Why are we walking so far, I keep asking myself as we pass by lakes that demand swimming and sunsets that need seeping. I need watercolors and trumpets and time. I keep walking. We’ve got a schedule to keep and things that need keeping must be kept. I watch rivers bend and flow north and I flow northward too. I see people talking but don’t hear what they say. We try to make meaning from it but there’s no meaning. What’s the meaning of a mountain? And so we keep walking, trying to be like mountains but failing from our restlessness.

We’d been walking for almost five months, and the weather was starting to change. The last two weeks had been raining almost nonstop. Some days grey drizzles flitted between the peaks, and most days the skies split in spasms that soaked through skin, bone, and Gore-Tex. We get it, we’d say, summer is over. But now, it seemed even fall might be coming to an early end. As we refilled our backpacks in the little town of Stehekin, Washington, a ranger warned us about a major snowstorm making its way down from Canada.

We nodded along to his dire warnings and then ignored them completely and headed out of town. We had heard this kind of thing a lot. When you tell people you’re going to do something, they love to tell you why you’re going to fail. And besides, we didn’t have very far to go. We were only eighty miles from our final destination at the northern terminus of the Pacific Crest Trail. After walking for thousands of miles, eighty didn’t seem like much at all. We were basically done. The mental countdown had started weeks ago, and there was no way we were going to stop now, just a few days from the finish line.

The “we” in the story is me, Nick, and Becky. My brother Nick and I had started the hike together, and we’d met Becky not long after that. We had hiked together and split up here and there all the way up the trail, through sunny mountains and desolate forest and miles of hiking and counting and pushing on. When I crossed into Washington, they were a few days ahead of me, and I ran to catch up with them before the end. I hiked thirty miles a day for a week straight. It rained every one of them. I broke camp in the rain, walked in the rain, set up my tent in the rain, and slept all night in my soggy sleeping bag, listening to the rain play chopsticks on my rainfly. I was wet, and I wasn’t having fun anymore. But all that didn’t matter, really. I had a goal, and all I had to do was keep on going and I would achieve it. I shook out my sopping gear and pushed on. Soon I’d be back with my friends, and then we would be at the finish line, and then it would all be worth it.

And hiking out of Stehekin, it all seemed true. I had caught back up, we were all back together again, and it was the most beautiful day we had had since entering the state. The Cascades were in perfect fall glory: crisp blue skies and sheets of evergreens speckled with brilliant yellow larches and crowned with toothy stone ridgelines. And more importantly, we were almost at the place we’d been striving to get to for what seemed like forever. The Canadian border, which had seemed like a distant dream through months of walking, was now something tangible. Just a few more days. We made good miles that day, and all three of us joked and laughed as we made camp and cooked dinner. Our third-to-last camp, we kept telling each other, hardly believing it.

I woke up the next morning just before dawn and heard soft pinpricks on my rainfly. Too light and infrequent for rain. As we got up, we found a delicate white dusting on our tents. We shook it off and were able to pack them up dry. The snow was actually better than the rain had been. It was thin on the ground, and our footprints showed red through the white. As we walked, little flakes flurried around us in bursts, but we were safe and dry in our fleeces beneath our rain jackets. In the clear patches between, we could see the surrounding ridgelines of sharp pinnacles and couloirs, all geometric contrast half-dressed in white. It was another glorious day. Our second-to-last day. Just today, and one more day, and then a short victory lap across the finish line. I kept repeating it like a mantra, trying to force myself to weigh down each step with the significance of finality. But as much as I tried, it was just walking, and each step was much like the last.

Our destination for the day was Hart’s Pass. Situated just thirty trail miles from Canada, the small dirt road and ranger station mark the last access point to the PCT until eight miles past the border. As we got close, the snow stopped completely and we watched a damp and tired sunset as we rounded the last bend into the Hart’s Pass campground in the fading light.

“Hey, do you guys want something warm to drink?” a figure just uphill of the trail asked us. What a lovely thing, the kindness of a stranger on a cold night to finish off an already amazing day of walking through the mountains.

We gratefully accepted and scurried up to the campsite where there was a small fire going and a woman who introduced herself to us as Grubs. Grubs had hiked the trail last year, and she and her boyfriend Ass Chaps (you can’t make this stuff up) had come to give a bit of kindness and encouragement to this year's hikers on their final miles. She waited until we all had a cup of hot chocolate in our hands to break the news. It was going to snow tonight. Yeah yeah, we shrugged. We had been snowed on all day. It was no big deal.

“No,” she insisted, “it’s really going to snow tonight.” Eighteen inches expected overnight, with up to a foot the next day and winter storm warnings for most of Northern Washington.

We had ignored pretty much all warnings we’d been given since departing Mexico, and so far it had always been the right call. We had a plan to follow, you see. And the schedule said we were going to arrive in Canada the day after tomorrow. But Grubs said no.

