10/18/19

I sleep for eight pure hours, curled in a ball against the cold under the bright moon, and when I wake I feel like I’ve won the lottery. It’s dark and I can just make out the forms of the others, sitting up in their sleeping bags, rustling around. We’re quiet. It’s quiet. The earth is quiet. The earth’s inherent nature is quiet! This kind of quiet is a strong hammock that holds me. My adrenals rest. My poor little exhausted organs rest. My heart rests.

I tear open a packet of starbucks via and empty it into my grimy water bottle. I shiver through this cold coffee and my cold granola in protein powder “milk”. After eating I sit on my numb hands to warm them again. The faintest hint of dawn is paling the sky beyond the Joshua trees. I look at the diet coke from yesterday’s cache. I don’t want it. Plants does, though. I give it to him and he chugs it.

We start hiking in all our layers. The road is flat and winds on forever. The backdrop of night lifts, the world slowly lightens. I have service so I call Muffy and we talk on the phone for a long time. It’s good to hear her voice! The road forks and our route heads up, into the Inyos. We sit in the dirt and eat gummies, fortifying. Then, we climb.

Five thousand feet of climbing later we are winded, roasted from the sun, high amongst the bristlecone pines, on the ridge of the Inyos looking across the Owens valley at the high sierra and Tumanguya/Mt Whitney, one in a set of jagged granite teeth. We don’t have permits to summit Tumanguya. This year the permits are only reservable online, in advance- there are no walk up permits- and all of them are reserved, and seemingly have been for a long time. For weeks before starting this hike we were all refreshing the permit page whenever we thought of it, hoping that permits would appear. But they never did, and so we’ve been talking of alternates- summit a different 14er? End our hike in Lone Pine? I’ve been to the summit of Tumanguya 3 times before, I don’t feel attached. And those 99 switchbacks full of hikers are so different in character than the rest of this wild, remote route. Still though, it is really special up there. It would be nice if we could go.

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The caretaker of Cerro Gordo, the ghost town on the ridge of the Inyos, is telling us about his guns. He’s got five of him, he says. To keep teenagers from stealing his artifacts. I ask after the chihuahua I met here the last time I hiked this route, in 2014.

“Oh you mean Harley? He’s in town, with my wife. She hurt her back, can’t live up here no more. How old do you think I am?”

We stare at him blankly.

“I’m eight years to eighty, that’s how old. Stayin active, that’s the thing.” He hooks his thumbs into the beltloops of his jeans. He’s wearing a wool plaid vest and his face is ruddy from the sun. “I best get back to chopping wood, let you all get on. Sun’s getting low. It’s gonna be cold tonight!”

The sun is indeed getting low. We pour the gallons that Robert shared with us into our empty bottles, grateful. When we first got here we couldn’t find him, and we spent a long time wandering around the makeshift antique store, looking at the wooden boards to which he’s mounted shotgun shells and antique spoons, the massive rings of keys he’s collected. The old bottles and postcards. We’d wandered the ancient hotel that definitely was once a brothel. Light gathered on the lace curtains, fell in patterns across the table on which a poker game was set.

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My pack feels heavy as shit, it’s cold, and this jeep road is still climbing. Presently the jeep road turns to a faint track that takes us to more mining ruins and then peters out, and we cross steep slopes of scree. More jeep road that seems to climb infinitely, or maybe I’m just tired. The forecasted low for tonight is in the twenties. If we walk 23 miles we’ll make it to the old cabin at the abandoned salt tram. We can sleep in there, out of the wind. Maybe we’ll be a little warmer. I pull out my headlamp and flick it on. Out in the blackness of space are tiny lights. Cars down on hwy 395, in another world.

The salt tram cabin is a little shack surrounded by pines, perched on the edge of a hill. A door creaks inward to four connected rooms, with narrow loose floorboards that shift under your feet. The corners of the rooms are crowded with mouse droppings but there’s windowglass in the windowpanes and these walls will protect us from the wind. We eat dinner on the deck, as a gesture towards mouse prevention. Pilar is the only one with a stove, and she heats everyone water for tea. We line up our bedrolls in the big front room, close together to keep away from the mouse poop. I saw the top off one of my empty gallons to make a pee jar, so I don’t have to go outside in the middle of the night. We close the door, shutting out the wide variable world. My neo air feels like heaven.

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