On my daily horse ride on the PCT north from my place this morning, I happened to cross paths with the first northbound thru hiker of 2018 — an older gentleman looking for the solitude that the PCT used to offer thru hikers, who was taking advantage of the very low snow conditions on San Jacinto, San Gorgonio, and the Sierra. (Of course, conditions may change.) Apart from the two guys who hiked the trail southbound during the winter of ’14-’15, this is the earliest I have seen anyone seriously attempt a thru hike. — I wish him luck. Hiking conditions in my area are ideal right now and the trail is nearly deserted.
Author: trailangelmary
Trail work on Spitler Peak/PCT re-route
Our fearless Section Chief Don led thirteen volunteers on a trail work day on the Spitler Peak Access Trail (temporarily, part of the PCT re-route around the small remaining Mountain Fire closure south of Idyllwild). On the one hand, passing through a fire area is sad, because you can see the damage that was done (and is still evident 3.5 years later). But, slowly, the vegetation is coming back.
Sad find in Alkali Wash off PCT
I had two friends up for the weekend and we decided for an off-trail hike down Alkali Wash (from PCT mile 148). With the recent rain, there were lots of tracks, including what appeared to be two pair of coyotes heading down canyon. We can upon an area with a lot of coyote activity, and my friend surmised that the coyotes were “playing.” Alas, that doesn’t appear to be what the coyotes were up to.
At first we thought it was a female coyote, but neither the coat nor the head were quite right, so we surmise it was a domestic dog or a coydog. Whatever it was, it hadn’t been dead for very long.
We were all surprised that the coyotes that killed it hadn’t fed on it. (Or, perhaps our arrival had interrupted them before they had a chance to.) On our trip back up canyon, we saw very fresh (as in, since we passed by on the outbound leg) coyote prints in the wet sand. It appeared to the the same pair that had left prints going down canyon that we had seen earlier.
Hiking versus Sauntering
Part of the theme update for 2018 was the retirement of the Hiker Book Register and its replacement with a register with the following (rather long-winded) prompt:
John Muir was once asked: “Someone told me that you do not approve of the word ‘hike.’ Is that so?”
Muir replied: “I don’t like either the word or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains – not hike! Do you know the origin of the word ‘saunter’? It’s a beautiful word. Away back in the Middle Ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going, they would reply, ‘A la sainte terre,’ ‘to the Holy Land.’ And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not ‘hike’ through them.”
HAVE YOU EVER SAUNTERED [in Muir’s sense]? IS YOUR CURRENT PCT ADVENTURE A HIKE OR A SAUNTER?
As with the 2017 Hiker Book Register, I supplied the first entry:
As I pondered what I should select as the prompt for my hiker register in 2018 — the year celebrating the 150th anniversary of John Muir’s arrival in California — I stumbled upon the quote about the difference between hiking and sauntering, and thought that might serve as a good springboard to get visitors to my hiker oasis (especially thru hikers) to reflect upon and share their thought on their relationship with the landscape through which they are passing on this epic journey.
For myself, my outdoor adventures are typically a bit of both. I find that maintaining the “sauntering attitude” through the grinding miles (and, frankly, the monotony) of distance travel by foot is beyond me; however, on almost a daily basis, I experience something … a beautiful vista, an interesting rock, a phalanx of ants marching by the thousands across the trail … that snaps me back into a sauntering attitude. One of the local vistas that works this magic most reliably in me is the one due south of here: four receding ridgelines that, in the early morning or late afternoon, become a play of light and shadow as the sun illuminates the deeply-furrowed mountain faces. I sense (to paraphrase Muir) “the radiant face of God” in this vista and it gives me goose bumps.
Trail Angel Mary
January 1, 2018
Time will tell whether this prompt sparks the same enthusiastic response from hikers as the one generated by the prompt for the 2017 Hiker Book Register.
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Theme Update for 2018
The turn of the new year brought a new theme to the hiker oasis at PCT mile 145.4. Now, instead of Thoreau, the spotlight is on John Muir, celebrating the 150th anniversary of his arrival in California.
The hiker oasis has been renamed ‘Muir Wood/s’ (ie, Muir Wood – South),
self-printed copies of Muir’s masterpiece The Mountains of California have been added to the Little Free Library, and a new gentleman has appeared between Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau next to the library:
The quote below Muir’s likeness is the opening line from The Mountains of California: “Go where you may within the bounds of California, mountains are ever in sight, charming and glorifying every landscape.”
