Peak Experience

Read Chapter 1 of Force of Nature!

I’m growing increasingly excited that my adventure memoir Force of Nature: Three Women Tackle the John Muir Trail will be published by the Black Rose Writing on September 28, 2023!

To celebrate, I’m sharing the exciting first chapter with you below!

What is Force of Nature?

Part gripping adventure tale and part vivid nature writing, Force of Nature will carry you along the John Muir Trail, alternately bringing you peace and thrills. Go feral on the trail with The Three Women and experience excitement, frustration, joy, camaraderie, laughter, satisfaction, and serenity.

Read the first chapter:

Peak Experience

Fear not, therefore, to try the mountain-passes. They will kill care, save you from deadly apathy, set you free, and call forth every faculty into vigorous, enthusiastic action. ~ John Muir, The Mountains of California, 1875

July 20, 2006 Donahue Pass — 11,056 feet

We were hiking uphill as fast as our fifty-year-old legs would carry us. Behind us, the sky was a bright California summer blue. But ahead, above the granite mountain ridge we were climbing, it grew gray, then grayer. Still early, it was barely two in the afternoon. Our plan was to be over the pass and setting up camp down in the valley on the other side long before the Sierra’s typical evening rains began.

Cresting eleven-thousand-foot Donahue Pass, however, we were shocked to find ourselves face to face with a monster storm lurking behind the ridge. Angry black clouds now rose like towers, filling the sky.

Shoulder to shoulder, we froze. Not only did this army of lightning-laced thunderheads block our forward motion, but it was charging directly at us, riding on an icy wind. There was no time for the three of us to retreat to lower, safer ground.

“What now, ladies?” Cappy shouted over the storm’s roar. Her eyes darted about, scanning the terrain.

“Hell! I’m dumping my pack and anything metal I’m wearing,” I said. Then pointing, I added, “I’m going to that low spot in the dirt to lie down.”

I threw my hiking poles on the ground beside a waist-high slab of granite, unbuckled my pack, and wrenched it off. I pitched my shiny new pack roughly against the rock slab and dug helter-skelter through its contents in search of any and all warm and waterproof clothing, pushing undesired items aside.

“All my warm clothes have metal zipper pulls and snaps,” I said. “Is that a problem?” No one answered. Maybe I had not said it aloud. I thought the metal might attract the lightning. In the moment I stood considering, I realized how cold the air and my heart had gone.

Stripping off shorts, I yanked on a base layer, fleece, and waterproof raingear top and bottom, plus gloves and hat. I abandoned my watch and glasses, both metal, zipping them into a small pack-pouch before slipping a plastic rain-cover over my pack.

Huge drops of rain began splatting around us. The wind carried the pungent zing of ozone, a harbinger of lightning, and shoved the rain horizontally with each gust. The black wall of clouds had followed us over the pass, hovering nearly overhead. Gray fingers reached downward from the clouds towards the spot where we dressed.

“It’s only a few feet lower here than it was at the top!” Cappy shot back.

“It’ll do,” Jane assured us in her steady voice. She kept an eye on the rapidly changing sky, as she rifled through her backpack.

Together, we dashed to the deepest of the slight dips in the landscape, really no more than a depression in the ground. Huddled between a tiny snowmelt pond and huge piles of granite boulders, we ran down our lists of sage backcountry dos-and-don’ts.

“I know we’re not supposed to stand under tall trees,” I said. Not a problem way above tree-line. “We’re also supposed to stay away from water and big rocks! So, should I be closer to that pond or these rocks?”

I could not decide; I could not move.

“I don’t think it matters any…” A blinding flash of lightning and its immediate crack of thunder stole Jane’s words.

“Spread out and get down!” She threw herself on the wet ground ten feet from Cappy. Shocked into action, I dropped into my own shallow dent in the dirt.

After tugging my fleece cap down around my ears, I pulled my rain hood up and cinched it tightly around my face, leaving only a small circle for my eyes and nose. I curled myself into the fetal position, drawing my knees to my chest.

Engulfing us, the sky was battleship gray—the early summer afternoon turned to night. The deluge pounded the ground and drowned out all sound, save the crashing thunder. My gloved hands covered my ears.

Lightning rent the clouds. Terrified, I watched as slivers of electricity, high above us, leapt from cloud to cloud, making intricate webs of light in the darkness. Thicker bolts slashed vertically to and from the twelve-thousand-foot peaks that surrounded us.

I covered my face with my hands. Peeking out between my gloved fingers in momentary bouts of bravery, I slammed closed my finger-shutters with each new assault. Still, I witnessed plenty.

Each time Thor’s hammer slammed down, the Earth shook and the air reverberated with thunder. Light and sound struck together, not a nanosecond between them.

Flash-BOOM! 

Flash-BOOM!

On and on it went, my heart booming in rhythm.

Flash-BOOM!

At the peak of the storm’s fury, frigid winds whipped around us. Rain froze into icy bullets shot from the sky, stinging me through my layers. The clouds grew thick and blinding. Wrapped in a ten-thousand-foot-high fog, I felt alone. I could barely make out the silent lumps that were Jane and Cappy just a few feet away.

