A L M O S T OUTDOOR LIVES SERIES 4 S O M E W H E R E Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail SUZANNE ROBERTS University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln and London © 2012 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska Epigraphs in chapters 1, 13, and 19 are excerpted from John of the Mountains, edited by Linnie Marsh Wolfe. Copyright 1938 by Wanda Muir Hanna; copyright renewed © 1966 by John Muir Hanna and Ralph Eugene Wolfe. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Chapter 10 originally appeared in The Pacific Crest Trailside Reader, California: Adventure, History, and Legend on the Long-Distance Trail, edited by Rees Hughes and Corey Lewis (Seattle: Mountaineers Books, 2011). Map by Phyllis Shafer. All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Roberts, Suzanne. Almost somewhere : twenty-eight days on the John Muir Trail / Suzanne Roberts. p. cm. — (Outdoor lives series) Includes bibliographical references. isbn 978-0-8032-4012-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Backpacking—California—John Muir Trail. 2. John Muir Trail (Calif.)—Description and travel. I. Title. gv199.42.c22r63 2012 796.5109794—dc23 2012001821 Set in Chaparral Pro by Kim Essman. Designed by A. Shahan. For Dionne and Erika, both strong women, each in her own way And for women hiking everywhere preface After college I set off on a hike that I imagined would be a diver- sion from thinking about my future. The year was 1993, the United States was in a recession, and most college graduates were finding it difficult to secure jobs. Many of my friends moved back in with their parents while they figured out what to do. When I’d left for college at seventeen, I knew I would never move back home. My friend Erika suggested we hike California’s John Muir Trail, and the 211-mile path seemed like a fine adventure, a good distraction from what I considered to be “real life.” I couldn’t imagine a twenty- eight-day hike would change my life. We ended up picking up another girlfriend, Dionne, making it an all-women’s hiking trip, but at the last minute a fourth decided to tag along, a guy we picked up in Mammoth Lakes before the trip. He didn’t last for long, and if this weren’t a memoir, I might have written him out completely. But I think he shows how even though I claimed to be committed to the “girl power” of an all-women’s trip, I really wasn’t. Not at the beginning, anyway. To some degree all of us had internalized the stereotype that we were “just girls.” The need to prove ourselves within a largely male world put us in competi- tion with each other until we finally realized what we needed was connection. vii When we lost our token man and the hike became an all-women’s trip, we encountered both men and women who could not believe that three twenty-two-year-old “girls” were wandering around out in the woods for weeks, miles away from paved roads, before cell phones and gps systems, “alone.” No records exist of the number of people hiking the John Muir Trail, but the Pacific Crest Trail does keep track. In 1993, 13 percent of the people completing the pct were women, and many of them, I imagine, hiked with male companions. Today there are more women hiking, and many more hiking with other women or solo, but still, only 26 percent of the people who completed the pct in 2011 were women. While the pct is much more monumental in scale than the jmt, the records do offer some information regarding the number of women backpacking versus the number of men. Anecdotally, I can say that I see many more women on the trails now, and when I hike alone, people don’t react with the shock or dismay of twenty years ago. Although I have hiked the John Muir Trail several times in the nearly twenty years since this trip took place, that initial journey, my own first summer in the Sierra, ended up altering my view of myself and my notions of the natural world. I had always felt a con- nection to nature, been bookish, and looked for a way to combine the two. The nature writers we read back when I was a girl and young woman were all men: Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau, Edward Abbey, and of course, the father of preservation himself, John Muir. Although I had, and still have, great respect for these writers, I could not relate to the way they viewed nature and their relationship to the natural landscape. While these male writers sought autonomy, I craved community. Where they were out to conquer oceans and deserts, woods and mountains, I wanted only to connect. John Muir says when we go out into the woods, we are really go- ing in. I wanted to see the Sierra Nevada in all the glory that Muir did, but when I got there, I still couldn’t adopt his vision, at least not wholly. Over time I realized I needed a uniquely feminine way of being in nature, of “going in,” one that included fears and failings viii (and even crying) but also intimacy and community. On the trail I wrote in a tiny journal every day, in search of my voice. I didn’t know I would write a book at the time. I first needed to find Isabella Bird, Mary Austin, Annie Dillard, Linda Hogan, Mary Oliver, and the other women nature writers who would help me navigate the way. Since then, I have found a whole community of women writing about the natural world, and this memoir is my attempt to enter the conver- sation, a conversation that is finally starting to include women of color as well. Certainly, there are now women writing guidebooks and natural histories of the Sierra Nevada, which was not the case twenty years ago. I have not found many women who have yet written personal narratives about the Sierra Nevada. Mary Austin writes about the high desert in Land of Little Rain, and Isabella Bird provides a short excerpt of Lake Tahoe in A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains. When I searched “women and the Sierra” online, the book that came up explored the early prostitutes of the West. A fine book, I am sure, but not exactly what I was looking for. Because of various fears of being in the outdoors alone, many women write from their own backyards. After twenty-eight days on the John Muir Trail, I moved to the Rockies and then finally settled in South Lake Tahoe, where I now write from my own backyard. That hike in 1993, my own first summer in the Sierra, led to a lifelong love of the mountains, of the place I now call home. The twenty-two-year-old girl who set off for the mountains in 1993 is me and not-me in the way that we all carry our younger selves with us. That young self knew she needed something; she just wasn’t sure what. Luckily, she hiked into the Sierra to find out. ix