Another smoky day and my thoughts were strictly focused on finishing this section of the trail. I mostly plowed forward, head down (there were no views to look up for), listened to a few podcasts to while away the miles.
But as always, there were a few spots worth savoring. Although much of this forest has been logged repeatedly, not all has. The terrain is rugged, steep slopes leading down to narrow gorges. And in these gorges are lovely flowing streams and springs bordered by wet leafy things and guarded by massive trees too inaccessible to be logged. I stopped at these and rinsed away the dust, drank the pure waters, forgot about the smoke, gawked at the forest giants, trying to comprehend their being and their sense of time and the flow of life around them. It seemed not only futile but disrespectful to try to capture them in a photograph.
A pleasant forest spring
I shifted uneasily as various stinging things flew about me. Yellowjackets are in abundance in these woods, and spend a fair amount of time near water sources. Even more threatening are the inch-long black and red hornets. They don’t hang around water but rise up along the trail, flying around you as you walk, like Indians circling a wagon train, occasionally lighting on an arm or leg for a second. None ever bit me, but I probably walked 30 or 40 miles in total with these guys and their low-pitched ominous buzz. It was unnerving.
The last, and perhaps finest of these little grottoes was the crossing of Squaw Creek, which meandered down a gorge just large enough to justify a bridge. In addition to water, rocks, trees and ferns, it contained another feature that had been absent for days: a trail junction. It was possibly the first (excepting the side trails to Subway Cave and Burney Falls) that I had seen since Lassen NP, more than a hundred miles back. No one comes to these mountains except to hike the PCT. And once you are on the PCT, there is no getting off.
Squaw Creek nestled in its gorge
The rest of the hike was just a trudge over the last smoky ridge and then down to the Sacramento River. I entered Castle Crags SP, where I had intended to camp, but a closer inspection of the map revealed that I would have to hike 3 miles further to get to the actual campground, and I just wasn’t up for it.
Down into the smoky valley
The Sacramento River, here neither deep nor wide
So I stood at the very rustic and deserted on-ramp to I-5, hoping to get a ride to town with one of the cars that happened by every 15 minutes or so, reluctantly remaining in the hot sunlight. This went on for a couple of hours until an SUV got off the exit, rolled over to me and asked if I needed a ride to town.
George is a union plumber just back from 9 months on a job in Hawaii (which he hated), and checks the trailhead a couple times a day to see if any hikers need a ride to town. I gladly hopped in and he asked if I had a particular place in mind to stay (I didn’t), rang up his friend Geno who runs the Travel Inn in Mt Shasta to see if there was a room available (there was) and drove me up there. There it was, the generosity of strangers once again.
I stepped into my clean and comfortable room located conveniently near the town center, turned on the AC, and considered my hike officially over and done.
My feelings, as always, were mixed. I was not at all sorry to be leaving the dust and the heat and the bugs and was really not sorry to be leaving the smoke. But I was also leaving my trail life, a life characterized by a few simple constraints, which is to say hardly constrained at all. So long as I got to the next water before I went dry, and to the next resupply before I went hungry, I was free to do as I pleased. Free to walk or stay, free to go at my own pace, to eat when I wanted, camp where I wanted, to linger, to go, to worry or to abandon care altogether. Not many people get that kind of freedom in their lives – perhaps most do not wish it – but once you’ve had it, once you know what it is like to live high and wild and free…well then you are kind of ruined for polite society. You may rejoin it for a while and even enjoy it, but like Huck Finn you are always thinking of lighting out for the Indian Country once again.
More love from strangers