Two-Heel Drive, a Hiking Blog

Rebecca of Calipidder.com was finishing her John Muir Trail trek just as I was gearing up for the White Mountain Adventure. She now has several days of words and pictures posted, starting with this introduction, which includes links to each daily entry. She still has another week’s worth to post, so be sure to check back.

As long as I’m on the subject of bloggers’ outdoor ramblings, you might as well check out Gambolin Man’s Lake Tahoe adventures.

From the Fresno Bee’s John Muir Trail blog:

As we start out, I feel more like I’m herded than hiking. I’m dejected and lonely and thinking about the people who say I shouldn’t be out here. And how my very purpose of being out here — to write about it — is slipping away.

But with every step I still feel better. I know it can seem kind of precious to talk about trees and rocks speaking. You can’t really get by with it unless you’re John Muir or Rogers and Hammerstein. But nevertheless, there’s something in the air. The Sierra is whispering to me: “Oh, ignore them. Look around. You’re welcome here.”

I flash back to the Desiderata, a philosophical statement that used to be on a poster by my dorm room, so I just happened to read it every day even though I thought it was a bit trite. I had no idea until this moment decades later that I had memorized it:

“Do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness … You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.”

These are the kinds of details the Bee folks were hoping would arrive in more or less real time, but the hikers’ satellite phone had other plans, so this was posted after the hiker got home. Just another of those “don’t trust your fanny to technology in the wilderness” fables.

This is interesting: The Fresno Bee is sending four pairs of writers & photographers out on the John Muir Trail, whose southern terminus is down in the general direction of Fresno. How come?

The trail, a north-south footpath completed in 1938, opened the High Sierra to the public.

Now the high country faces issues of crowding. The trail has been rerouted several times because portions were worn out by thousands of hiking boots and hooves. The trashing of Mount Whitney, at 14,494 feet the highest peak in the contiguous United States, led to strict permit limits for parts of the trail.

So the paper and its people want to see for themselves what’s happening along the JMT these days. One of the writers is going along despite an innate disinclination toward sleeping on the ground; she talks about how the originator of this scheme, another writer named Mark Grossi, talked her into it:

Once we teamed up, I got excited about the mythology and lore and international pull of the trail. Together we concocted an idea about different reporters writing about different segments of a JMT quest.

The day we realized that the The Bee would go for the project was the day I remembered that I don’t backpack. Don’t really want to go backpacking. I remembered that I really like hot showers and cold gin and tonics, and that I’m afraid of matches, and that mosquitoes pick on me.

My definitive unsuitability hit Grossi about that time, too.

Every day he looked at me with grave eyes, shaking his head and saying, “Marcum, I’m really worried you don’t understand what you’re getting into.”

I’d readily agreed and suggested we find someone else.

He grew genuinely alarmed.

“Oh, no. You have to do this,” he’d say. “If you don’t, you’ll HATE YOURSELF FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE.”

So, OK, I’m in.

Then she muses on the possibility of putting Coke machines every 20 miles along the trail.