Gravel crunches under my boots at 5:57 a.m. The beam of my headlamp shakes as I cinch the vest tight, the buckle clicking loud in the stillness. It’s forty degrees, and the cold air moves like a blade against every gap in my vest. I am not carrying a puffy jacket - too much weight for the amount of use it would see. At seven thousand feet, the calendar still says September, but the mountain has already switched seasons. Frost needles the grass by the parking lot. My breath fogs white.

I start slow. The first two and a half miles are flat by mountain standards-rolling, gentle, enough to make you think maybe the whole thing will be kind. My body knows better. It hasn’t forgotten last week.

Seven days ago, I started this hike in reverse: Old Hyndman first, then Cobb, then Hyndman. The idea was simple-save time by staying high. Connect the ridgeline between Old Hyndman and Cobb instead of dropping all the way down and climbing back up. The numbers looked good on paper: fewer miles, less elevation lost. In practice, the ridge was a knife. Drop on both sides. Rock too loose to trust. Six hundred vertical feet that felt like six thousand. I reached the low point, the saddle, and stared at the way ahead. Then I scrambled down.

That decision stayed with me all week. The bail. The silence on the drive home. The sense that I had shown the mountain my back. I told myself I hadn’t done any technical climbing all summer-that was reason enough. And it was true. I’d spent four months walking north on the Pacific Crest Trail, May to September, moving through deserts, passes, and fire closures, covering miles instead of scrambling rock. I finished, but it wasn’t the kind of training that prepares you for a Pioneer ridgeline with death on both sides.

Still, excuses don’t erase the taste of quitting.

The trail threads through spruce and fir, the path packed dirt sprinkled with early fall needles. My lamp catches the glint of frost on roots, the silver sheen of dew on bent grass. Water trickles somewhere off to the right, invisible in the dark.

I keep my eyes on the beam. Forward. Left foot, right foot. My pace feels too slow, but I know what waits: twenty miles, ten thousand vertical feet. It isn’t won in the first hour.

At the 2.5-mile mark, the trail splits. A new wooden sign leans at the junction. Left keeps me in the Hyndman basin area, the line I’ll follow to the saddle. Right goes across the creek and into Big Basin-the way I’ll come out if I make it all the way. I touch the sign with my glove like a checkpoint. Then I stay left.

The forest thickens, and the trail pitches steeper. My calves warm, lungs catch, and the first real sweat prickles down my spine. My headlamp beam glances off bark and stone, the circle of light shrinking with each breath. The silence presses in harder now. No voices. No cars. No one else at the trailhead this morning.

That’s the real bargain: alone means free, but it also means exposed. If I slip here, it will be hours before anyone finds me-if they ever do. I think about the ridgeline again, the narrow spine between Old Hyndman and Cobb. I remember how my hands shook even before I decided to turn down. Proof after failure-that’s why I’m here. Not just to finish the trifecta. To show myself I can step back into the hard places.

The trail tips upward, and the trees start to thin. Ahead lies the lake, the Sun Valley Trek yurt, and higher still the bare slopes that climb toward the first peak. But for now, it’s still dark, still quiet, still me and the steady rhythm of boots striking dirt.

Left, right. Breath, cloud. Step, doubt.

And the mountain waiting to see if I’ll keep going this time.

Continue reading (Chapter-2) » Lake, Yurt, and the Last of the Trees