PCT Day 96 to 112
August 3 to 20, 2021
Off trail for foot injuries and wildfire smoke inhalation
Start: Mammoth Lakes, CA
In betweenies: South Lake Tahoe & Sacramento, CA
Finish: Portland, OR
Shannon and I left the town of Mammoth Lakes, California early in the morning to catch a couple of buses to our buddy Brad’s place in the popular vacation town of South Lake Tahoe. Shannon hobbled down the street with me to the bus stop where we grabbed a bustling shuttle bus headed to Reno, Nevada. The bus was packed with people heading to the airport, local travelers and a few John Muir Trail hikers who’d completed their 200 mile adventure. 2.5 hours of public transportation later we were dropped off in the border town of Gardnerville, Nevada. Last week the major highway 395 finally reopened after being shut down for several weeks due to wildfires actively blowing over the interstate highway so this was the first week that the bus line was actively running as firefighters had declared the highway safe to drive down again.
In the Wild West town of Gardnerville we waited another 6 or 7 hours to catch the afternoon shuttle over the mountains to State Line, California right on, you guessed it, the state line of California and Nevada. After an absolutely psychotic bus driver whipped us around (and almost launched us off of) the mountainside cliffs, we arrived in the touristy part of the South Lake Tahoe basin. Shannon almost got us kicked off the death bus because he kept sliding into the handicapped emergency stop button as there were no seatbelts and the driver couldn’t stop Tokyo drifting. Shannon felt like he was going to puke on the bus as it went off the rumble strips and dallied with the edge of the road over a thousand foot drop. He pulled down his face mask for a brief time while he swallowed back puke and the bus driver yelled at him that he was going to kick him off. Oh brother.
Finally after a full day of travel, we arrived by Uber to Brad’s cabin. We spent a few days hanging out while Shannon recovered from feeling crappy by the bus ride up the mountain. I spent two days borrowing Brad’s truck to bring Shannon back to the Gardnerville urgent care center as he couldn’t seem to shake the fatigue, nausea and other symptoms from what he said was the death bus ride. The nurses at the urgent care looked at Shannon’s symptoms and seriously asked him if he was just being lazy – haha! I teased him that he was a bougie hiker who must have hated public transportation so much that it made him physically ill.
Anyways, by the time Shannon felt better a bunch of smoke from the enormous Dixie Fire northwest of us blew in and smothered the sky in a hazy blanket. We woke up one morning and the air quality was so bad that we couldn’t see the mountains, everything smelled like a campfire and the sun beat down in an unearthly orange red ball. Of course this is the day that we decided it would be a good idea to go paddle around the beautiful Echo Lake. We had so much fun stand up paddle boarding and kayaking across upper and lower Echo Lakes where residents could only access their cabins by boat as the area was too rugged for roads. 17-year-old Marley the dog rested in her doggy bed on the front of Brad’s SUP board and we had a blast paddling the calm lakes. The smoke smothered the views of the mountains but bathed the peaks in a beautiful muted light. After 4 or so hours of paddling, we were a little exhausted and rode back to Brad’s place. I hadn’t had an arm workout like that since before the PCT!
At Brad’s place we spent the next few days hanging out with his girlfriend Kat who was super sweet and played drinking games and ate lots of yummy food. The air quality got really bad, jumping up from a hazardous rating of 350 out of 500 while paddling to 700+ (!!!) overnight when Brad had to bring Marley out for a bathroom break. Going outside and breathing the smoke was so hazardous that it literally taking time off our lifespans. We’re all from the Midwest where we rarely have to deal with wildfires so we thought we’d be fine to go outside and paddle for a couple of hours. We soon found out that we were completely ignorant of the effects of wildfire smoke and had no idea how dangerous it was for our lungs. Both Kat and Brad admitted that they’d never seen smoke this bad in their time being in South Lake Tahoe which was a little alarming.
Brad, Kat, Shannon, Marley the dog and I drove a couple hours west to the state capital of California to the gold rush town of Sacramento. We were meeting up with our old neighbor and friends Spencer and his wife Angie who we hadn’t seen in several years. Despite the air quality being sooo much better in Sacramento, we played indoor mini golf to get out of the summer heat and ate tacos. It was so much fun to see old friends and we were so happy! Before they left to go back home for work the next day, Spencer and Angie also gave us some N95 face masks for all the wildfire smoke and in case we had to hike through areas of poor air quality. It was so thoughtful of them and clearly they’d learned a lot about wildfires living out here full time the past few years. They also brought with them some replacement hiking gear like a trekking pole section for Shannon to fix his broken pole and a hip belt pocket that had ripped and torn on my backpack.
