Discovering Joy in Aragog’s Hollow
In 2012, Sierra ‘Monkey’ Burror and her mother, Heather (’Mama Bear’), thru-hiked the PCT. When Sierra finished she was a mere 9 years old. But here hiking exploits were not done. This mother-daughter team hiked the Colorado trail in 2013 and completed the Continental Divide Trail during the following three summers. Sierra is now 17 and is finishing her senior year in high school. She will be attending Cornell University next year, where she will be running both cross country and track, and plans to study Ecology and Evolutionary Biology with a minor in Environmental Economics. This is a short piece from their PCT thru-hike.
Even with my eyes squeezed shut tight, I could still sense the 472 spider legs as they slowly advanced up my purple nylon sleeping bag toward my head. After an exhausting, 20-mile day, the postage-stamp-sized patch of bare ground we now called home had seemed like a palace. Too small for a tent, we simply tossed our sleeping bags down on a crinkly Tyvek tarp to “cowgirl” camp for the night. But then we started noticing thin black shadows scuttling across our tarp. Spiders. Lots of spiders. Hundreds of spiders, and now a small army steadily marched toward us. Our “palace” was actually a spider hollow. After months on the trail, I had definitely learned to find joy in the most challenging circumstances, but now I simply wanted to hike on. “Mom? I think we need to keep hiking.”
At the age of six, I had a dream: to through-hike the 2,665-mile Pacific Crest Trail from the Mexico Border to Manning Park in British Columbia, Canada. Now, two years later I was living that dream, each day filled with new adventures and breathtaking scenery. I witnessed the brilliant colors of a desert sunset and slid down snowy passes in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. I strolled through fields of wildflowers and sheltered under towering pines. I discovered a Blue Jay nest tucked into the crook of a Joshua Tree and scooped aquatic invertebrates out of an alpine pond.
However, the trail also naturally brought its share of challenges: the intense desert heat, the freezing rain, hail, and sleet of mountain thunderstorms, and long days of hiking. Now it brought a new challenge. Spiders. Reluctantly I packed up my backpack, loathe to leave camp after such a tiring day, but eager to escape our newly-discovered Aragog’s hollow in the dense Shasta-Trinity National Forest.
We hiked into the night, but somehow the lateness of the hour didn’t bother me. Moonlight glistened on the nearby creek and bright pinpricks of starlight pierced the darkness of the sky. The cool night air washed over our skin and we settled into a familiar rhythm, just one foot in front of the other on the dusty, brown trail. Our flashlights beamed off the trees and ground, bouncing with each stride, trees, ground, trees, ground, and then, a spider-web! Spanning at least four feet, the reflective gossamer strands stretched tree to tree, across the trail. Perched on the center of the web was a massive creature with dull silver, tinsel-like hair and eight green eyes. Despite my earlier fear, now that I no longer had spiders crawling on me, I found myself fascinated by her. Who was this creature? How did she accomplish this engineering feat, constructing a web all the way across the trail, almost perfectly level? A miracle.
Carefully sidestepping the web, we continued down the trail. The Pacific Crest Trail at night was very different than it appeared during the day, and I developed a new appreciation for the other mysterious nocturnal creatures who made the trail their home. Bats swooped in and out of the trees, scooping up insects. A mountain scorpion skittered across the trail, alerted by our footfalls. A coyote yipped in the distance. The magic of each new discovery lightened my sluggish steps, easing the pain of my first 28-mile day until we eventually found a new spider-free camp.
Many people scoff at the idea of hiking at night, wondering incredulously why you would want to hustle through such beautiful terrain in the dark. But what we learned that night is that the night has a special beauty of her own. And the next time we found ourselves hiking into the night on our way to Canada, we greeted the night as an old friend.
Note: For those of you who missed the Harry Potter series, Aragog was a rare giant spider.
