Zero Days. Barbara Egbert
Lake, we hiked down to a highway, and the next day had to walk through a construction area that put us right smack in the path of high-speed traffic. I still shiver, thinking about those huge vehicles hurtling down on Mary as we rushed along the road.
PUNCTUALITY: When Mary was born, the reputation for punctuality that Gary and I had built up took a severe hit. As new parents, we had an excuse. But on the PCT, there was no excuse for our inability to get out of camp more quickly each morning. Three hours to break camp and get walking, without even cooking a hot breakfast? Good grief. The most humiliating day was the time we camped with a thru-hiker with the trail name of Pineneedle at Spanish Needle Creek two days before Kennedy Meadows, which marks the end of the southern California section of the trail. We had a 25-mile day ahead of us with significant altitude gain and loss, so we got up at 4:30 a.m. We did cook breakfast that morning, probably because we had more freeze-dried food left than any other kind. We really pushed hard and managed to get out of camp at 7:10. Meanwhile, Pineneedle woke up at 6:30 a.m. and left at 7. He just got up, packed up his tent and so on, put on his boots, and hit the trail. Amazing. We weren’t any better at sticking to our original schedule, which called for us to finish the PCT in early October. We lost a day or two in the first seven weeks through the desert, then lost another four days because it took us so long to complete our resupply work while we were at home after our June trip to Maryland. We took unplanned zero days at Vermilion Valley, Carson City, and again at Cascade Locks, Oregon, when I realized I would have to leave the trail temporarily for dental and medical treatment. We had to spend a day at the Portland REI buying a two-person tent for Gary and Mary to continue with, plus some cold-weather gear. We lost so many days that when we finally headed into a late-October snowstorm in hopes of completing the final stretch of Washington state, we were the last people on the trail.
SIMPLICITY: We’re not Luddites, honest. We decided, years ago, for perfectly logical reasons, against having a television set at home (and thus no VCR, no video games, and no video cameras). Same goes for cordless phones and cell phones. So it was ironic that when we headed out on the trail to spend time outside of civilization, we were lugging a video camera, a cell phone, and a new digital camera that we didn’t even figure out how to use properly until halfway through California. The digital camera replaced the film cameras we had used and abused over the years to the point of unreliability. The video camera was for shooting film for a documentary that died stillborn but that seemed like a good idea at the time. And the cell phone was for calling motels and arranging rides along the way. Many backpackers whose houses are loaded with the latest technological wizardry deliberately eschew all gadgets on the trail. Some don’t even carry a camera or a wristwatch. We felt as though we were the last people in the English-speaking world to acquire a cell phone, but once we had it, we were glad we had brought it along. It’s no good for emergencies—there’s hardly any cell phone coverage in the backcountry—but it was very useful for calling for a ride from the trailhead and for calling friends and relatives when motels lacked working telephones.
We didn’t carry a TV with us, of course, but we watched more television while we were thru-hikers than we ordinarily see in an entire year. At almost every town stop, we’d check into a motel. And before long, Gary and Mary would be glued to the screen. Channel surfing drives me into a homicidal rage, so I generally retreated to a corner of the room with the newspaper and tried to ignore the monster truck pulls, cooking programs, historical re-enactments, and ancient cartoons they were watching. I couldn’t help noticing that at one town stop in Oregon, Mary watched The Matrix, which struck me as not entirely suitable for a 10-year-old. But I decided to let Gary be the adult that night, as far as monitoring the TV went.
Living without television at home is a major plus for anyone who wants to have a family that’s seriously involved in outdoor adventure. That wasn’t why we got rid of ours before Mary was born (we did that because we feel television is the biggest time-waster ever invented), but it turned out to be a big help. Without spoon-fed electronic entertainment, children grow up learning how to create their own entertainment, indoors and out. They learn to be content with a lightweight paperback book for relaxation, and to focus on the real world long enough to watch a hummingbird visit a feeder or a deer climb a hill. In the wilderness, Mary likes to braid pine needles while walking, and in camp she depends on her imagination to create stories around the towns she builds with rocks, twigs, and pinecones. Kids who grow up with TV are attuned to fast-moving, all-engrossing entertainment, and it’s hard for them to make the transition to the slow-moving natural world. But for Mary, no TV and no VCR meant she grew up without knowing quite all the characters on the Cartoon Network, without memorizing all the lyrics to The Little Mermaid, and without playing video games. And thus, she didn’t miss them on the trail.
ENVIRONMENTALISM: I should have felt really good about this one. We followed Leave No Trace standards as much as possible, including packing out our toilet paper, which is more than most hikers do. And, of course, we weren’t burning any gasoline on the trail. But although we didn’t drive a car for most of the time, I made up for it during the last month, driving about 5,000 miles to get home, get back up to Washington, play trail angel all over the state—including side trips to Yakima and Seattle—and then finally go home again. In the end, I probably drove as many miles as if I’d never set foot on the PCT that year.
IN SPITE OF THE CHANGES we made to our family values on the trail, the one we did retain, without compromise, was togetherness. It may have been horrid, as Mary suggested in her journal entry at the beginning of this chapter. Sometimes we were so much on the outs with each other, I thought we’d never be on speaking terms again. But we’ve always been a close family, and it was that willingness to stay close, no matter how badly we wanted to divorce and disown each other, that formed us into a group capable of taking on almost any challenge. The hardest thing for all of us was when we split up in September, when I had to return home briefly for medical treatment, and Gary and Mary had to continue without me. And the happiest day for me was when we teamed up again in Mazama, Washington, to take on the frozen barrier of the North Cascades. We were worried, we were stressed, we were in some degree of danger. But we were together again.
CHAPTER 3
BACKPACKERS A TO Z
Day 123: It was cold, windy, and foggy. We almost got lost around Grouse Hill. The high point was definitely meeting Scott Williamson. He told us a lot, like how people often got sick around Crater Lake, and the South Brown Mountain Shelter well water was highly suspect. He carried a little rubber ducky! Got to camp, dark and damp.
—from Scrambler’s journal
BACKPACKERS ARE MY KIND OF PEOPLE. When Gary, Mary, and I attended our first Annual Day Zero Pacific Crest Trail Kick Off (ADZPCTKO) at Lake Morena County Campground, I looked at the collection of long-haired hippie types, the talkative, gregarious types, and the shy, hopeful, and helpful types all exchanging tips on gear, sharing sunscreen, looking out for each other’s dogs and children, and volunteering in droves for kitchen duty, and felt right at home. To some extent, they reminded me of the people I got to know during my year as a member of the Lutheran Volunteer Corps, when I lived in Baltimore with five other volunteers and worked for an inner-city health clinic writing newsletters, raising money, and lobbying at the Statehouse. Members of both groups are, for the most part, young or young-at-heart, well-read, and college-educated or self-educated. Both groups include significant numbers of vegetarians, amateur musicians, and pacifists. They’re comfortable with eccentrics, uncomfortable with ideologues, and generally opposed to litterbugs, war, and the destruction of the environment. Most of all, they’re smart, healthy, and determined to achieve their goals.
Roughly 200 to 300 people make it their goal to thru-hike the 2,650 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail every year. There aren’t any official demographic numbers on PCT thru-hikers, but judging from our observations, young men with middleclass backgrounds and college educations make up a slight majority. It would be misleading to envision a “typical” PCT thru-hiker. More women are hiking than ever before, as well as more senior citizens and more people from other countries. We met people who worked in construction or waited tables for a living, along with a sprinkling of Ph.Ds.
Our