It was 105 in the shade at my brother's house near East Los Angeles. Smoke from a foothills fire browned the sky while rolling blackouts swept through the city, defeating the air conditioning, closing restaurants, leaving us to swelter without benefit of even a fan. Darkened traffic lights made the already horrible traffic impossible.

We left LA at dawn, escaping north on US395, heading to the southern terminus of the Sierra Nevada at Walker Pass. We had taken this road forty years ago nearly to the day. Then we were two teenage hiking punks not long out of high school, ditching our menial jobs for the grand adventure of walking the high Sierra from Lake Isabella to Lake Tahoe. We would follow the nascent Pacific Crest Trail, not yet a trail but instead an imprecise route cobbled together from logging roads, cattle driveways and a few stretches of single-track trail. We ordered topo maps from the U.S. Geological Survey, plotted our route, devised a resupply plan and spent our meager savings on gear and food.

A Section Hike of the Pacific Crest Trail Begins

Our dad and uncle dropped us off at the base of a cattle driveway near Weldon, wished us luck and roared off in the uncle’s ’67 Mustang. Dave and I turned and scrambled up the steep eroded slope for miles, dodged an angry bull and topped out, our water long vanished, on a rolling wooded plateau mercifully bisected by a cool slithering stream. We camped and refreshed ourselves, but I had torn a cartilage in my knee during the scramble. I limped north, hobbling the best I could but was finally done in by an afternoon of postholing down Forester Pass and had to bail out. Surgery followed and then life – first college, then graduate school, marriage, kids, jobs, startups. All were good, all were adventures of their own kind. None were compatible with disappearing for weeks or months on the trail. I became strictly a weekend backpacker.

But life has a way of returning to certain themes. Mobility was prized in the mid-20th century much as connectivity is prized today. People no more wanted to be stationary then than they want to be off-line now. I am a child of that road trip culture, imprinted with the desire to keep moving. Whatever else I was – husband, father, scientist – I would always be a walker.

The kids grew up, my wife invented a second career, some ventures succeeded and others failed. I was becoming more...not quite dispensable, but certainly not as needed. I began doing week-long sections of the Colorado Trail, then spent six weeks over two springs hiking north from Mexico on the now-grown-up PCT, stopping in May of 2014 at mile 652 – Walker Pass, gateway to the Sierra. I was ready to complete and extend the journey that my brother and I had begun decades ago, planning to walk not just to Lake Tahoe but to Mt. Lassen, the southern terminus of the Cascades.

Dave drove me to the trailhead but could come no farther. We embraced, and he faced south to return home and to minister to his church and congregation. I faced north to wander in the wilderness, not to minister but perhaps to find sanctuary and haven. A heavy dome of hot dry air arched over California and the temperature was soon in the 90s. I hiked station to station between those trees still living, stopping to cool off in their narrow shade, wiping the sweat from my face before walking on. California is dying, I thought. The signs were everywhere — the desiccated springs, the withered sage, the digger pines on the south-facing slopes baking brown in a pitiless sun.

An outcrop of Sierra granite appeared, dazzling and white in the desert sun, a promise of cool mountains to come. And on the north-facing slopes, in shady gullies, I found lupines and paintbrushes, signs that spring was not quite dead and vanished from California. Life was hanging on, even if confined to refuges no larger than a broken-down backcountry corral. There is hope yet for a resurrection.

I walked on, making my camps where I could, past the dried-up Joshua Tree Spring; near Chimney Creek; then along the South Fork of the Kern River, whose green sluggish waters provided a cooling swim. The ridge above Rockhouse Basin afforded the first views of Mount Whitney, highest peak in the 48 contiguous states, riding serene and blue on the horizon. Though I was hiking through yet another hot and shadeless burn zone, I felt a bit cooler just seeing it in the distance.

