Animals
Pacific Crest Trail, August 2015

One of the first things to strike you on the northernmost part of the PCT is a pervasive silence. The forests breathes, but the birds and squirrels generally don’t chatter (except in Canada; Canadian squirrels make a racket!). It’s like being in a pre-Internet library. Not to say there is no sound, just that it is generally a quiet rustle, definitely not a roar. One exception: an unidentified bird whose call exactly duplicates the single note sounded by the emergency whistle on the sternum strap of a backpack.

It’s never clear whether it’s movement or sound that signal snakes. Snake awareness is always synaesthetic– a full-body response. We only encountered the occasional garden variety, never hearing the electric rattle that stops all movement including the human heart. More often the rustle is a bird pecking at the ground, innumerable chipmunks, and the occasional sharp call of a pika (small round mammals related to rabbits who sound a sharp alarm before diving into their burrow).

Movement on the trail usually means marmots or grouse. Many hikers regard marmots and cute, almost cuddly animals, who fearlessly perch atop hills, surveying the slopes and the hikers passing by. To me, they are slightly cute grey groundhogs. Back home, I remember kids with 22 rifles going out to hunt groundhogs, and farmers who carried a 22 or a 310 shotgun on their tractors to eliminate the critters who were digging up their fields. Guess it’s an east coast/west coast thing. Other fearless beings on the trail are grouse–the size of chickens (well, almost). Most hikers know the rush of adrenaline when they scare up a covey — the sudden burst and beat of wings brings the unsuspecting hiker to a shocked, heart-pounding standstill (or the hunter to a frenzy of shotgun blasts). These grouse rarely flee, and barely make the effort to run away. Sometimes they just head down the trail in front of you, barely outpacing boots and trekking poles.

Bears lurk but do not often appear. Parks may require food canisters in parts of California, but the hikers on the Washington PCT don’t use them, nor do they hang. They just curl up in their tent, food bags and all. So the largest non-human creatures to grace the trail are deer. Also fearless and also desperate for salt, they act offended when you invade their area, particularly if it is a campsite. And if you are foolish enough to piss anywhere near camp, you can expect multiple loud visits in the night, with the deer munching carefully the moss, humus, and soil you recently marked.

By far, the most frequently encountered animals are human, falling into several categories: day hikers, trail runners, short section or weekend hikers, lashers (long ass section hikers), and the occasional thru hiker (in the case of the PCT, that would mean hiking from Mexico to Canada). Each species exhibit different behaviors. Short timers tend to be louder and overburdened with shiny new equipment (most of which they will not use). Long timers smell, travel light and fast, and demonstrate remarkable efficiency in setting up or breaking camp, eating lunch on the trail, or crapping in the woods. A typical PCT thru-hike is over five months, usually commencing around May 1, so we were in front of the main bubble, only meeting a few hardy, fast souls.

True long-distance hikes are not just weather but also seasonally dependent, which is why most people hike both the PCT and the Appalachian Trail northbound. As the title of his book indicates, Earl Shaffer (the first AT thru-hiker) hiked north “With the Spring.” But the PCT presents other obstacles to the would-be thru hiker as the mountain passes in California can still be snowed in well into the summer, and Washington can ice up even in September. And, as we learned, other unanticipated obstacles present including trail closures or rerouting because of fire. All that makes a pure thru hike of the PCT, what would be called a “white blaze” hike on the AT, difficult to accomplish. All but one of the thru hikers we met who finished in Canada, still planned to return south to finish miles skipped for any number of reasons.

The PCT hikers tend to be different from their AT cousins in some fundamental respects (even though there are clear exceptions). Perhaps because of the prior planning the great re-supply distances the PCT necessitates, most hikers are decidedly middle class, and tend to be well-outiftted. Benton Mackaye’s original proposal for the Appalachian Trail opens discussing labor, and quickly turns to the needs of all people for fresh air and some time away from urban factories. His was a decidedly egalitarian vision, turning the great outdoors into a place for all to use. The difficulty of access and resupply on the PCT creates an environmental niche that limits thru-hikers to the well- supplied, the well-heeled in all senses of the term.

T. Hugh Crawford

Foliage
(Pacific Crest Trail, August, 2015)

Starting out, the plants are two–Douglas Fir and blueberries. The ancient trees loom. They have dominion. But the blueberries proliferate, and they are flavor. Their bushes vary in size and color, as do the berries. The ones with red leaves growing close to the ground seem always to give a tart jolt, while the slightly taller ones hold the round blushing blues you’d expect on a label. Others are tall with shiny black skins and a thin sweetness. Not just taste and sweetness, they also give moisture. One year, hiking from Vanderventer Shelter on the Appalachian Trail to Damascus Virginia, Bennett and I found ourselves in the middle of a 33 mile day with almost no water. The path was covered with blackberries which carried us down the mountain.

