May 7, 2025
Today is the one year anniversary of TomTom’s death on Mt. Whitney. Oh TomTom, we miss you. I hope you’re at peace wherever you are. It’s a shitshow here on Earth. Read more about TomTom in this post, “Rest in Peace, TomTom.”
Twelve hours ago India attacked nine targets inside Pakistan in retaliation for the April 22nd terrorist attacks where 26 Indian tourists were murdered in the contested and military occupied region of Kashmir. They were on vacation in the place known as the “Switzerland of India.” There’s a horrific video of an Indian tourist on a zipline. He’s taking a selfie as he happily zips across a beautiful green valley. The beginning of the video is idyllic. And then you hear gunshots. People in the background are running for their lives. More gun shots. One man in a full sprint falls down, it’s unclear whether he slipped or was shot. Another man can be seen lying motionless on the ground at the end of the video. And all the while the man taking the selfie on the zipline is completely oblivious, smiling away wanting to capture his fun zipline vacation.
That right there is the perfect metaphor for what’s happening in the US. Middle class white Americans are on a zipline taking selfies and having a grand time while immigrants around them are abducted and rushed into unmarked vans by masked, plain clothed men. The president is actively dismantling the last checks standing between him and a total fascist dictatorship, meanwhile my audience on YouTube asks me constantly when I’ll start making hiking videos again.
I’m coming through here on a second pass edit and I just saw that Pakistan has retaliated by launching artillery strikes at targets inside India. The video I saw was a young boy missing the top of his skull being carried to car. He’s definitely dead. Horrific. Horrific, horrific, horrific. There’s another video of Pakistani tanks on trailers being driven to the border. This feels different than the other border skirmishes between India and Pakistan. I hope I’m wrong but I fear greater escalations will arise from this.
Not to make everything about the US, but this is what happens when the US hegemony fails. Like it or not the overwhelming might of the US military and economy was a stabilizing power in the world. It was wielded toward its own interests, but for most of the last 50 years US interests were aligned with global stability and relative peace. This has all changed now with the trump takeover. With the power vacuum of the fall of the US hegemony we are going to see unprecedented chaos around the world. Europe is rearming itself for a possible war against further Russian incursions, and China is building fleets of giant landing vessels to invade Taiwan.
This too, shall pass
This too, shall pass. This is the subject I want to write about today. Everything is fucked, and so are you. It doesn’t matter how things play out. You will age, you will get sick, you will die. Even in the perfect world where democracy wins out against these authoritarians and everything becomes love and light and rainbows. You will still age, get sick, and die. Your loved ones will still age, get sick, and die. There is not a single thing that you can cling to that won’t change. That won’t eventually fade with time.
It is our clinging to the false notion that the world must be a certain way that causes us so much suffering. We are attached to a mental image of how the world “should be.” Right now that image is being challenged by the very real tides of change. The truth is the world is never any certain way. It is in constant change. We’ve simply had the illusion of stability for the last several decades but that’s only been an illusion born out of privilege. Go ask the people of Sudan, or Bosnia and Herzegovina, or Syria, or Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Venezuela, or El Salvador, or Myanmar, or Gaza, or Lebanon, or Yemen, or Ukraine, or Russia how stable their last few decades have been. You see my point? We in the west have lived a privileged life sheltered from the harsh realities because we have artificially propped up our standard of living by sucking up the labor and resources from the rest of the world. The world hasn’t changed. The change has simply come to our doorstep. Our frankly well-earned karma has finally arrived.
It gives me comfort to zoom really far out and remember that in five billion years our sun will die, leaving our solar system to languish in eternal darkness. But maybe not, because in 4.5 billion years our galaxy will collide with the Andromeda galaxy, so maybe if we get lucky we’ll get smashed by a giant star or planet before our solar system dies.
Either way, even if you could build something absolutely permanent on Earth it’s still gonna get wiped out by cosmic forces eventually. It takes the pressure off with the need to “leave a legacy” and “make a lasting impact.” Nothing we do, absolutely nothing we do will make a permanent impact in this physical realm.
Yet look at the pains and the devastation and untold needless suffering that people like Putin and trump are putting the world through in their futile efforts to “leave a legacy.” These petty tyrants, nearing the end of their lives are being confronted with the reality that their lives are completely meaningless, and rather than accepting that truth with grace they have instead decided to throw one last tantrum in the hopes that it will change the truth. Sorry guys, Truth is Truth and you will not escape it no matter how much power you grab or how many lives you ruin.
