January 18, 2015. Well, I was reminiscing with Maureen today about the first time I ever went backpacking, and she said, “We should get out the recorder.” I think I’ll just do this instead.

What is Backpacking?It is, as one might assume, packing something onto one’s back, in particular everything one might need to live in the “wild” for days or weeks at a time. For me, this involved a large external frame pack with an aluminum frame (about the size of one’s back from hip to shoulder) to which is attached a sturdy cloth bag with a large inner pocket (with a movable divider to make two separate compartments) and an array of outer pockets of various sizes on its sides, back, and top. There are loops on the outside through which one can thread ropes or straps to add items outside of the pack. The frame has broad, padded shoulder straps and a padded hip belt that snaps around one’s waist just above the hips to transfer most of the weight of the pack to the hips rather than the shoulders—not a trivial matter, as my fully loaded pack would weigh 50-60 pounds.

What goes into and on this pack is food, water, shelter, furniture, clothing, entertainment, and survival gear. Lemonade crystals, powdered milk, oatmeal and muesli, nuts and grains and chocolate, pepperoni, cheese, cream cheese, flatbread, a few eggs, some veggies and fruit, packets of dried soup, coffee, power bars, a variety of packages of dried backpacking meals (lasagna, omelets, beef stew, spaghetti, beef stroganoff, cheesecake, space ice cream), salt and pepper and herbs and spices, and two quarts of water (I never backpacked in extremely arid environments where I would have had to carry much more water). Breakfast would typically be coffee (made either with Bob’s little espresso maker or instant fancy-flavored coffees like Irish cream) and oatmeal (instant packages with fruit) with added dried fruits and milk made from powder. Lunch would typically be water or lemonade and pita stuffed with cheese and green peppers, or peanut butter. Dinner would be cold or hot lemonade (depending on where I was and how late it was, which would determine how cold it was) and one or two dried backpacking dinners, or maybe soup (Knorr soups were favorites, especially leek and potato). Sometimes I might switch lunch and dinner. In between would be snacks galore: gorp or dried fruit or power bars or cheese.

Shelter was a lightweight two-person (barely) North Face backpacking tent with a rain fly and a tarp for a ground cloth. The kitchen was a tiny backpacking stove made by Svea (I used the same one for 30 years), fuel, a fork, a spoon, a spatula, a Swiss Army knife, a plate, a cup, a little espresso maker that Bob Milardo gave me, and nesting stainless steel pans (the handle on the lid was melted from Bryan’s childhood hike in the Laurel Highlands). The bedroom was a ¾ length backpacking sleeping pad and a North Face mummy sleeping bag. Other furnishings were supplied by nature. The bathroom included toilet paper in a plastic bag, a shovel, toothpaste and a toothbrush, Dr. Bonner’s liquid soap with all that tiny writing on the bottle, and a yellow quick-dry towel.

Clothing was minimal and layered. Altogether (both what I was wearing at the time and what was in the pack) there were 3 pair of socks, one pair of boots (always Vasque Sundowners, a big waterproof backpacking boot with steel shanks in the lugged soles),

one pair of sandals, 3 pair of jockeys, one pair of hiking pants (convertible to shorts, but in the early days I carried one pair of each shorts and bluejeans), one belt, two tee shirts, one long-sleeved thermal undershirt, one Pendleton, one rain jacket (in the early days an Army surplus poncho), one hat (Army surplus for many years, Tilly later), and one bandana. I suppose we could call glasses and sunglasses clothing too.

The only entertainment I carried was one book (for the final few years a Kindle), a little notebook and pen for journaling (to which I was not faithful), one pair of binoculars, and one camera. After all, I was about to spend a week or two on a trail or in the wilderness—entertainment enough in itself. Survival gear included a first aid kit, bug repellant, a whistle which I never used), a spare pair of glasses, sun block, topographical maps, a compass, a space blanket to carry on day hikes, a day pack for those hikes, a maglight, matches, a lighter, a headlamp (a gift from the undergraduate LGBT club that I advised for many years), a sewing kit and other repair stuff, iodine pills for water, bear bells where appropriate, rope, and a walking stick picked up in the woods (or manufactured when I was someplace where broken limbs were not likely to be available).

To get this thing onto your back, you would lift it first to one knee with the frame and straps facing you, slip one arm through a shoulder strap, and swing it around to its new home. Slip the other arm through the remaining shoulder strap and buckle the hip belt. Adjust the strap lengths for comfort, and off you go. When I was using a walking stick, it was important to have it propped up against something before I put on the pack because bending all the way over to pick something up off the ground was not really feasible with 60 pounds on your back.

Aloneness. As I sit here on May 30, 2015 pondering my plan to go backpacking in the Smokies for a few days with Maureen, I realize that aloneness had become central to my backpacking experience. I don’t know quite how to describe that feeling of being entirely on your own, surrounded by an astonishing nature. For me it’s definitely not a feeling of accomplishment, as in “I did that all by myself,” but simply a sublime feeling of calm contentment produced by the emotional knowledge that you are and will be the only one with you for an extended period of time. As you hike over a steep pass or along a gentle forest trail, stop to take a drink or to recover your breath to continue, or take off the pack and sit down for a real break, or sit there for much longer than you had planned because it’s so peaceful and you really don’t want to pick up that 50 pounds again, or choose a spot to pitch your tent, or seek out a tree in which to hang your food, or stoke up your stove (never a sure thing, but in fact always a sure thing as it turned out), or lean against your pack to read a book, or crawl into your tent to nap or sleep for the night, or cower in your tent irrationally relying on it for protection from nearly constant lightning strikes, or hiking in the rain, or crawling out into a frosty night to urinate, or coming over a ridge or around a corner to see an amazing panorama, or waking up to a “dawn” of vivid red Northern lights, or watching a wolverine trot by your camp, or taking a bath in a frigid glacial stream surrounded by thousands of wildflowers, or lying on your back gazing up at the constantly changing clouds moving over and around high peaks—you are alone. There’s nothing like it.

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Thirty Years (Now 35)For me, backpacking started in 1980 with Bob Milardo and Mara Crootof in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. I immediately fell in love with it, and bought the equipment I needed from Appalachian Outdoors in State College and from a sporting goods store where Bob’s wife Jennifer worked in Los Angeles. As it turned out, my partner at the time, Susan Shuman, also loved backpacking and my first eight years of trips (mostly on the Mid-State Trail in Pennsylvania) usually included her. The summer after we broke up in 1988, I went on my first solo backpack, which was also my first high mountain backpack, in British Columbia, Canada. From then until my last hike in 2010 or so, the high mountains were my favorite places (Banff and the Ghost River Wilderness in Alberta, the San Juan Mountains in Colorado), although I still spent some time on the Mid-State Trail—and I mostly backpacked alone. I was a fair-weather backpacker. Although I had fantasies of winter backpacking, I never did it. My few snow experiences were a product of the changeability of high mountain weather. My time frame varied from 3-5 days on the Mid State or Appalachian Trail to 10-14 days in the high mountains. No through hiking for me. It was all about getting a few days or weeks alone with nature. A complete list of places would include most of the Mid State Trail; pieces of the Appalachian Trail in Tennessee (Great Smokies), Virginia (Shenandoah), Vermont, and Maine; Dolly Sods in West Virginia; Yosemite, Mammoth Lakes, and the Devil’s Postpile in the High Sierras; Big Bend in Texas; the Green River in Utah; the Collegiate Peaks in Colorado; the Wind River Range in Wyoming; Glacier National Park in British Columbia; Banff in Alberta; and multiple trips to both the Ghost River Wilderness in Alberta (my absolute favorite place), and the San Juan Mountains above Pagosa Springs in Colorado.

