Broken Down: An Adventure in the Wilderness
Following is the beginning of a book I’m in the process of writing about a real-life experience that took place in northern California in September of 2016. I started writing it last year, but haven’t worked on it in a while. Who knows when I will finally finish it. So I decided I might as well publish what I’ve written so far for people to take a look.
I was filming the whole thing as it unfolded and made an hour-long movie about the experience, which I posted on my YouTube channel in December of 2016. But that video doesn’t capture everything that transpired, which is why I decided to write the book. There’s a link to the video at the bottom of this page.
Enjoy the reading, and feel free to give any feedback in the comments section below.
Chapter 1.
Hi Family,
Wanted to let you all know I’m heading out on a backpacking trip to the Marble Mountains tomorrow. I’m in Arcata right now, but I’ll camp tonight at the East Fork campground near Willow Creek. That’s on the way to the Marbles.
I’ve got all my shopping done and everything, just need to stop at a forest service office tomorrow to get a fire permit. I’m not sure how long I’ll be gone, maybe 3–6 days. A week at the longest, but probably won’t stay out there that long.
I’m looking forward to it. I wanted to get a backpacking trip in before summer was completely over. I have a good tent, a new camping mattress and a loud noise device that’s supposed to be good for scaring off bears. Not that I’m likely to see any.
I’m not certain which trailhead I’ll park at, but I’m hoping there’s one in the northwestern part of the wilderness. The last time I was out there I hiked in from the southwest and I’d like to explore a different area this time. I’ll be getting a map and more information at the forest service office, which is just north of Willow Creek.
So that’s the deal. I’ll write again when I get back to civilization.
Take care, talk soon, Gabe
I hit send, shut down my laptop and stuffed it into my backpack. It was 9:45 pm and I was on the third floor of the Humboldt State University library in the small town of Arcata, California, a little ways south of the Oregon border. The library closed at 10. And I had some driving through the night ahead of me. Time to get rolling.
I graduated from Humboldt State. But that was more than a decade earlier. Now I was just passing through. The short version of the story that brought me here this time was that I’d been traveling in Europe earlier in the summer, when my younger brother Christo offered me a free truck. He and his wife were getting a new car and had a 20-year-old Mazda pickup they didn’t need anymore.
I’d been traveling for six months straight and was ready to head back home anyway. I flew from Spain to Oregon to pick up the truck and to visit my brother and his family in the eastern part of the state. Then I took the truck on a road trip across Oregon for a week. From there I headed south to visit my mom in northern California. It was mid-September, summer was winding down and I wanted to get some camping and backpacking in before traveling elsewhere for the winter.
I decided to go on a solo wilderness backpacking trip before I visited my mom. The Marble Mountains are a remote wilderness area northeast of Arcata on the coast of northern California. I was raised in Mendocino County, just south of Humboldt, and when I was a kid my family went on backpacking trips into the Marbles. I’d been back there twice before as an adult on solo trips. The last time was four years earlier.
I pulled on my jacket and small backpack, walked down the stairs of the empty library and stepped outside into the dark night that was peppered with scattered street lamps. Classes had started for the semester, but it was a Sunday evening and not many people were around. I walked over to the parking lot where my red Mazda truck was parked. It was all loaded up with the gear and food I would need for several days in the wilderness.
I left Arcata, heading north on highway 101 up the coast a few miles and then turned east onto highway 299 towards Willow Creek. I almost hit two deer on the way there. They leapt onto the road right in front of me. I saw them just in time to slam the brakes and watch them run safely through the beams of my headlights and disappear into the darkness.
I drove up and over a mountain range. On the other side before getting to Willow Creek was the East Fork campground. I turned off the highway and into the campground, merging with the thick forest that lined the road. It was creepy driving in at night because there was no one else there, just empty campsites and towering trees along the road, reflecting my lights back at me. Summer was for all practical purposes over, and this wasn’t a popular area anyway.
I set up my tent, crawled in, laid there for a while listening to the crickets, slept, got up the next morning and kept driving.
At Willow Creek I turned north onto highway 96 which goes through the Hoopa Indian reservation. I almost hit a deer again. This one came out of nowhere. All of a sudden it was running along beside me on the right side of the truck, as fast as I was driving, which wasn’t too fast since it was a curvy road. Somehow, before I had time to slow down much, it passed me and then ran right in front of my truck, crossed the road and disappeared down a hill on the other side. I don’t even know how I didn’t hit it.
