The famed views of Mount Shasta to the east are lost in a white murk beyond a ridgeline or two.
At first, I expect it to be like this all the way to Oregon, since there are major fires to the north and south. But then, around 6,600 feet, just below the tree line, a northwest wind begins to clear the skies, and the upper reaches of distant peaks suddenly appear above the lower-lying haze choking the valleys.
This becomes a daily pattern. Each morning, as the Carr Fire worsens, the smoke at lower elevations becomes notably heavier. Setting out on a stretch from Parks Creek Road at Mile 1539 several days ago, my eyes began burning, and I donned a medical mask. (I normally wear these on my hands to protect them from the sun.) But as the trail neared 7,000 feet, and as the late morning winds picked up, the air cleared. To the south and east, a heavy band of murk butted up against the mountains, with Mount Shasta and other peaks making only brief cameo appearances. But to the north, at high elevations, the skies were blue and pristine.
Deep into the Russian Wilderness, around Mile 1585, I sit for a spell with a pair of other hikers, Woodchuck and Gently Used. We look out at the sharp smoke line below us to the southwest. Woodchuck, the older of the two, with a resplendent long white beard like Father Time, fears the Carr Fire will grow so big that even here, around 7,000 feet, there will be no escape from the smoke. If so, he says, he’ll just go somewhere else. “I’m old,” he says. “I adjust.” Besides, there are worse things. Like cancer. Over the winter, doctors removed the tip of one ear and a slice of his lower lip. “Skin grafts suck,” he says in his soft mountain-man accent. “Feels like dead meat. Can’t drink my coffee without spilling.”
The Russian Wilderness is a day of Sawtooth — up a thousand feet, down again into a valley. Soft and fast trail through forest one moment, goat-walking along vertiginous rock cliffs the next. After one particularly hot and long climb, I look up at another ridge and think, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we didn’t have to climb that?” But the PCT offers no respite. Up and over she goes.
After Etna Summit, at Mile 1599, a group of us hitchhike into little Etna, 10 miles to the east. The skies are clear. Fifty or so tents are pitched in the town park. Etna is a foodie’s heaven. The best place in town, the Denny Bar, distills its own gin and vodka and offers a menu and ambiance more typically found in Manhattan than a tiny hiker town in Northern California.
I could easily have zeroed here. But, alas. Overnight, the Carr Fire has again substantially worsened, and in Etna you cannot see clearly to the end of the block. Hiker posts from the mountains to the north are not much better
My swing through the Big Bend has gone well until now. From the trailhead at tiny Castilla, a one-shop hamlet just southwest of Langmuir at Mile 1499, the trail rises several thousand feet into beautiful Castle Crags, then the next day gains another thousand feet across talus-covered slopes full of flying grasshoppers (sounding deceptively like rattlesnakes) into the Trinity Alps.
In the morning, these legendary mountains are swathed in smoke. The famed views of Mount Shasta to the east are lost in a white murk beyond a ridgeline or two. It’s a bit like wandering through watery clouds of milk.
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