I don’t know how much more rejection I can take. Every day for a month the National Park Service has sent me the following email, addressed to William Stith: “We regret to inform you that your application was not selected in today’s wilderness permit lottery.”
Late this summer three backpacking friends –Viking, Iceman and Nine! – and I want to hike the 211-mile John Muir Trail, from Yosemite Valley, through the Sierra Nevada mountains, to Mount Whitney in California, the tallest peak in the lower 48 states.
The problem: a lotof other people also want to hike the JMT, and, like they say, space is limited. You don’t have to win the lottery but you need to win the lottery, which I’ll come to in a minute.
This would be a once-in-a-lifetime kind of hike, beautiful beyond words. Here’s how one JMT veteran described it:
The John Muir Trail
“The John Muir Trail covers some of the most beautiful mountains in the world, from stunning, glacier-chiseled Yosemite, to the jagged spires of the Minarets, to the highest mountain peak in the contiguous United States. You’ll hike over numerous high mountain passes, pass ancient glaciers, cross fast-moving mountain streams while surrounded by giant peaks.”
And it would fun hiking with the guys I hope to go with, all of whom know what they’re doing. Viking has thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail, 2,189 miles; Iceman has sectioned hiked all of the A.T.; and Nine! has backpacked into the Grand Canyon six times, including two trips down the infamous [as far as I’m concerned] Nankoweap Trail.
The JMT presents one challenge, altitude, that you don’t face on the A.T. and another, resupply problems, you seldom encounter.
The risk of altitude sickness
The altitude ranges from 4,035 feet in Yosemite Valley on the north end to 14,505 feet at Mount Whitney in the south. The first 100 miles is mostly above 9,000 feet and the rest is mostly above 10,000 feet.
By comparison, the highest mountain on the Appalachian Trial, which I hiked end to end in 2015, is 6,643 feet, at Clingmans Dome in North Carolina. Big difference. I’ve also hiked some in the Grand Canyon, the North Kaibab Trail which starts at 8,241 feet and the Nankoweap Trail, which starts at 7,640, but both descend quickly.
Limited Resupply
No roads cross the JMT, although there are nearby resupply opportunities on the first half of the trail. I’ve never carried more than a six-day supply of food, 1.5 pounds per day on section hike of, say, 100 miles or less; 2 pounds a day on the thru-hike. So I’ll have to resupply twice.
OK, so what’s the rejection all about?
Well, to hike the JMT you must have a permit. And your chances of scoring one in the lottery are, in a word, small – two or three percent, or so they say.
Yosemite restricts traffic on the trail to protect it. The daily quota is 45 hikers, and 10 of those permits go to walk-ups.
Here’s the way it works: You submit an application and you’re in the lottery for 21 consecutive days. If your name is not drawn, you submit another application, for another 21 days.
I don’t know what I’ll do if I — if we — win. Jump up and down, I guess. I’ll let you know if and when that happens.
NOTE: Yesterday was the three-year anniversary of the first day of my thru-hike of the Appalachian Trial. How time flies.
Almost every thru-hiker I met on Appalachian Trial in 2015 had a trail name, as did most section hikers. A few waited to get a name more or less assigned to them, growing out of some incident on the trail. But that strategy was fraught with peril — you could fall in the mud and get a name like Dirty Bottom. So most hikers picked their own name.
When I decided to hike from Georgia to Maine several friends told me how “fortunate” I was to have the health to at least try –I had a birthday on the trail and was 73 years old when I finished — and a wife who had said, “Yes.”
“Fortunate” didn’t resonate with me, but “Lucky” did, so I made that my trail name.
I don’t know the real names of most of the hikers I met. Some I know now because we’ve gotten together for reunions of sorts, or I’ve kept in touch by email. But we still call each other by our trail names.
Here are some of the people I met on the A.T., and the origin of their name.
GRRRR
GRRRR
GRRRR got his name from his youngest daughter, who is called “Goose.” When GRRRR came home from Viet Nam he brought with him a painting of a tiger. He and his wife would asked Goose, who was just learning to talk, what a tiger says and she would answer GRRRR. And then she began calling her daddy GRRRR. I met him on the A.T. but since then we’ve gone kayaking together, more than 100 miles down the Roanoke River this past spring. I posted this story about our river trip.
Temper
Snacks, L, and Temper
She was not a big woman, I’d bet she didn’t weigh much more than 100 pounds. But when I first met her I figured it was best to avoid any disagreement. You just know, with a name like Temper she must have a short fuse. But, turned out, her name had nothing to do with anger management or lack thereof and everything to do with an unusual job — she had worked in a chocolate factory where she “tempered” chocolate. After I finished I got to play trail angel at Snowbird, in the mountains of North Carolina, for Temper and her boyfriend, Snacks, after she finished the northern half of the A.T. and began hiking south to Georgia.
Crockman
Crockman’s crocks
Back in the real world, Crockman was a carpenter, so his name had nothing to do with his occupation. It came from his footwear. He didn’t wear boots, he wore crocks, the only hiker I met who did that.
O311
This man got out of the Marines in the summer before his thru-hike. His MOS –Military Occupational Specialty — was 0311 — Infantry.
