It was meant as a warmup, to reclaim my mojo.

I had been deskbound for the better part of two weeks, as happens to even the best-intentioned of outdoorsmen, and my spirit had begun to wither. I grew ornery and discontent, angered that material obligations had once more bettered those of the spirit. A great ambivalence overtook me. Surely this was what the Buddhists referred to as dukkah, which translated variously as “unease,” “unstable standing,” and “terrible emptiness.” 

It is clearly not a place to linger.

So I fled the city and took to the nearest wilderness. There was nothing to do but walk until the awful torpor lifted. It was Nietzsche, I think, who said, “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.” Of course, being a documented insomniac, opium aficionado, violent dyspeptic, and ultimately manic depressive, Nietzsche is perhaps not the most reliable source of spiritual guidance. 

Regardless, I set out from the Monte Cristo Campground in the San Gabriel mountains and made directly for Rabbit Peak. I thought one summit, maybe two. A simple outing in rough country. I was traveling unusually light, forgoing the food and water typical of longer dayhikes. It wasn’t that I lacked fitness or experience, only confidence. 

You see, the symptoms of my dukkah had recently grown quite alarming. I had a permit for the Zion Traverse and four days at my disposal, blocked off in incontrovertible thick red Sharpie on my calendar. And yet the days escaped me, one passing after the next in a blur of empty movement. I could lean on any number of excuses: there was a toxic bloom of cyanobacteria fouling numerous water-sources in Zion; the snow had yet to melt off its cliffside trails; the entire East Rim was inaccessible. 

Each of these was truthful. But none of them was true.

Now, to miss a trip for no appreciable reason is akin to burning a wining lotto ticket—as sure a sign of crisis as one could ask for. It shattered my confidence completely. I would have to rebuild myself, methodically, with great finesse and sensitivity, starting with a single summit.

So I walked along the soft banks of a creek in early shadow until rising into daylight and scrambling at last off-trail, up the embankment toward Rabbit Peak. The ascent was strenuous but uneventful. I hiked the thin spine of the mountain through tufts of red buckwheat and fountaingrass, and soon came to its summit. A small rock cairn adorned the high point. Sweat glazed my brow and neckline. My native cowardice was not in evidence. Perhaps it was not so native.

Rather than doubling back and returning home, as had been my plan, I regarded the mountainscape around me. Across the thin cut of the highway, the looming presence of Mount Lukens, then northward across the rumpled sweep of ridge and gully. There was before me what seemed a viable cross-country traverse linking my current position to a far higher, rockier summit. My map revealed it as Granite Mountain, among the tallest in the vicinity. The undulating ridgeline appeared neither too vegetated nor too steep as it proceeded along three distinct false-summits before arriving at the true one.

I guzzled water from my small bottle while considering the traverse. It would commit me to a far longer day than expected, but then again there was a thin trail shown from Granite Mountain back to my car. Not an overly direct trail, but a trail nonetheless. Naturally, there is a crucial difference between traveling on-trail and cross-country. The former can be safely accomplished even in sub-optimal conditions—say, without sufficient water—while moving through untouched terrain increases one’s exertion tenfold.

I vacillated momentarily but feared a resurgence of my dukkah, so set out for Granite Mountain without another thought. Within minutes of clambering onto the sandy ridgeline I felt wondrously unencumbered. Yes, it was the satisfaction of hard exertion. But it was more than that as well. 

I have heard it said, “Never negotiate with your goals.” But this assumes in the first place that you have them. In retrospect, the Zion Traverse was something less, something more akin to a passing fancy. A transient impulse I had not fully adhered myself to. The difference was plain, for here at last in Granite Mountain I felt the pull of a fixed goal. Deep and irrevocable. A tidal pull. It felt exquisite.

As is so often the case, the journey outshone the destination. Granite’s bald, wind-battered summit, with its Ponderosas long since toppled, had nothing on its ridgeline. It was here, sprawled momentarily on a slab of yellow rock, that I took leave of all good judgement; for at the sight of a fresh range to the north, I resolved myself to hike it. 

This was Pacifico Mountain, agreeably austere and clustered handsomely by pines, standing five hundred feet above me. It was enticing, the way its summit rose to a jumbled prominence, slanting obliquely at its apex and trending eastward in striking fashion. Never mind that it would draw me several miles deeper into the mountains, or that I had rationed my last remaining drops of water so as to finish them on the traverse. There was no choice to it—I could not negotiate with my goals. (That I also could not control them had not yet fully registered.)

