The John Muir Trail is a 215 mile stretch of trail that takes one from Yosemite to Mount Whitney. This means you will walk through Yosemite, Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. Add in the Ansel Adams Wilderness and end at the highest peak in the continental United States and you have the John Muir Trail.
I have distinct memories of things that my mom probably doesn’t want me to remember or for me to share, but they are stuck in my head and I’m glad they are there. They remind me of where I’ve been and why I might be searching, why I might want to go somewhere else. They are the moments I lived without thinking. When my parents didn’t know what to do with me. When I would fall asleep in places that I wasn’t supposed to be. When freedom was considered a destination, because I didn’t really understand it.
She once said to me, “I give up.” But after that, when it was obvious that it wasn’t so much that she was giving up, but rather she was allowing me to be responsible for my own actions. She said, “I hope you find what you are searching for.” I never felt like I was looking for anything, I was just angry and didn’t understand why the world didn’t make any sense. I guess that’s what I get for spending too much time in a dingy basement thinking.
I fell in love with the wilderness because it offered me a place to be. The first time (as far as I know) that I entered a wilderness area was on my first backpacking trip to the top of Pine Valley Mountain. We were doing an overnighter. I quickly recognized a feeling that I had felt many times before, the ability to be alone. When one is alone there is nothing to keep you from doing whatever the hell you want. On that overnighter, I realized that all I had to do was walk for 10 minutes away from the group and there was nothing but me, the trees and air. It was one of the most liberating experiences of my life. I learned there were places that I could go that were free.
The ability to do what you want has two faces to it. Your desire to do what you want and how that action will effect others. When you are alone, the only person you have to worry about is you. Surround yourself with a million other people and pretty soon you can’t walk your dog on the beach.
Speaking of beaches and vacations, when I think of a vacation, I envision people sitting around on a sidewalk café drinking lattes and discussing the afternoon’s planned activities of golfing, walking the beach and drinking cold margaritas. Last time I took a vacation was to Portland a couple years back to visit my sister-in-law. And that’s pretty much what we did. We wandered around, drank beer and watched this dude do beat box.
It was pretty awesome and thoughts of moving into a permanent vacation were shared while we were there.
As I mentioned that was a few years ago.
I don’t tend to look forward to “vacations” much. If I want a vacation, I pop a cold one and sit on my front porch. Come to think of it, I do that a lot. No, if I’m going to make the effort to go somewhere I want to learn, feel, suffer and be in that place. I want an adventure, something I can write home about and have my Mom be proud that I found a little piece of that for which I was searching.
Read this, http://semi-rad.com/2013/01/your-best-vacation-is-someones-worst-nightmare/.
Last summer as KB, Shelby, Ben and I were slowly making our way through Yosemite, we ran into this guy just as we were coming up or down, I don’t remember, a pass. He stopped and chatted us up. He was finishing the John Muir Trail. This was what he hoped to be his last day and he would make it to where we had started 3 days earlier. He looked fresh, clean and definitely not an amateur like us. 11 days to hike the entire JMT. That sounded like something I could muster.
KB about shit her pants when I told her that I wanted to thru-hike the thing. Ever since reading Wild, she hasn’t stopped talking about the Pacific Crest Trail and thru hiking even if that meant doing it in week sections for the next thirty years. And I was stoked when the boss man said, “I’m sure we can work something out.”
My next “vacation” will be thru-hiking the John Muir Trail. We will be starting in Yosemite and make the 215 miles trip in more or less 30 days.
It might not be exactly what I am searching for, but it’s really damn close. The only problem is I can’t bring my dogs.
It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
P. L. and R.
