Loopy came to the trail from a podium. We came from office chairs.
He was a former professional cyclist and triathlete who had raced for the US national team and won Ironmans.
Most of us had little to no thru-hiking experience. Loopy had finished the PCT four times, and this was his fifth. The Continental Divide Trail, the Appalachian Trail, and a bunch of other long trails were on his résumé too.
Loopy’s favourite line came from Cool Runnings: “a bad ass mofo who don’t uh take uh no crap off of nobody.” It was his highest praise for anybody who impressed him. He never needed to say it about himself.
But we did.
So when Loopy told stories about the trail, we listened.
And as we approached Mission Creek, he had one for this section too.
He told us about a woman who had gotten into serious trouble there on a previous PCT attempt. She needed to be rescued, and, according to Loopy, the whole thing was captured on live television.
The rescuer apparently called her a “Code W” – short for Code Wimp.
She left the trail.
Then, somehow, she came back.
And when she returned, she had a new trail name.
Cliff Hanger.
We laughed.
Then we looked at the section ahead.
There was no trail.
We were standing at the beginning of what looked like an entire section of the PCT that had simply been erased.
Years of floods had carved through the landscape. What remained was a mess of loose rock, steep bluffs, dead ends, and the occasional suggestion that a trail might once have existed there.
Sometimes we thought we had found it.
We would scramble up a slope, squeeze between rocks, and convince ourselves we were back on the PCT.
Then, twenty minutes later, we would hit a dead end.
Back we went.
Sometimes two or three miles.
Then we would try another route.
It was carnage.
People fell. Trekking poles broke. Shoes tore. Ankles twisted.
Every step required concentration. You had to look at the rock in front of you, figure out where your foot was going, then immediately start thinking about the next one.
It felt like a video game.
Except in this game, you couldn’t just respawn.
We had heard that Mission Creek had a lot of rescues, and that a lot of people quit here. It wasn’t difficult to understand why.
We stayed together. I was already Code. I didn’t need a W.
When someone got stuck, someone else helped. When someone got frustrated, the rest of us waited. When the route disappeared again, we figured it out together.
We made it, everyone in one piece, some of us less enthusiastic than others.
Nobody went ahead alone. Nobody was left behind. That felt more important than the miles.
Most people seemed to either love this section or absolutely hate it. I was firmly in the first camp. But only because this section lasted two days. Any longer and I would have hated it too.
Conquering Mission Creek gave us the confidence boost we needed. Miles had lost their meaning, and so had the days of the week.
We were thru-hikers now.
Even setting up a tent every night felt like an unnecessary project. If we found a reasonably flat patch of ground, we put down our ground sheets, pulled out our sleeping bags, and went to sleep under the stars.
Despite the heat, rattlesnakes, long days, dry stretches, and ridiculous misfortunes, we were still very good at finding ways to have fun. Something about the trail had made us kids again.
In the town of Big Bear, Poppins, Count Andy and I shared a room in a hostel.
We chased each other around the halls, screaming and laughing like a bunch of juveniles.
Count Andy had a little USB device that plugged into his iPhone and used heat to stop the itching from mosquito bites.
Naturally, this meant we had to chase Poppins down and use it on his arm.
It was one of those moments that would have been completely ridiculous anywhere else.
But out here, it was the funniest thing in the world.
Perhaps we were just too good at finding ways to have fun.
It was becoming a problem.
We were forgetting about the goal.
Our mileage had fallen below what we needed.
So we kicked it up a notch. Well, more than a notch.
We doubled our daily mileage.
Most of us managed to keep up.
Unfortunately, it proved to be too much for Zapper.
He developed a few overuse injuries and had to leave the trail to recover.
That was the price of catching up.
We said goodbye the way hikers do: promises to meet up down the trail, and the quiet understanding that those promises were easier to make than to keep.
We had already seen what happened when someone left. RP was only a few days behind us, but it had been more than a month since we had seen him.
We knew how quickly the trail could create distance between people. There was a real possibility this was the last time we’d see Zapper.
And then we kept walking.
Nobody said much for the next few miles.
Back around Mission Creek, we had begun leapfrogging two hikers from Switzerland: Ladina and Angelina.
They had known each other since university and started the trail together. Both were teachers and mountain bikers.
I knew immediately that they would make excellent additions to the group.
Joining the tramily wasn’t as simple as hiking with us.
There was an initiation process.
There were sacred vows.
And there was one requirement.
They had to learn the opening high-pitched scream of Immigrant Song by Led Zeppelin.
It was the sacred song of the tramily.
Wrightwood was another reminder that the trail could change completely in minutes.
On the climb toward town, it was sunny and bright.
Twenty minutes later, we were in a snowstorm.
We hiked through it for hours.
We found ourselves standing beside a desolate highway, wet, freezing, and scared, trying to hitch into town.
Ladina and Angelina were ahead of us.
They were picked up by a couple who took them into Wrightwood.
And then, when they heard from Ladina and Angelina that there were more of us stuck in the storm, they took the rest of us in too.
They let us make their home ours for the night.
We showered.
We ate.
Then we sat around their wood-burning stove and talked.
A whole bunch of hikers ended up sleeping in their living room.
They weren’t established trail angels. They weren’t running a hostel or waiting for hikers.