I dropped down out along the fireroad and found the walking to be pleasant, rimming the unnamed valley that stretched to Big Tujunga Canyon. Only with its final thrust up to the summit did it pose any real challenge: the narrow singletrack swooping and meandering between dry heaps of fallen needles to a fragrant grove of pines.

I made the summit, took in the vast bronze flat of the Mojave, and returned to Granite Mountain. By now I had lost all sense of reason and my thirst had grown immensely. I had stopped eating altogether, as digestion requires water. Also, I had begun to keep my mouth shut—a rare thing for me—as a preponderance of moisture is lost while breathing with it open. I was rapidly going hoarse, which frankly did not bode well. But my mind was clear, and my head, if pounding somewhat, was neither light nor spinning. 

I was still on the good side of risk, though certainly not of comfort. In a minor stupor, I lurched inexplicably toward Roundtop, the day’s fourth summit, and from its dry crest surveyed my options. Beneath me, quite a good ways beneath me, stretched the pale track which led back to the Monte Cristo Campground. Convenient enough, except there seemed no earthly way to bridge the gap. Loose rock bounded my left, and while the descent before me was unobstructed, it looked troublesomely steep.  

Of course, if you have any familiarity with nature’s ruthless sense of humor, you will anticipate the punchline. There existed, not five hundred feet from where I stood, a clean and undemanding route down from the summit. Naturally, I had no inkling of it. Actually, I had no inkling of anything but my need for water.

And so, in a perfect illustration of godawful decision making, I chose not the neat descent before me, nor the far gentler one to my left, but instead flung myself directly onto the most scarred, friable, and unmanageable gully on the mountain. It was a route which could not have incorporated more unnecessary torment had it simply launched me from the cliff face.

Let me just say here in my defense that the map had advertised a trail—albeit a bizarre one whose twists and turns seemed the work of an extremely drunk cartographer—over this very stretch of mountain. But I had overlooked one slight detail: the dotted line which every hiker comes to depend on blindly, even unreasonably, had at this very point on the map turned from its common black to crimson.

A small thing, it might seem. But the San Gabriels had a habit of this, of luring unwitting hikers into embarrassment and injury. Routes innocuously labeled “Unmaintained” or “Truck Trail”—to say nothing of those drawn in hellish crimson—were often nothing more than unmitigated deathtraps. 

This was certainly the case with the The Monte Cristo Trail, which was not unmaintained so much as entirely fabricated. Primeval undergrowth clotted every square inch. It grew so dense as to leave no choice but to crush directly into the unforgiving center of one thicket in order to avoid the same in another. I tottered wildly between thick stands of whitethorn and vicious greasewood, each tipped with cone-like prickles. They seemed to erupt from all directions, opening cuts on my neck, both arms and thighs, and the unlikely span below one nipple. I bent myself into positions generally available only to the most skilled of contortionists, occasionally bursting into the open along a high-angle ravine. 

I was fully committed now. The fifteen-mile route back was not an option. And so, by a technique known in the jargon as “side-hilling,” which sounds rather technical but is in fact only a desperate scrabble in which one drags themselves, face-down and trembling, across a treacherous ravine, I made my way down the mountain.

Eventually, I emerged as Adam had from Eden: chest heaving, my face a latticework of scratches, and vaguely mortified. I had been without water seven hours now. The sun hung bright above me. A strange pressure amassed above my neckline. My dusty pallor deepened to that of a very healthy eggplant. It was not the distance—I had done twenty-mile days before, though never inadvertently—but the jarring contrast between map and territory that gave me pause.

A final peak towered before me. Granted, I was once again on level ground, and the fork ahead if taken to the west would quickly reach the shallow creek and soon thereafter the campground I had parked at. If taken to the south, however, it would crescendo flawlessly atop the summit of Iron Mountain, the last peak in the region. It seemed a fitting climax, if not a particularity wise one. 

Ordinarily, this might call for a certain amount of vacillation. A dithering of spirit. Uneven standing, you might say. But that was all behind me now, by twenty miles or so.

I clambered up the slope to Iron Mountain. 

I did not negotiate.