After Spencer and Angie returned back to the San Francisco area, Kat took us to “Old Sac” or the historical western themed part of Sacramento where we spent the blistering hot day bar hopping and sipping on refreshing wine and cold beer. At one point we even got our palms “socially distanced” read from behind a glass divider which was the first time I’d ever done something like that. It was total bullshit but a hilarious lesson in some basic psychological tricks. Kat and Brad dropped us off later that evening at a hotel where we were going to stay for another day to figure out where we were going to hop up to on the trail. Kat had to work on the coast tomorrow morning so Brad who’d sobered up drove her over after saying goodbye to us. Just this afternoon our well laid plans to hop up to northern Cali were disrupted by another wildfire that had blown up overnight and was threatening to close down the PCT section that we had planned to start hiking north on this week. We needed another (sober) day to figure out logistics.
While I was trying to figure out where we were going to start hiking again, Shannon started to feel crappy again. Soon both of us were feeling the effects of wildfire smoke inhalation which we initially thought was the Covid delta variant as the symptoms were very similar. We both were vaccinated and had been wearing masks whenever we were in public but soon found out it wasn’t Covid. We spent almost two weeks in the hotel in Sacramento with coughs, fatigue, noisy breathing, headaches and sinus congestion. At some points we could barely get out of bed and were so thankful for delivery apps like GrubHub, DoorDash and InstaCart so delivery drivers could drop groceries, medicines and food at our hotel door. Brad had similar lung infection symptoms and after negative Covid tests we realized that it probably wasn’t the best idea to have gone exercising during the bad air quality days.
By the time we were recovered enough to get out of bed and not feel like we were going to pass out from the effort of walking to the bathroom, hundreds of more miles of the PCT were on fire. The places in northern Cali where we were going to shuttle up to were now closed, the residents evacuated and the area off limits to anyone but firefighters. Southern Oregon was ablaze too and all the way up to Bend in the middle of the state the air quality was in the hazardous range. At this point it looked not so good in terms of completing the entire PCT in one year since so much of the trail is on fire and might not be reopened for several years until the land stabilizes. Even in Sacramento the sky was smokey and gray from nearby wildfires that had just popped up over the last week and were out of control. With all of the trail closures and our lungs recovering from the effects of wildfire smoke inhalation, we needed to skip any section of trail with bad air quality so we could heal. It looks like we’ll be heading up to northern Oregon and continue our hike up from there, about 1000 miles north of Mammoth Lakes where we got off trail.
Shannon had been on an almost all vegetarian diet the past couple weeks and his gout symptoms were completely gone. Our energy had returned and we only gasped for breath a bit while hiking up the stairs with our backpacks on. We’d learned about how many homeless people lived in Sacramento by me traveling the bike path to pick up some supplies for us before the lung issues hit. In the 3 or 4 miles of walking on the city’s bike path I passed by no less than 300 or 400 homeless tents, vans or ramshackle huts. Families with baby carriages, young couples struggling to get by, sex workers, drug addicts and regular normal looking people populated the homeless tents. One lady who most likely was on drugs complimented my tanned legs and asked me if I used carrot juice to make them tan. Luckily with my dirty hiking clothes and ragged pack I blended into the homeless crowd so no one bothered me and my pepper spray and knife went unused. I couldn’t believe how many homeless people there were living in shambles next to the bike path where cyclists riding $5,000 or $10,000 bikes passed by on a regular basis. It was mind blowing the disparity between the “haves” and “have nots” in this city and seemed to be something so wrong with having so many homeless people everywhere. One of my Uber drivers used to be homeless and warned us not to go outside our hotel at night because of all of the sex workers and drug dealers roaming the streets. We were grateful for the hotel accommodations, air conditioning and security at the front desk while we recovered from smoke inhalation but we couldn’t wait to get back to the woods where life seemed to make more sense.
Finally we caught a 14 hour long bus ride on the Greyhound bus from Sacramento, California to Portland, Oregon. The joys of public transportation included a crackhead trying to bust into the bus station at 4:30am while getting cussed out by the station agents, having to yell at the lady in front of us to put on headphones to listen to her shitty Ed Sheehan music and pimple popping videos after us and the bus driver asking her to do so at least 5 times and the growing stench of the bathroom emanating into our nostrils as the long hours passed as 50+ passengers made use of the facilities.
Getting off in downtown Portland was not much better as we hiked nervously through tent cities that were so large you couldn’t use the sidewalks and had to dodge cars in the streets. We stayed a day in Portland to grab some hiking gear and explore the town before catching several trains and buses to the Pacific Crest Trail near Mount Hood. I thought Portland would be a cool place to visit but in a state where every drug from crack to heroin to weed is legalized and the homeless people have no incentive to come off the streets, it was a real shitshow. Even walking around in the fancy Pearl District downtown it was a gritty experience dodging shit stained rags, piss covered streets, needles and clusters of homeless people begging for food while updating their Instagram statuses on their $1000 iPhones. It was effed and we made sure we were off the streets by nightfall. After injuries, smoke inhalation, dodging wildfires and the joys of public transportation we couldn’t wait to get back to the woods where life seemed to make more sense.