My First TimeIn the summer of 1980, I headed down to Gatlinburg, Tennessee for the Groves Conference on Marriage and Family with Bob Milardo and Mara Crootof—in Mara’s old car. We planned to do a little backpacking in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and then attend the conference. Now, I’d done some camping, but I had little idea how different backpacking was—even for a little one night/two day adventure in a well-traveled national park.

The trip down is a story in itself. We were traveling in what I remember as Mara’s old Dodge Dart (maybe it was a Plymouth), that had serious overheating problems. We would drive for a few hours, overheat, and have to pull over to let the car cool down. We were pretty serious dope smokers in those days, and our interludes involved dope, food (sometimes heated over a Coleman stove), drink, and Mara playing her grandfather’s mandolin. Some of these stops were in the mountains of Virginia and included pulling over into what we learned later were truck emergency pullouts, a narrow lane of loose gravel that ascended up the mountain to slow down and ultimately stop a runaway truck. Truckers would blast their horns at us as they blew past, and we were clueless to the fact that they were angrily reacting to what they saw as a life-threatening (to them) stupidity on our part. In the end, the car actually died near Harrisonburg Virginia, and we had to call for help. The car was loaded onto a flatbed truck that tipped back and had a winch to pull the car up onto the bed. While Jim Bible worked on the car in the garage, Mara

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entertained us on her grandfather’s mandolin and she and Jim shared music stories. When it turned out that the car couldn’t be repaired without parts that wouldn’t come in until after the Memorial Day holiday, Jim invited us all up to his cabin in the mountains for a weekend jam session. I wish I could say we went, but unfortunately we played it safe (perhaps with visions of Deliverance in our heads). This must have been where Bob and Mara had their epic fight over Bob cooking over a camp stove in our motel room. I’m Swedish. I’d never seen people screaming at each other. Bob reminds me that this argument had started as Mara stormed out of the shower stark naked to demand that he get the stove out of the room.

We got a late start the day the car was finished, and when we found ourselves near Blacksburg that night, we tried calling a former sociology grad student who was now a new faculty member at Virginia Tech, hoping for a free night’s lodging. No dice, as he had a new baby, and absolutely refused to consider putting us up. So, we ended up setting up our tents in a farm field along the side of the road. In the middle of the night, we awoke to find our tents lit up by spotlights—from a police car. After a fairly scary encounter and questioning, the cops finally decided to just let us stay where we were as long as we got out early in the morning. The next morning we ate in a small-town diner that is memorable for the green eggs prepared by a former Army cook.

We did finally get to Gatlinburg, where I remember meeting Donna Sollie and some other woman in an outdoor hot tub, beautiful stars above. Here are the few things I remember about the backpacking after the conference. We had planned to do this before the conference and were only able to squeeze in a one-night, two-day trip post-conference. I don’t know where it was, but it was in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park and involved, as I remember, a fairly straightforward hike halfway up a wooded ridgeline, camping for the night, and then continuing up to the top the next day. Mara and I were in one tent (where she introduced me to the concept of “fuckbuddy”), Bob had his own backpacking tent. I don’t even remember what I was carrying (it was probably old boy scout stuff). There were wildflowers everywhere and wild boars in the underbrush and a black bear that Bob charged with a wild scream to drive it away.

The cooking is a vivid memory, as Bob lovingly fired up his old Svea backpacking stove, carefully explaining everything he did. It is (I carried one myself for the next 35 years) about the size of a large can of vegetables, split into two pieces that fit together. The bottom consists of the fuel canister with a brass cap on the side with a screw in the middle of it to hold the gasket. The top of it is indented, with the burner tube and plate rising up from the middle of the dent, and a hexagonal pin sticking out on the side for turning it on and off. There is a key that fits this pin attached by a chain to the stove so you don’t lose it. The top is a round sheet metal wind guard that slips over the top inch of the bottom piece and has metal braces that are twisted in for storage, out to form a “platform” for a pot or pan. The whole thing is maybe five inches in diameter. The other important stuff you carry with it are an eyedropper, matches, and white gas. As Bob demonstrated, you take a little fuel out of the tank with the eyedropper, be sure to re-cap the tank, drop the fuel into the depression around the burner, light it to heat the mechanism, then use the key to turn it on just as the last fuel is still burning, and you

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should hear the roar as the pressurized fuel ignites. Adjust the flame, add the windguard/platform, and cook. It is amazingly efficient, and the more beat-up mine got to be over the years, the more I loved it. Bob’s cooking involved tomato sauce, pasta and pepperoni. Mostly you try to do stuff that you can just throw together in one pot.

Two last memories from this first backpack. Waking up in the night to look out into the woods and see bright lights moving toward our campsite. They were so bright, I was sure someone with lanterns was coming over to bother us (there was another group camping roughly in that direction), but when I got my glasses on I realized that they were simply the brightest fireflies on earth. The second memory is my astonishment when we reached the top of the ridge in what seemed to me to be a wilderness, only to find that our destination was a crowded parking lot alongside a highway.

Addendum. I think it makes sense now to jump ahead briefly to 35 years later, when Maureen and I backpacked for three days on what I think must have been the same trail (for me at ages 37 and 72). Last year Kevin and Barbara Vahey invited us to join them in early June in the Smokies to see “the fireflies.” It turns out that those fireflies Mara and I had seen are a major natural phenomenon, a species found only in one section of the park and that synchronizes their mating lightshow. We couldn’t go last year, but arranged this year (2015) for Jerry to visit in early June while we ran down to Tennessee. Well, the logistics were tough because during this two week firefly window the area is closed to anyone who isn’t camping (reservations required) or snatches up a shuttle pass. We couldn’t get down until the end of the time and could only get a campsite in Elkmont for the very last night. Then it occurred to me that there might be backcountry sites that had fireflies, and I was right. So, we reserved a campsite 5 miles up the Little River Trail, the beginning of which is in Elkmont and is the major viewing site for campers and shuttle riders. It looked like a relatively easy hike, only a 400’ elevation change.