I continued driving north, eyes wide open for more deer; but luckily didn’t have any more close calls. I stopped at a forest service office along the way to buy a map of the wilderness area and get a required fire permit to make campfires. While I was there I asked the woman at the desk about trailheads.
“The last time I was up here I started hiking in at the Haypress trailhead,” I told her. “But I wanted to explore a different area this time and go in from the northwest. I can see there’s the Johnsons Hunting Ground trailhead on the map. Is that a good place to start from?”
“Well,” she said. “I’m not familiar with that particular area myself. But I think people do go in that way, so it should be fine.”
It wasn’t fine. I would discover that in a few days.
I said thanks and got back on the road.
It was a warm, sunny day and I stopped for a swim in the Klamath river to cool off. Then I continued driving north. When I got to Independence Creek road I turned right and crossed a bridge over the river. The road soon turned from paved to gravel. It was a maze of forest service roads back there and I had to study my map closely to make sure I went the right way to get to the trailhead. It was about eleven miles of winding gravel roads to where I would park the truck and start hiking with my backpack into the wilderness. It was slow going on those curvy roads. But after forty minutes or so of steady uphill climbing I was almost there.
Then the truck broke down. I came up over a little hump in the road, heard a strange noise come from the bottom of the truck somewhere and the engine cut out suddenly.
I hit the brakes, cursed out loud and tried to restart it. It wouldn’t start. I tried several times, but nothing. The engine turned over and over, but that was it. It was stone cold dead. I didn’t want to drain the battery, so I stopped trying.
“Damnit!” I yelled, hitting the steering wheel. ‘Now what??’ I thought to myself. I checked my phone and had no service. This was a worst case scenario.
I got out of the truck, looked underneath, popped the hood, poked around to see if anything obvious was loose or broken or otherwise easily fixable. I’m the furthest thing from an auto mechanic. Nothing looked out of the ordinary, as far as I could tell.
I looked around and assessed the situation. I hadn’t seen another vehicle since I’d left the main highway. I was ten miles out remote and very steep gravel roads. No phone service. Late in the season and no guarantee anyone else would be coming by anytime soon.
How the hell was I going to get out of this one? It would be a ten mile hike just to get back to the main highway, which was still in the middle of nowhere. The nearest tiny town of Happy Camp was another ten miles north of there. It could take me all day or even a couple days just to get to town, which had a population of 1,100. I had no idea if there was a mechanic or towing company there. And would a tow truck even come all the way out there to get this thing? If it did, it would cost a fortune and I didn’t have AAA towing coverage.
There was one small stroke of luck. I’d just driven past a large pull-out on the right. The road was narrow most of the way up there so that passing other vehicles would have been difficult. Right where the truck had stopped it would be impossible for anyone to pass me if I left the truck there. There was a steep hill going up on the right side and another going down on the left. Getting the truck off the road was imperative. If I left it where it was, it would be blocking any traffic that might come along while I was gone. And for all I knew that might include vehicles already up the road at the trailhead, that would then be trapped and unable to leave. Luckily there was the pull-out behind me. But I’d just driven over a small hump in the road. I needed to push the truck back over the hump first, and then I’d be able to roll it backwards down the road, into the pull-out and safely off the road.
This task looked barely doable. If I’d driven another few feet down the hump it would have been too difficult to push it by myself.
I opened the door and started pushing on the truck going backwards, standing at the side of the truck by the door so I could jump into it once it started rolling backwards down the other side. It wasn’t going to budge easily. It required rocking the truck back and forth where it stood to get the momentum to get it up and over the hump. Eventually I succeeded and got it rolling backwards down the other side. I jumped into the seat so I could steer it into the pull-out. It started rolling pretty fast and I hit the brake. But the pedal went straight to the floor. I thought power brakes meant they would be hard to push, not that they would be non-existent.
But it didn’t really matter, because I didn’t have far to go and the pull-out was slanted uphill. I steered the truck backwards into the pull-out, coasted to a stop, applied the emergency brake and put it into gear. Mission number one was accomplished…except that I was back to square one. Now what?
I tried to start it a few more times. The engine rolled over and over without the slightest hint of attempting to fire up. I wasn’t going to be driving it out of there. I sat in the truck pondering my options. They were scarce. Unless another vehicle came along going back to the main road, there was just one course of action. I would be hiking out of there.
The quandary was, should I take all my stuff with me and be prepared to abandon the truck if getting it towed wasn’t possible? I had more than a backpack’s worth of things since I was on a road trip. I would have to leave something behind. But still, this would mean hiking out, possibly more than twenty miles all the way to Happy Camp with a heavy backpack. Or else should I hike out with only the bare essentials to make it an easier hike and plan to get back there one way or another to retrieve the rest of my things, and hopefully the truck as well?