Iceman
Iceman
He was a section hiker and trail angel par excellence. He brought ice to a little girl who had broken her arm on the trail. She named him. And he helped me multiple times.
I wrote about my last encounter with Iceman here. It was this past summer, on the A.T. in Pennsylvania.
Since 2015 Iceman has finished the entire A.T., section by section.
Iceman, Viking, and Nine!, a man I hiked a Grand Canyon back country trail with last October, and I are trying to get permits to hike the John Muir Trail, in California, this summer.
Eddy
Eddy
She is an expert kayacker – she runs Class 5 rapids. And an eddy, of course, is a river word, “a circular movement of water, counter to a main current, causing a small whirlpool.”
Last summer Eddy rafted down the Colorado River with a bunch of other folks. Early in the trip someone accidentally hit her in the mouth with his paddle and knocked out four of her front teeth. She stuck them back in and continued the trip.
California
California
California was an EMT who was moving to the East Coast, to a new job. He had some time off in between and decided to hike a few hundred miles of the A.T.
We hiked together for a week or 10 days and any time I whined about anything he would tell me, “It’s all good, Lucky.”
He was from — how did you guess? — California.
Tadpole
He planned to join the Navy after his hike with a goal of becoming a Seal, a modern day frogman. And, as you know, a tadpole is baby frog.
Cashmere
She was a 50-some year old college professor who taught organic chemistry.
And her trail name? She said she sweated a lot. Get it? Sweater? Cashmere?
This woman could really hike. She finished the A.T. in less than four months –the average hiker finishes in just under six– and, last I heard, was hiking the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail.
How long did I take? I’m glad you asked: four months and some few odd days. OK, OK, four months and 29 days.
J
J
J, just the letter “J,” a retired firemen from Georgia, picked that name in memory of his brother, John, who died in infancy.
J and I hiked a little over 100 miles together, over mountains in North Carolina and Tennessee. The closer we got to Damascus, Virginia —town food, hot shower, clean clothes — the more we wanted get there. So one cold, snowy night we agreed to skip breakfast and get an extra early start, leave before sunup and hike by headlamp. J was an early riser, he like to drink coffee before the day began. That morning was no exception; he had his coffee and then called out in the dark, “Lucky?”
“It is time?” I asked, and he said yes.
I rolled out, dressed, and packed up as quickly as I could. It was still snowing.
As we were leaving, J asked me to check the time. I did. It was 4:20 a.m., almost two hours earlier than the start time we had agreed on. J insisted that he had no idea, and he sounded so sincere. I told him, of course, to sell that somewhere else.
[J did not finish in 2015 but in 2017 he started over, and hiked from Georgia to Maine.]
Verminator
Mice had eaten holes in his backpack and he was determined to trap and kill as many of them as he could.
The Hiking Vikings
The Hiking Vikings
This is easy. Take one look at their head gear, knitted for them by a sister-in-law, Sara. I guess I hiked 1,000 miles or more, off and off, with The Hiking Vikings. They were fun to hike with in part because they were always in such a good mood, no matter what the weather was like, or the trail. My wife, Donna, and I have been on holiday with them since the thru-hike and the Viking and I did a 100-miler on the A.T. in Pennsylvania this past summer. I think The Hiking Vikings, AKA “The Famous Hiking Vikings,” are going to be hikers for life. They’ve named their firstborn son Asher Thomas — A.T.
Lucky and The Hiking Vikings
All in due time I’m going to post several stories about those two.
Viking and I plan to do another 100 miler in May, on the A.T. in Virginia.
Slowman
How slow was Slowman? Pretty slow. I passed right many
Slowman
thru-hikers who were laying around in town, taking a day off. Or in shelters, sleeping in. But I only passed three on the trail: One was legally blind. One was injured. And Slowman.
WYSIWYG, pronounced Whiz-e-wig
You might never have guessed this one. It’s an acronym for “What You See Is What You Get.”
Between
Between and his mother, Mother Nature, at the end of the hike.
He was 17, going on 18, between high school and college. Between hiked with his Mom who was called Mother Nature. The three of us were together at the end, on Mt. Katahdin in Maine. Between and his mother are German. I met three other foreigners thru-hiking the trail including Canada’s most honored Olympian, who called herself Red Feather.
Not Yet
It was his first day on the trail, and he wasn’t going anywhere special, certainly not starting a thru-hike. He was just trying out his equipment.
Someone asked, “Do you have a trail name?”
And he replied, “Not Yet.”
NOTE: GRRRR told me told me about a hiker who tried go by his initials, “DJ,” but word had spread and every time he arrived at a shelter someone would ask, “Are you the one they call ‘Ice Pee?'”
Seems that DJ hadn’t wanted to get up one cold night so he peed in his Jetboil — his cooking pot.
“The temperature dropped to 15 degrees and all water froze,”” GRRRR said. “Next morning he had to cook his pee to empty the pot. Hence the name, ‘ Ice Pee.’ “
Scout
Other hikers I met on my thru-hike: Apollo, Atticus, Attrition, Badger, Bolt, Bridges, Blissful, Blister, Bruin, Claus, Cork and Daddy Smurf.
