SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2019
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to eat. Then as we began to descend, both my eyes
abr uptly ex ploded with f ier y pa in. It felt a s if g rit were
in my corneas, no matter how often I bathed them
with snowmelt. There was some relief when I closed
my eyes, but that didn’t help my hiking.
I realized immediately that I had snow blind-
ness—basically a sunburn of the corneas—because of
my failure to wear sunglasses. Cooling my eyes with
snow temporarily relieved the fire but didn’t help me
see, and in the process of repeatedly bending over to
grab handfuls of snow I somehow lost my main water
bottle from a n outside pocket of my pack.
As I staggered down from Muir Pass, pained, frus-
trated, slow, and blind, I was almost completely
dependent on Tumbler. She wasn’t just guiding me
down the trail; she was now the team leader.^16 Which
made me wonder: What was I?I HAD WORRIED THAT CAROLINE WOULD LOSE
interest in the trail as she grew older, leaving me
without a hiking partner. Instead, the opposite hap-
pened. She grew more interested, leaving me without
a hiking partner. Let me explain.
After graduating from high school in 2015,
Caroline decided to take a gap year before college, and
after a weeklong hike together in May, she insisted on
continuing on her own for another month.^17
Disaster!
On her second day by herself, Caroline joined a “trail
family” of thru-hikers—and they quickly sabotaged
all my years of careful indoctrination. I’m a believer
in packing ultralight, so we don’t even carry a stove.
Likewise, given that my constraint is usually time
away from work, we never take zero days and spend
little time in trail towns hanging out with other hikers.
Alas, Tumbler discovered what she was missing.
“Child abuse” is how she dryly termed my previous
approach to hiking.
“Who knew?” she explained. “Hiking can be fun.”
Ouch.
On the phone from the trail that summer, she
recounted with excitement that one of her new hiking
buddies carried baby wipes and let her use them each
evening to clean up after a day on the trail.
“What!” I sputtered. “Think of the weight!”
“Dad! They’re wipes—they weigh nothing!”
Tumbler returned from the trail proposing the
heresy of carrying a stove. I argued that this was
impractical: As section hikers, we often had to f ly to get
to the trail, and you can’t carry stove fuel on a plane.^18
She relented. A close call.
On our next hike, the insidious effect of Tumbler’s
experience hiking with others became even more
evident. She suggested that a half day in a trail town,
to get a shower and a nice meal, might not ruin our
hike. She argued that occasionally setting up camp
in the late afternoon to cherish a sunset, rather16 I could make fun of dad’s
rookie mistake here, but it
was kind of cool to feel like a
seeing eye dog.17 My mom was thrilled with
the idea of me alone with the
rattlesnakes.18 Almost all thru-hikers fly
to the trailhead as well, but
they discovered this neat
trick where you go to a store
after landing and buy fuel!
Still, I wasn’t driving, so I let
it go.Forester Pass, the 13,100-foot high point of the trail.
There was a thrilling sense of accomplishment in
fording snow-swollen rivers or in scoring our first
30-mile day together, and something of a spiritual
reverence in passing through alpine meadows or
seeing a herd of mountain goats.
Our bond deepened as the years passed and I
became increasingly reliant on Tumbler. If I was in
denial about our role reversal, it became abundantly
clear one day in year five of our project. We were
in the High Sierras, which were full of snow when
we passed through in early July. It was bright and
sunny, but my sunglasses didn’t fit well, so I didn’t
use them.
Muir Pass was gorgeous, with a gentle slope, a blan-
ket of snow, a stone mountaineers’ hut, and peaks as
far as the eye could see, speckled with alpine lakes.
We stopped at the hut to take a couple of photos,
absorb the majesty of the scenery, and have a biteNick and Caroline reached the PCT’s northern terminus
in 2014, then spent four more years knocking off the
California section.