Girl in the Woods by Aspen Matis

Author:Aspen Matis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-08-03T16:00:00+00:00

MAY 31, KENNEDY MEADOWS, THE GATEWAY TO THE HIGH SIERRA, MILE 702

We had at last reached the northern edge of the desert. Kennedy Meadows was the last resupply stop before the High Sierra, a clump of wood buildings on dry hills of sand and pine, desolate. The air smelled cold, of snow. The High Sierra would be more beautiful than anything we’d yet walked through, with white lakes glimmering in granite, cold and wild. We were at the gateway to John Muir’s Sierras, the Range of Light “like the wall of some celestial city.” I had expected the mood of the place to be festive, but the hikers here seemed solemn. Thin, bearded men crouched on the general store’s porch, huddled in circles. They smoothed out their fresh maps.

We went inside to pick up our resupply boxes. He had one, from Anaheim, Texas, sent from his high school host mother, who still told him she loved him, and was logistically supporting his whole hike. I had three, all from my mom. Out on the porch we began to organize our things. It was crowded, everyone packing their fresh sausage and crackers, their guidebooks for navigating 150 miles of signless snow.

The dozen or so hikers with us here were new to me. We were now at the front of the thru-hiker pack, among the very fittest and fastest.

Icecap and I spoke softly about the upcoming miles, thrilled and scared as if we were embarking on an older kind of Great American Expedition. I felt like a pioneer. I overheard two older thru-hikers discuss in quiet voices the snow levels in the mountains to the north.

The High Sierra snow is deepest each year in mid-April—right when we all set out at the Mexican border—and the hope was that, in the two months it usually took to traverse the seven-hundred-mile desert, it would have melted away. But Icecap and I had crossed the desert in just thirty-nine days. Most years the High Sierra “opens” on June fifteenth. Dana Figment warns hikers that to enter before then is stubborn and foolish. She tells John Donovan’s story. But it was the last day of May, and here we were.

And worse—this was not a normal year. Spring in the California desert had been cooler than usual, in the eighties instead of the low hundreds. This had been a blessing for us earlier—the cooler weather had allowed us to walk faster—but now we’d arrived to mountains that were frozen and white. The safe, familiar path I’d hiked my past two summers was still buried under fifteen to fifty feet of snow. We would need to rely on maps and a compass, neither of which I had. But even with a map and compass, I didn’t trust my navigation skills. I didn’t know how to triangulate. I could never remember how to discern uphill from downhill from the topographic lines, their cryptic, pretty patterns of unfurling blue and white circles. I couldn’t even depend on my GPS, because all I’d learned to do with it was push the button that told me exactly where I already was.

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