But as he had walked toward Mount Baden-Powell after that night at the Cajon Pass Inn, slowly but surely, it’d dawned on him that maybe it was the detours that actually counted the most. The adventures he met along the way that would actually change him.
Thank goodness all this had come to him, because by the time he’d handed over his credit card in Wrightwood, Ben had become such a miserable companion—pretending to be fine when he clearly wasn’t, his eyes closed off, his entire aura un-Ben-ish—that Alexei would have done anything at that point to see a real smile from him again.
“You sure?” Ben had asked approximately twenty-five times, until Alexei had reached over and stolen his phone, typing in his credit card number himself.
But Ben was full of real smiles now.
Ben had become exceedingly cheery, even for Ben, the closer they got to Kennedy Meadows. The closer they got to the hitch to Reno. To the plane ride to his hometown.
And against all odds, with each mile, Alexei had only become more sure.
“I bet you would recognize a mountain chickadee, too, at this point,” Alexei said.
“Negatory,” Ben said confidently. “Although your faith in me is cute.”
“Or scrub jays,” Alexei continued. “When we get back and hike more into the Sierras, I bet scrub jays will start popping up everywhere, and believe me, they’re obnoxious. You’ll start recognizing them for sure.”
“Whatever you say, Lex. I’m just going to sit tight with my tanager victory for the moment.”
Alexei was going to miss this. These small interludes on the trail when they decided to extend a lunch break, or take a temporary respite from the sun after a particularly crushing incline. They had become some of his favorite moments.
He knew it was barely more than a week—eight days—that they’d be off trail, and then they’d be right back to these moments again. Resting in the shade. Listening to birds. Just the two of them and the open air.
But he was still going to miss it.
Ben turned on his side and squinted toward Alexei.
“Kennedy Meadows tomorrow.”
“Kennedy Meadows tomorrow,” Alexei confirmed.
Although they had technically been in the Sierras for a while now, Kennedy Meadows was the gateway to the famed High Sierra: Yosemite. Mount Whitney. Sequoia National Park, Kings Canyon. The John Muir Trail. The peaks and meadows that had inspired Ansel Adams and so many others. For most northbound PCT hikers, Kennedy Meadows was the milepost you walked through all of Southern California to get to. The beginning of the crown jewel of the entire trail, by many people’s standards.
Ben and Alexei were finally a skip, hop, and a jump away. The landscape had already started to change substantially over the last few miles of trail, the desert finally, finally slipping away, morphing into something different, something exciting.
And they were going to leave it.
Ben had originally hoped to get through more of the Sierras before rerouting to civilization—getting off at Tuolumne Meadows maybe—but it wasn’t going to be feasible. Alexei blamed it on himself, for twisting his ankle two weeks ago. He couldn’t even quite remember what happened; they had traversed up and down far rockier, more treacherous paths on their journey thus far, and then on a relatively straightforward, gentle section of trail, Alexei had found himself abruptly faceplanted on the ground, a sharp pain ricocheting up his leg.
Ben had made him rest the ankle for a full day, an unplanned zero, and then insisted on lower mileage days for the next week, putting them behind. They had figured out then that stopping at Kennedy Meadows made the most logistical sense. It was a popular starting point for section hikers, too, so Ben thought it would be easy to get a hitch to the highway, where they could then get a bus.
Buses. Highways. Airports.
Alexei had done a relatively decent job of notreallythinking about it all too hard, for the first hundred miles or so after Wrightwood. Reno had still sounded so far away, and the trail had been tough, requiring their full attention. As they made their way out of the San Gabriels, into Antelope Valley, through the Piute Mountains at the edge of the Mojave Desert, and now into the southern Sierras, Ben and Alexei often fell into a comforting, focused rhythm, even on the hard days. Like well-oiled, thru-hiking machines.
But they had also had their fair share of tribulations. Other than Alexei’s twisted ankle, there had been mutual crankiness at various points, especially when they had run too low on water and the stress of trying to find the next viable source was real. Or frustration when they lost the often poorly marked trail and walked in circles in the hot sun, wasting time and energy trying to find it again. Ben had repeated freak-outs on top of particularly steep ridges, snow or no snow, and while Alexei was now a verified expert at talking Ben through them, they were stressful nonetheless.
There had also been the night Alexei pulled a tick out of Ben’s butt cheek, which led to more ramblings about Lyme disease from Ben than Alexei truly needed. And most regretfully, there were the two days when Alexei’s stomach betrayed him once again, and Ben waited patiently by the side of the trail each time another bout of stomach cramps made Alexei suddenly dash off into the manzanita.
So as Reno got closer, Alexei found that, to his own surprise, he wasn’t overly nervous to reenter civilization with Ben at all. He supposed after you had gotten lost together, after someone had waited for you without shame as you repeatedly emptied your bowels, airports and highways didn’t sound as scary anymore. They had been around each other at their most exhausted and at their freest. He knew Ben like he had never known another person. Like Ben had simply become part of his DNA. Alexei didn’t see how Nashville could change that.
What he did start to worry about, as Kennedy Meadows now loomed in their reality, were the other people who would be in Nashville. Would Ben’s family like him? Would his friends? Would Alexei retreat into his awkward lizard brain as he so often did, forget how to talk to any of them?
“I’m actually a little sad we probably won’t run into Faraj and the guys again,” he said now, thinking about the people hehadgotten okay at talking to, these last 500 miles.
They had run into the group of Idyllwild bros again shortly after Wrightwood, and hiked together for a few days this time. Alexei still hadn’t been as comfortable with the whole crew as he was with just Ben, but he had ended up feeling almost fond of the group. Tanner, the ginger-haired one, had gotten off the trail for a while to deal with some plantar fasciitis, and Alexei thought the group was more harmonious without him. Leon made poor choices, but he was funny. And Ryan had illuminating stories about being Black in the hiking community, stories that made Alexei reflect on his privilege, think more carefully about his own choices.
And Faraj—well, Faraj flirted with Alexei a lot. Which made Alexei blush a lot. And made Ben hide his laughter in his shirt a lot.
