Good Will To Travelers

The Skykomish River ran high and wild with cold rain.

Shivery as I was in the early morning, it was a pleasure to behold the thundering rapids and the foam leaping up from boulders.

I shook my fist at the raging waters as I looked down on them from a bridge.

“I loveya, you crazy river!” I shouted.

So did locals apparently. Many of them had plastered bumper stickers on the back of their rides, speaking out against a dam proposal.

I had a good feeling about being on the west side of the Cascades.

In the past couple of days I had biked through Coulee City, Washington, crossed the rolling Columbia River, stayed with my buddy in Wenatchee, then climbed from 780 feet to the top of 4,060-foot Stevens Pass where my bike tires touched snow for the first time on the trip. I made great time bombing down the other side, though I was thoroughly chilled by the time the road leveled. I spent a night with my tent pitched beneath some enormous trees along the highway. There were some perfectly good Forest Service campgrounds nearby, but all of them were closed due to the federal government shutdown. Washington State was many miles from Washington D.C., but not far enough to escape the stupidity of its leaders.

The gates were drawn over the entrance to the campgrounds. Later, I’d read that the Sheriff’s department had gone into the campsites and removed the campers who’d stayed in place in defiance of the rules (I’d come close to camping there myself.) I thought it was funny that the Sheriff’s department had done the removals instead of the Forest Service, but then again those employees weren’t drawing a paycheck now. The Forest Service office I passed nearby was closed up with a sad message taped to the door explaining that they couldn’t help anyone as long as their funding was dried up. I can’t fault the rangers for not volunteering to throw out campers on their own time.

There was a small café down the road done up like a Bavarian cottage. “PCT Hikers Welcome,” a sign announced.

The café was only a dozen or so miles from where the Pacific Crest Trail goes over Stevens Pass. The pass was just over 100 miles from the Canadian border — the end of the line for the hikers who had spent about half a year hiking up from Mexico through California, Oregon and Washington. I wondered if any of them were around.

Sure enough, when I walked through the door, I saw several bearded faces and well-worn outdoor apparel on the guys and girls alike. All of them looked fitter than the average folk that you see on the street. They looked like people who had been walking.

They had been walking — all the way from Mexico — but not so much over the last couple of days with all of the snow moving in over the Cascades. This I learned after introducing myself to several of the thru-hikers and warming myself over a big mug of coffee. I’d been on the road for a couple of weeks at this point; they’d been on the trail since the spring (it was the first week of October now.) My adventure was small fry compared to taking on the PCT.

Still, the group seemed happy for the company. They wolfed down enormous plates of pancakes and home fries. No wonder the café welcomed thru-hikers. They were good business.

It turned out that one of the guys was going to work at Gray Nob hut on New Hampshire’s Mt. Adams — one of my favorite mountains back east.

 Despite the laid-back atmosphere, the weather in the mountains was never far from anyone’s mind. The seasons were turning against the hikers. The snow in the passes would get deeper, the wind more treacherous, the cold more brutal. The trail to the north of Stevens Pass would probably be harder than anything they’d faced yet.

I’d already got a taste of the Cascades’ cold and wind at 4,000 feet on Stevens Pass. The trail would climb to 8,000 feet before it reached Canada.

I stepped out on the café porch to look at the cold drizzle coming through the pines. The Cascades rose straight up like knives, thrusting themselves into the low-lying clouds. It was sure to be blowing snow up there.

A large bearded guy had also stepped out on the porch, his face grim as he watched the spectacle unfolding thousands of feet above us. It was going to be a helluva hike to get to Canada I told him.

He agreed, though he wasn’t hiking the trail. In fact, he had devoted the last months to following the PCT hikers up from California. He met them at the trailheads in his truck, brought them food, helped some of them find work after they got off the trail and cheered them up when they were in the pits.

It felt like a calling to him, he said, in the same way that some people felt like they had a call to hike the trail. I nodded. Both the Pacific Crest Trail in the west and Appalachian Trail back east are known for their “trail angels,” people who go out of their way to help hikers. I’ve enjoyed a cold can of soda out of a crate that an angel left in mountain stream for passerby to enjoy; sometimes they give rides or let dirty hikers crash at their place for no charge. In this case, being a trail angel had become a way of life.

Now he was worried. Most of the hikers didn’t have the gear to take on the blizzard-type conditions or the deep snow that lay ahead. He had already heard horror stories of people not being able to make it through the drifts or flirting with hypothermia in the high passes.