As the miles unfold on the PCT, the foliage differentiates. I now find Western Red Cedar, Western Hemlock (a welcome sight after witnessing the die-off of eastern Appalachian hemlocks), Lodgepole Pine. There must be more I will see when my eyes and feet focus. I kept imagining balsam fir because the smell is penetrating, reminding me of the stories about tuberculosis sanitaria in the south Georgia Long-Leaf pine forests trying to exploit the healing power of the chemicals drifting through those evergreen stands. The Long-Leaf disappeared beneath the axe and turpentine bucket years ago, but here in the Cascades, apart from fire and chainsaws, these big trees just stand–hundreds of years. We came across one sawed log which was marked with a sharpie as 658 years–a testament to human insignificance.

At the burn-overs, the duality shifts. The silver-grey burnt trees shed all needles and bark, each species becoming synonymous. The blueberries are replaced in the first year with fireweed, in the second with what looks like coppiced beech. At lower elevations a few maples might mix in, but up high, the beech seem the only broadleaf to take hold, at least until the the evergreens re-establish their dominance.

Down close to the ground, tiny hemlock sprouts compete with club mosses. Both plants look like miniatures of the giants around them, but the club mosses, for all their tiny imposing stature, will never break for the sky, and must be content with the spots of light that filter through the canopy. Occasionally a tall yew or maybe a larch drift down short needles with the sound of rain as they cushion the path with litter. Near Canada a new bush appears looking very much like a wild American boxwood. The combination of yew and box take me back to the front yard of the house where I grew up, a domesticated version of the wild that confronts daily the walker of these Cascades paths.

But what arrests is reverence. The trees make quiet spaces through sheer brooding presence. A tall smooth-barked pine (Lodgepole?) grows straight, tall, fast, and the thin lower branches lose their needles and slowly drift into a semicircle, like arms lowered with hands about to clasp. Those branches are covered with an epiphyte a brighter green than what in the American south is called Spanish moss. When it dies, it turns black and looks like a bear’s fur on the ground, but in the air, it is a shaggy spectre, delineating a path, pointing on.

T. Hugh Crawford

Surface

The Pacific Crest Trail in the Northern Cascades of Washington has a surface that, when not scree, is soft, springy soil composed of fresh and decaying needles, cones, and wood from the giant trees that dominate this world. Dig down a few inches and you will find grey sand– fine particles of granite, the result of eons of erosion. It’s a beautiful but fragile surface to walk on. The high-traffic areas near entry points or where pack horses work quickly turn to dust or deep loose sand that slips under foot and settles into every crevice of your footwear, painting your calves to the knee. Still, a forgiving surface which reminds us that we may experience the great outside through our eyes, ears, and nose, but we come to know it through our feet.

Preparing to navigate a trail, hikers first think about distance, then elevation change. Those factors are well-represented by maps, particularly in profile, but there are few sources for an understanding of the third important factor: surface. Mileage/Elevation/Surface. The PCT is 2,650 miles long–a brutal distance made tolerable by it being more often than not “pack-grade” (no more than 6%). This accounts for its incredible length, as it takes lots of switchbacks to keep that grade (the trail’s distance as the crow flies is just over 1000 miles), but it also keeps the trail generally perpendicular to the direction of water run-off, making the surface much more stable. In comparison, the Vermont Long Trail seems to have been laid out by hiking next to or directly up stream beds, almost as if the designers had decided to use dry creeks as the base of their trail and which results in a washed out path–hard hiking over exposed rocks, more like climbing uneven stairs than hiking a trail.

Most of the trails in the various parks and wilderness areas across the USA are well-designed and maintained near their entry-points–because they get more traffic but also it is is easier to bring in crews and tools at those points. This is particularly true along the Appalachian Trail which is maintained by volunteer clubs. So, for example, a walker can leave Stevens Pass in the Cascades heading north and walk for miles along an old railroad grade wondering why anyone would think hiking is hard. Of course the deeper they plunge into the wilderness, the rougher it gets, but also more interesting.

These forests burn. Often a distance hiker will find a path through standing silver trunks, no bark, no needles, swaying gently but ominously, with an understory of shrub-like beech and a waving field of fireweed. One day, in a deep green growing forest I found on the path a cone with edges burnt. Puzzled, I thought back on tree stories I had read, concluding that this might be a cone from a tree that only opens in a burn, and, with the magic of ecological cooperation, some squirrel had dragged the now-open cone here for a meal and perhaps dispersal of the species. Across the Cascades, the trail is littered with strange white blossoms. Squirrels cut green Douglas Fir cones–tight cones with a thick green sap-like covering–then peel them, scale by scale, leaving neat piles of bleached white tinged with pink.

The thin soil of the Cascades supports trees of fantastic size and age– Douglas Fir, Western Red Cedar, Mountain Hemlock. Their roots spread out, sometimes covering boulders and, after centuries, they pitch over, heaving roots high, revealing eternity. Stones suspended high in the air, and surface rock, now exposed, reacting reacting to light it has not reflected for millennia.

T. Hugh Crawford