Prying apart a seemingly endless expanse of emerald green forest, a bright golden sea of grass cradles a hardy stock of ranchers and a lazy, winding river that courses through it. Late summer stacks and rolls of bailed hay dot the fertile land by the thousands. It's the kind of place Monet would have come to paint had he not found haystacks closer to home. That's the Big Hole Valley.
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A Tale of Two Winters
The Sierra Nevada—literally, “the snowy mountains”—has recently begun to challenge its very name. In the past twenty years or more, the cyclical nature of snow and sun in these mountains has become anything but cyclical.
Shortcuts in the Wild
Automation is having, shall we say, a moment. Spreading its tendrils through our lives everywhere from our homes to our cars and to the supercomputers disguised as smartphones stashed in our pockets, its promises are many. More efficiency, less time wasted on the perfunctory tasks of daily routines, and more focus on the things that really matter.
A Brief History of Time
Honest question: What day is it? Away from the routines and patterns of home, it’s remarkable how something so familiar vanishes so quickly, each day seamlessly bleeding into the next, only the rising and setting of the sun demarcating one day from the next.
Saguaro
The flames dance and flicker to the music of a barely perceptible breeze floating down through the Ponderosa pines. Daylight fades, and the red embers pulse and shimmer.
Pit Stop
Strange. I don’t remember there being rocks under me. In the trance-like state between dreaming and waking, not a whole lot makes sense. Yet, as the dust from my recent slumber settled, it was starting to making quite a lot of sense. I just didn’t like what it added up to.
Land of Mystery
The southwest is a land of mystery. Of wide open space and eerie desolation. The kind that you can easily fill with all of your fears—the setting of the drama becoming a character all its own.
Resistance
Aside from our plunge into the depths of the Grand Canyon and our subsequent reemergence, the trail since Utah has been largely devoid of any significant climbing—until today. In the first minutes after leaving our camp at the base of a climb, any pretense that our legs might have been under about the leisure with which we’d stroll our way to Mexico had vanished.
Bumps and Bruises
Diverse. That’s the word that kept rattling through the recesses of my brain while following the now red ribbon of trail beneath my feet. Gently rising and falling far more frequently than at any preceding mile of the trail thus far, we traversed around drainages and ascended over small shoulders of ridges before descending to a neighboring wash.
I Left My Heart in the San Francisco Peaks
The lightning flashed without even a whimper of thunder, so distant was it. The crescent moon that hours earlier had tucked the sun into bed and took its place in the sky was nowhere to be found, obscured by banks of thick, dark clouds that should not have been there.
The Grand Staircase
One hundred miles north, far from the banks of the Bright Angel Creek on which we slept, Bryce Canyon National Park sits at the top of a geological feature few will notice. Known as The Grand Staircase, layer upon layer of sedimentary rock stretches from the high elevations of Bryce Canyon all the way to bottom of the Grand Canyon, telling the story of 600 million years of the planet’s history.
History Book
When you take your first step off the North Rim and onto the North Kaibab Trail, it is your first step into a different world. Gone are the ponderosa pine, traded for pinyons and eventually catclaw acacia, yucca, and all manner of cacti. The white Kaibab limestone yields to red sandstone which gives way to band upon band of other rock formations of varying colors and textures.
Flash
I can see the flash through my eyelids. One one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand....boom. From our snug little tent tucked into the trees it went on like this for an hour as I tracked the movement of the storm without so much as opening an eye, counting from lightning to thunder as it approached, passed above us, and then receded into the distance.
Starting Line
Since I’d first heard of it in 2016, the Arizona Trail has captured my imagination. Completed only five years earlier in 2011, it stretches nearly 800 miles north-to-south down the length of the state, from Utah all the way to Mexico. Along the way, the vast and often unsung diversity of Arizona is on display
Denouement
When we had gone to bed, the sun still dominated the sky with only a handful of brave clouds fending for space amid its rays. When we had woken up, everything had changed. What first began with the lightest of drizzles morphed slowly into droplets that sounded a bit more like sleet. By morning, the snow that dusted the ground and our tents told the rest of the night’s story.
Journey’s End
When you finally put the last piece of a puzzle into its rightful place, exactly how long should you admire the completed work before taking it apart and putting it neatly back into its box? A few minutes? A few hours? A day? A week?
Rookie Perspective #6: The End
Holy shit! We did it. After more than 100 days and 2500 miles we reached the southern terminus of the CDT. Most importantly, Mountain Man did it. I cannot believe he has hiked three of these bad boys. And today, when we touched the obelisk marking the end of the trail for us, he completed his Triple Crown. He set out to achieve this goal and he did it. I couldn’t be more proud of him.
A Farewell to Pines
There's an expression in sports, embraced by coaches and players alike, that can start to sound rehearsed, robotic even, if you listen to enough postgame press conferences: “It's a process. Trust the process.” Pick your favorite sport, collegiate or professional, and there's bound to be no shortage of coaches among its ranks that preach an emphasis on “the process.”
Rookie Perspective #5: Outside the Bubble
We finished our road walk from Doc Campbell’s to Silver City. As far as road walks go, it was quite pleasant. Well maintained, not busy, nice views. While Mountain Man and I were disappointed not to walk along the Gila River, a shady river valley with over 50 river crossings in 20-degree weather sounded like too much discomfort and too much cold.
On the Trail Again
At 6:15am, the sunrise is still just an idea. One that hasn't been born into reality yet. In the dark, I reach out to light the stove for coffee. Atop is a pot that I've pre-filled with water the night before. Through holes in the windscreen below, the blue flame of the stove glows and dances in the subtle breeze, the whole thing taking on the look of a tiny metallic jack-o-lantern.