They were so close, he said. I thought he might choke up. The café below Stevens Pass was probably the end of the trail for them, even after they’d managed to make it this far all the way up from Mexico. He had already scored some donated winter gear for the group, but it wasn’t likely that he would be able to scare up the thousands of dollars of clothing and equipment necessary to outfit everyone — especially not snowshoes, which can cost a couple hundred bucks a pop.

So that chapter in their lives would be over soon. It’d be over for him too. As much as he hated to see the hikers abandon their journey when they were so close to Canada, he was even more afraid that some of the hikers would try to take on the last miles without the right gear, risking injury or death.

I felt humbled by how much he cared about his charges, who were right behind us in the café, wolfing down pancakes and making plans.

As it happened, the trail angel helped me as well. I didn’t have any work lined up for after the trip, but found a farm gig through a website he recommended.

I enjoyed hanging around the PCT guys, but alas, my journey was not at an end having about 60 more miles to go until I reached my friend’s apartment in Seattle.

It is important to note that PCT hikers are not the only ones who benefit from acts of charity.

My free motel room in Davenport jumps to mind.

Later the next day, I was biking on a windy stretch of road east of Coulee City when a truck in the other lane did a U-turn and the driver pulled off the road. A guy in a U.S. Marines uniform with a blonde ponytail jumped out, holding something in a paper bag.

“Hey man! Where are you biking to?”

“Seattle from Utah,” I said.

“That is so cool! Hey do you want some cookies? My grandma made them for my birthday.”

I wanted the cookies. Technically, I had just become a vegan and they most likely had eggs and milk in them. Somehow, I just couldn’t bring myself to turn down this earnest young marine who u-turned in the middle of a busy highway to give his grandmother’s homemade cooking to a stranger.

“Thanks man!” I said.

 It crossed my mind that baked goods made in a state, which had recently legalized pot might contain other ingredients beside chocolate chips and peanut butter. It had been a long trip so far and I decided that anything offered with good intentions was fine by me.

“These look like great. What a great coincidence that he had vegan cookies right next to him while I was biking down the highway,” I lied to myself in a fit of shameless moral relativism.

The next day was another trial and saw me climbing two tall passes up from my campsite west of Coulee City.

I spent a couple of hours pedaling through whirling fog, feeling disoriented, discouraged and cold. Occasionally the sky would clear and I’d get a glance at a barren scrub landscape with red rock cliffs that reminded me of Utah.

The highlight of the ride was bombing down from a 2,000-foot pass down to the Columbia River at 700 feet. I would have hit the turns harder if it weren’t for the water on the road.

I followed the wide river waters the rest of the way to Wenatchee with the landscape dominated by apples and pears.

There was a park near the outskirts of town where I took my cell phone out of my pack and called my friend Jon. He knew I was coming to visit, but didn’t realize that I was biking.

“I was wondering why it took you so long to get here from Montana,” he said later.

Lucky me, I got a place to crash in his apartment and went for a night on the town in Wenatchee. 

For the first day on the trip, I didn’t pedal a lick.

I took most of the rest day off, heading out mid-afternoon to begin the climb up Stevens Pass. My initial plan to camp in the national forest that night sank when night fell and I was still on the highway. I turned into a KOA Kampground instead, where I paid the $27 fee like the sucker that I was.

At first, I didn’t think Stevens Pass would be such a big deal. It was only 4,000 feet, half as high as the 8,000-footer I’d tackled on the second day of the trip. No prob. A glance up at the imposing white wall of cliffs rising up to the west of me made me reconsider this position.

If a storm swooped in while I was still in the mountains, I’d be in for a rough time of things.

The climb was gradual but long. I got world class views of the Wenatchee River, with its crashing, reckless waters that mirrored the Skykomish on the west side of the pass. It was entertaining trying to figure out what line I would take if I was trying to navigate a kayak or a raft through the chaos.

I stopped at a rest area at around 2,000 feet to refill my water bottles. A big truck pulled in as I walked over to my bike, brimming with fresh-picked apples.

“Hey, help yourself if you want anything,” the driver told me.

I was more than happy to oblige, snatching a tasty golden delicious that was crisp and full of juice.

A few people asked me about where I was going with all the gear. When I explained the trip, most of them thought it sounded like a cool thing to do. In fact, it seemed like the further west I got, the more people seemed to think I was doing something worthwhile as opposed to deranged a la the “are you ill in the head?” woman that I met in Manila, Utah.

There were more thumbs ups on the road, and more acts of charity to keep me going, even as I felt like I was running out of steam.

Thankfully, the threat of storm never materialized and I made it over the pass just fine.

20 hours after I wiped the apple juice out of my beard, I was leaving the café and headed for Seattle.