They were simply a kind couple who saw a bunch of cold and wet hikers and decided to help.
People say the trail provides.
Sometimes it doesn’t provide water or food or a campsite.
Sometimes it provides a warm house when you’re cold, and a stranger who treats you like family for the night.
We stayed in Wrightwood another night waiting for the storm on the trail to pass.
As we walked around the town, gathering our resupply and doing the typical town chores, Poppins casually announced that Wrightwood looked like the kind of place where E.T. might have been filmed.
It sounded like one of those completely random Poppins observations that you nod at and forget five seconds later.
Then someone checked.
He was right.
Wrightwood really had been a filming location.
Poppins had somehow done it again.
Ladina and Angelina invited us to their Airbnb for dinner and a night of games.
They prepared Swiss dishes for us. The way to a hiking tramily’s heart is through its stomach. And the Älplermagronen did the trick.
So that was that. Ladina and Angelina had completed their initiation.
Our ranks had grown by two.
They also earned a name of their own: the Swiss Missus, like the chocolate drink.
Soon, echoes of the Immigrant Song could be heard bouncing through the valleys of Southern California.
We were becoming a problem.
Some people called us the Cult.
Others called us the Bubble.
It stuck.
We had our own vocabulary, our own music, our own rituals.
Some of that vocabulary was German.
Ladina also became my German teacher – Frau Fischer. She maintains that I was a good student. If you are reading Ladina, can you leave a comment and let me know if you still think so?
Having always heard from my other teachers that I was disruptive to the good students in the class, I am skeptical.
Ladina, on the other hand, was a good teacher.
Increasingly, the tramily had its own gravitational pull.
We’d arrive at a café and occupy half the tables.
We’d walk into a restaurant and suddenly there were a dozen dirty hikers ordering food.
We’d enter a grocery store and start filling baskets like we were preparing for a siege.
Towns would see us coming.
Grocery stores would feel us leaving.
And once you were in, you were in.
As in Hotel California, leaving was more complicated than joining.
We kept growing.
At some point we added two more: Cryptic and Scratching Post.
Cryptic earned her name by giving very little away when she spoke.
Scratching Post fell so often that her legs started to look like a cat’s scratching post.
There were also occasional guests who drifted in and out.
By Tehachapi, we even had our own uniform.
We stayed at the home of Barbara and her late husband, who had hosted PCT hikers for years.
When I first reached the house, Barbara was out riding the lawn mower, immaculately dressed.
She was old, but she did every chore herself. Sharp as a tack, and funny.
While we were there, the Swiss Missus decided to paint all of our fingernails pink. It was the only colour they had.
Now the entire group was recognizable from a mile away.
Grizzly Gramps, a trail angel who followed the trail by car to support hikers, gave us a new name.
The Nail Polish Gang.
Zapper was still recovering, but he wasn’t quite finished with us yet.
At Walker Pass, he drove all the way from home to give us trail magic. He even picked up RP, who was taking a couple of days off in the last town.
There was something comforting about seeing Zapper and RP again.
We weren’t hiking together anymore, but for a little while at least, they were still part of us.
We were looking for a place to stay at Ridgecrest, and we managed to score a secret trail angel.
The couple used to host a lot of hikers, but over the years life got busy for them and they stopped.
Every once in a while, however, they decided to take hikers in.
The wife had a hobby farm in the middle of the desert. I won’t disclose her name here. We have to protect their secret trail angel status.
Sheep.
Highland cows.
Maine Coons.
Emus.
Peacocks.
Desert tortoises.
Dogs, cats, chickens, rabbits, geese, alpacas.
It was heaven in the desert.
The husband was an incredible storyteller. We sat around listening to his stories until two or three in the morning.
Their grandchildren came over too. We sat and watched the younger ones play, and then fight.
The little boy flipped off Cryptic for fun, and his mom caught him in the act.
He got a whooping on the spot.
The oldest kid was remarkably mature. We talked about her passion for starting a business selling jewellery online.
For two nights, we weren’t hikers.
We weren’t counting protein bars or calculating water or thinking about resupply.
We were just people in a home in the desert, listening to stories.
The trail had a funny way of doing that. It would make you work hard for something as simple as a place to sleep. And then, every once in a while, it would give you something far more than you expected.
The landscape changed a little each day, and the desert began to feel like it was behind us.
We were getting closer to Kennedy Meadows.
Closer to the Sierra.
Closer to the point that I had imagined for years.
And then we arrived.
Kennedy Meadows.
There were seven of us.
We walked in together, hands interlocked.
People were cheering.
There were claps and bells.
It felt like a celebration we had somehow earned without realizing we were earning it.
I had seen this moment before, in Wild and in videos of hikers arriving at Kennedy Meadows.
For years, it had existed somewhere between a dream and a scene from someone else’s life.
Now I was standing in it.
Except this time, it wasn’t a movie.
It wasn’t YouTube.
It was us.
We had started as a handful of strangers.
People had joined, and people had left. The Bubble had grown, shrunk, split, and grown again.
But through all of it, we had made it here together.
A bunch of people from different countries, different careers, different lives, who had met on a trail and decided to keep walking together.
I had come out here to see what difficulty would do to me. I hadn’t expected it to give me this.
With a great bunch of people.
And painted nails.