Boy howdy – I just rolled into a fully committed Bavarian Village themed mountain town after hiking nonstop through marginally maintained wilderness for the past 10 days. My toes are blistered, my body is a galaxy of bruising, I have a cluster of 17 mosquito bites in a 1-inch circle on my left butt cheek, and I’m happy as hell.

The section of trail between Stehekin and Stevens Pass is 110 miles long, 25,081 ft of total elevation gain and 23,077 ft of descent. 95% of it goes through a protected Wilderness area. What that means is that there aren’t any bailout points, and the rare trail maintenance can only happen when the forest service helicopters in a pile of equipment every couple of years. What this translates to for hiking is that you get to immerse yourself in spectacular, untouched, glorious mountains, while also being routinely whipped in the mouth by thorny brush that has overtaken the trail, and clambering over enormous, 5-foot thick blown-down trees at 45 degree angles perched terrifyingly over sheer cliff faces and blocking the trail. There’s nothing quite like being face-down on a gigantic, creaking log, hugging it against your chest for dear life as you slowly tilt your body around it, wondering what will happen first: if your pants are going to blow open at the crotch or if you’re going to plummet to your death. Maybe both simultaneously!

As the 5 of us were still trying to take it slow and get into hiker shape, we aimed to average about 11 miles a day, which meant 10 days in a row of hiking. The first 2 days (22 miles) were unrelenting, unbroken, straight uphill. At the end of the second day Dumptruck dropped his pack, groaned and stretched, and announced that he felt that he had just spent the last 12 hours riding a mechanical bull, where “you have to hold onto your life with only your butt.” It was utterly brutal, but unsurprisingly, gorgeous beyond all measure.

At the end of the first day, as we were all in various states of getting our tents set up and making dinner, Scope gestured silently for me to come over to her. Like a magic trick, she produced a Pez Dispenser with a white rabbit on the top of it. As she pulled back the rabbit to dispense a bright pink candy morsel for me she said,

“Hey. Good job hiking today.”

Several months ago, Scope had suffered a significant injury along the tendons of her left foot. Part of the reason we started so gradually is that we were hoping that her foot would be able to adjust to hiking, and hopefully not flare the injury. Unfortunately, at the start of the second day, her injury had flared up worse than the initial incident. With the wisdom and courage of a sage, she told us that she knew she needed to turn back.

We helped her get back to the previous evening’s campsite, and she and Little Brother set up there to rest, and planned to take their time make the 11 miles back to Stehekin to get off trail. Now that we’re back in a town, we have learned that she and Little Brother had a wonderful adventure in Stehekin and Chelan. Scope has acquired an Amtrak Rail Pass to go adventure around the country in a different way. As she is a monumentally awesome, mature and wonderful human bean, she is totally supportive of Little Brother joining back up with us at this point to continue hiking. She gave us the rabbit Pez Dispenser for luck, and we’ll carry it to the end in her honor. And so we can have Pez.

What that meant though is that for 9 of the 10 days, it was only Dumptruck, Toasty and I in the great unknown. We met several incredible hikers along the way, including Riddles, who had a spectacular laugh, a genuine kindness, and the knowledge that the hundreds of giant fluffy critters we’d seen galumphing all around the mountaintop meadows were indeed marmots, and not just groundhogs with perms. We met a lot of encouraging Snow-Bos, as well as someone’s dad on a small hike just outside of town on the last day who said he was proud of us. I know my Dad is proud of us, but man, sometimes in the middle of the woods when you may or may not have continually wept for the past 2 hours because you have a debilitating migraine that you hiked 1,500 feet of elevation in 90 degree blazing sunlight through, having a dad say he’s proud of you can really bolster a fried spirit.

We leap-frogged quite a bit with a fellow SoBo named Barefoot Nick who, you guessed it, is hiking the entire trail barefoot. He has long hair, speaks gently, uses a gnarled walking stick he found in the woods, and I am not entirely convinced that he isn’t just a forest spirit. He was just ahead of us in very hard sections, and seeing his whimsical bare footprints in the dirt was always encouraging, like a quietly cheerful confirmation that we were doing the right thing. There was a moment where we got lost in a web of tree blow-downs and couldn’t find the trail, and just as we were about to throw our hands in the air and turn back, suddenly we saw Barefoot Nick sitting quietly and meditating in a patch of dappled sunlight. He opened his eyes, saw us, smiled, and gently raised an arm to point to the trail. You can’t tell me he’s not some sort of fae creature who stumbled into this realm and is just floating through the woods.

On the 6th day, we were confronted with a raging white water river, opaque as chocolate milk, inundated with glacial silt. It was at the base of an enormous rockslide that was actively still dropping rocks from 60 feet above our heads, menacingly looming over us as we stared, gobsmacked at the river we were going to have to navigate across. There were no logs or rock hops – we were going to have go go in. We’d done several river crossings already, but none had been torrent, and all the other ones had clear water, so we could see where we were stepping.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t terrified. I felt my heart begin to beat a steady rhythm of run away run away, and my fingertips began the slow accumulation of tingliness that heralds an approaching panic attack. I am normally very adept at crossing rivers, and I knew I had the skills and wherewithall to do it, but the thought of I can’t see the bottom kept richocetting around in my skull, an alarm bell of danger. Toasty and Dumptruck were also completely terrified and stymied, totally at a loss of where to try to cross.

