Walking the Line

We pulled on dry clothes and Colin gathered driftwood for a fire while I cooked an extra large dinner. We had a double ration of Scotch that night. The most dangerous hazard of the Canol was behind us.

I woke to the cloying stink of infection in my sleeping bag. My feet had been suffering for several days, rubbed raw by the heels of my boots. The oozing sores had stuck to the bag’s fabric in the night. I heated a pin, poked holes and drained the sores before bandaging my feet, the only way that I could get my boots on. I had been optimistic that a day’s rest at our next food drop (Mile 108) would mitigate the situation, but serious infection was an unforeseen complication.

The day brought a steady drizzle that locked in a leaden grey ceiling. We picked our painstaking way across the broad stony alluvial fan of Decca Creek, past the last remaining timbers of a washed out Canol bridge. After an hour the trail turned upslope. It narrowed to a track and the brush closed in, dripping with rain and whipping our faces. It continued like that all day, a tunnel of tangled green, pissing rain and gloom, with a chill that dampened our spirits as it soaked through our clothes.

Every step was agony as each twist and turn ground the open wounds in my feet even deeper. I played songs in my head to take my mind off the pain. Despite thick moleskin and layers of duct tape, things were getting steadily worse. Still, I’m pleased to say that we never once missed our mileage; we always exceeded it.

Near day’s end we crossed several bad washouts, descending precarious hand- and footholds down loose piles of rock. We pushed on to where the road crossed Trout Creek in the hope of finding shelter at the pumping station there, but the rotting floor of a caboose and some unidentifiable pieces of twisted, rusting metal were all we found.

We pitched the tent and cooked quickly in the pouring rain, then climbed into dry sleeping bags and boiled water for tea out the doorway of the vestibule. Rain pattered on the tent all night as the air turned cold and frosty.

We woke to a dusting of snow on the peaks. We packed up our wet gear, ate standing up in the rain, and trudged on through what the guidebook quite accurately describes as one of the worst stretches of the trail. Several miles of complete washouts would be the order of the day.

The morning was a seemingly endless clamber over boulder beds, paired with continual crossings of the braids of Trout Creek. Our boots were soon sopping with icy water and the scrambling sapped me of all strength. Colin began to hike ahead. For perhaps the first time in my life I felt like I had nothing more to give. But we couldn’t stop to rest; more than five minutes and we began to shiver. The only way to stay warm was to walk.

On the other side of Devil’s Pass, a collection of tumbledown structures sagged into view, their wood damp and mossy from decades of neglect. The remains of several Quonset huts lay scattered about. The sturdy pump house, bereft of windows, still stood on its solid concrete floor, with bits of machinery sticking up like stumps in a clear cut. A phantom smell of oil saturated the place. It felt lonely and forlorn under a brooding sky that obscured the hilltops.

One Quonset had a newly papered roof and a functioning door held shut by twisted telephone wire. Inside were the spring frames of several bunks, including two grouped around an oil barrel stove in the main room. Stan had placed the plastic tub containing our food drop on the counter.

I dropped my bag and collapsed onto one of the metal cots while Colin built a raging fire from wood and tinder left by a previous party. The room filled with the funk of steaming, sweaty clothes, and the intense heat of the stove tightened the skin of my feet, drying and cracking them.

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