And it was, but “easy” certainly is relative. After checking in unnecessarily with the Elkmont Campground office (where the ranger said that Rough Creek is lovely and one of her favorite backcountry sites), we parked at the Jake’s Creek trailhead, got loaded up with our packs, locked the car and walked the .1 mile to the Little River Trailhead. The trail is an old railroad bed, so it’s wide and level and after a hundred yards or so past some old abandoned cabins, runs along a lovely river full of boulders on the left and woods and 20’ rhododendron on the right. The weather was great and we encountered other folks along the trail every hour or so. The five mile hike took five hours and we (I speak for myself, but . . .) were almost always in pain and often exhausted. My hips and knees hurt and carrying 50 pounds at 72 doesn’t work out so well. Every mile or so we’d sit down and take a break. About four miles in, we were sitting by the river when two guys came in on the Jake’s Creek trail from the right and seemed lost. We pointed the way for them, as they were headed for the same campsite we were headed for. They were a 50-something father and a 30-something son and we said we’d see them later as they hiked off ahead of us. As it turned out, we ran into the son as we got close to the campsite and he warned us that it was about to get rocky just before we hit our goal. Indeed it did, boulders that we had to cross in the trail and then in a creek. I hated this process, as

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always, but with my hiking pole managed to not fall. Maureen did fall and banged up her knee.

The first night rain bees fireflies other campers moving campsites chicken water butterflies snails

Well, Maureen’s opinion of backpacking has not changed, and the hike confirmed my decision a few years ago to stop backpacking.

East of the Mississippi (and a little bit of Texas)Well, I loved the 1980 Smokies experience, and shortly thereafter I started to buy the equipment I needed. A sleeping bag, a tent, a map of the Mid-State Trail, a Svea stove, and miscellaneous other stuff came from an outdoor adventure store on Beaver Ave. near Pugh Street (I don’t know if it was Appalachian Outdoor or their rival), and the backpack was bought in Los Angeles (Bob had taken a job at UCLA and Jennifer was working in a sporting goods store). The Mid-State Trail (at that time about 90 miles of trail that started around Water Street, passed above Boalsburg, and ended at Little Pine Creek Canyon) was my major destination for the next eight years or so.

The Mid-State Trail. For the first eight years or so, backpacking consisted mostly of Susan and me knocking off relatively short sections of the Mid-State Trail, until we had actually hiked much of it. After she was no longer in the picture, Maureen and/or Frank Sullivan would drop me off somewhere and pick me up a few days later somewhere else. There are boxes in the basement in which I have the guidebooks and a bunch of topographical maps that I obsessively colored to dramatize the topography. For trails like the Mid-State (and the Appalachian, the Pacific Crest, etc.) the topo maps came with the guide, but for other hikes you had to order the maps from the USGS. In the old days, that process started with a visit to the map room at Pattee library, where you would pull out a huge tray in a table in the center of a big open room and take out a large map of, say, Colorado. That map would be divided up into smaller sections, which represented the 1:1500 (or whatever) maps you could order. You’d write down the numbers of the maps that covered the area in which you were going to hike, send off a check to the USGS, and weeks later maps would arrive in the mail. Nowadays you just go on-line and download the maps you need. In fact nowadays folks have apps that use the GPS features on their phones (or in remote areas on their GPS satellite gadgets) that will not only show them the topo map, but place their current location on it. Of course, that eliminates all the fun I used to have not knowing where I was, usually just in small way, but once feeling really and truly lost in the wilderness (more about that in the Colorado section).

I don’t know for sure what my first section of the Mid-State was, but I would bet on the section that passes by the fire tower on Tussey Ridge above Boalsburg. The Mid-State Trail is mostly a ridge-top trail following the ridges above the valleys that run southwest to northeast through central Pennsylvania. Of course, the trail has to come down occasionally to cross gaps or give access to lakes and streams, but much of time you are walking on rocks amidst pines and mountain laurel (the state flower). Down lower on the ridges and in the valleys there is lots of hemlock and oak, and near water there are huge

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swaths of rhododendron. In the spring the mountain laurel blooms all over the ridges, and in mid-summer the rhododendron is spectacular. The trail is blazed with orange rectangles painted on tree trunks, two rectangles where the trail turns. Side trails are blazed in blue. To get to the fire tower we would have started someplace south, perhaps where the trail crosses Route 26 above Pine Grove Mills. Or maybe north at the top of Seven Mountains on Rte 322. From that direction (I think I remember it now) you go past Bear Meadows, where you can (and we did) take a side a side trail down to camp near this lovely boggy meadow. We were camped (probably illegally) along the level loop trail that goes around the Meadows.

The next day I remember the awful experience of crossing a scree field in the rain and fog. When you are crossing a wide area of nothing but large rocks, the blazes are painted on the rocks and there is little by way of a trail to follow, unlike on the wooded areas of the trail, where the path is worn in the earth and easy to follow. Thus, in this area we’re stepping from rock to rock, twisting our ankles and worrying about tippy rocks, unable to see far enough ahead of us in the foggy rain to know for sure if we were still on the trail. However, because this is at the top of a ridge, you can pretty much stay on the trail by staying level, and in the end we made it across without major mishaps. The day was slow, however, and we were quite disappointed when we reached the cabin near the fire tower in the dark and in the rain, only to find that it was locked. We set up our tent nearby, ate, and went to bed. In the middle of the night we were awakened by loud voices, as it turned out a bunch of drunken guys around a campfire not far from us. We were not within the light thrown by their campfire, so we just stayed silent until they left. It seemed like forever, in part because with Susan there I worried about the possibility of a sexual assault. This is a theme that followed me as long as I hiked with Susan, finding myself afraid of men on the trail when she was with me, not afraid when I was alone. The next morning we hiked down a side trail into a little valley and over the shoulder of the ridge into Boalsburg at the head of Academy Street and got a ride home from Frank Sim.

Found in a tiny notebook following what appears to be a Christmas list. Who knows? There were mileages throughout the first list, which seems to include a bit more than the second list, i.e. Buffalo Creek to Crocodile Spring, 8.73 km. It’s just come back to me that Frank dropped me off at Ravensburg State Park, and this is the time I started to get blisters very quickly on the initial climb. I had sense enough to just stop at the top, sit down, and do a bit of work on my feet with baby powder and moleskin. Moleskin is a band-aid-like tape that has soft furry stuff on the non-sticky side.

Buffalo CreekPine CreekPanther RunCrocodile SpringRB WinterSpruce RunRendezvous SpringFourth GapGasline Spring

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White Deer HoleDunbar TrailRavensburg State Park31.21 miles 50.23 km Bear Paw Loop

Tues climbRavensburg State ParkDunbar Trail W 9.16 White Deer HoleGasline Spring Th 5.95 Fourth GapRendezvous SpringSpruce Run Fri 3.52 R.B. Winter Sat 7.11 Crocodile Spring 3.07

Vermont/Maine. This was a trip to Maine with Bryan when he was about 8. Actually, he must have been more like 10 because Bob moved to California in 1980 and later moved to Maine. On the way we did a small section of the Appalachian Trail in southern Vermont near Bennington. We were planning to hike into a large pond and he wanted to fish, and did. His memory is fairly negative, remembering that I didn’t want to let him carry fishing tackle. Well, he did, and my favorite memory of this is looking behind me on the trail to see him reading a book as we hiked. I may even have a picture of this. We camped, fished, and then hiked out.