Thinking about TomTom today feels appropriate for what I’m writing and the CDT stories I want to tell. TomTom was an integral part of my CDT journey and I have so many images of her beaming her radiant smile in her bright orange shirt. I can’t know what her thoughts were in those final moments on Whitney, but I wonder if she regretted anything. I know for me, in the moments on trail when death has felt imminent that I feel a sense of peace and acceptance, not a feeling of regret.
My feeling for TomTom’s life is not sadness that it was cut short. Yes, she had so much potential and such a bright future, but she’d lived a more full life in her 29 short years than most people in their 80s. We should all strive to be more like TomTom and just go after what we want instead of being bound by fears. From TomTom’s obituary:
Patty was born in Port Washington, WI, the second of two daughters. She attended Port Catholic, K4-8, and Dominican High School, graduating in 2013. She then attended and graduated from Boston College, in 2017 with an Honors degree in Physics. After a gap year that included hiking the entire Pacific Crest Trail and a fellowship at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard Smithsonian, Boston, MA, Patty entered the Doctoral program in Physics at the University of California at Davis in the fall of 2018. She completed her PhD requirements in December 2023 and was anticipating her hooding ceremony in June, 2024. Patty was starting her career as a data scientist.
Patty loved outdoor sports including hiking, mountain climbing, rock climbing, skiing, and snowboarding. She enjoyed traveling, visiting six continents in the last ten years. In addition to her adventurous outdoor interests, Patty was musically talented, and learned to play several instruments. She was a volunteer at Irish Fest since the age of eight, serving most recently as a stage manager. She shared joy and friendship with everyone she met.
“Oh this was such a bad idea”
In 2020 I’d attempt to hike the Arizona Trail and met a guy on reddit who had arranged an AirBnB and shuttle out to the Mexican border and was looking for other hikers starting the same time to split the accommodation and ride. That was how I met Driver. We got to talking on the shuttle ride down to the border and he told me he’d hiked the CDT northbound in 2018. “Oh no way, I did it SOBO that year!”
He said he’d gotten off trail for a while after a scary experience in the San Juans. He’d entered the mountains very early, in early May, and was one of the first NOBO hikers to attempt the San Juans that year. To his knowledge no one else had successfully gotten through the official San Juan route that year yet, with other hikers either getting off-trail to wait out the snow or taking the Creede alternate. He faced a ton of snow and after two days realized that he just wasn’t going to be able to make the miles before he ran out of food. Rather than slogging back two more days through the thick snow he decided to bail off the mountain.
He slid down the mountain and started bushwhacking out to where he knew there was a road. It was slow going but he was making progress until he reached a river. The snow melt turned what was a small stream on his map into a raging, impassable river. He spent the rest of the day trying to find a way around the river, and then trying to climb back up to the trail. He failed at both tasks. He was now stuck in this valley between a mountain he couldn’t climb and a river he couldn’t ford. So he pushed his SOS button.
The S&R helicopter arrived around sunset and I guess couldn’t find a safe enough LZ, but Driver was able to communicate to them that he was okay and had all the gear to safely spend the night. The chopper returned the next day and was able to successfully rescue him.
“Oh weird, we had to do almost the same thing in the San Juans in 2018 in September!” I told Driver after listening to his harrowing tale.
“Yeah those mountains are no joke! One of the most rugged places I’ve ever been.” Said Driver as I nodded in agreement.
I looked up to see the towering San Juan mountains arrayed before us, imposing and impossibly tall, not unlike the ice-wall that guarded the realm of men from the horrors of the frozen north in a Song of Ice and Fire. In the books the ice-wall was only 700 feet tall. Many of the peaks in the San Juans reach over 14,000 feet. “Oh this is a really bad idea.” My gut was screaming at me to turn around. We could already see boiling black clouds converging over the mountain range, yet the group was in good spirits.
“Yeah baby we’re going up there!” Hotlegs said with giddy excitement as he pointed toward the ominous dark clouds. “Finally, the San Juans!” The most anticipated and feared section of the whole trail.
That night the first storm came upon us. We’d found an old abandoned mining cabin and squeezed inside. It was a disgusting place. The floor of the cabin was literally covered in a layer of dried rat feces. Didgeridoo found an old broom and swept it away. “There, all clean.” It was not clean. Such is the power of not wanting to spend a night in the open when a storm is approaching that we would brave hantavirus rather than just setting up our tent.
