The Martians(39)

So I stopped and thought it over. My glasses were misted with rain, and the air was whipping by in a pure fog. I couldn't see more than twenty yards in any direction, and up here it wasn't enough.

I turned back and whacked along the rim to the road, deciding I would run down the wall road to the crater floor, then over to the Bubbles and the tram. All the distances in the crater are so small, I figured at most it would be 10 k, and downhill most of the way. Not so much fun as a rain scramble, but faster.

Before I took off I went into the shop and bought a soda. They had just opened up. I took it to the counter and two young women stared at me as I took my wallet out of my pocket, from under my rain pants you know. But the wallet was wet, and even my card inside the wallet was wet. I might as well have just dived into the lake. I decided to pass on explaining and drink the soda outside.

Running down the road was spacey. It switched back and forth, always in heavy mist and rain. I had no idea how high on the wall I was. I passed a bluff cut by the road, now a waterfall, very pretty. Got into the trees, then under them, a long green canopy tunnel floored by the road, and the rain still bombing down on us. Got back to the station and trammed home, but I missed breakfast that day.

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.