Hildebrandt spends as much time in front of the computer screen as he does in the field. So he was happy to be out hiking on this late spring afternoon and marveled at McInturff's adventure.
"Congratulations, you've made it this far," he said. "What have you seen that's wild and crazy?"
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Wednesday, May 13, 2009 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 4 National Desk 1 inches; 37 words Type of Material: Correction
John Muir's trek: A map accompanying an article in Saturday's Section A about a Stanford University graduate student who is retracing the conservationist's 1868 trek from San Francisco to Yosemite Valley misspelled Millerton Lake as Mullerton Lake.
McInturff shifted his pack and smiled. "I thought I got shot at," he said.
He'd been out for just three days, he recalled, and was in Hayward when shots rang out. McInturff ducked, then raced terrified down a hill, backpack flopping -- a sprint that left him with tendinitis in his Achilles and took him off the trail for a week. That night, he told a park ranger about his brush with death. The ranger laughed and broke the news: McInturff had hiked too close to a police firing range.
"I was almost a little disappointed to have not survived something more harrowing," he later blogged, "and to have embarrassed myself in front of chickens and middle-school kids."
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By the time McInturff passed Pacheco Pass, he'd gobbled meals while hiking highway shoulders and cooked in the rain on a lightweight camp stove. Some days, a planned 12-mile hike stretched on to a weary 18 when lodging fell through.
Several campsites left much to be desired, like the time he was given dispensation to pitch his tent at Hellyer County Park in San Jose only to be wetly awakened -- not once, but twice -- when the sprinklers went off.
Santa Cruz book artists Peter and Donna Thomas, the other hikers to trace Muir's tracks, plan to publish a guidebook to the route. But it's so hard to find a place to sleep while walking through the Central Valley, they said, that "some sections require riding a bike." (Their walk is chronicled at www.johnmuir.org/walk.)
Crossing the sere stretch from the Coast Range to the Sierra Nevada took its toll on McInturff. The dangerous roads, unchanging views and hazy skies "all made for hard days and low spirits," he blogged last week.
Interesting, yes. Pleasurable, not really. And nowhere near the ecstatic romp Muir described: "Go where I would, east or west, north or south, I still plashed and rippled in flower-gems; and at night I lay between two skies of silver and gold, spanned by a milky-way, and nestling deep in a goldy-way of vegetable suns."
But once McInturff hit the Sierra foothills, his spirits began to lift. The mountain range that changed Muir's life 141 years ago hasn't lost its magic.
"Returning to the forest today, I rediscovered the freedom I love about walking, which was lost a little in the San Joaquin," McInturff wrote Wednesday after climbing from Coulterville to Greeley Hill. ". . . And to cap it all, my first view of snowy Sierra crests, bringing happy shouts and arm swinging at my hilltop viewpoint."
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maria.laganga@latimes.com
