Zero Days. Barbara Egbert
our camping chores, setting up the tent, arranging the bedding, and making dinner, while I looked after Mary’s needs.
Nonetheless, I was nervous those first few trips taking our baby into the wilderness. I couldn’t sleep because I was so worried about how Mary would fare on those chilly nights in the tent. Infants can’t regulate their body temperatures as well as adults, and they don’t wake up and cry when they get cold, as older children will. They can quietly slip into hypothermia. I arranged Mary as warmly and comfortably as possible in the car seat, inside our four-person dome tent. Then I crawled into my own sleeping bag next to her. I would check her every few minutes to make sure she was warm enough. If I didn’t think she was, I’d take her into my bag to warm up. I didn’t dare fall asleep, for fear of rolling over on her. Every couple hours, she would cry and I would nurse her.
Some of the adjustments we made for family backpacking trips would occur to any experienced parent: Allow extra time for camp chores, and venture out only during good weather. But I quickly learned other tricks, like trying to schedule our trips during a full moon, which made it easier to discern the outlines of baby, blankets, and diaper bag in our dark tent. Some things we learned the hard way. During a particularly inconvenient phase in our backpacking history, Mary was throwing up—a lot—and it was then that we discovered the importance of sealing everything that is wet, or could possibly get wet, inside two Ziploc bags. I even got the hang of breast-feeding while walking. This was an invention born of necessity: We were hiking near our home to a backpackers’ site in the Sunol Regional Wilderness, and a steep hill lay ahead of us, when Mary made it clear she needed to be fed. But if I stopped for 20 or 30 minutes, darkness would overtake us before we reached the top. I stopped long enough to let her latch on, arranged the sling around her securely, and carefully resumed walking. To my surprise, the motion didn’t bother her, and we reached our destination in plenty of time, with a happy, well-fed baby to boot.
At six months, Mary moved into a Tough Traveler “Stallion” model baby backpack, with all the options: a rain hood with a clear plastic window, side pockets, and an extra clip-on pouch. Mary frequently fell asleep in the backpack. Her little head would rest against the pack’s coarsely textured fabric, and she would develop a rash there. So we padded those parts with flannel from an old nightgown. We also made a two-part rain cover out of waterproof, ripstop nylon, with Velcro to hold the two parts together. On clear days, we used diaper pins to clip together receiving blankets or old crib sheets to ward off the sun. I also bought a little round rearview mirror from an auto-supply store that I used to check on Mary when she was on my back. You wouldn’t think a small child could get into trouble in a baby backpack, but during a trip to northern California’s Lost Coast, she managed to pull some leaves off a tree and stuff them in her mouth. Another time, while we were returning from the summit of Utah’s highest mountain, 13,528-foot King’s Peak, she somehow managed to squirm around until she was riding sidesaddle.
By the time Mary was 1 year old, we had taken her backpacking six times, and to celebrate her first birthday, we took her on a trip down the New Hance Trail off the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. Each year, we kept hiking and backpacking as a family, tailoring the trips to Mary’s needs and abilities, but always challenging ourselves to do more. Back then, there were few books on backpacking with children, and the few in print suggested that it just couldn’t be done at certain ages. We never found that age. If Mary couldn’t walk the entire distance, I would carry her part of the way. If she wanted to walk but was getting tired, I would entertain her with endless stories to keep her mind off her problems. On our trip to the Grand Canyon, we hit bad weather as we were hiking out. We had swathed the pack with our home-sewn rain cover, but this meant Mary couldn’t see out the plastic window in the hood. And she got bored. I sang. I told stories. And then Gary hit on the perfect boredom reliever: raspberry sounds. One of us would make a loud noise, blowing out with our lips flapping, holding it as long as we could, and then the next would try to top it. This got us all laughing, and eventually we made it back to the trailhead.