Nick and Becky went to talk to the ranger in the station. He was a round old man of many superlatives. Tonight would be the biggest, coldest, snowiest fall storm ever recorded, he told us. Possible yeti sightings, potential for the advent of a semi-permanent nuclear winter (I might have stopped listening at some point). He used the word historic at least three times. I walked back to stare at the tiny fire. Why did this have to happen right now? Couldn’t the storm just wait two more days? My hands clenched into fists and I realized my fingers were stiff with cold.

Grubs came over to sympathize. She understood my frustration, she told me. She got why we’d want to push on. But she was also detached enough from the situation to see that it would be super dumb, and she was there to give us a ride down to safety if we wanted it. It got darker and colder. We debated what to do, and in the time we had lost between decisions, we didn’t set up our tents. The sputtering little campfire echoed the hollow and anxious vastness of the freezing night. I realized I was shivering, and thought maybe if I could crawl inside the little metal fire ring, I might get warm enough.

Eighteen inches of snow is easily enough to collapse a flimsy ultralight tent. Assuming we opted to push on, and our tents survived the night, we’d then wake up to a whole day of postholing, slush soaking through our shoes, checking the map every ten minutes to see if we were still on the trail. Thirty miles had seemed like nothing just an hour ago, and suddenly it seemed like a very long way. On the flip side, I imagined how pissed I would be if we bailed on our plan to run down to town, tails tucked, only to wake up and find out it had barely snowed at all. And we were just so damn close.

“Let’s just do it,” I said, “We can take two more days of misery, and then it’ll be over.” The idea hung on my breath for a moment in the air. We all wanted it so badly.

“You don’t even have pants,” Nick pointed out, like a cliche of a bad dream, standing in front of the class for a presentation. And it was true. I had one pair of shorts and that was it. As much as we didn’t like it, there was only one decision to make. We thanked Grubs for warning us, and miserably accepted her offer.

It was another hour in the cold until her boyfriend returned. They had been rescuing hikers all day, making trips back and forth to the not-so-nearby town of Mazama. Ass Chaps finally showed up in an old Subaru hatchback, and told us we had to grab a couple more hikers at a campground just down the road. The three of us helped them pack up their camp, squeezed into the car, and then, upon arriving at the next campground, played a game of Dirtbag Tetris that, despite my prevailing gloominess, I couldn’t help but find amusing. Grubs and Ass Chaps were so committed to helping as many people as they could, they refused to call good enough good enough. In the end, they managed to fit seven hikers with backpacks into the little car, in addition to themselves and their own gear. There were two people in the passenger seat and a full row across the back, all laps occupied with either packs or more people. In the trunk, Grubs was jammed between the gear and the ceiling, curled in a fetal position. We began the thudding descent down the bumpy dirt road just as the first flakes started to swirl through the high beams.

Our destination in Mazama was a place called Ravensong’s Roost. Ravensong is a trail angel and PCT legend who was the first woman to complete a solo through-hike of the cross country trail back in the ‘70’s. She has a small guesthouse on her property that she built to host hikers on their way to tag the border. Usually (I was informed) it is a quiet place, as most people getting to Hart’s Pass are like we had been: on a mission to be done, already tasting the terminus. When we got there, however, the place was packed. There were at least thirty hikers in the Roost. Moving through the tiny living room required five excuse me’s and some gentle sideways shoulder shoving. The garage was a maze of hanging tents and sleeping bags. There were people who had been just ahead of us, corralled by Grubs and Ass Chaps earlier in the day, and more who were days behind us, all hoping for a weather window in which they could push out the last thirty miles. The place reeked of feet and sweat. People were loud. It was late and we were tired. I claimed a narrow bit of floor in the corner of the kitchen, unpacked my sleeping bag, and lay facing the ceiling for hours, doubting and redoubting our decision to come down off the trail.

The next morning, a group showed up who had not been able to make it down the night before. They were wide eyed and visibly shaken. They had spent the night getting slowly buried, snow whipping up into their tents and piling high on the windward sides. They woke up every few hours to dig themselves out with their hands, and when dawn finally came, they walked several miles down the snow-covered road before getting to a place where car travel was possible, at which point they had been rescued by the continuing heroics of the indomitable Grubs and Ass Chaps.