Shenandoah. It was 1983. I know because I just found the backcountry permit and some notes and maps. Here are some memories. We drove down to Washington to visit Jimmy and Brian, and the guy whose name I can’t remember. Then we drove up to Shenandoah with them and picnicked. Left the Dart at Panorama and they drove us to the trailhead at Compton Gap (whoops—see below). My memory is that the first day was a short hike and that the next morning was the morning we almost stepped on a fawn curled up in the grass and nearly invisible. Other highlights include a deer at the tent, a shadowed hike along a stream in which we crossed the stream a dozen or more times in a short distance, a long hard climb up a mountain during which we encountered a boy scout troop and which ended at a huge wall of mountain laurel (mistaken at the time for rhododendron), a huge thick eight foot rattlesnake moving slowly across the trail, setting up the tent in the rain and the dark, a ranger warning us the next day that we’d camped too close to the trail and telling us there were snakes everywhere but a snake bite wouldn’t kill a full grown man, a large bird (hawk, eagle, vulture?) attacking us on a very narrow cliff trail, getting a burger and a post card when we came up to the skyline drive, two guys saying “There’s no place like home” in response to Susan’s striped socks, and watching those socks as we walked through fields of emerald ferns.

Because Shenandoah is bear country, this might be a good place to talk about the routine task of hanging food in a tree. For me this always (well, almost always—I did use a rock

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once) involved my long cotton rope and a pepperoni. When I arrived at a new campsite, I’d set up my tent and then head out to find a tree that would work for hanging food to discourage the bears. It would have to have some sturdy branches, fairly high but not too high, with enough clearance above for me to be likely to be able to throw a rope over one. Tie a pepperoni to one end of the long rope, secure the other end to something. Throw the pepperoni (rope attached) over a branch. This may sound easy but would inevitably take 5-10 tries. Throw, miss, retrieve. Throw, miss retrieve. Throw, think I made it but it’s stuck, pull it back down, retrieve. And so on. Once it’s over a good branch, I’d have to flip the rope repeatedly to send a beautiful sine wave up to the tree, lifting the rope off the branch when it reached it, allowing the weight of the pepperoni and whatever rope was on the other side to pull the rope down, a little further each time, until I could reach it and pull it to earth. Then I’d secure both ends so that when the cooking is finished I can come back with my food and cooking utensils and hoist them up into the tree. Imagine how many times I did that over 30 years of backpacking.

I just found the detailed plan for the Shenandoah hike, including the amendments written in by Susan, plus her one-page commentary on the final two days. That comes next, then perhaps I’ll add my reactions to the pictures in a photo album. It turns out this was a seven day hike! We evidently started on Monday outside of the park, where the Appalachian Trail (AT) crossed route 522 on the DC side and climbed the AT to camp near Tom Floyd Wayside, 3.1 miles. However, Susan’s notes indicate that we only hiked 1.2 miles. Tuesday we were supposed to hike 10 miles to Bluff Trail and down it a ways, but we only did 9.2 miles. Wednesday we did 2 miles, which would have gotten us down onto the Bluff Trail, but it’s not clear whether we then did the planned day hikes up (or down) the Big Devil Stairs and up the Peak Trail. I imagine we did and on one of them were attacked by that big bird. Thursday, our planned 8.6 miles became 10.7 as we hiked up to and along the AT, then .7 miles over to Matthew’s Arm Campground and 1 mile down to Bear Wallow, before shedding our packs to hike 1.2 miles to the falls, then picked up our packs and went on another 1.7 miles to camp closer to the AT than originally planned, along Overall Run. As a result, on Friday we only had to hike 1.7 miles up to the AT, 4.2 miles along it to Jeremy’s Hollow, then down Jeremy’s Run Trail to the intersection with Neighbor Trail. Saturday we hiked up to the AT and cut things short at the Byrd’s Nest #3 shelter, camping inside illegally. On Sunday we hiked out to Thornton Gap (Panorama, which no longer exists), picked up the car and drove out to Port Royal. All in all, it evidently adds up to about 42 miles, c. 25 miles of the AT, plus spur trails.

Here are Susan’s notes, handwritten, one page: Sun, June 19. Woke up at 6:30 to Michael rustling around—he was afraid the rangers would be angry that we spent the night at Byrd’s Nest #3 inside. No tent. Listened for snakes and bears all night. Heard an animal, maybe a wolf, scratching him/herself and walking around. Cereal for breakfast. Walked steadily for 4 miles—2 hrs. Took packs off twice going up Neighbor Mountain, 2.6 miles to the top, very steep, many. Trail guide described trail as gently descending but it was rather steep at junction with trail leading to shelter. Saw a rabbit, watched it for quite a while. Got impatient looking for the spur trail to Panorama so cut up early. Black & white housecat on trail. No showers there, drove 20

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miles to Big Meadows. No towels—used Michael’s undershirts, he used bandana for washcloth. Nice lunch at Skytop—Michael had roast pork and very strange crumb cake. Bought ornament, drove slowly down Skyline, reviewing where we’d been. When we got back to Front Royal, Michael realized he couldn’t drive home so we checked into Pioneer Motel. Ate at My Father’s Mustache—in Victorian home. Chicken Kiev and Devilled Crab and strawberry shortcake. Bed by 10. Susan asked large man next door to turn down TV. Happy Valley Bakery, bats.Monday, June 20. Up around 8, ate breakfast at Nick’s Diner—incredible thin waitress, writing all over inside and outside. Went home off main roads, ate lunch at Burnt Cabins Hotel—cheeseburgers and fries—home around 3:30. Corner Room. JMF paper revise but accepted.

West Virginia. I gather from a photo album that this was before Shenandoah. We were down in West Virginia to visit Sam What’s-his-name and we were travelling without a car. Our backpacking was in Dolly Sods Natural Area, starting at a cranberry bog up high and hiking down into the mountains. The sundews (darling, tiny, sticky, red, star-like carnivorous plants) were a major find in the bog. I remember three other things about this hike. First was a totally exhausting day, when we were determined to get to our planned campsite, and were literally staggering by the time we got there. Second, the killer rhododendron. Clever me, looking at the topo map one day, I thought we could take a shortcut straight up the ridge instead of following the trail down and around and back up. I should have know there was a reason the trail went where it did. We started pushing through the rhododendron that grab at your pack, your legs, your arms. After what seemed like forever, they opened out onto an impossible looking scree field. We turned back. Then there was the last day, hitchhiking to I don’t know where, but being picked up by the ranger in a pickup truck. We rode in the back. I don’t really know how we got home (we’d gone down by bus).