As Mary got older, we discovered that dehydration was the surest source of trouble, and that crankiness was the surest sign of dehydration. Whenever Mary complained about the heat or the distance, or sat down in the trail and refused to move, we’d have her drink a cup of water. If it was late in the day and Mary was getting too cold or sleepy, we’d start looking for a place to set up camp. Just knowing she wouldn’t be forced beyond her limits, or criticized for weakness, helped Mary enjoy backpacking when she was small. By the time Mary was in kindergarten, she could easily hike 10 or 12 miles at a stretch, climb Mission Peak (the 2,517-foot hill that dominates the skyline around our home in Sunol), and help with camp chores.
Although Mary, Gary, and I don’t remember exactly whose idea it was to hike the Pacific Crest Trail as a family, I can trace the genesis of the plan to 1999, when we hiked the 76-mile portion of the PCT that runs from Tuolumne Meadows in Yosemite National Park to Sonora Pass. That ambitious expedition was the watershed trip for everything that followed. Mary was five-and-a-half years old when we began planning. Initially, we decided we would take her out of first grade for a week in October and hike what is known as Section J of the Pacific Crest Trail in the central Sierra Nevada. (The PCT is divided into sections of 38 miles to 176 miles, labeled alphabetically from south to north. All of California is divided into sections A through R, and then the alphabet starts over again. Oregon and Washington are divided into sections A through L.) On the map, the 60-mile stretch from Sonora Pass north to Carson Pass looked rugged but not too challenging. Two weeks before our start date, however, I suddenly remembered something I had almost forgotten after 10 years of living in the heavily populated San Francisco Bay Area: hunting season. Gary and I might have risked it anyway, with the help of matching Day-Glo orange vests, but we weren’t about to put Mary in harm’s way. She was a strong hiker, but hardly bulletproof. We hastily rewrote our plans so that we would go south from Sonora Pass instead of north, thus spending most of our trip on National Park Service land, where hunting is prohibited. This change from Section J to Section I also meant a longer and more difficult trip. Gary arranged to change our permit, and I talked my older sister, Carol, into picking us up in Yosemite.
When we reached Smedberg Lake in the Yosemite backcountry’s perfect alpine setting of granite and evergreens, we had been out five days and were 50 miles into the trip. That day, we had walked 12 miles with a total elevation gain of 3,500 feet. Mary was happy as a lark. While Gary filtered water and I set up the tent, she took my bandanna down to the edge of the water and “washed” it over and over. Mary had been in particularly fine form that day, leading us up the initial 1,000-foot hill to Seavey Pass, down 1,590 feet to Benson Lake, and then up 2,500 feet before dropping down to Smedberg Lake.
That’s when we realized that Mary had it in her to tackle a really long hike. This particular section of the PCT is one of the most remote parts of the entire route. The trail doesn’t cross any roads, paved or dirt, for the entire distance. If one of us had suffered sickness, injury, or snakebite, we could have been as many as 38 miles from a road. Most of the eight days we were on the trail, we saw nobody, so we were completely on our own. As it turned out, the Section I trip was a tremendous experience, but not a perfect one. In fact, several things went wrong. What was so encouraging was that we were able to deal with them.
The problems started on our first day. Leaving Sonora Pass in late morning, we ran into trouble after a few miles when the trail headed straight into a steep snowfield that looked too dangerous to climb. We followed footsteps off to the right, marked by rock cairns, but we still ended up on a precarious, unstable slope. We spent a lot of time working our way down through the shattered rock. Mary took a fall and Gary caught her just in time to avoid injury. This delayed us to the point that we were 3 miles away from our intended campsite as darkness fell. We were all very tired, and we had enough water to get through the night, so we set up the tent on the first flat space we found. The next day, we easily made up the 3 miles and got to Lake Harriet by dusk.
Second day, second problem. About half of the rechargeable batteries that should have been enough for the entire trip turned out to be duds. Most backpackers are early risers, but not us. We like to get up in full daylight, hike until dusk, and then set up camp by headlamp. But now we had to change our habits, getting up at the icy crack of dawn each morning and hiking quickly to take advantage of all the light that an October day holds. We wanted