JOSHUA M. POWELL

The mosquitoes were worse than I had ever experienced. I could see their abdomens swell with blood and turn red as they sucked from my skin. When I would swat and squish them the amount of blood that exploded was astonishing. One had made its way inside my head net and when I crushed it a thick drop of blood fell from the mesh. A mosquito landed on my right hand and I brought down my left upon it with a satisfying smack. I pulled my hand back only to reveal the mosquito still

Climbing up from Six Horse Spring towards Windigo Pass I began to feel intensely dizzy - my vision blurred and became foggy and I wavered from side to side nearly losing my balance. I quickly recovered and then felt instantly ravenous. I devoured whatever snacks I had at hand, the same snacks I had been eating for weeks and months, yet they somehow tasted better than they ever had before. I felt a burst of energy course through my body and hiked on, discovering relics from th

I became lost in thought - past grievances, people who had wronged me in some way, the frustrations of previous jobs. They were all negative thoughts but yet they offered some relief from the tedium of the trail, at that time in the late afternoon when the monotony of thru-hiking can become almost unbearable. Once I snapped out of it I hated to admit that I almost felt relieved that for a short while I had escaped any thoughts of hiking. Soon enough my mind once again drifted

As thru-hikers often do, I had hiked until it grew dark and set up camp wherever I happened to find myself; in this case not far from Highway 140. In the morning, two local hikers passed by as I was packing up. "Wow, this is a nice spot," one of them said sarcastically. "You can almost not hear the highway ..." ... A few hours later I departed from the PCT and took an alternate route through the Sky Lakes Wilderness. The green tree cover persisted and there were no wide-reach

The trail led me through meadows and past a derelict cabin with a corrugated tin roof curling up and missing in several places. I entered and stood there staring at its tattered walls. The surrounding meadow was beautiful in the afternoon sun but a sadness pervaded the interior of the cabin. Names and initials going back to the sixties were carved into its wooden walls and posts. Pinned above a window was a photograph of a smiling man. He held a dog close to him, their faces

The remainder of the day was one long descent, mostly under tree cover, down towards the small town of Seiad Valley. At one point I literally fell asleep while hiking - a combination of both exhaustion and the monotonous landscape. Monotony aside, the joy of thru-hiking, as it had become apparent to me, was not in the epic scenery, which could be sporadic at times, but rather in the constant progression - the feeling of being in the midst of a monumental journey. There was a

I packed up and made my way back to Ammirati's and then across the road to the interstate on-ramp, intent on hitching in to Mount Shasta. Despite the early hour there was quite a bit of traffic, though none of the commuters seemed inclined to stop. I found hitching a frustrating endeavor. Having grown accustomed to the complete and utter freedom of hiking along the trail, free from any constraints other than those that are self-imposed, it was hard to suddenly find myself at

Dry and brittle leaves crunched under my feet - leaves once green and hanging over the heads of last year's thru-hikers. They too must have felt elated as the McCloud River came into view. I watched a Steller's jay make its way up a tall snag without the use of its wings; it simply hopped from branch to branch, climbing higher up each rung of its makeshift ladder. I had always found the Steller's jay to be an incredibly beautiful, albeit obnoxious bird. As any piece of writin

Mack and the boys are the Beauties, the Virtues, the Graces ... Mack and the boys avoid the trap, walk around the poison, step over the noose while a generation of trapped, poisoned, and trussed-up men scream at them and call them no-goods, come-to-bad-ends, blots-on-the-town, thieves, rascals, bums. Our Father who art in nature, who has given the gift of survival to the coyote, the common brown rat, the English sparrow, the house fly and the moth, must have a great and overw

I passed along Twin Lakes and stopped at its shores to fill my water bottles. The water's edge proved too shallow to submerge my bottles and so I waded out to where it grew deeper. After the lakes my surroundings changed drastically as I entered a flat and endless expanse of burnt forest. The trees had been warped by the heat of the fire and they curved over the trail forming an arched promenade of charred wood. Some were so distorted and bent their tops almost touched the ea