Big Bend (5000’-6000’). I backpacked in Big Bend twice. Both times I got there with Ted and other folks. As I remember it’s something like an eight hour drive from Austin to the big bend in the Rio Grande that forms part of Texas’s border with Mexico. The national park is a marvelous multi-environmental area of Chihuahuan desert, the riparian Rio Grande ecosystem, magnificent river canyons, and the Chisos Mountains. We would camp together in the big campground up in a bowl of the mountains. There are great day hikes out of there, either down to the river (where you can take boat trips into the canyons or even over to Mexico), out into the desert, or out to lookouts from the mountains. For me, another big draw was the marked trails that took you further up into the mountains and then down and into some of the desert canyon environments. Again, I’m not sure of the chronology. I suspect the first trip was the one with Ted, Chris, Megan, George and Ann Levinger, John and ?? Rempel, Bob, and Susan in March of 1988. Susan had just defended her dissertation and had called me to say she’d changed her mind about coming down to Austin (where I was on sabbatical) to celebrate. I insisted, she relented, and the first night there she told me our relationship was over (in a bathtub with Dom Perignon that I’d bought at the wine store next to my apartment in Austin). Well, that made the planned trip to Big Bend a little awkward, but we made the best of it. I have a great picture of Susan and Bob and me lounging on an old pink Cadillac convertible

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somewhere between Austin and Big Bend. The camping experience was great, part of the marvel being the high energy of George and Ann, who were avid hikers and seemed quite old for such things. The second marvel was a three or four day backpack up into the Chisos, starting with Bob and Susan (Bob was intent on seeing a Colima warbler, which he did, and which was of little interest to me as this was before my true conversion to birding), after which Bob returned the way we’d come, and Susan and I continued on around to descend into a series of colorful desert canyons, planning to be met by Ted in a car for our return. My most vivid memory from this was how the canyon hike took many hours longer than we had planned, and was a really miserable hot thirsty experience for both of us, quite relieved when we finally did make it to the meeting place.

The second time must have been later that year (or it might have been a few years later) and I was backpacking alone (don’t remember whom I’d driven out with, but it must have included Ted). This is where I had that great laugh after I had passed an old couple hiking up the trail into the mountains. I was stopped for lunch and a long rest when they caught up to me and as they slowly passed me, the man uttered sotto voce, “The tortoise and the hare.” Cracked me up. My next great experience came up on top, as I was simply enjoying the solitude at my first camp site, surrounded by Texas trees (probably juniper). I saw a delightful little gray bird with a crest and a black marking on its face flitting from tree to tree in a circle around me (as Bob had told me they often do, curious about this new creature in their home). By this time I did have a field guide and managed to find this delightful little guy as a variation on titmouse (bridled). The next memory is another bird memory (I guess I was starting to get the bug) at my second camp site. As dusk came on, I looked up to see a kettle of 13 Chihuahuan ravens circling high above me. It occurred to me that 13 ravens was a pretty ominous sign. Thoughts of death. But then just pure appreciation of the beauty of the moment. Never did see a Colima warbler, which is special because it is basically a Mexican bird that can only be seen in this one place in the U.S.

The High Mountain YearsCanadian RockiesThe solo, high mountain backpacking years started in the summer of 1988. That spring, Susan had ended our relationship, and in early July ISSPR was in Vancouver. Bob and I had planned to do some camping with his partner Jennifer after the meetings and I decided to try out solo backpacking in the high mountains. I picked out a trail in Glacier National Park (the Canadian one near Revelstoke) and Bob and Jennifer dropped me off at the trailhead. The plan was for them to camp while I hiked a 1000’ climb to a pass and returned to meet them a few days later at a motel up the road. The trail started out through old-growth cedar forest and then climbed to a more alpine environment. As the day wore on, and it seemed I wasn’t going to make the 8 miles or so that I’d planned, I took a close look at my topo map to try to decide where to camp, at which point I realized that I’d mistaken meters for feet (damn those Canadians)—this was a 3000’ climb, not 1000’. So that’s what high mountains were about. I set up camp near a cabin in beautiful sunny weather.

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The next day I hiked up into a broad open area that rose for the next few miles up to a pass and beautiful mountain peaks well above tree line. I set up my lavender backpacking tent (which means I had by this time abandoned the old spacious tent with a “porch” and all) in the middle of meadows of wildflowers, near a clear mountain stream, and settled in to just enjoy the silence and the space. I’d never been alone in such a magnificent place before. The sky seemed huge, the scale of the mountains around me completely different from life in the East.

After breakfast I loaded up my day pack with food, water, some emergency stuff in case I couldn’t get back to the tent, and extra clothes. It was a beautiful warm day, so I was dressed in shorts and a t-shirt, but carried layers in the pack. I headed up the green, wildflower-laden meadow toward what looked like the top of the pass way off in the distance. The further up I got, the more I realized how vast this landscape was, as I looked back down to the small lavender dot of my tent in the distance. As I neared the top of the pass, I could feel the air start to cool, and a cloud/fog bank rose up over the pass in front of me. As it continued on to engulf me, the temperature dropped 40 degrees and it began to snow heavily. I felt a tinge of pride at my thoughtful preparation as I pulled on my blue jeans, a Pendleton wool shirt, and a rain jacket. By the time I reached the top of the pass, the weather had passed and I could strip back down to my shorts and t-shirt. This sort of dramatic weather change was to be a major part of my experience in the mountains over the next 25 years, and I loved it.

Late in that day I returned to my tent, and the next morning was able to hike back out in one day. Back at the trailhead, I hitchhiked to the motel where I was to meet Bob and Jennifer, took a shower and then a bath, ate a hearty meal of real food, and settled in to watch Big Trouble in Little Chinatown.

The Ghost River Wilderness. I don’t have a good handle on when I did what, so I’m just going to ramble around in the chronology (unknown at the moment) and talk about trips that are geographically connected. Just east of the town of Banff there is a large man-made lake (Minnewanka), and I believe that at some point I decided to backpack to the campsites that ringed it. You start out in what feels almost like an urban park, then cross a bridge over a river that runs into the lake and head out on a trail that eventually is cut into the side of the mountain that rises up above the northeast side of the lake. My first time on the trail I took a stupid turn at the fork just over the bridge and hiked in the wrong direction for half an hour before I realized that I should be seeing the lake—and I wasn’t. Once you get on the right trail, it undulates up and down as it moves in and out of the woods, sometimes covered by trees filled with birds, sometimes just a rocky path hanging a hundred feet or so above the lake. In those open areas you look out over a deep blue lake to evergreen forests that cover the lower reaches of the mountains on the other side that rise to strikingly bare granite ridges.

I camped for few days in the first campsite on that side of the lake, hanging my food up in the cables that are strung between tall poles because this is bear country. I never did move on to the other camp sites. That was slightly nerve-wracking because you needed a

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permit to camp in these backcountry campgrounds, and my permits were for one night here and then on to the other sites. In the end, no one asked to see my permits.