What am I doing here? I shouted in my thoughts, trying to hear myself over the storm. What are three smart women doing in this predicament? We know better than this! 

Prayers, pleas, and promises flew like charged particles from my mind. I urged them upward and outward, hoping they would penetrate the ion-filled sky and find a sympathetic reception with the Powers That Be. I visualized a golden igloo of protective light arching over and around us as we huddled on that small patch of grass in the sky. Whispering my words over and over like a mantra, I held that image of a protective glowing dome steady in my mind’s eye.

“Protect us, keep us safe.

“Protect us, keep us safe.”

Cold to the bone, even in my layers of fleece and plastic, my body shivered and convulsed. Gritting my jaws could not stop my teeth from chattering. Has it been an hour? How much longer can I stay curled up here before hypothermia sets in? 

I wiggled and rubbed my extremities in an attempt to raise my body temperature, but to no avail. The shivering and chattering went on and on. The weak link was my feet—I was still wearing my Teva hiking sandals with thick, wet socks.

My ears pricked up. Is that real? Or just my imagination? Was that a pause?

I raised my head to watch the sky. The heart of the storm was moving north. We remained wrapped in clouds on the rocky pass, but the violence inched slowly away.

At precisely that moment, Cappy’s voice rang out, penetrating the storm’s din and my cold-numbed brain. “Let’s go! It’s moving north! Let’s go!”

Galvanized, our three bodies jumped up like one, moving with focused energy. In mere moments, we had packs on. In the same way a distraught mother lifts a car off the body of her child, I tossed onto my shoulders the forty-pound pack I had struggled to hoist and buckle earlier in the day. Faster than I could have imagined possible, we scuttled southward across the broad granite pass, peering through the rain and fog to find our way down the other side.

Frozen feet, impossibly sure-footed, rock-hopped downward over an ancient talus slope, the remains of an old landslide. The trail lay hidden somewhere among the acres of automobile-sized boulders and vast expanses of snow spread across the steep slope before us. Hurtling downhill, I scanned the gray-and-white landscape for any sign of a trail—rock cairns, patches of brown, anything—but saw nothing.

“See that tiny green square at the bottom edge of the talus?” Cappy shouted over the pounding rain and roar of the storm. “That’s our destination, Rush Creek.” A thin gray ribbon of a river sliced through a postage stamp-sized meadow.

Trail or not, my feet did not care as they fairly flew over the rocky rubble toward that distant spot of green, so eager was I to get down off that damn mountain!

“I have to stop!” I called out, halting on a flat rock slab.

We were only halfway down the mountain, but I could not take another step. My feet had been numb for over an hour, and my legs felt rubbery with exhaustion. With the immediate danger of the lightning and thunder past and my adrenaline surge used up, my feet were lifeless clubs, and I feared stumbling in the rock maze.

Jane and Cappy joined me where I stood.

“I can’t feel my feet,” I said. “I need to put on my boots and warm up my toes.”

The sky, still filled with clouds, had grown lighter and paler. The rain had calmed to sprinkles and showers.

Scanning the sky, Cappy said, “My feet are freezing. I’m changing, too.”

While we sat, Jane, who had worn her boots all day, scouted around for some suggestion of a path.

Though the trailing edge of the storm continued to sprinkle on us from high gray clouds, the hour-long run down the mountain had warmed my body. Only my feet remained frozen and unfeeling. I peeled wet socks from my prune-wrinkled feet and massaged my bare toes between gloved hands, encouraging the blood to flow into the pale skin. I tugged on a new pair of plush REI hiking socks and pushed my feet into dry boots.

Before I had tied my laces, Jane called out, “There it is!” Standing on a broad slab of gray stone a few yards away, like a sailor on the prow of a ship shouting, “Land, ho!” Jane pointed with her hiking pole towards the green spot we had been eyeing all the way down the mountain.

“See how that thin brown line cuts straight across the meadow?” She paused, waiting until our eyes caught up with her words. “Halfway between us and the spot where it disappears into the rocks, you can see a brown patch of trail—”

Cappy and I leapt up to see better.

“—and then another patch a little closer—and a third.” All the while she pointed downward at a series of brown splotches among the rocks. Sure enough, like a connect-the-dots puzzle, the trail stood out from the rock-covered slope as a brown dotted line pointing arrow-straight towards our perch.

“I see it!” Cappy said, a smile growing across her face.

“Wow! It’s right there!” I answered.

With warming feet, I felt my confidence return as I navigated the leaps and bounds over and around the heaps of stone. In response, my body stopped gripping itself so tightly, and my breath came easier.

Despite the day’s harrowing events, our blundering mistakes, and utter exhaustion, we had survived. We had climbed up and over our first High Sierra pass. We had twice lost the trail, but found it both times. We had responded appropriately to a dangerous situation, partly of our own making, and come out unscathed.

In the days to come, we would find ourselves repeatedly challenged by the physical demands of the wilderness through which we journeyed. There were more mountains to scale, more rivers to ford, more mishaps to overcome. All that was to be expected, of course. Little did I know that it would be my inner journey—my own personal mountains to climb and rivers to cross—that would prove most daunting.

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Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear your thoughts!