And all the rest of the day—and ever since, really, but that day it really possessed me—I wondered whether I had been on an old trail or not.
2. Mistakes Can Be Good
I took my parents up Precipice Trail when they were in their mid-sixties, and to tell you the truth I had always run that trail before, pretty much, trying to do it quick and get back into town and do the family thing, so my memory of it was deficient. I realized that when I took them up it going slow. There’s a hell of a lot of ladders on that trail. After the fairly acrobatic boulder traverse across the huge talus slide, it’s nothing but ladder after ladder, with some exposed ledge traverses to get from the top of one ladder to the bottom of the next. On one of these ledges my mom said my name in that intonation of hers which means “you’ve got to be kidding,” and my dad brought up the rear saying nothing—he maybe wasn’t in as good a shape as my mom, and was wearing tight jeans. Later he said he thought I was getting back at them for all the things they might have ever done that I didn’t like. But he was strong, and Mom too. We topped out and immediately descended, which was easier aerobically, but still pretty white-knuckle—worse, really. The ladders are just rungs of iron, drilled into sheer cliff as high as fifty feet. Looking down as you descend can be daunting. When we got back to the bottom I pointed up where we had gone—it looks like a pure cliff from below, and some climbers were there gearing up to do the face just to the left of the trail, so it was impressive. We got back to camp and they were high, they were high as kites. They couldn’t believe they had done it. So even though it was a mistake I had done a good thing.
3. You Can’t Lose the Trail
I had been hiking Crommelin Crater for years when a man published a history of the crater’s trails and made it all new to me. I had seen but I hadn’t understood. The trails had not been built by the co-op currently administering the crater, as I had assumed, but instead by a succession of inspired crazies, who had gotten into a kind of contest with each other to see who could build the most beautiful trails. The steep brecciated granite walls of the crater had become the canvases for their new art form, which they had pursued for some twenty or thirty years, back before the turn of the century. One had gotten his entire co-op into building trails, putting in several on the wall just above and behind the co-op’s diskhouse.
But when the current administration took over, they closed down half the trails in the crater as being highly redundant, which they were. But they were works of art too, and being well built out of huge blocks of stone, a lot of them were still out there, but not on the maps anymore. And this man had published the old maps in his book and given directions for finding the old trailheads, which the current agency had allowed to become obscure. Finding the old trails—“trail phantoming” he called it—was a new art form, making use of and preserving the older one. I started doing it myself and loved it. It added route-finding, archaeology, and huge amounts of bushwhacking to the already beautiful experience of hiking the crater.
One day we took the kids and hunted for one of the old co-op’s lost trails. First we found what must once have been a wide esplanade running along the foot of the wall, now all filled with birch. We crossed the northernmost trail still on the map and continued north on the overgrown esplanade, looking at the great wall for signs of a trail. There were a lot of possibilities, I thought—as usual. But then in all the leaves I spotted a big dressed stone, like someone’s trunk, and we all ran over and there it was—a stone staircase, buried deep in dead leaves, leading up the wall. It was thrilling.
Off we went, kids first. We couldn’t keep up with them. It was easy as could be to follow the trail, which was mostly a full staircase, set into the wall for flight after flight. But it was also obvious that it hadn’t been walked on much in many years. One traverse section had lost its underpinnings and ten or twelve blocks had slid downslope, forming a loop of stone we had to negotiate. In another place a thick-trunked birch had fallen across the trail and we had to work around the roots. These digressions made us realize how hard the slope would have been without a trail. But with it: sidewalks and staircases.
And then, looking ahead, we saw the trail cutting up and across a big shadowed talus slope, under a curved section of the wall. All the great shatter of rock was light pink granite, and all the lichen growing on it was a pale green. Pale green circles mottling pale pink shatter—pale green carpet on pale pink stairs—it looked like something the Incas had built, or visitors from Atlantis. Even the kids stopped to look.
4. The Natural Genius
Dorr obviously explored the eastern crater wall thoroughly, and then designed his trails to take advantage of features already there, leading travelers under overhangs, behind drop blocks, up cracks, and through tunnels. One section of the wall has a big steep concave bulge of granite, an exposed pluton, kind of unusual, with a vertical fissure running all the way up it, waist or chest deep all the way. Naturally Dorr put a trail right up that crack, filling its bottom with a steep narrow staircase, each granite block stacked on the back part of the one below it, in a flight that was hundreds of stones long.
I was hiking up this beautiful trail one dawn patrol in the rain, everything gray and misty so that I only saw a bit above and below me, and by the time I got to this section of the trail, the fissure had become a streambed. White water dropped down it step by step, as in fish ladders you see by dams. White water clattering stepwise down a granite slope, out of the mist—it was surreal.
To continue upward meant soaking my boots, as each step would submerge me in water to the ankle, if not the knee. Out in the backcountry that would be a problem. But I knew I would be at the house twenty minutes after the end of my hike, and there take a shower, and put my boots by the fire. It wouldn’t be that good for the boots, but so what. Worth it for the joy of hiking up that staircase waterfall. Step after step, splash, splash, white water, the noise of it, the rain and the wind. Every step placed securely, hands using the granite walls to both sides as railings. A beautiful ascent; something I never expect to see again.
Then at the top of the staircase, the trail stopped. For some reason Dorr never connected this trail to his others, and it ends on the top of that granite bulge, still only halfway up the crater wall. To get over to the nearest of Dorr’s other staircase trails you have to traverse a broad tilted bench, thick with birch and dead logs. And currently soaked and obscured by mist.
I whacked on, enjoying the new nature of the problem. Here all the trail phantoms together make the trail, I thought, and looked for sign. I was not overly concerned when I didn’t see any. Trail comes and goes depending on how much you need it. Where many ways will go, people disperse and take them all, and so the trail fades and disappears. You don’t need it. When the way gets hard the trail becomes clear again—there are only a few ways to go, and people find those over and over. This happens everywhere, wherever people walk the land. Most trails were never planned, you see, but were made by a collective of people spread through time, all evaluating the slope on their own, and very often coming to the same conclusions. So when I lose the trail and then come back on it again I am always pleased to see that I have made the same judgment as others before me. I say, Hey, the natural genius here once again, inside all of us. How nice.
So I crashed across this wet bench, content to wander; it was fun. I would hit Dorr’s next trail eventually.