This was not particularly wild backcountry, more like car camping except you had to hike all day to get there. I spent my time eating at picnic tables, swimming in the freezing cold glacial lake, sleeping in, and taking short day hikes on the trail along the lake. It’s a big campground, so there were plenty of other folks around, although the campsites were well separated, wooded, and generally not visible to each other. There were deer and small mammals wandering about regularly, and of course lots of birds. One early morning I was awakened by a great commotion, as one of my fellow campers came running in my direction banging on a cook pot, and told me a bear cub had wandered into the camp. These are grizzlies, by the way, and I had mixed feelings about not having seen it—where there’s a cub there’s a protective mama, big enough to kill. I just now (2015) went to web site about the area to find that because of multiple bear attacks (two fatal) it is now mandatory that you travel in groups of four or more. I never did have a close bear encounter beyond this one that I never saw.

My memory is that on this first trip I only hiked part way up the trail that goes from this campsite over a pass into the Ghost River Wilderness, only going up to the branch trail that took you to the right to a lookout over the lake. I resolved to come back and do the 3000’ climb some day and experience the true wilderness just outside the park.

Well, I did go back, more than once. It became my absolute favorite place to get totally away, totally alone, totally self-sufficient and in tune with nature. For two of the trips there were ISSPR meetings in the town of Banff, and later trips always began there as well. I would fly in to Calgary and take a bus over to Banff. I’d spend two days buying provisions, eating in fun places, discussing issues with rangers, and making my camp site reservations for the parts of the trip that would be within the National Park. I remember one favorite restaurant was named something about a Coyote (“Coyotes Southwestern Grill has been serving the Bow Valley and its visitors since 1993”). And I remember the amusement of a camp store clerk when, at the urging of Maureen, I asked if they rented cell phones for me to take up into the Ghost River Wilderness. Now that I understand the difference between cell phones and satellite phones, I realize what a dumb question that was.

The first time I did this, I camped at a private campground in town and then hitchhiked out to Lake Minnewanka. It was definitely cheap, but the camping was not comfortable (it never is) and the hitchhiking took most of the day, so on later trips I stayed in small hotels or B&Bs and took a cab to the lake.

My typical trip would be 10-14 days, the first two spent at the campground discussed above, which is 8 miles or so in, along the shore of the lake. I was often the only person in the campground, always at least out of sight of the others. The campground is a regular haunt of mule deer, totally tame. You could walk down to the lake shore for breakfast in one the most beautiful settings on earth. I’d usually spend a day there, sometimes I’d sit by the lake for hours. It was always a quiet day, the excuse being acclimating to the

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altitude. This would be followed by a one or two day hike up over the pass into the Wilderness, a week or more out there doing day hikes or moving my campsite around a bit, then two or more days hiking back out with a stop once again in that campground. The “aloneness” is a function of (1) the 3000’ climb that is required to get there, and (2) the fact that once you cross the national park border and enter the wilderness, there are no trails. You are on your own with your topographical map and compass. What you get for this effort is a magnificent landscape of huge granite mountain peaks surrounding wildflower-covered valleys filled with woods, ten foot high reeds growing in bogs, glacial lakes and streams, grizzly bears, mountain goats, wolves, coyotes, pika, birds (my favorite being the Wilson’s warbler), wolverine, ground squirrels, and marmots. Stars in numbers you’ve never seen before, full moonlight that seems like daylight from inside a tent, and (once) the Northern lights. And the cleanest water you’ve ever seen in your life.

My plan (not always carried out successfully) was to get up before dawn the next day, eat a hearty breakfast, break camp, and be on my way up the mountain by dawn. The distance from the campsite by the lake up to the main trail never ceased to surprise me, and the hike up to the pass was an all-day effort. The first time I did it, I did start early as planned and was a bit shocked at hw long it took me to get up to the turnoff to the lookout. I took a rather long rest there before I went on. This kind of climb (3000’) involves lots of stops along the way to catch your breath, in the steepest sections hiking maybe only a hundred steps or so before stopping to gasp for breath, take a drink, and look around at the astounding scenery. You’re climbing up alongside a stream that you can hear but not see, below you in the woods on your left. Ahead you see the trail climbing into the woods, to your right woods. To your left you could often see the mountains rising up above the creek, and in special places you could look back over a vast evergreen wood dropping down to the lake, with wooded mountains rising up to bare ridges on the other side. One time during this climb I happened to look back down the trail to see a wolf trotting toward me. It never broke its rhythm, simply veering off the trail to the down side and trotting in a wide circle around me to re-appear up the trail. The second time I did this hike I wrote in my journal that it was so difficult that I resolved never to do it again. This was the time that I didn’t make it over before dark and had to camp illegally in the alpine tundra in the middle of the pass. I set up the tent in a rocky area to minimize impact. It was really a beautiful spot, with Mt. Aylmer rising up above me, the pass and other mountains laid out in front of me, and the ground covered with gorgeous, tiny alpine flowers.

At some point things start to level out a bit, the trees slowly disappear, and you find yourself in alpine meadows surrounded by bare granite peaks. Although I was there in the summer, there were sometimes patches of snow up in the pass, once one with a very clear grizzly bear track. The alpine foliage is very low but spectacular up close, full of colorful flowers in the summer. The first time I did this, I was early enough and hearty enough to make it all the way over the pass and down into the high valley above. Somewhere in the pass, where the trail winds through these meadows between massive expanses of bare granite, you run into the national park boundary and know that you are about to descend into trail-less wilderness, but the trail goes on, no longer marked, clear nevertheless. You are in the pass way longer than you imagined, continuing along a winding up and down

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trail, passing by pika (a tiny rodent) and marmots (big groundhog-like mammals that live only in the high mountains). You’re not supposed to camp on the fragile alpine meadows and I begin to worry that I won’t descend into the valley ecosystem before dark, but finally it opens out before me. My God!

At first the size doesn’t overwhelm you. You see a beautiful long, relatively narrow valley down and out to your left. Straight in front of you the green wildflower covered alpine meadows turn to tall green grasses that descend down and to the right into evergreen woods that you know from the topo map extend down to the Ghost River. To your right is solid granite that gets bigger and bigger the longer you look at it. Then you realize that the valley you’re looking at is in fact huge. Along the left side are sheer rock cliffs, that are later populated by mountain goats and big-horned sheep doing amazing climbing tricks. To the right is what appears to be gentle green ridge, animal trails visible along its side. Down the middle is a strip of woods bordered to the left and right by greenswards that go all the way up the ridge on the right, but only to the rock scree and cliffs on the left. At the end of the valley is a glacial lake, a granite wall topped by a glacier, and a pass that disappears up the mountain to the right. A small creek runs along the right side of the woods, continuing down to your right into the woods and probably on down into the Ghost River. You don’t know it yet, but the tall grasses in front of you are sometimes growing in water that you learn to love walking in with your water slippers, following animal trails through the dense eight-foot reeds. This first trip the valley floor is dry and you hike down, thinking it is a short hike, and beginning to get a sense of the scale as the hike down takes way longer than you expect. So, it’s suddenly time to camp, and I opt for a spot in the open where two animal trails intersect, giving me just enough space for my backpacking tent’s footprint. I set up the tent, get some water from the creek, eat dinner, and settle for leaving my food on the ground far from the tent—I’ll find a tree tomorrow. In the morning I wake up to find a huge deer-like animal looking curiously into my tent and wondering “Who do you think you are, blocking my trail with this lavender contraption?” It’s magical, and I go back to sleep.