The trail out of Kennedy Meadows rose steadily upward through the sand and rocks, passing Chicken Spring Lake and then opening into the green valley of Rock Creek. There I paused and broke out my Tenkara rod to spend a late morning fishing, gratified to find an abundant and eager population of Golden Trout. Goldens are the state fish of California, native to the upper tributaries of the Kern River. They are not large and are not fierce fighters, but each is a bolt of sun and forest, a wonder of color and form. They are the most beautiful fish in the world, each one a small deity, an exemplar of perfection that never ceases to astonish.

I moved on to Crabtree Meadows, joining the small army of hikers camped as close to Mt. Whitney as our PCT permits would allow. A late afternoon thunderstorm lashed the campground with unfettered violence. Torrential rain alternated with hail. Everyone turned in early, hoping for better climbing weather in the morning.

I woke at 3a.m. to cloudy skies and began the hike to the summit, passing Guitar Lake at dawn as the clouds began to break. The weather held and I joined the crew of midnight hikers already there enjoying both the sublime view and the opportunity to communicate with the world below. On the hike back I fell in with Woodpecker, a tall and engaging young Frenchman who had earned his trail name by repeatedly walking into overhanging branches. Hiking the PCT made him the sensible one in his family: his father was sailing solo around the world and his mother was trekking the Sahara.

I was now at the southern terminus of the John Muir Trail, which I had first encountered hiking from Reds Meadows to Yosemite Valley in the summer of 1968 with a scruffy group of Boy Scouts. We hauled improbably large canvas packs whose straps cut cruelly into our scrawny shoulders. We carried hatchets, slept in tube tents and filtered no water. We suffered and complained but kept walking, recovering the native wildness of boys in a landscape where few (we imagined) had been before. Even at that age I felt at home here, a sense of ease and belonging that comes only in wild places. I always knew I would return, but never imagined how long and how far I would travel before coming home to these mountains.

The trail now entered the great rolling waves of rock that are the heart of the High Sierra. Every day there would be a pass: Forester, Glen, Pinchot, Mather, Muir, Selden, Silver and Donohue, the trail a rushing current that washes at last on to the gentle Lyell Fork of the Tuolumne River. The geography here resembles a series of trees laid sideways with their trunks pointed west to the Central Valley. Each day’s hike would start on the north branch of a river basin, ascend its heading pass, and descend down the south branch of the next river: the South, Middle and North Forks of the Kings, the South, Middle and North Forks of the San Joaquin.

I butt-glissaded my way down Forester Pass and into Kings Canyon National Park and entered the realm of rock and sky. The atmosphere held a light touch of haze, enough to soften the spires and pinnacles stretching north, exaggerating distance and turning rock walls into veils. I stopped to chat with Robocop, he making the commonplace observation of how this land of beauty was so much better than the real world. But, I replied, this is the real world. It is the world of jobs and schedules and rules that is false.

The Sierra heartland creates its own reality. The mountains of Colorado are higher but less rugged. One rarely goes a whole day on the Colorado Trail or the Continental Divide Trail without crossing a road. And roads lead to settlements and cities and civilization. When you cross a road, no matter how rarely traveled, you leave the wild and enter the world that is bounded and divided, where the land and time itself are broken apart and apportioned according to someone's notion of propriety and profit.

But between Kennedy Meadows and Tuolumne Meadows, a stretch of 240 miles, there are no roads. This section of trail is an island of wildness, a land unto itself, complete and whole and indifferent. And the wholeness of the land soon becomes a wholeness of spirit, each step upon the trail an offering, a wordless chant that fills us and brings us back to ourselves, our true indivisible selves: it is here that we receive the gift of empty spaces.