We squeezed our sleeping pads together and had a cozy evening while the storm raged outside with occasional bursts of thunder and lightning. I slept fitfully, waking occasionally as gusts of wind blew cold rain on me through the cracks of the cabin and even woke up once to find an overgrown pack rat chewing on my hat. This thing was fat, more like a small rabbit rather than a big rat, but it was cute and I captured a video of him eating my hat before shooing him away and going back to sleep.
The next two days weren’t too bad. It rained off and on and the mountains were socked in with clouds. As long as we kept moving we could stay warm enough. I use that phrase “warm enough” often when I recount trail stories. Warm enough doesn’t mean I’m warm, or even comfortable. Warm enough means I’m not actively going hypothermic and I’m not in danger of imminent death, but it’s not comfortable and I would never choose to go out and hike in any conditions where I’d only be “warm enough.” Those are the sacrifices and conditions you face on a thru-hike though. These times are rare enough that hikers won’t carry extra layers to stay warmer because they would be dead weight for 99% of your trip. For that 1% however it’d sure be nice to be a little more comfortable.
The third morning dawned cold and drizzly. I have a vivid memory of stepping off trail to pee and my attention being captured by the strangest looking log. It was one of those images that made my brain hurt where you just couldn’t figure out what you were looking at. “Is it a log? But it’s so tall and it looks like there’s a face and oh my god it just moved, it’s a big bull moose.” Pictures and videos don’t do moose encounters justice. Moose are HUGE. When they run you can literally feel the ground shake from dozens of feet away. Their hide looks blacker than black and when they’re in the shadows of trees their bodies seem to form a dark, bottomless void.
The bull moose had a large rack of antlers. It picked its head up and looked at me. I looked at him, still mid-stream as I continued peeing. He continued to gaze at me stupidly. I finished peeing and frantically grabbed for my camera. This broke our connection and he jogged off into the woods. I was ecstatic that I was able to get a shot of him before he melted into the dark treeline.
That was my last happy memory of that whole stretch. The drizzle turned into a light rain that kept up for the rest of the day. We had one final pass to go over before camp and again I ignored my gut instincts. It was 4pm and I was in a nice sheltered meadow at about 9,000ft. I knew the weather was probably going to get worse and it would likely get dark before I could make it over the pass. All of my better judgement told me to just set-up camp early and climb the pass tomorrow.
But everyone else had started ahead of me and I didn’t want to be separated from the group. I started climbing. 10,000 feet and the rain was picking up. 11,000 feet, I’d been out of the treeline for an hour and the wind was definitely picking up. 12,000 feet and now it was full dark. I was struggling to see as the rain was freezing over my headlamp and onto my glasses. I kept losing the trail and knew from the map that this next stretch was a knife’s edge type traverse. To the left of me was a sheer cliff and to the right was a steep sheer mountainside. As steep as it can get without being a cliff. The trail was cut into the side of the mountain and it’d be deadly to veer too far to either side.
“Oh this was such a bad idea.” But now I was committed. I didn’t have any other option but to keep pushing(because hikers abhor turning around) and so I continued on despite the poor visibility. The rain had now turned into freezing rain and the wind was gusting up to 40mph. I was cold to my bones but didn’t feel any of it at the time due to the adrenaline coursing through me. I’d stop occasionally to check my phone and orient my blue GPS dot to where the red line of the trail was supposed to be. In this way I kept myself from veering too far off trail. After about half an hour I ditched my glasses entirely.
The rain freezing to my glasses made it about impossible to see out of them and I grew frustrated at having to take them off and clean them every thirty seconds so I took them off completely. My vision was horrible without glasses. I got them in third grade. I probably needed them before that, but no one in China had noticed. At the optometrist even the big E was a blur. Still, a blurry trail was preferable to the frustration of trying to see through frozen over glasses. This is one of the experiences that pushed me to get my eyes fixed through surgery in 2021. Best money I’ve ever spent.
I stumbled on like this for another hour the whole time feeling my core temperature drop and knowing I was already hypothermic and getting close to the danger zone. I couldn’t stop though because there’s no way my tent would have survived a night pitched on the ridge-top like that in these high winds. I had to get over this pass and get to a lower elevation.
