I didn’t even know what the Sheep Camp ranger meant when she told us the pass was a class three rock scramble.
What the HELL was I thinking?
—entry from Happy Camp log, Chilkoot Trail
I WASN’T GOING TO let anyone rush me. I wasn’t going to let me rush me. I was going to take it one foot at a time, one boulder at a time. I was going slow, I was going careful, I was not going to slip or fall, there would be no Stabenow blood shed in the Chilkoot Pass that day.
That was my plan. I slithered across the snow field to the foot of the Scales and got chest to chest with a boulder taller than I was. Slowly, carefully, one fingernail at a time, I thought my way over it. One boulder behind me. A thousand to go. I stretched out a toe that was suddenly and inexplicably prehensile for the next.
What the hell was I thinking, saying I’d hike the Chilkoot Pass with my friends Rhonda Sleighter and Sharyn Wilson? I didn’t even know what the Sheep Camp ranger meant when she told us the pass was a class three rock scramble. Who was I, overweight, out of shape, someone who voluntarily quit camping when she was twelve, who was I to think I could hoist myself over a mountain pass which Henry De Windt had described in 1897 as, “difficult, even dangerous, to those not possessed of steady nerve?”
When did the giggling with relief start?
Honestly? On the plane home.
Yup. Nope. There was an interesting profile of Kim Stanley Robinson in a NYer last year (or the year before, I have no sense of time), who seems to spend most of his time traversing just such passes in Northern California.
“For the kinds of people who like those kinds of things, those are the kinds of things that they like.”–Miss Jean Brody
And you already know how many times the miners had to go over that same pass! And carrying all of their supplies. I don’t know how they did it. I am glad you made it safely to the other side.
Me, too.