During the day I move the tent down to the edge of the woods where I face out to the pass over which I climbed and Mount Aylmer behind it. In front of me are the tall reeds, to my right a large scree field climbing up to a sheer cliff, to my left the beautiful green ridge, behind me woods (in which I’ve treed my food) that run up the long valley to a little glacial lake below the glacier and a pass off to the north. The easiest way up the valley for a day hike over the pass to the next valley is along the edge of the woods. One day I hike to the lake and back. Another day I hike to the lake and then up over the pass. I enjoy my lunch sitting at the top of the pass looking down into the next valley and out at the granite peaks receding into the distance. On the way back I decide to shorten the hike by staying high and following a vague animal track around the mountain, only to find that the track becomes a pretty scary edge, probably mountain goat terrain. I manage to get around without falling and then slab down along the ridgeline toward my camp, falling and sliding down the grasses more that once. At some point I realize that one of the falls had torn my bear bells off the pack. I’m too exhausted to go back to look for them.

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One of the delights of this campsite (over the years I will continue to camp there or nearby n the woods) is the cliff, which is often populated by amazingly acrobatic mountain goats. They create another size experience as you watch them leaping (or stepping) from ledge to ledge as the group ascends the cliff (leaving you open-mouthed at their ability to cling and move effortlessly on a seemingly sheer wall) and the individuals shrink and shrink until they reach the top, where your need to use binoculars to see them tells you how much bigger this cliff is than you realized. Another wondrous experience was having a wolverine trot past my campsite, just 20 yards away.

My most amazing animal experience was of humans. As I may have said above somewhere, one of the delights of solo wilderness backpacking is the aloneness, which was indeed my experience on the Ghost River year after year every day but one. On that day, I was just wandering about near my campsite (which that year was hidden in the woods near the bottom of the pass) during the day when I heard voices, evidently coming down from the pass. I stepped behind some cover and watched quietly as a group of six men and women came single file down the pass and into the high reeds heading down to the river. Someone in the group was singing as they hiked, and the last person in line was dancing and twirling around. The silhouettes against the sky reminded me of the scene in Bergmann’s “Seventh Seal.” One by one they disappeared into the reeds as if falling off the face of the earth, and the singing receded into the distance. It was dreamlike.

Banff with Bob and Renate

Yosemite, Mammoth Lakes and The Devil’s Postpile. This one was alone. I don’t remember why I was in San Francisco, but I rented a car and drove out to Yosemite, planning to camp a little and then head over the Sierras to backpack on the east side of the range.

Wind River Range. Maureen describes this as “My vacation as a pack animal,” a trip with Maureen, Bob, and Renate, camping in the Tetons and then backpacking at a place recommended by Greg James, a college buddy of Tom’s and now my stock broker. I just found all the maps and guides for this trip. It looks like I laid out the whole trip on topo maps that I ordered, helped by a guide to hiking in the Wind River Range written by a guy who spent 70 years stocking the lakes and fishing up there. Rainbow Lake’s name was neither arbitrary nor an allusion to the weather. It looks like there was about a 2000’ climb, most of it the first few miles to ?? Lake. That was where I fell and my pack smashed my face into the ground and broke my glasses. Luckily I always carry a spare pair. Bob and Renate had gone on ahead of us, but we met at that lake for lunch and then they went on again and we caught up at Rainbow Lake. (Maureen remembers the glasses smashing as happening on the way out rather than on the way in, and she’s probably right.) Rainbow Lake is a jewel surrounded by bare granite peaks, but our campsite was nestled a hundred yards from the lake in Ponderosa pines (maybe).

Highlights were the “lamb attack,” the great horned owl, and the moon. The lamb attack has to be a story told by Maureen. The gist f it is Maureen sleeping in one morning as I went down to the lake for a swim. While I was gone she found herself terrorized by a

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large scary animal outside he tent, actually rubbing against it. When I eventually returned to hear her hoarsely calling for help and discovered that the animal was a badly wounded lamb, Maureen found the sympathy for the lamb an amazing distraction from her terror. The great horned owl happened at a nighttime campfire (Bob loved campfires). Bob heard the owl calling and returned the favor, calling the owl in from across the lake into the trees above us. A very special experience. And the “moon” was across the lake the morning of the lamb attack. Bob, Renate, and I heard a shout from across the lake, and looked up to see three bare bottoms. Not exactly a wilderness experience, but quite a laugh. Lynne’s Canoe Trip. This was Lynne Goodstein’s 50th birthday adventure (1998). She invited a dozen or so of her best friends to join her in northwestern Colorado for a canoe trip through spectacular canyons on the Snake River. It turned out to be all women except me and the guide, Mike, who soon managed to alienate all of us so badly that he was a recipient of constant criticism, criticism that ultimately drove him to call for a substitute halfway through the trip. These were wonderful, feminist women from all parts of Lynne’s life: a childhood friend (Phyllis), fellow feminist criminologists (Maureen otherwise known as Banfield, Julie ??, ??, Kathleen Ferraro), and fellow women’s studies scholars (me, Dally, and Dally’s partner from California). I hardly know where to start. As for the travel part, this is completely different from backpacking. The canoe does all the work and you have provisions galore, stoves, camp chairs, and on and on. In our case, however, we did lose lots of the cook stuff in a major event in some rapids. The trip involves long periods of calm drifting through spectacular orange and red canyons, punctuated by intense moments of major rapids. It was on one of these that the guides made a bad choice of route and we lost two canoes, one simply capsized and losing equipment that was not properly stowed, the other involving my canoe (with me in the front and Banfield the experienced one guiding from the back). Our canoe got jammed up crosswise on a huge boulder, requiring maybe an hour of ropes and strategizing to pull it free. I later realized that I got pretty banged up in the incident, including damage to my binoculars. The camping was a delight because of all the equipment. The guides had fantastic meals planned, musical instruments for entertainment, and each night someone in the group was assigned to come up with some fun activity (like dance lessons from Phyllis). As it turned out, Lynne was really sick and didn’t join us until halfway through the trip, so she missed our constant conflict with Mike, the know-it-all guide who couldn’t stand the challenges from women. In the end, he went into a pout and called for a replacement at the halfway point, a new woman guide who was delight.