Traveling the passes between the two roads the hiker pushes up a wave of pitched rock and then skids down again. On the crests, the space ahead is an inverted basilica, a deep nave of clean rock converging on an apex of forest and river far below, the smooth granite gouged out in clerestory lakes that hold the condensed hues of a thousand skies. Unlike the great medieval cathedrals, where light is subdued and excluded, the Sierra rock is all light, and shadows find purchase only in the deepest cracks and fissures. The palette is elemental: rock the color of a gibbous moon at midnight, sky and water a blue uncomplicated by any overtones of earth. It is not just civilization that is absent here, it is the muck and squish of life itself.

The hikes down to the valley floors complete the cycle of inversion, transforming the negative space to positive: smooth blue skies replaced by wet bumpy streams, scoured towers softened by a foreground of meadow and forest. The exposure of peaks is exchanged for the enclosure of forests and a reunion with the living things of earth.

Every day this cycle is repeated, a climb into sky and rock then a descent to river and wood, a rhythm that makes its own time. Soon enough it seems that one has always been in this land between the roads, will always be in this land.

Passing Devil’s Postpile, I stepped back into a different kind of time. I was now retracing the steps of my eleven year old self, a lost uncertain creature who struggled to find place and identity in the world, and found both in the mountains. I was carrying a laminated picture of our scoutmaster Mr. Bradley who led the ragged pack. He died some years ago and I intended to honor his memory. It was he who proposed that our troop go backpacking every month, that we spend a week in the Sierra hiking the JMT. Mr. Bradley had then recently retired from the Marine Corps.

He was a drill instructor, accustomed to turning boys not much older than us into men who would be sent to war. He held us to high and exacting standards, and when we failed and were weak he cussed us hard with the practiced skill of a professional, leaving no doubt as to what low and miserable specimens of manhood we were. We cringed but were secretly glad, thrilled to be noticed and cared about. It gave us hope that we were not completely beyond redemption. I had no camera in 1968 and so no memories other than those I carried in my head. I was curious to see what remembrances might be triggered as I walked this trail again.

To my surprise, I felt nothing. No spark of memory, no flood of associations. No recollections of old comrades, of shared sufferings and triumphs. The mountains and valleys were beautiful but they were empty. There were no ghosts in these woods, not for me anyway. Forty-eight years is a long time, long enough that all traces of that boy have now vanished.

One memory that did persist was the annoyance of mosquitoes near Rush Creek, a mob of bugs that persecuted me to the top of Donohue Pass. There I stopped and climbed the flanking ridge to a spot commanding a fine view of Lyell Canyon. Mr. Bradley did much for me, giving an example of honor and decency, and it was a privilege to remember him in this place.

The trail finally touched road at Tuolumne Meadows, a frantic scramble of disheveled cars and worn buildings. I had become accustomed to the slow, silent, almost imperceptible conversation of rock and forest and river and found the hustle of motorized nature appreciation to be jarring and unbearable. I was glad to leave and head into the north Yosemite country, one of the largest roadless areas in the lower 48. This land is a series of long steep granite ridges, two and three thousand feet from valley to crown, smooth sculpted loaves of rock running northeast to southwest. The trail here heads northwest, cutting against the grain, threading its way through the maze of ridges. It goes along a valley until a flaw in the granite wall is reached, then straight up the flaw to the ridge, along the ridge until it discovers another flaw, then straight down to the valley floor to repeat the cycle again.

Every hiker has been asked why we hike – why we drag a heavy pack up steep hills under a hot sun or through the cold rain, why we sleep on hard and lumpy ground and eat terrible food, why we endure blisters and bugs and dirt – and why we keep doing it over and over again. Most of us come up with some vague and plausible-sounding explanation: “It’s the challenge…the beauty…the sense of freedom…to find myself.” None of these explanations are lies, exactly, but they are not wholly true either. It’s the uncertainty, the suspense.

And so it is with hikers. Every bend in the trail, every mountain we climb could be the one, could be the jackpot. Most of the time, what is beyond a bend in the trail is...just another bend. But every so often, we do hit a jackpot: there is a meadow filled with flowers, a moose and her calf grazing in a willow thicket, a sparkling waterfall, a forever view of mountains beyond mountains. Jackpot. We got our fix. And then it’s time to see what’s around the next bend. It could be even better. Time to keep hiking.

