter in my backpack on the very first night where it froze solid and was ruined. This was a rookie mistake that I paid for over the next 10 days until I could get the right filter sent to me. I had to purchase a different kind of filter whose threads did not match up with any of my bottles so the constant threat of dirty water dribbling into clean water lent a feeling of vulnerability and clunkiness to my daily routines. 

Despite all this, I settled into the walking and the carrying of my pack as if I had just been off trail for a few days. The routines of sleeping on a slippery, narrow pad, drinking coffee in the doorway of my tent early in the morning, looking out at the stars as the sky slowly lightens, all of this felt is natural as it had last season. And just like last year, I made some last-minute decisions about my footwear, but this time for the better. The first 100 miles have resulted in no blisters, knock on wood!

The most remarkable differences this spring is the state of my heart. Grief was a heavy burden last year and difficult to carry alone. This year, I am in a better place emotionally. I have survived my first year without my mother and honored the anniversary of her death. I still feel her with me, but now when I think of her there is more sweetness than tragedy, more feeling loved than feeling bereft, more hope that I will be able to go on.