It was clear we had made the right call, but that didn’t help the feeling of boiling frustration and impatience. In the end we spent two full days at Ravensong’s Roost, watching old movies and listening to the endless hiker babble of humble-bragging and gear talk. As much as I tried to find my Zen acceptance of our reality, I couldn’t stop myself from playing a long mental game of what-if. This morning we would be waking up at Hart’s Pass, I thought as I listened to the group of hikers who had just arrived tell their story. As Gladiator played on the little living room TV for the second time of the afternoon, I was somewhere else, hiking twenty five miles and setting up camp just a stone’s throw from the border. Now we’re waking up for our victory lap day, I thought, as I was awoken by a particularly loud snore from someone a few feet over. In my fantasy, we slept in, not leaving our tents until sunrise, maybe even burning off the last of our fuel making some hot coffee. Back at Ravensong’s, I rolled up my sleeping bag from the kitchen floor and picked my way to the door across the mass of bodies. The air outside was crisp and fresh, frigid, but untainted by stale BO. There was a shifting fog in the surrounding mountains, and when it parted it revealed a snowline sitting frighteningly close to the valley floor. A few hours from right now, we should be at the border, high-fiving, hooting and hollering, cracking open the lukewarm PBR’s we’d been carrying for the last three days. Instead, by three o’clock we were drinking overpriced beer in a nearby bar, trading blank stares because we’d run out of things to talk about. But in my head, we’d just made it to Manning Provincial Park, the exit point into Canada. I couldn’t help it, and the further the alternate timeline unraveled, the more anxious I became. We checked the weather constantly, but the reality was that no one knew what was going on in the thirty mile stretch of trail in between Hart’s Pass and the US-Canada border at Monument 78.

Finally, it was the day that all of the weather reports seemed to agree the storm would be over. Nick, Becky, and I woke up early to be the first ones out of the house. We rushed over to the gas station/general store that sits in front of the road leading up to Hart’s Pass, knowing there would be hordes of hikers close behind us, all trying to take advantage of the same weather window. Before too long, a man named Bob showed up with a truck half-full of hikers. He was heading up to the Pass with his dog to do a bit of cross-country skiing and had just been by Ravensong’s to see if anyone needed a ride. The cab was already full, but we managed to squeeze five more hikers into the covered bed, straddling his skis in a comic imitation of our ride down two days before. Much to our surprise, Bob was able to take his truck all the way to the top of the pass. After a long ride, the bumping stopped and we piled out onto a snowbank. We had gotten into the truck in autumn and emerged in winter. The peaks around us that had been beautifully dusted in white just a few days before were now caked in fresh powder. As Bob strapped on his skis, we watched, more than a little jealous, and lined our shoes with plastic bags before finally, belatedly, and after much frustrating ado, commencing the last leg of our trip.

The walking that day was much easier than we had expected. Some brave souls had apparently gotten there before us, and had done the thankless job of breaking trail ahead of us. We followed a clear line of knee-deep footprints along rolling climbs and sweeping ridges. We moved at a good pace, and the sun was shining, and it felt amazing to be back on track.

But there was still some anxiety tugging at me. Some voice telling me we had failed somehow. This was great and all, but we were supposed to be done. We could have done this yesterday no problem, the worrying voice in my head insisted. Clearly, whoever had made the footprints had done it. We came to the top of a pass and climbed over a wind drift, stepping into a boot print that swallowed me to the waist, and I was suddenly imagining those people, breaking trail while whiteout snow swirled around them. Cold, miserable. Making glacially slow progress, heads down, just churning their feet for the sake of making miles. Just playing a numbers game. Enduring it for no other reason than their egos and their plans. Is that really what I was wishing for? Is that what this whole thing had become to me?

I looked around. We were side-hilling a steep face through the snow, climbing toward a distant saddle of rock that sat like a dark smile in a field of white. It was sunset. Our last sunset of the trail, I realized, and for the first time in my countdown, there was a sense of nostalgia instead of the jittery, clock-ticking focus. There was something precious and sweet that was happening exactly here, exactly now. There was a roof of clouds along the highest mountaintops, but below it the air was clear, giving us a view of miles and miles of jagged peaks and valleys. No roads or buildings or anything at all but more peaks and more valleys. Some of what we could see must be in Canada, I figured, but then realized I didn’t care. The sinking sun flung shards of gold down the mountains. We almost missed this, I thought. We looked down from our high perch as the whole world below was engulfed, each peak and the bottom of each cloud it’s own fiery watercolor. Dark mountains wreathed in vapor emerged from the thick orange like fingers reaching upward, a thousand hands raised in prayer. As if by some prior agreement, we all stopped in place and watched the day end. No one spoke. There was nothing to say.

We are detached from the earth at every moment between steps. We fly, for seconds here and there, weightless if we could only freeze time. But we cannot do that either. Time marches forward as steadily as we do, as uncaring as the mountains. We try to make sense of this too. We can’t help it, it’s what we do. And finding it senseless, we make up little meanings of our own. Live in the moment we tell eachother, as infinite moments wrap around our finite little spheres, overwhelming us. Sunsets bloom scarlet and spill neon before our eyes, and behind our heads as well. As we walk in daylight, sunsets bloom far beneath our feet, and our moments are helplessly short. We stack them together as we walk, doing the best we can, but even our walk is finite. We walk toward a finish line that we’ve drawn on a map. The map for the territory, our brains scream at us, knowing enough to know that they cannot escape their own constraints. When we get to the finish line, we know, it will feel like nothing. And then we’ll stop walking. But we can’t keep ourselves from pushing toward that imaginary dot on the imaginary map just the same. In the meantime we practice Zen in our movements, balancing each moment of flight in the apex of our tumble.

Moments Between Steps