Dave Spivey - John Muir Trail 56 Days of Crazy Adventure

-56 DAYS OF CRAZY ADVENTURE

A Journal by

DAVE SPIVEY

SMASHWORDS EDITION

.............

PUBLISHED BY:

Dave Spivey on Smashwords

John Muir Trail

56 Days of Crazy Adventure

Copyright 2013 by Dave Spivey

Thank you for downloading this ebook. This iscopyrighted property of the author and may not be reproduced,scanned, or distributed for any commercial or non-commercial usewithout permission from the author. Quotes used in the reviews arethe exception. No alteration of the content is allowed. If youenjoyed this book, then encourage your friends and others topurchase their own copy.

Your respect and support for the property ofthis author is appreciated.

Note: I recommend the use of the internet toaccess pictures, videos, and maps of the John Muir Trail so you canfollow along with my journey. Just type in the location!

Cover photograph: View of the Eastern Side ofthe Sierra Nevada Mountain Range

Formatting and cover design by Caligraphics

I need to give a special thank you to mywifes Aunt Becky for without her encouragement to adapt my journalinto book form it may have never have been completed.

Dedicated to my family Amy, Abigail, andMadeleine

Table ofContents:

This is the journal of my first hike along the221 mile John Muir Trail. Although I have edited and added to thejournal writings, I have made a point to try and not embellish orexaggerate the happenings of the adventure. When I wrote thisjournal, I wrote in snippets of sentences so that I would not haveto spend too much of my day and night with a pen in my hand. It wasmy intention to record my adventure in such a way that I would beable to remember the happenings of the trip after I was back athome. An adventure like this has so many parts to it that I knew Iwould lose some of the memories of the experiences over time if Ididnt write them down. I have input the original journal, word forword, into another file for safe keeping and for my ownverification that I havent fibbed about my adventures!

The Muir trail (210.4 miles long) starts atMount Whitney summit but the nearest trail head is Mount WhitneyPortal, 10.6 miles away, and ends in Yosemite Valley. There is ashort side trip available along the way to the top of Mount Whitneyitself which adds to the attraction of the trail. Mount Whitneysummit is the highest point in all of the contiguous United Statesat 14,497 feet. There are eleven passes (if you count Trail Crestas one of the passes), many fords of creeks, streams, and riversalong the way. There is 80,000 feet of elevation change along theway. It has 38,000 feet of ascent (elevation gain) and 46,000 feetof descent (elevation loss). I had to cross over many high, tall,wide, suspension, stone, steel, wooden, ice, log, and downedbridges. The trail has many sections which traverse snow packs andice fields all which must be crossed with a heavy pack.

I was fortunate enough to be able to go on a 56day backpacking trip (my wilderness permit was good for threemonths!). My intention was to take my time and only travel shortdistances between overnight stays so I would be able to explore andenjoy the trail and the trip. So many people were covering 15, 20miles a day and I couldnt figure out why they wanted to hike thisbeautiful trail so quickly. I wanted to look around and see thewhole trail and not just look at my boots all day long.

A trip like this is not possible without thehelp and support of many other people. My sister contributed awonderful jacket for the trip and mom helped with some of the food.Someone had to drive me up to the trailhead and someone had to pickme up at trails end, without their volunteering of time and money,such a hike would not have been possible.

The preparation for such a hike begins months inadvance. Originally for this hike three of my friends had plannedto go on the hike with me. All three for one reason or another hadto back out of the trip. For some it was time they couldnt spare,for others it was the monetary expenditure which held them back.One of my friends didnt let me know he was not going until oneweek before the start of the trip. I was very disappointed in hisdecision not to go with me but what could I do? All had goodintentions to go but, it just was not in the cards for my friendsto accompany me.

I was the one who had done all the prep andresearch for the hike. It was my idea to do this. I had made up atentative daily itinerary for the entire trip. I was the one personin the group whom had applied for a wilderness permit for all of usto go on a three month trip. I had planned a three month trip intothe wilderness and was ready to go, I was still going to go,come-hell-or-high-water! If I had done all the prep work for four;then if the others could not go; why not just go by myself?

I think it is important to put some history intothe story of what really motivated me to attempt this adventure. Asa child I was lucky enough to have a father and mother who enjoyedbeing in the outdoors. While growing up our family would go toYosemite Valley and Tuolumne Meadows every summer for a couple ofweeks vacation. Dad loved to fish and he instilled his love offishing into me. He would take me and sometimes my friends onbackpacking trips into the mountains for overnight stays. Mom anddad bought a small sailboat one summer and we used it on weekendsand sometimes to sail to Catalina Island. It was very slow and itwould therefore take us forever to get anywhere but, that didntever stop us from going. Pulling a fourteen foot travel trailer wewould go on trips to National Parks and we would even stop at thosesmall roadside attractions along the way. All of these wereadventures no smaller than the one I was getting ready to go on,except this time it was me who was doing all the work instead of myparents. I was brought up to be an adventurer, to seek otherplaces, and to explore the world around me, and I dearly thank myparents for giving me that mind set.

I did this hike at the age of twenty-four. Whythen? Here are some of the recent events which lead up to mydeparture. I had dropped out of college, quit a good job because Idesigned the tooling for parts of a delivery platform and safetyfor nuclear weapons, got a bad case of the chickenpox, moved to myparents Arizona vacation house on the desert and then moved backhome to live with them in El Segundo (California), had broken upwith my girlfriend, my best friend turned into a Jesus freak, and Iwas pretty close to being flat broke. I was feeling down becausewhen I was younger I was a pretty good swimmer and water poloplayer and used to dream of going to the Olympics. The 1980Olympics were boycotted by the U.S. so if I was going to make theteam it would have been this year (although I had dropped out ofswimming several years before this adventure and never came closeto going to the Olympic trials, my best years were in my youngerdays). I really needed to get away and find my place in the worldand most importantly, get my head straight. All of these thingscontributed to me wanting and needing to have an adventure. Ifigured what I wanted was something a little dangerous, mentallyand physically challenging and something that I could succeed at toget me back on my feet. My life was in the toilet before I left. Ithink by having this crazy idea to hike the John Muir Trail it gaveme the attention of family and friends that I so dearly needed inmy life so I could keep going on with my life. I felt like I wasgoing to be somebody again and all I had to do was finish!

So now I was all about making it happen. Time toget off my poor, sad, feeling-sorry-for-myself ass and do what Iknew needed to be done. I had a direction at last! When I returnedfrom the desert I went looking for a new job. I couldnt find oneso, I signed up with a temp agency and began taking any job theyoffered me. It was frustrating, low paying work but I made enoughto be able to start buying my equipment for the trip. I even workedfor my brother-in-law for a while as a masons tender that wasmindless, back breaking work! Whatever it took to make it happen, Iwas going to do it!