After a last steep climb up to Wilma Lake the trail turned north and east to follow the spacious valley of Jack Main Canyon, topping out at beautiful Dorothy Lake and exiting Yosemite just beyond. The geology changed from close granite walls to open mountains of shale and basalt. Along the Colorado Trail, the trail itself is usually good but the weather is often bad. Here in the Sierra the weather is usually good, but the trail is often bad, or at least rough. This section had good trail to match the weather: rather than twisty boles of granite or high-slabbed steps, the trail was a smooth gravelly grade rising up to the top of Leavitt Ridge on its way to Sonora Pass.

The ridge walk – my favorite kind of walking – afforded fine views of this transition zone of the Sierra: the turbulent snow-capped granite of Yosemite to the south, the desert mountains of Nevada to the east, the forested drainages of the Mokelumne and Stanislaus to the west, and the subdued melange of igneous and granite peaks to the north. Although I loved the granite cathedrals of Kings Canyon and Yosemite, I had also felt overawed by them, humbled and constrained. Here I was at home, neither a guest nor a worshipper, just a traveler upon the land. I belonged in these mountains, on this trail, among these fellow hikers. I was a wayfarer but not a stranger. I strode along feeling a happiness that was as simple and pure as it was complete.

A Long Walk Out & PCT Reflections

I woke up on another fine morning in my cowboy camp near the headwaters of the Truckee, ready to head down to South Lake Tahoe for a resupply and a zero. I got up to retrieve my Ursack food bag and immediately collapsed, my leg numb and useless under me. With the aid of my hiking poles I was able to get around to pack up my camp and hobble the ten or twelve miles down to the highway and hitch into town. I hoped that a couple days of rest would put me right, and spent days at the hostel icing my knee between trips to the casino buffets. But the injury was to my back, and herniated discs don’t heal quickly. Gradually it became clear to me: I wasn’t going to make it to Mt. Lassen. I had never contemplated this outcome. Instead, I was now off the trail, done hiking, through. The realization brought grief and despair. Or maybe I was just being deprived of my fix.

Eventually gratitude replaced grief. I did not make it to Lassen, but did go as far as Tahoe. That nineteen year old punk had done what he set out to do. An old man fulfilled the dreams of a young man, a privilege granted to few. I had not gone as far as I wanted, but had gone farther than most. And I still want to see what is around that next bend.

Need to Know

Information

Start with the Pacific Crest Trail Association’s website. If you are hiking more than 500 miles you can get a permit from the PCTA that is good in all jurisdictions. Otherwise you will have to apply for permits as needed for each national park and wilderness.

Best Time to Go

For the Sierra many use the Kennedy Meadows Day calculation: Take the snow depth at Bighorn Plateau on April 1, divide by 3.5 and add to June 1. For example, if there are 60 inches of snow, then I would leave Kennedy Meadows no sooner than 60/3.5 = 17 days after June 1. This is the day you can head north from Kennedy Meadows (mile 702) with less risk of getting snowbound, however each year is different.

Getting There

From Los Angeles, drive 100 miles N on CA-14, then 50 miles west on CA-178. If flying into LAX, take the LAX2US shuttle bus to Union Station, then the Antelope Valley train to Lancaster. From there take the Kern Transit bus to Inyokern. I highly recommend the Mellow Mountain Hostel if you are staying in town. Several private bus lines run shuttles from SLT to the Reno airport.

Maps and Books

The National Geographic Trails Illustrated Pacific Crest Trail Map Pack covers the trail, and maps for individual sections of the trail are also available. Many books covering the PCT can also be found.

Editor's Note: This article by Drew "HappyHour" Smith originally appeared in Issue 32 of TrailGroove Magazine. You can read the original article here for additional photos and content.