Complete Book List
The complete list of books mentioned by hikers as works that had “dated a new era in their life,” in order of first mention in the 2017 Hiker Book Register:
Demian by Hermann Hesse
Hard Times by Studs Terkel
Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
Eat and Run by Scott Jurek
Extreme Ownership by Willink and Babin
Dune by Frank Herbert
Nonviolent communication guide series by Marshall Rosenberg
Book of Mormon
High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
[Christian] Bible
[Hebrew] Bible
A Dream in Polar Fog by Yuri Rytkheu
Means of Escape by Philip Caputo
Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut
Kingdom of God is within You by Tolstoy
Peace Pilgrim Her Life and Work In Her Own Words
Science and Health by Mary Baker Eddy
I am That by Sri Maharaj
The Man Who Quit Money by Mark Sundeen
The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch
The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle
Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl
No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran
Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz
Garden of Letters by Alyson Richman
The Pleasure of the Damned by Charles Bukowski
Apathy and Other Small Victories by Paul Neilan
Way of the Peaceful Warrior by Dan Millman
The Coming Insurrection by The Invisible Committee
The Swallows of Kabul by Yasmina Khadra
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George
Way of the Wizard by Deepak Chopra
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Thru Hiking Will Break Your Heart by Carrot Quinn
The Dude and the Zen Master by Jeff Bridges and Bernie Glassman
Harry Potter series by JK Rowling
The Stand by Stephen King
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki
Being Mortal by Atul Gawande
Aztec by Gary Jennings
Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach
Roughing It by Mark Twain
The Trial and Death of Socrates by Plato
Born to Run by Christopher McDougall
Works of Nicholas Sparks
The High Adventures of Eric Ryback by Eric Ryback
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson
“Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman
Massacre of the Dreamers by Ana Castillo
The Stranger in the Woods by Michael Finkel
Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur
Cold Mountain Poems by Gary Snyder
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart
Ronya, the Robber’s Daughter by Astrid Lindgren
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh by Robert O’Brien
The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk
Pacific Northwest Foraging by Douglas Deur
Freaky Green Eyes by Joyce Carol Oates
Selected poems of Victor Hugo
The Diary of Anais Nin by Anais Nin
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Wild by Cheryl Strayed
Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel by Virginia Lee Burton
Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse
Poems by Rumi
Henry V by William Shakespeare
Bitter Greens by Kate Forsyth
Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson
Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
The Heart of the Buddha by Chogyam Trungpa
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Toole
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury
The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Tolstoy
Memories, Dreams, Reflections by CG Jung
Island by Aldous Huxley
Pelsjegerlv by Helge Ingstad
A Separate Reality by Carlos Casteneda
A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold
In the Shadow of the Sun by Anne Sibley O’Brien
Rebus novels by Ian Rankin
The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Weep Not, Child by Ngugi wa Thiong’o
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
The Open Society and Its Enemies by Karl Popper
Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes by Daniel Everett
Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
Canoeing with the Cree by Eric Sevareid
The Magicians Trilogy by Lev Grossman
Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey
The Moon by Night by Madeleine L’Engle
Reason for God by Timothy Keller
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder
The Godfather by Mario Puzo
God jul, lille mis by V. French and C. Fisher
The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
The One-Straw Revolution by Fukuoka Masanobu
Choke by Chuck Palahnuik
Horseradish by Daniel Handler/Lemony Snicket
My Journey to Lhasa by Alexandra David-Neel
Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dosteoevsky
Becoming Odyssa by Jennifer Pharr Davis
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender by Leslye Walton
The Last Rune series by Mark Anthony
A Million Miles and a Thousand Years by Donald Miller
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
My First Summer in the Sierra by John Muir
Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach
Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman
Paper Towns by John Green
The 4-Hour Week by Timothy Ferriss
River of Doubt by Candice Millard
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac
Salt by Nayyirah Waheed
Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg
Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson
The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
After Birth by Alisa Albert
Valencia by Michelle Tea
One Man’s Meat by E.B. White
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Paradise Lost by Milton
What is the What by David Eggers
I had a Dream, I Lived It by Gabriela Fulcher
The Noticer by Andy Andrews
Maine Woods by Henry David Thoreau
A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle
Down the River by Edward Abbey
Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey
The Chalice and the Blade by Riane Eisler
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
The Giver by Lois Lowry
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
The Snows of Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway
The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihari
The Story of my Boyhood and Youth by John Muir
Travels in Alaska by John Muir
Peace Like a River by Leif Enger
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Endurance by Alfred Lansing
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
Turtle Island by Gary Snyder
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay
Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami
The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey
Timeline by Michael Crichton
Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Marillier
Indignation by Philip Roth
Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed
Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
Eragon by Christopher Paolini
Where the Wild Things Were by William Stolzenberg
Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan
Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson
Love Warrior by Glennon Melton
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
West with the Night by Beryl Markham
Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner
We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live by Joan Didion
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Life Safari by John Strelecky
Maggie Cassidy by Jack Kerouac
Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski
Bill the Galactic Hero by Harry Harrison
The Way of Mastery by Shanti Cristo Foundation
On the Beach by Nevil Shute
Vagabonding by Rolf Potts
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
Ruins by Terence Donoghue
The Pacific Crest Trail by Jeff Schaeffer
Johnny Got his Gun by Dalton Trumbo
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Kimmerer
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
Feeling Good by David Burns
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
Feminism is for Everybody by bell hooks
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
The Upanishads
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling
The Mastery of Love by Don Miguel Ruiz
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
The Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd
They Thought for Themselves by Sid Roth
White Fang by Jack London
The Secret by Rhonda Byrne
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
Unlearn Rewild by Miles Olson
My Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
Evidence by Mary Oliver
A River Runs through It by Norman Maclean
A Fine and Pleasant Misery by Patrick McManus
Survival of the Sickest by Sharon Moalem
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Fatu-Hiva by Thor Heyerdahl
Rising from the Plains by John McPhee
Bhagavad Gita
Watership Down by Richard Adams
Diaspora by Greg Egan
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean Auel
The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein
Homo Faber by Max Frisch
The Gifts of Imperfection by Brene Brown
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness
You Shall Know our Velocity by Dave Eggers
Odyssey by Homer
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf
Wicked Plants by Amy Stewart
Tao by Alan Watts
Vaster than Sky, Greater than Space by Mooji
Solitude Michael Harris
A Fish Caught in Time by Samantha Weinberg
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Illusions by Richard Bach
Nausicaa of the Wind Valley by Hayao Miyazaki
The Bone People by Keri Hulme
Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom
The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton
Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech
Inside by Susan Marie Conrad
Appalachian Elegy by bell hooks
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Trial by Franz Kafka
From this Moment On by Shania Twain
Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
The Pilgrim’s Progress by Paul Bunyon
Complete Poems by Emily Dickinson
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Trail Life by Ray Jardine
Introduction to Protein Structure by C. Branden and J. Tooze
Undeniable by Douglas Axe
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
PCT 145 Trail Angel Mary 