Michelle and Gerry PCT hike: October 2008

My father wanted me to think about, and share, what I learned from this trip (before I forget). So here:

Five things I learned on the Pacific Crest Trail

1. Light: the right way to backpack
I don’t really believe there is a “right” and “wrong” way to do anything recreational. But what I will argue is this: If you can reduce your packweight (minus food and water) to around 10-12 pounds, you will never go back. Most backpackers spend the majority of their time hiking, not camping or enjoying the comforts of expensive gear. Backpackers spend most of their time walking around looking at beautiful things. Hence, the more enjoyable the walking, the more enjoyable the backpacking trip. You will enjoy yourself more if you can: 1) bend over or squat easily to look at a small flower, 2) nimbly scramble up or down a steep slope, 3) have enough balance to playfully walk across logs and stones, 4) walk a long distance without suffering ill effects from stress on your body, and 5) forget you are carrying anything at all. These are just a few examples of things you can only do with a very light pack.

Having a light pack in the summertime is easier then you think. First, sleep in a shelter that is under 2 lbs (tarp or tarptent). Then, sleep in a bag that is under 2 lbs. Next, cook with a system that is under 1 lb. (alcohol stove). Carry a backpack that is under 2 llbs. There. Now you have 3 lbs for extra clothes and personal items. And that’s less than 10 pounds.

The outdoor recreation culture is highly influenced by companies who tell you that you need lots of heavy, expensive gear that you don’t need and will only make you suffer needlessly. If you follow the advice of people in gear shops, you’ll have no money, bad gear, and no idea what you’re missing by carrying so much crap. The best gear we’ve seen is homemade. And the best advice comes from people who most often do the specific activity that you want to do. People in gear stores will try and sell you a climbing pack designed for summiting K2, even if you’re just taking dayhikes in your backyard. Anyways, many, many people have already written diatribes about this frustrating situation, and there are many good books and websites out there. So I leave you to investigate the topic yourself. You might want to start with Ray Jardine.

Although you wouldn’t think so from walking into REI, backpacking is actually about having less and experiencing more.

A Spruce Grouse

A ground squirrel

Pollination

Grouse

2. Natural selection is amazing, obvious, and ubiquitous
On a plant near the trail we saw thousands of black specks. Aphids. Crawling around atop the carpet of aphids were ants. Why?

It’s quite an amazing thing to really think about and we can explain much of whole story with what we know about evolution. DNA is a molecule of digital information that replicates itself. Genes are segments of DNA, and act as digital instructions for the construction and maintenance of extraordinarily complex machines called organisms. Genes that build good machines survive. But most genes die. Of the survivors, genes that replicate faster become more common. Hence, the world becomes populated by survival and replication experts. That is the basic idea of natural selection, first realized by Charles Darwin. Different organisms have evolved different strategies for survival and reproduction. These strategies are quite ingenious. For instance, plants survive and reproduce by literally making themselves out of thin air. They suck carbon right out of the air, and use photons shot across space from a nearby star to construct an elaborate architecture of roots, shoots, and leaves. This whole process evolved from an inconceivably long period of trial-and-error combined with random innovations from mutations. The bad genes went extinct. The good genes with their good designs survived and seeded the next generation. But mutation is not the only source of innovation.

Much innovation comes from organisms combining together into superorganisms. Some bacteria evolved the ability to process sunlight, but it may surprise you to learn that the ancestors of plants did not. Plants never gained the ability themselves. Instead, they joined forces with those bacteria and the bacteria began to live inside the plant cells. The bacteria are now known as chloroplasts. Plants store the energy they make as invisibly tiny rings of carbon, called sugars, for transport. Mitochondria provide cells with energy, and they use to be bacteria too. Some plants are still in the process of joining forces with bacteria. You can see this in plants like peas that house nitrogen-fixing bacteria. Given enough time, the bacteria and plant will become indistinguishable.

Aphids are tiny critters that have evolved to steal plant sugar by breaking past plant architecture. In fact, they have become so good at extracting sugars from the plants that their waste is almost pure sugar. Their genes have over time optimized their mouthparts for piercing plant walls and sucking fluids. Ants, on the other hand, have evolved pincer jaws, rather than sucking mouthparts, because their ancestors ate things they could grab. An ant colony is a large super-organism. Instead of having hands for manipulating the world, ant colonies have thousands of tiny “organs” called ants, which can collectively kill an animal, lift it, and carry it back to the nest for “digestion”. Each ant is specialized and acts as an organ, not as an individual. Each one will easily die for the colony. This is because, like the cells of your hands, an individual ant is sterile. Individual ants are just the leaves of the tree. Ants are good at fighting, but not parasitizing plants, so the ants use the aphids to get sugar, just like humans use cows to convert grass into milk. The ants milk the aphids. The aphids provide the ants with their sugar waste, and the ants protect the aphids and the plant from predators. The ants and aphids co-evolved into a cooperative venture. There are mutual benefits for each. Given enough time, will they become indistinguishable? Standing there looking at this plant and its aphids and ants was like a religious experience for me. There was just so much there. Yet all so easy to miss. It made me feel like there was that much richness in all the living things around me all the time, everywhere I looked. I won’t continue on this anymore, because I suspect it’s getting boring…

I wanted to see the West. That was my main reason for hiking the PCT. By “the West”, I wasn’t referring to cowboys; I wanted to see the different plants, animals, and environments found in the Western United States. I will never think about the ecological term “communities” the same way again. What was once a mere abstract concept, is now permanently blazoned into my mind. I learned so many new species of plants and animals and noticed which ones appeared together and which ones show up in different kinds of environments. We walked two ecological gradients at once, altitude and latitude. For me, the Pacific Crest Trail was a 4 month ecology and natural history field class. Textbook biology concepts that flittered, pulsed, screeched, and glittered in the morning sun.