Long Day’s Journey Into Night
A Eugene O’Neill play isn't typically the first place one would go to feel uplifted. There's a depth and darkness to the themes he explores, none more so than his semi-autobiographical masterwork, Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Addiction, despair, depravity, familial dysfunction—it’s all there. And if you were waiting for a Hollywood ending, keep waiting.
The Folly of FKTs
The 100-meter dash is not for the slow-footed. It is the domain of the rocket ships of the human race and the winners are bestowed the title of world’s fastest man or woman. One simple question though: Why?
Wind of Change
As if bemused by the accelerating pace of our hectic lives, the natural rhythm of the world moves ever onward, inexorably slowly, one season slipping into another almost without our notice. It's one of the many small joys of trail life—the rare attentiveness to even subtle changes in the world around us that might otherwise go unnoticed.
A Birthday Ode to Ace
Four years ago, I wrote this post sick to my stomach over a tearful goodbye as Ace went home to our house in Seattle and back to work while I continued on my hike of the Pacific Crest Trail. Rereading it now, I can still feel my insides turning over seeing how broken hearted she was to say goodbye for what we both knew would be a long time.
The Day that Time Stood Still
When we'd dusted the sleep from our eyes and set off down the trail, the morning sun was ablaze as a scarlet fireball hanging low in the sky. A thick haze seemed to be everywhere, giving the impression that we might be entering an impenetrable fog at any moment.
A History of PUDs
It's the dirtiest of words out here: PUDs. Pointless Ups and Downs. It behooves you not to complain too much when you've signed up of your own volition to walk from one side of the country to the other, but PUDs are like the proverbial thorn in your side, the pebble in your shoe, the tiny thorn entangled deep in the fibers of your sock that you just can't shake…
A Parting of Ways
We're missing something. Well, two somethings. Two someones, to be precise, and it hasn't felt the same without them.
Trailside Chats: Beardoh
New Mexico at last! A few short miles delivered us to Cumbres Pass and another hitch in the backup of a pickup truck to the nearby town of Chama. After being turned away by the miles of snow slogging in Montana, spending the month of July traversing the state of Colorado was a redemption of sorts.
Threading the Needle
Life is full of curveballs—no different here than at home. Adaptivity, above nearly all else, is a prized commodity when the best plan is to obliterate any plan from your mind. Mike Tyson, the colorful and feared heavyweight champion, said it best: “Everyone’s got a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Better yet: don't get punched in the mouth.
Hitchhiking 101
Don't be an asshole. That's good life advice in general, but it's especially true when it comes to asking perfect strangers for a favor, even one as simple as a little help getting from Point A to Point B. But I'll come back to that.
Rocky Mountain High
The sound was enough to wake me from a dead sleep. The confusion that followed was the kind that comes only when your brain, in its sleep-induced fog, strains to make sense of the unexpected. It was the sound of machinery, but it couldn't be. Not way out here.
Rookie Perspective #2: The CDT Back Flip, with a Twist
As I said in my previous guest post, I’m a rookie. What do I know? However, as we began planning for the CDT I quickly learned that conditions must be perfect (said to the tune of Flight of the Conchords, of course) in order to hike this big ass trail continuously and without performing any mental, logistical or geographical gymnastics.
Snowbound
Thirty miles. That seemed reasonable given the perfect weather we were expecting and the gentle topography after the first few miles of climbing. It didn't go as planned.
The Mountain that Blew its Top
Four months before I was born and a small, towheaded terror was introduced to the Brownscheidle household, an altogether different sort of terror was unleashed on the Pacific Northwest not far north of the Columbia River that divides Oregon from Washington.
Roots
Nearly one year ago, I arrived at an unassuming stripe of cleared forest that would never have been identifiable as an international border had it not been for the small silver obelisk marking precisely that. A few feet away, a collection of square wooden posts also declared this the end of a Pacific Crest Trail adventure that had begun 2,650 miles and…
The American Alps
The clear skies that we'd fallen asleep to were the same ones we woke to, but somewhere in between we had yet another dose of overnight rain. Fortunately, it was the last we would see of the wet stuff for the rest of the day. Under the newfound sun, steam was quietly rising off of the damp understory like smoke from a smoldering fire…
Thank You Sunshine
It was an exhausting night trying to keep things as dry as possible, and sleep came only in short spurts. The sweetest sound of the morning wasn't even a sound at all but rather the absence of one: the absence of rain falling on the tent. It was a big weather break if it would only hold out long enough to climb up and find a spot with some sun if there was any to be found.
Quiet Reflection
Tearing myself away from a cozy bed was made only slightly easier by the fact that although the clouds still hung in the sky like unwanted guests it at least was not raining. As this grand adventure nears its home stretch, I've noticed that comfortable town stays like last night bring my mind closer to the home that awaits me when this incredible hike comes to a close.
Goat Rocks
It was still pitch black a few minutes after 5am when I unzipped and reached through the open door of the tent to light my stove for coffee. Against a black backdrop, the flame of the stove cast a soft blue light under and through various holes of the windscreen around it. It looked like a jack-o-lantern fitted with a candle burning blue and it was an oddly calming way to begin the morning.
Blueberry Forest
Since crossing I-5 outside of Ashland, I've felt closer to civilization in Oregon than any other stretch of the trail so far. The best evidence is the number of consecutive road crossings, many separated by less than half a mile, that we seem to encounter every day here.