Breadcrumbs

Dad collected lots of small, seemingly unimportant things. He liked to keep tokens from people he'd met, things he'd done, or places he'd seen, most likely to act as reminders for when memories faded. That made the top drawer of his dresser pretty interesting to explore as a little kid. It was a chest filled with strange rings, coins, rocks (I know...), pins (mostly for merit from the U.S. Postal Service, if you knew Dad, that should explain), and a myriad of other small items he'd collected and kept throughout his life. 

After my brother brought up hiking the Muir Trail, the topic dropped off a cliff a bit. We would discuss it every now and then, but it was far from maturing into a real plan.

I'll never forget the sunny afternoon in September 2013 when Mom showed my brother and I an ordinary sheet of lined paper that would compel both of us to attempt the hike in 2015. 

My girlfriend and I were visiting family out in California; it was our last day there, and my brother had come by for a visit. We hadn't spent much time together, and it was our last chance to catch up for a bit before I flew back to New York. I opened up an old box while going through some of my things to find a disorganized cache of family photographs. It was a haphazard collection of pictures of my siblings and I as children, Mom and Dad in their youth, and everything in between. 

Young bucks on the Muir Trail in the Ansel Adams Wilderness, September 1996.

At the bottom were a bunch of framed pictures of Dad in the mountains that used to hang proudly in the hallway upstairs. One of them in particular struck me: a photograph of him sitting on a rocky out crop, his long lean legs folded underneath him, profile shadowed as he gazes across a sunlit range.

The photograph is in my first post. I'll never forget how it made me feel. I wanted to sit right there! Earn the right to enjoy that view.

When I showed my brother the picture and the John Muir Trail came up in that living room yet again, Mom produced another box. It had some of Dad's most guarded memories in it: things from his childhood, like old backpacking gear, and even some of his boy scout memorabilia. But the box was mostly filled with momentos he'd kept from his kids: Father's Day cards we'd made in school; a hilarious note from my sister apologizing for breaking her window and offering her $5 allowance to pay to fix it. These were the sorts of things he collected and kept with him. 

The most important item to come out of that box for purposes of this story was a single sheet of lined notebook paper. On that thirty eight year old brittle sheet of paper, written in pencil in Dad's flowing script, was his John Muir Trail itinerary from 1975. It's a pretty crude log, where he recorded each day's campsite, daily total mileage, and each day's ending elevation.

It's a tad inaccurate, and just a piece of notebook paper, but to us it was like a sacred document. We stared at it with wide-eyes, drank in the schedule. The daily mileage wasn't even that bad!

Dad's John Muir Trail Log

This was the flare I'd been looking for, the moment that 'we should do that,' became 'we can do that,' which rapidly turned into 'let's do it!' It was September 2013: it only made sense that we'd follow Dad forty years later, and hike the John Muir Trail in 2015 in his honor and memory. 

He also left a personal journal of his hike that I've kept. It's not necessarily a guide, a little difficult to decipher, and doesn't contain a whole lot of practical information on the trail, besides, the JMT has changed much since he walked it. It's more a glimpse into his own experience. He addressed it to us in the hopes that it might lead us to the Muir Trail, or at least to some understanding of how the experience impacted his life. 

Dad's John Muir Trail Journal

So we had an idea: to walk from the bottom of the Yosemite Valley to the summit of Mt. Whitney in summer 2015. Now we'd need a plan, lots of gear, and a ton of love and support. And a permit.