I forced myself to stop frantically looking up and down the river for rock-hops, closed my eyes, and took a deep, long breath into the bottom of my lungs. You know how to do this I whispered to myself, wrapping the frantic, fluttering bird of my heart into the warmth of my hands. Your feet can see the bottom.

I opened my eyes and they alighted upon a small log protruding about 2 feet into a rapid where the river split into three sections. Like a video game, my brain manifested waypoints where it looked safest, and I saw an invisible path highlighted in my mind’s eye. I turned to Dumptruck and Toasty, mapped out my plan to them, and said that I was going to go for it, but that we needed to wait for Barefoot Nick. We’d passed him maybe 45 minutes earlier and I didn’t feel right leaving him to cross the river alone. A few moments later Barefoot Nick emerged from the woods, and as soon as I saw him, I compelled myself to unbuckle my backpack belt (in case I got swept downstream, I needed to be able to ditch my pack immediately so as to lower the risk of getting lodged underwater somewhere) sit down on the log, submerge my legs into the river on the downstream side, and scoot out into the flow.

Once I found footing I stood up, the water cascading around my legs. I shuffled through, being careful not to cross one leg in front of the other, using my hiking poles as balance points. My shoes gripped better than I’d expected on the invisble slick rocks, and as I went, I shouted information back to the 3 boys about the terrain under the water. Big rock here, submerged log here, etc. When I made it past the first section, to the loose, damp rock pile slightly out of the water, a whoosh of relief went out of me and I bellowed out in triumph. One by one Toasty, Dumptruck, then Barefoot Nick made it across. Just before he stepped out of the water, Barefoot Nick looked a bit like he was about to lose his footing. Without hesitation Dumptruck leaned back out over the flow, grabbed our forest spirit’s outstreched hand, and pulled him up onto our little island.

Together, we traversed the next two sections, me leading, my submerged feet feeding me the information that I hollered back to my companions. Once we all alighted on the opposite shore 10 minutes later, we all shared a moment of glee together, grinning in that sort of post-anxiety relief way that’s a mix between a smile and lockjaw. The next section of trail flew by – turns out adrenaline is good for hiking speed.

There were so many other instances of mometary terror followed by intense relief. The day before the river crossing, we’d spent several miles inching down switchbacks through an angry dry carwash of whipping thorny jungle brush on the side of a sheer mountain cliffside, the trail eroded away to a 45 degree angle of nothing but powdery dust. At one point the trail gave way beneath my foot and I was suddenly doing the splits, my chest tilting precariously off the edge. Toasty immediately grabbed for my pack and caught it, but the trail gave way underneath his foot as well, and he collapsed bodily on top of me. As it turns out, one body with a heavy backpack whomping down at full speed on top of another, is a rather effective, albeit startling, way to arrest one’s movement. Once we creaked slowly back to our feet, studiously avoiding the hole to nowhere, I saw one perfectly ripe raspberry dangling above the spot where my body almost fell. I stretched out my hiking pole, caught the branch and brought the raspberry to myself, popping it into my mouth and feeling as though it was the trail’s sheepish way of saying it was sorry.

About 150 feet later we saw a perfect Looney Toons human body splat outline in a tangle of brambles, where someone else clearly suffered a similar fate that I had just lived through. At the bottom of the mountain we came across James, who was laying on the trail in a tiny patch of shade, his left ankle swollen to double its normal size. We quickly learned that it was his body print that we’d seen. We collected some icy river water in a Ziploc for him to ice his ankle, and a kind pair of SoBos from the Netherlands helped him wrap it in a bandage. James had recently finished several other long distance hikes, so he was very hardy, and able to slowly hike his way out. Even with a likely broken ankle, we never caught back up to him.

There was a 45 degree day with freezing cold rain, when we happened to summit the tallest peak in this section at 6,520 ft above sea level (for reference, our home in Maine is at 10 ft). We crouched in a shivering huddle behind a boulder to block the icy wind, eating lunch with fingertips protruding from our ham-hock hands wrapped into the sleeves of our rain jackets. On a different summit Dumptruck, at my behest, threw a snowball at me that walloped my stomach so hard that I doubled over in pain, hysterically laughing. That summit we’d reached as a lone deer scampered about 20 feet ahead of us for a mile or so, stopping every few minutes to turn and look at us, twitching her tail and ears, looking for all the world like she was waiting for us to catch up.

The highs and lows were wildly vascillating. I found stinging nettle with my butt when I crouched to pee, and a pika ate Toasty’s hiking pole straps while he slept. In contrast, I had the monumental privilege to dive into a frigid mountaintop lake made of only glacial snowmelt, my heart singing as it thrummed in my chest, the water so clear and aqua as to be made of liquified blue gummy bears. There were multiple hiker dude-bros eating lunch the same lake, but I went in shirtless anyway, my top surgery scars blazing bright in the midday sun. I saw the sun glitter on Glacier Peak. We passed 100 miles of hiking and I only cried 6 times.

I love it here.

Love,

Thresher