There were some really special aspects of this trip for me, the worst of which was the infection from a cactus needle that I had to deal with in an emergency room in Denver before I went on up to the Ghost River for backpacking, the best of which was connecting up with Kathleen Ferraro. We were tenting together in my tent and the first night we talked ourselves to sleep. As we asked and answered questions about ourselves (I only knew her first name), it came out that she did work on domestic violence as a criminologist. As the conversation proceeded, it finally dawned on me that she was Kathleen Ferraro, a scholar whose work I knew and admired, and she in return was stunned to learn that I was the Mike Johnson. The more we talked, the more I liked what I

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heard, both personally and professionally, and I asked her if she’d like to co-author the JMF decade review that I had been commissioned to write. It turned out to be a great collaboration. Of course, I was also madly in love with her, but contained myself (now being the new “monogamous Mike,” as Ted would say). Another delight was hot-tubbing with the “girls” at the B&B after the trip.

The Weminuche Wilderness (8500’-11,600’). My second favorite place in the high mountains was recommended by George Kephart, a young Sociology faculty member who essentially got fired because he talked back to Dennis Hogan. He grew up in Colorado and backpacked a lot with his father. One of his favorite hikes was a loop out of the Williams Reservoir Campground north of Pagosa Springs in the San Juan Mountains down near the New Mexico border. It’s pretty far west, near Durango. I flew in to Denver, stayed at Tom and Cookie’s for a day and took one of their cars for the week down south, a full day’s drive away. The drive out to the campground at Williams Reservoir is much longer than it looks, mostly on paved roads through fields that make me think of wild horses, with mountains all around in the distance. The road climbs gradually but steadily up toward the mountain range that looms up ahead, and at the end I am on a dirt road with woods on the up side, fields on the down. The campground is at about 8500’ and a good place to spend a day or two acclimating to the altitude. Bathrooms, water, and very friendly campground hosts, an older couple from Texas. One year I ran into a hydrologist there and went crazy infatuated, even trying to track her down in Durango after I finished backpacking. Thank God I was unsuccessful.

There are two ways to hike up to the Continental Divide Trail from here. One is a ways further up the road, near the horse corrals used for the pack train tourist businesses. I’m occasionally passed by them on the trails up there and sometimes its a pretty exciting experience—a group of horses passing by on a narrow trail with a rock wall on one side, a sheer drop on the other. And I’ve seen them camped at quite a cozy campsite with large cabin tents and “kitchens.” And then there’s the stuff you resent a bit, places in the muddy trail that are worn three feet into the ground by hooves and are essentially non-navigable. You basically make a new trail “up” on the grass alongside the damage.

The other way up (which connects in a loop to the other) starts close to the campground and climbs steeply to a pass at about 11,500’, behind Cimarrona Peak (12,536), then stays above tree line, takes you around some peaks, along a knife edge and eventually to the trail that descends gradually to a spot on the road less than a mile from where you started. I ordered what turned out to be an old topo map that still had the trail that George and his father used for the initial climb. There is now a new trail, used all too frequently by pack trains that take folks up to luxury camp sites in the area. The first time I hiked there, I turned off this main trail to cut across an amazing patch of wildflowers that towered over my head, and up a very steep ridge to intersect with the old trail. My plan was to get up to an open area and creek just below Cimarrona, but the bushwhacking slowed me down and tired me out. Pushing your way through 8 foot growth and up a steep ridge with 50 pounds on your back is not exactly fun, but the relief when you hit the trail is palpable. Since this was now an abandoned trail, I simply set up camp right on the trail itself. The

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thrill of the evening was turning around while I was eating to see a red fox sitting 20’ away on the trail, wondering who the hell I was.

The trail then continues to climb, slabbing along the ridge through woods and eventually comes out a meadow nestled below Cimarrona—quite a sight/site. It’s a great place to camp, with many small streams of runoff snaking though the meadow in front of you (a meadow filled with wildflowers), nice tree cover where the trail comes out, and a magnificent view of the fairly unusual shape of Cimarrona. I spend the night there. I can see the main trail from there, off to my left, running around Cimarrona and up to the pass. On later trips I’ll see that this site is used regularly by pack trains and I have to move on up to get away from them. On this trip I make the fatal mistake of rejecting the trail and bushwhacking up the ridge to my right on my own, thinking (mistakenly) that it will be an easy matter to get back to the trail up at the top. This is the one time I felt truly lost in the mountains. Somehow I got all turned around and really didn’t know where I was. I stayed calm, reasoning that in some general sense I knew where I was and I was not far from civilization, but the going was rough because I was surrounded by fairly steep climbs with no people trails, so I followed the less visible (and more difficult) animal trails up and up until, late in the day, I reached a vantage point from which I knew where I was relative to Cimarrona. Much to my surprise, I began to cry. I guess I was more frightened than I had realized. By then, late afternoon thunderstorms were coming in and I realized I had to get down off the ridge before the lightning started, which meant I couldn’t get far, would have to just hike straight down a little ways and hunker down until the storm passed, and would have to spend the night very low on water. After the storm passed, with what was my first experience of the terror that lightning in the mountains can foist upon you, I settled in uncomfortably on the side of the ridge and gathered snow to melt to last me through the night and until I could get to water the next day.

The next few days were a delight. I got back onto the main trail, which climbed around the base of Cimarrona and up to an 11,800’ pass on the Continental Divide Trail. I took a side trail north to get off the main trail and settled in at a copse by a creek, surrounded by wildflower fields that literally buzzed with bees. While I had been hiking in what seemed to be silence, I realized that I was hearing some sort of background hum, and it took me a while to figure out that I was surrounded by thousands of bees going about their business. How could I not camp there. So, I spent a couple of days just lazing about with the bees, reading a John LeCarre book, cooking and eating, taking care of camp hygiene, napping, sleeping, and watching the clouds come and go in their amazing high mountain way. Eventually, I headed back down to the main trail, which disappeared off to the east across the broad, green, wildflower-strewn pass. I wasn’t sure exactly where the trail was until I saw a pack train slowly moving away from me and disappearing around a bend. They were so tiny that it took me some time to figure out what I was watching, and then a few more seconds before the meaning of their size hit me—this view was vastly larger than I had thought, so much larger that it took my breath away. This would be a common experience in high mountains.

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Emerging from a backpacking trip always involved a ritual of comfort. In Pagosa Springs it was a nice motel near a favorite restaurant, not in town but out in the fields with views of the surrounding mountains. A bottle of champagne awaited me at the motel where I started with a shower, then settled in to a hot bath with a book. Then clean clothes and off to the restaurant where I could sit outside looking up at the mountains I’d just left and enjoy a hamburger and a couple of beers. It was on this patio that I had my first experience watching killdeer flying about the fields with their beautiful striped wings, and one in the parking lot doing its “broken wing” trick to lure me away from its nest.

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