I often thought about evolution and natural selection on the trail. It has been argued that Darwin’s “dangerous idea” –the idea of natural selection- is the most powerful concept ever conceived by a human. The argument goes like this. Darwinism requires you to assume only one extraordinarily simple idea: Some things copy themselves. Yet it explains the most complex things in the known universe, namely, all of life. Once you understand natural selection, it will change the way you look at everything. On the trail, I saw evolution everywhere. I saw adaptation, selective pressure, competition, and cooperation. In those ants, aphids, and plants, I saw the war of genes in different bodies reaching across space and time, cooperating and conflicting, making a world that is marvelously complex and yet makes so much sense given what we know about how evolution works. At the same time, I was reading some important review papers on animal cooperation and I had the time to let the ideas sink in. I was learning a lot, and more importantly I was getting excited about biology and science as a process of discovering new things.

Caught in snow and rain near Glacier Peak

Blowdown along a "closed" section of trail

Michelle crossing a wet log over a raging creek

Thru-hikers celebrating at Stehekin, the final resupply before the border

Taking the bus back to the trail.

My stuffed bat (Thanks Ingrid!)

3. People enjoy being altruistic to strangers
Biologists know why selfishness exists. It’s similar to the reason that ruthless businessman exist. Natural selection. If you’re not ruthless, you can go extinct. So why does niceness exist in nature? That’s the subject of animal cooperation. That’s what I get to study for 3-4 years using vampire bats!

Anyway, on this trip I was utterly amazed at how nice people could be. We ran into dozens of “trail angels”, people who gave us housing, food, rides, showers, clothing, and even cars to use, not just for the two of us, but often for 50 “guests” at a time! They asked for nothing in return. This was a lot of work for them and a lot of cost. Their days seemed to be devoted to supporting a bunch of hikers, making water caches out on the trail, and providing food and shelter at crucial points. Our early ancestors like bacteria may be selfish, but humans are far from selfish. Why?

I love to be nice. I bet you do too. Most people want to be good. And almost all people want others to be nice and good to them. But people are not only good so that others will be good to them -- we are kind because it feels good. With a few exceptions, like psychopaths, our brains reward cooperative behaviour. We actually get a “high” from being kind, caring, and helping others. Isn’t it great to be human! Humans are biological “angels” in many ways. But, like all animals, we also evolved to not be suckers. We are not blank slates at birth. We are endowed with moral instincts. The mechanisms of these innate moralities are still being worked out. Just as language, which we learn, is built on an innate structure, so are our moral intuitions.
I’ll give you one example. Take generalized reciprocity. An experiment obtained the following result. If a person finds a quarter in a payphone, she is more likely to pick up a dropped newspaper for someone else. In other words, people are more likely to give, if they received something, regardless of who gave it to them! Rats will give food to other rats more when they get food, even if they received food from an anonymous rat. They will give even more food back to the very same rat, i.e. tit for tat. But that’s not always necessary. Sometimes we just give. I suspect that rats feel an urge to be nice just like humans, and an urge to return favours. These subtle drives may be built into a social animal’s brain. Then, throughout our lifetime, we learn the details-- how and when to give.

But anyway, I’m digressing. My main point is that people are amazingly amazingly altruistic, especially given the opportunity and the right context. Many people might say that things like religion make us nice. But I would argue that people join religion because religions say to be nice, not the other way around. People already want to be nice. they have that in them already, and they use religions as a tool to try and be nicer. That’s how nice people are. Yeah, there’s a lot of greed and awfulness in the world. But people are nicer and more cooperative than any animal I can think of. And there’s astounding evidence that people and cultures are becoming nicer over time. This talk gives some examples.

Hike the PCT yourself. If you are not impressed by natural beauty or ecology or human endurance, you will at least be awed at how amazing people can be to each other.

The northern Cascades

Six, Michelle, Kim, Spiff, and Brent

4. A conflict worth pondering: Achieving goals versus caring for people
I took a free outdoor education course on “leadership dynamics”. It was kind of lame, but one thing I took away was the idea of leadership styles. Some leaders are apparently “goal-oriented”. They are mainly focused on achieving a goal, like getting to the summit of a mountain. Other leaders are “people-oriented”; they mainly focus on whether or not people are having a good time. Much to my chagrin, the instructor said I was slightly biased towards being goal-oriented. I would rather be described as the more sensitive, caring, person-oriented type of leader, but “goal-oriented” is what she said. :-(

Anyways, my point is that it’s difficult if not impossible to focus simultaneously on both achieving goals and caring for people; often the more you do one, the less you do the other. On the PCT, Michelle and I were sometimes focused more on getting to our next schedule point on time. Other times, we cared more about just making sure we were both having a good time. Sometimes we did both equally ok, but neither very well. But we had to shift priorities, and we had to be on the same page about what the current priority was. What I learned on the PCT is that you have to intentionally and consciously think about this conflict, because it’s inherent in life.

