Sunrise
December 8, 2022. My friend Kaitlin and I woke up before sunrise to hike with the full moon. We were close to the summit of Miller Peak, at around 8000 feet elevation near the border of Arizona and Mexico. We were a few hours from the end of our 800 mile hike of the Arizona Trail. My inflatable sleeping pad failed a week before this day. Thankfully, Kaitlin had a foam pad to protect her inflatable one from the pricklies on trail and let me borrow it for that last week. It was not comfortable, but it helped me persist. I would have slept on the ground, to be honest, or not slept. Pain was a norm for me after so many miles of hiking. I had plantar fasciitis, a sore knee, and I was understandably tired. I was determined to complete the trail in ways that surprised me.
The life of a long distance hiker is measured one step at a time. Goals are broken down by basic needs. Where is the next water source? When and where will I resupply with food next? Is it going to rain? It is simple, but not easy. We woke early every day to get in as many miles as we could. Hiking longer days meant carrying less food between resupply points and a lighter pack meant a happier body. Then again you want to enjoy every moment, revel in the beauty, slow down every minute to make it all last as long as possible. I entered this hike seeking a life I could be happy with, ready to let everything go and build it back piece by piece. I soaked up every simple pleasure. The joy of finding a pit toilet, water you don’t have to filter, the serendipity of running into friends on trail, watching a lunar eclipse from bed, eating veggies, spooking a rattlesnake and surviving to move forward. The little things matter most. This is what you get back when you hike for a long time. You remember what matters. Then you return to a place we started to call the ‘real world’. Maybe this was the real world. How lucky we were to have so much while carrying so little.
We began our hike in the darkness that morning, moving our tired bodies through the cold wet cloud that settled on the top of the mountain. The full moon, bright as the sun, glowed and moved with the mist. When it looked like we were headed downhill, we stepped off trail into a nook with a view, protected from the wind. Below we could see lights and maybe cars. I saved my last packets of instant coffee and hot chocolate for a final sunrise mocha. Every moment was our last. The last time filtering water. The last night without a sleeping pad. The last breakfast on trail. Our last favorite snack. We watched the glow in the distance as it got brighter. Shapes emerged from the darkness. We took a selfie. The last day of carrying a backpack. My pack was never as light on my back as it was that day. Months of walking by myself, thinking through my life, singing songs, listening to podcasts, talking with fellow hikers and non hikers, watching the world change from pine forest to Grand Canyon, to mountain top to river to prickly wilderness, marveling at every beauty along the way, step by step. I steeped in my surroundings. I steeped in myself. I wondered if I knew myself more, or if I just lived there more fully. What was unknown when I was planning this adventure was now known, in the way I could know it, and the future continued in front of me in ways I could not. On trail, your path is chosen for you. In life, you choose your own trail.
We picked up from our sunrise view. There were more uphills left and I struggled with those more than other days, ready to give my legs a rest. There came a point when we could see the wall that stretches across the border and wondered which part of it marked our end. We could hear a cowboy calling to his cows in Spanish on the other side. Though we could see it, the end came upon us suddenly. The wall ended abruptly too and continued as a tiny fence of barbed wire. A concrete obelisk stood just beyond the wire fence, marking the official end of the trail. We snuck under it to take a photo. Then we ducked under again and sat down to eat a snack, both of us quiet. We were done. Nothing was really different. Everything was different. We had to hike back up the hill to take another trail to the place where my parents would meet us. As we descended once more, we stopped briefly. I pulled a mesh bag filled with small rectangular cards, warped from rain and sun, out of the side pocket on my pack. Angel cards are small cards with a word on each card, like ‘Inspiration’, or ‘Friendship’, “Beauty'“ or ‘Brotherhood/Sisterhood’- that was the one we pulled on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon before meeting several new friends. In this last moment that we were still us two, still just hikers on a trail, we each picked a card. Mine read: Courage.
