Sometimes it’s the scent of sun-baked pine needles, others it’s the evening’s glow. And then there are the mornings – when the silence gives me a flash of déjà vu. It’s been 14 years since we hiked 2,300 miles along the Pacific Crest Trail, but I’m reminded of it often, most tangibly because I wake up to my hiking partner everyday.
In our “real” lives, Duffy is now an emergency department physician, a research scientist, and medical director for our county’s Emergency Medical Services. I’m an RN, writer and editor. We have two children, ages 9 and 5. During the hustle and bustle of family life, there are times when our trail lives feel like a dream, but when things get hard, it’s the PCT that grounds us and gives us a compass with which to navigate.
In 2003, The Mountaineers Books published our story.
A Blistered Kind of Love; One Couple’s Trial by Trail won The Mountaineers’ Barbara Savage Miles from Nowhere Memorial Award and Honorable Mention from the National Outdoor Book Awards. In the book excerpt below, I reflect on what the PCT meant to us. But that part of our journey is actually ongoing.
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Coyotes yip, yip ya’roo’d as a full desert moon began its ascent across the quickly darkening sky. The trail meandered among the fuchsia blooms of prickly pear cactus, blood-red Indian paintbrushes, and fragrant sagebrush. Jittery pushup lizards and emerald hummingbirds kept Duffy and I company as we set up camp on a sandy exposed ridge in the Colorado Desert.
Five hundred and fifty miles later, from glacier-polished, snow-blanketed High Sierra slopes, we gazed down at a turquoise, ice-crusted tarn, breathing air so crisp it made our lungs ache.
In the Trinity Alps, a burly bruin cub peered at us from his treetop perch. Four hundred and sixty miles north, in Oregon, sheets of crystal water plunged over a black volcanic cliff that dripped with moss. In Washington, bright orange mushrooms flourished in a dense muddy rain forest. On the slopes of the North Cascades, larch trees donned autumn hues of gold.
We’d been living, breathing and walking the PCT for four and a half months. You’d think that would have given us enough time to prepare. But nothing can prepare you for coming to the end (in the words of a fellow hiker) of your “life’s best journey (so far).” When we arrived at the Canadian border, our hearts burst with happiness, but also broke.
Monument 78 sits in a small clearing in the forest between Washington and British Columbia. It had taken us approximately 6,300,000 steps, 528 doses of ibuprofen, 180 Snickers bars, thirty-six popped blisters, seven pairs of shoes, four pairs of shorts, two stoves and one titanium pot to get there.
At the end of it all, our friend Toby, also known as Catch-23, wrote, “We walked from an arbitrary line in the sand to an arbitrary cut in the trees. It is not a particularly meaningful accomplishment when you boil it down. It is somewhat of a ridiculous thing to do. But it was meaningful to us, for some reason, and that is why we did it.”
Like many before us, we felt joy and exhilaration but also sadness upon finishing. We had renewed faith in the generosity of strangers, but we dreaded going back to crowded urban streets. We’d discovered a simpler view of life and yet longed for creature comforts. We couldn’t wait to get home; we were sad to go home.
We’d had adrenaline rushes, we’d conquered things – our fears, our differences, and a mountain or two in between – but mostly we’d strived, long and hard. We’d strived to become better hikers and, most importantly, better people. And even if we only succeeded in these things just a little bit, it was worth every ache and pain. As Walt Whitman once wrote, “Now I see the secret of making the best persons, it is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the Earth.”
Of course, our trail life wasn’t all sunsets and starry nights. Exhaustion killed many otherwise profound moments but the romance of our hike was in what we accomplished together. Climbing Mount Whitney (the tallest mountain in the contiguous U.S.); helping one another through 31-mile days; holding hands across ice, snow, and treacherous fords; even carrying a little extra weight when the other person was hurting. As Ginny Owen (a longtime long-distance hiker who met her husband while hiking the Appalachian Trail) once told us: “On the trail, you don’t have masks and you don’t have distractions and you don’t have games. You’re just being yourself. That leads to a level of intimacy that is way beyond what you might develop during the same time period at home. You spend months with somebody on the trail and you’ll know that person better than you’ll know most people in 20 years.” Duffy and I each gained much from walking from Mexico to Canada, but by doing it together we gained even more – we gained each other.
We held our wedding ceremony eight months later. We stood outside with our backs to a storm front. Maple leaves were flopping upside down, exposing their silver underbellies to the wind. Holding hands we laughed and looked into the heavens as fat drops began to fall – first scattered like petals in the wind and then steady and straight. It was the perfect end to one adventure and beginning to another.
Excerpt from Angela and Duffy Ballard’s A Blistered Kind of Love; One Couple’s Trial by Trail, The Mountaineers Books, Seattle, 2003.