People who do great public things often have troubled personal lives. Examples include Gandhi, Einstein, Newton, and there are many others. Most other people are more subtle heroes to a small group of family and friends. What do we sacrifice for achieving our big dreams? As Gary Snyder wrote-

What history fails to mention is
most everybody lived their lives
with friends and children,
played it cool,
left truth and beauty to the guys
who tricked for bigshots
and were fools.

At the Canadian border

5. Another conflict worth pondering: Social pressures versus internal motivation
Humans are social animals, and much of our behaviour is molded to be socially beneficial. Fish are good at swimming. Rodents are good at chewing. Birds are good at flying. And primates are good at socializing. We observe, we copy, we assess, and we manipulate. And humans do it better than anyone. Hence, culture.

This has some interesting consequences. Everyone knows that humans can be a lot like sheep. We follow the herd. We do things because we see other people doing it. And we are extremely curious about what other people do. For many, a popular form of entertainment is spying on celebrity personal lives. It’s human nature to be interested in other humans, and to learn whatever we can from them. We end up becoming a lot like the people we are around.
One point of disagreement we had on the trail was “ethics”. Is it ok to skip around a section of trail? What if it’s closed? Should we walk on the road or take the bus? For the reader, it may seem simple: do whatever you want! But it’s quite amazing how culture affects peoples’ decisions. When sections of the PCT were closed for forest fire, everyone looked to everyone else to know what to do. Many people chose to walk on the roads to avoid “cheating”. I wasn’t interested in hiking on a highway, so we opted to take the bus. The amazing thing was this: Michelle felt very guilty. Why? Certainly not because she wanted to walk on a road. It was because it seemed like everybody else was walking on the road and we were cheating by taking a bus. If everyone was taking the bus, no one would consider this “cheating”. And how can you “cheat” on a hiking trip?! Yet, there was an obvious social pressure that had arisen. Purists held a moral high-ground and talked about “cheaters”, meanwhile people felt they had to actually justify hiking on “unofficial” sections of trail!

Before we started the hike, we both talked about how we wouldn’t mind skipping sections, for instance, taking a shortcut or hitching into towns. At the time (but not now), I was even fine with skipping over parts that I thought might be "boring". But later I learned that, for many, being a “thru-hiker” meant following a certain code of conduct. Taking a shortcut, for some, seemed tantamount to saying you were skipping miles in a marathon. Different people started different standards. Some people said “I’m not walking on anything but the official PCT”. Others said “I’m making a continuous series of footsteps from Mexico to Canada”. These personal rules were often adopted by others consciously or unconsciously. They became part of a culture. To some people, the Pacific Crest Trail was like running a huge marathon and either you do the whole thing or you’re a cheater. And this attitude gets passed on to people who originally had no such lofty goals. Some people (like yours truly) just wanted to see the mountains out west. It was like being in a biology class of future medical students, when you just wanted to learn some plant names.

Michelle and I differed in the amounts we were affected by these pressures. For some reason, the social norms usually made me want to do the opposite. "Official PCT?? Blah, whatever. Let's go the way we aren't supposed to. I can do whatever I want..."

I’m not sure if that tendency is good or bad. The important point is that I think it’s crucial to think about why you do things. We can’t help but copy the ideas, perspectives, and culture around us. That’s why it’s even more important to take a moment to think about whether or not social influences are good (as they often are) or bad. I’m glad I copied so much of what people did on the PCT. I don’t think I would have been able to hike the whole trail without copying people’s hiking styles, gear, and even food preferences. But on the other hand, we are all free individuals and we can tailor what we learn from others with what we reason out ourselves. Often we should follow our internal motivations, regardless of what other people have as goals. So I’m also glad that we didn’t hike on 80 miles of roads. Not just because I don’t like roads, but also because it demonstrated to me that hiking really is about making your own adventure.

Bat in the sky

One last thing…
Life is short! I can’t say I learned much about this particular reality on the PCT. Everyone knows this already. But sometimes –like right now- it’s blaringly obvious. The entire trip already seems like it happened last week.

And yet, I still have all those thousands of memories to fill my daydreams and nostalgic moments. These were rich, surreal moments we shared. We found ourselves surrounded by utter beauty and so far from anything to remind us of our worldly egos. But in retrospect it all went by in a flash. I want to have a life that’s rich with experiences like that, streams of pure sensory experiences that will shape us for the years to come.

As I read that last sentence, I realize it doesn’t really mean anything. Streams of pure sensory experience?? Wha? So, obviously, I can’t really tell you everything I learned in words. But you get the idea…

love to all of you,
Gerald