Finding our Way in the Wilderness

The mountains instill in those who love them an insatiable hunger. When we are not on backcountry treks, we are planning hikes, pouring over maps, ordering moisture-wicking socks, or entering chat rooms to discuss the virtues of peanut butter versus trail mix. Or doing online research and making trips to the bookstore in pursuit of that tome written by yet another lover of the mountains. Anything to feed the hunger.

One summer when Eliot was six, my compadre Kate and I traded in our annual Yosemite adventure for a backpacking trip out of Florence Lake in the Central Sierra. We did not have to hike a long way to be in a complete wonderland of meadows, riverside trails, and astounding vistas.

People who don’t like to backpack wonder why someone would choose to hike miles with a forty-pound pack strapped to her back, only to dine on freeze-dried food and sleep on a half-inch thermo rest pad. But we do it for the views. We do it for the feeling, which car camping with its luxuries cannot replicate, that we don't need all the junk we haul around most of the time. This is not to say we do not love our luxuries. In fact we appreciate them more after one of these trips --as well as during them, when a bite of chocolate or a sip of hot coffee tastes all the better.

One early afternoon in August, Kate and I took the ferry across Florence Lake and started the five-mile trek to our destination. But someone had taken the sign out at the connector to the Pacific Crest Trail. Without the sign we never saw the junction, and with my less than brilliant navigational skills, we headed back toward Florence Lake, crossing the San Joaquin River before I realized my mistake.

Backtracking, we found a junction and headed down what we hoped was the right trail. The map said we needed to head east, and the written description I carried said we followed a “road,” which in reality was a series of tire tracks between stretches of granite. Where there were no tire tracks, we relied on the sun at our backs, bootprints in the dirt, and the occasional concrete pourings over granite.

Most comforting were the trail markers, stacks of rocks other hikers leave on boulders to help people find their way, but even those can be misleading. I started to pray. Between trail markers I stopped and searched for the next stack of rocks. Our eyes swept over grey stretches spanning miles of wilderness. There was nobody around, but their boot tracks assured us they had been there, and as we picked our way across the granite, the stacks got closer and closer together and we walked with more confidence.

After a while the road dropped down into forest and skirted a meadow we identified on the map. As we walked, four-thirty turned to five, and five to five-thirty. We were rapidly losing energy and it would be dark by eight o’clock. We crossed creeks several times, becoming more uncertain the deeper we moved into pine forest. Then out of the trees appeared our trail angel.

She was the first person we had seen since we left the San Joaquin River some four miles back. She had long hair and milky blue eyes and was wearing jeans. She said she worked at the ranch nearby and had come up to the road to look for the supply truck.

Determining that we wouldn’t make it to our destination by dark, I asked how far it was to the first set of campgrounds. She said less than half a mile. Someone had been stealing signs, she said, and we had been following the road which was much longer than the trail.

We followed our trail angel’s directions and arrived in camp at 6:30. We hung the bear bag just before night fell, and set up our tent in the dark. Too tired to eat, we gulped down all the water in our Camelbacks and crawled into the tent.

As I wormed into my sleeping bag I missed Blue. With his navigational skills we would never had been lost. But quickly my thermo-rest pad and down sleeping bag absorbed my body heat, enveloping me in warmth and comfort. I sent up a grateful prayer and fell asleep.

The next morning we prepared to head out. Packed up and without camp chairs, we sat back to back against each other, eating a simple breakfast of apples and cheese.

It was an easy two miles to the next campground, where we had to cross the San Joaquin River to reach our destination. Kate was afraid she would lose her balance and fall, pack and all, into the river. We took our packs off and changed into our Tiva sandals.

Before Kate realized what I was doing, I strapped on her pack and started to cross. The river was thigh-deep in spots and running fast, and several times the frameless pack wobbled on my back, my walking stick slipped on the rocks, and I regained my balance only at the last minute as my stick hit solid ground. I was bent over the rapids, and the water rushing past my face had a dizzying effect. But I made it to the other side, deposited her pack, and returned for my own. Ten minutes later we were setting up camp in a miniature paradise.

Scrambling over the rocks the following afternoon, we found stunning views of the San Joaquin River. There were boulders perched where they had rolled and stopped after some great shift, and rocks wedged together in graduating sizes with moss, grasses, and flowers growing between them, a landscape any gardener would envy. Upriver there was a split where the water ran through rapids on one side of the boulders and flowed deep and crystaline on the other.

We had crossed over into paradise, but getting there had been treacherous. In life with our children, Blue and I were still backtracking from the San Juaquin River to the junction. We hadn’t even reached the camp where Kate and I spent our first night. But we would get there, dropping in exhaustion and waking early to sit with our backs against each other, fortifying for the next phase of our journey.

What Blue and I were hoping, as we moved uncertainly between trail markers spread too far apart, was that our son would make friends and learn to read as rapidly as the adult teeth popping through his gums. But we were on the road, not the trail, and had we known how much longer the road was we might have become discouraged. Thankfully, with the signs ripped out we didn’t know where we were; we only knew we were on the road, and a road is always encouraging.

Eventually we would rejoin the trail and cross the river, where either one of us could be bending under the weight of the other’s pack, dizzy at the sight of the river rushing beneath us. Then we would be safe on the other side, but only until we crossed the river again to make the journey home.