Log0014
Ohio Matt
We’d been out in the Sierras for 7 days at this point and we were pushing to get down to the trailhead before dusk. Our packs had been getting lighter by the day, that and the mosquito swarms had made for quick miles. Slipping between Twin Lakes we took our final descent into the Lodgepole pines.
I don’t quite remember why we stopped to talk to the man from Ohio, but we did. Plodding slowly up the trail, with a legitimately loaded pack, we’d crossed paths. He’d already been out tramping around the hills for a week. Then he’d resupplied in Lodgepole, our exit point, and now with 2 weeks of food he was climbing up toward all we had come through. Knowing what he was heading for I checked if he had a mosquito net, but given he was well traveled in these parts he begrudgingly carried his own.
The character we began to speak with reminded me why I loved coming out here, why I loved remoteness and the solitude. It’s so often the people that break this silence that have the most intriguing stories.
It wasn’t long before he sat down to rest his pack on a boulder and broke out his map. Together we all poured over it. While I provided him some ideas for his coming adventure he told tales and traced trails with his hand of the places he’d been; Tehipite Dome, Number 7, rocks and trees. Everything came with extraordinary praise. This was a man who loved the High Sierra.
My glossy clean topographic map was an embarrassment against his, identically printed, but far more tested. His routes were highlighted various shades yellow and blue. Many of the page folds were beginning to tear at the creases. Ripped and tattered maybe, but those pages held more character than mine did gloss.
He was meeting up with his hiking partner. A 75 year old man who lived out on Hawaii. This struck me, but the story of their relationship never surfaced. Though there must’ve been one. Ohio explained how every year he got two months off work. And every August, he spent it in the Sierras. Then 6 months later he’d take off across the Pacific and together they spent the month trekking the Big Island.
My curiosity continued to grow. Why live in Ohio if your passions roam out West? Why constantly come back to the same two places? What job lets you take two months a year, to shut up everything, and disappear?
I didn’t get answers to any of these. He did touch on the other 10 months. Planning, preparing, reading, building… After his strong book recommendation to read Kim Stanley Roberson, I’d asked about his hiking pack. It looked incredible but unlike anything I’d seen. He’d built it himself. Learning off of other hikers, tweaking ideas, iterating on the last version. His weight distribution was totally different. Of course his pack had no frame, interestingly it had no waist strap either – he went on to explain how it frees his hips and mobility, costing him only when scrambling off-trail. I looked him up and down. I had to wonder about how my own shoulders would fare with the load of 14 days food and no way to redistribute weight to my hips. But it worked for him and the man didn’t look like he was lacking strength.
He had just the pack he wanted, nothing more nothing less, he knew just how to fix any faults or flaws and the satisfaction from the build was undeniable. Ohio carried with him an aura of infectious enthusiasm that I admired.
Full of future trail ideas, a High Sierra book recommendation and newfound pack design fundamentals we’d just started to head our separate ways when he asked for our names. I introduced myself, we shook greasy gloved hands and he said, we could call him Matt.
It can be these fleeting encounters with strangers that you will never see again that stick with you. Why does a 15 minutes conversation on the side of a trail captivate me so? I don’t know. But I don’t tire of talking to real people with real passions and real experiences. And for some reason, years after the difficulties of the trip fade in my mind, it is these conversations that I ultimately remember.