On Pilgrimage: The John Muir Trail (Part I)

The months before my wife and I set out for the John Muir Trail, I spent time watching Ken Burn's documentary on the National Parks.  Much of the footage is appropriately spent talking about John Muir.  I quickly fell in love with this man - a wild man - ecstatic in nature - a man who literally got so physically ill when he was confined to society that his family had to let him back out into the woods or he would have died.  I fell in love with him and and shortly thereafter, his wilderness.

I had done a fair amount of training for the 3-week hike well into the High Sierra backcountry.  My wife had not.  I felt confident hiking with her because the year prior, when she hadn't trained to top Mt. Whitney (the tallest mountain in the continental United States), she topped it anyways.  She has an iron will.  So, I figured the John Muir Trail was nothing more than a Mt. Whitney every other day.  She did it once, she can do it ten more times in close succession!  And so we went for it.

We hiked, untraditionally, from south to north.  This is a common theme in my pilgrimages - to walk against the wind.  Josh and I road our bikes west to east, thereby enduring terrible weather the entire time.  Wendy, Jenny, and I hiked the Camino de Santiago in the spring, thereby getting rained and snowed on.  I walk backwards.  It's what I do.

We did not cover the entire route.  We started just south of Mt Whitney, because we'd previously topped that and I think Anita swore against doing so again.  We stared in Onion Valley, spending out first day going over a pass just to connect to the John Muir Trail on the other side.  I remember setting off - getting unplugged, getting dirty.  Anita was my fiancé at the time and I wasn't sure she'd marry me after this.  We were plunging into the unknown.  Prior to this hike, Anita had hiked 3 days and I had gone about 5 days in the backcountry.  Now we were set for 3 weeks!

We are slow hikers, and we reached the mountain pass around dusk.  It was a bad sign that we would end the first day of our voyage hiking down a mountain in the dark.  And we were tired - we weren't going to make it to our hoped-for destination.  This would become an all-too-common theme, and we would nearly run out of food.  Regardless, by the time we set up camp that first night, we knew we were in over our heads, and it was only going to get worse the next day.

(To Be Continued...)