My adventure on the Pacific Crest Trail

Part 1

Hubris: excessive confidence. Foolish pride.

Hubris is the bane of wilderness explorers; and particularly, a pitfall my son Caleb and I seem to fall into when we go on adventures together. We create our own foolhardy dynamic: he wants to show off a bit, and I want to be game for anything he proposes.

Thus, we’ve been lost hiking on San Juan Island (documented in Open Road) semi-lost while ocean kayaking (and then later had the kayaks fall off the car), and he’s had to push me from behind while rappelling up a cliff above the ocean above San Diego (not pleasant for either of us.)

Making a trip to visit our son at his house in Lake Arrowhead, California, I told Caleb how hard it had been to say goodbye and turn back when we dropped him off on the Pacific Crest Trail near Yosemite as part of our road trip. I had watched him hike off into the distance without me, carrying his world on his back, and I had been hankering to try that myself ever since.

“I’ve got an idea,” Caleb said. “I’ll take you to one of my favorite spots on the Pacific Crest Trail, which runs past my house on the other side of this mountain. You’ll like Deep Creek Hot Springs. It’s only five miles each way to get there, and you can get a taste of it what it’s like to do an overnight backpacking trip on the PCT.”

“Yes!” I was thrilled, though a tad apprehensive. That amount of distance is negligible for real hikers, but I’m not a real hiker.

I had also been recovering from Long Covid symptoms after a bout with the virus in December, and my energy level and fitness were at an all-time low. Still, after a few days of relaxing at his home in the San Bernardino Mountains and taking minor hikes around Lake Arrowhead and its surrounding area, I was confident that I could pull off a mere five miles each way.