Choose

Choose life.
Choose a job.
Choose a career.
Choose a big fucking television.
Choose washing machines, cars, compact disk players and electrical tin openers.
Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance.
Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments.
Choose a starter home.
Choose your friends.
Choose leisurewear and matching luggage.
Choose a three piece suit on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics.
Choose sitting on the couch watching spirit-crushing, mind-numbing game shows, stuffing junk food into your mouth. 

– Renton (Trainspotting) 

Let’s get down to brass tacks, Gentlemen…If I was informed correctly, the clock is ticking.

If I subscribed to modern conventions, I would feel the need to prefix what I’m about to say with the somewhat trendy disclaimer, “Full Disclosure”.

I’m not going to do that.

I believe that the mere act of simply telling you what’s up is strong enough to stand on it’s own. Plus, the kind of people who say things like “Full Disclosure” also tend to be the kind of people who phonetically pronounce abbreviations like “Elle-Oh-Elle” or “Oh-Ehm-Gee”.

Those people are annoying.

I’m here today to tell you that there has been a whisperering among the crew. Rumours of a mutiny. And the chief protagonist of those rumours?….Me!

I wanted to quit.

I’d wanted to pack up my toys and go home.

This is not an uncommon theme for me. I get bored very easily. It plagues almost every aspect of my life: School, my job, my hobbies. Once the mystery surrounding something is gone, once I figure out how the machine works, once something becomes routine, I want to move on. It’s been particularly difficult with work and is the chief reason I don’t have a “normal” job. I’ve tried but just the act of showing up to the same desk in the same office in the same building, feels like a jail sentence. Perhaps a few of you out there are armchair psychologists and can offer up an explanation as to why this happens? Anyhow, after 3 weeks and 200 miles of hiking, it had become routine and I was bored and wanted to do something else. Plus, the thought of doing nothing but more hiking, everyday, for the next 5 months, felt like the prison term I mentioned above.

I told Rachel I wanted to quit. She was not amused. We’d been planning this hike for years! In her mind we couldn’t just quit after 3 weeks because I was bored. But I was relentless and kept hammering away on her. She finally acquiesced but only under the condition that we wouldn’t just “go home”. The whole purpose of this hike and taking 6 months off work was to spend time together. Going home to waste away the summer on the couch wasn’t an option. So we got off the trail at mile 210, just outside Palm Springs, and rented a car. We drove to LA to visit my friend who had gratuitously agreeded to post our re-supply packages to us along the trail, and collected all our stuff. I even bought deodorant…I hadn’t worn deodorant in 3 weeks….this was serious!

We didn’t really know what to do, so we started to drive towards the town of Big Bear, which is the next town we would have arrived at on the trail. Driving up there I began to feel sick: “What have I done?” I felt a loss, similar to when a pet dies. Maybe not a beloved pet like a dog, but more like a hamster. A good, solid, hamster; we’ll call him Harold. “Man, that hamster, Harold – he really tied the room together.”

With the death of Harold weighing heavily on my mind, we discussed our options. Maybe we could go visit a bunch of National Parks and see the Grand Canyon! My brain, being the pop-culture vending machine that it is, immediately cued up the Holiday Road theme song complete with the Griswolds and the station wagon, all on their way to Wally World.

Fuck that.

I’ve been to the Grand Canyon and it is amazing but it’s also INCREDIBLY crowded. Just getting a campsite can take months of planing and advance reservations. When we’re hiking and camping on the PCT we get twitchy if there’s another human within a halfmile of us. The Grand Canyon in the summer is like the Tokyo subway of National Parks; packed to capacity. I knew that wasn’t going to work.

What to do, what to do??

Inside, I knew the answer. I had to get back on the trail. The feeling of quitting, of giving up; the empty hole that was left behind was way worse than the feelings of monotony I’d had previously.

After a night in Big Bear we got back in the car and drove back to LA to visit REI (an outdoor equipment supplier) and both got new boots. It’s amazing what a couple hundred miles of hiking will do to your feet. We needed bigger and wider boots as my feet had expanded from a size 10.5 to an 11.5 ‘wide’ and Rachel was in the same boat. Plus, I had drank the kool-aid and walked the last 100 miles in running shoes, which is the trendy thing to do these days. Friends, if anyone tries to convince you that trail runners are the be-all and end-all when it comes to hiking, you tell them to come see me. Walking over baseball sized rocks, all day every day in what amounts to fancy tennis shoes is not a good idea. I don’t care what the pundits on the Internet say; my feet were killing me!

So now we’re fully kitted out. I’ve got my (now larger) Italian boots back complete with German Currex insoles, which are exceptionally hard to find in America. I’ve got a new hat to keep the ridiculous desert sun off my noggin and I’m rolling the dice on a new pair of German underpants. When you’re hiking with only 2 pairs to your name, underwear takes on a more prominent role. When it comes to your undercarriage, chafing and blisters are bad news. Choose your underwear wisely my friend.

Tomorrow we’ll head back to our friend’s place with our resupply boxes, return the rental car to Palm Springs and get back on the trail where we left off. I’m committed to silencing the voices in my head and to tackling the remaining 500 miles of desert which will deliver us to the Sierra Nevada mountains. Once in the Sierra’s, we’ll figure out what to do about the 14 foot deep snowpack they’ve got going on this year. In the meantime, I’m going to treat this like a whole series of small trips instead of the overwhelming enormity of the remaining 2450 miles we’ve yet to cover.

In closing, here is a picture of Rachel crushing it in the snow on Mt San Jacinto a couple days ago.

Going into this trip I was worried it was going to tear us apart but it’s done just the opposite. She is an incredibly strong woman, a certified bad ass, and I’m privileged to have her as my partner.

– Steve