I thought about it some more. I was less than a mile from the trailhead that I’d been driving towards at the edge of the wilderness area. I realized that I could still do my backpacking trip. The truck wasn’t going anywhere. I would be in the exact same situation whether I made the journey to town now, or else hiked into the wilderness for a few days, got the experience I came there for and then dealt with the sticky situation a few days later.
As it turned out, I was wrong. If I’d done this I would have been in a much worse predicament. But I couldn’t have know this at the time. I’ll explain all that later as events transpire.
I decided to go for it…pack up my backpack and head into the wilderness. Get a break from everything and clean up this mess in a different frame of mind. It was the middle of the afternoon at that point. The mission to get into town was actually a much bigger mission than getting to the lake in the wilderness where I wanted to camp that night. Starting the hike into town now would mean most likely arriving after dark, paying for a hotel room and then (hopefully) getting the truck towed the next day. Then there would be getting it fixed (if possible), which might take days. If they couldn’t fix it there, I might have to tow it to the larger town of Willow Creek, which was two hours south. Even the best case scenario of dealing with this was looking like an arduous and costly ordeal. Meanwhile, the peace and quiet of nature was just a few minutes walk away.
I got started packing up my backpack. I’d done countless solo backpacking trips in wilderness areas all over the west: in California, Oregon, Washington, Montana, New Mexico, Alaska, Hawaii, even Europe. I wouldn’t call myself an expert, but I was experienced enough and had all the necessary gear. I had enough food for four to five days.
I left a note on the dashboard, visible from the outside, that read:
Jim, I’ll be back soon with the dogs. Wait here for me. Steve
There was no Jim or Steve anywhere nearby, that I knew of anyway. But I once had a car vandalized at a trailhead so badly that I had to abandon it. If any potential vandals came by, scoped out the vehicle and read that note, they might think twice about messing with it if two men and their dogs could show up at any minute.
Fully loaded backpack on my back, I started hiking up the road. I got to the trailhead at the end of the road in about twenty minutes. There were no other vehicles there. A signboard indicated that the Marble Mountains Wilderness Area lay ahead. Stapled to it were the usual cautionary and informative messages: Permits required for campfires. Filter or treat your water. Take only pictures and leave only footprints. Watch out for bears and hang your food at night. There was a map of the wilderness area and the trails that looked like the same one I had with me.
It was late afternoon by that point. The sun was getting low in the horizon. I had about a seven mile hike ahead of me. I was already up pretty high in elevation and there wouldn’t be a whole lot of uphill hiking. I figured I could get to Ukonom Lake within three hours or so if I kept a steady space. I might end up hiking the last part in the dark. But that was okay, as long as the trail was clear and easy to follow. I had a headlamp and I’d hiked in the dark before.
I read over some of the signs on the signboard for a few minutes, even though there was nothing I hadn’t seen before. I looked back down the road, then turned towards the trees and started hiking up the trail into the wilderness.
Thirty seconds later I thought I heard a sound. Not from the woods ahead of me, but from the road behind me. A faint, low rumble. Sounded like it might be a vehicle. I waited a minute to be sure. Yes, a truck of some sort. It was getting louder, which meant it must be coming up to the trailhead. There were no other roads right nearby.
Should I keep hiking and get started making progress? The day was winding down and I had quite a few miles to cover. But considering the sparseness of people around here, I figured I should probably take advantage of the opportunity to potentially get some assistance with my predicament while I had the chance.
Little did I know at the time what a pivotal moment that was. If I’d been a few minutes ahead and hadn’t heard the sound of the engine, or else had chosen to ignore it and kept hiking, then my life would have been quite a bit different going forward from that point. Again, more about that later.
I walked back down the trail to the trailhead and waited. Within a few minutes a Jeep Cherokee came around the corner and rumbled up the gravel road towards me. There were three men in the vehicle. They parked and I walked towards them. The driver rolled down his window.
“Hi there!” I said. “Did you see that red pickup parked down the road a little ways?”
“Sure did,” he said.
“Well that’s my truck. It broke down, won’t start up. Do you guys know much about cars?”
“Well yeah,” he said. “My dad here is a mechanic.” He gestured towards the older man in the front passenger seat.
“Great,” I said. “I don’t suppose you have a few minutes to take a look at it and see what’s wrong?”
He looked over at his dad for a second, who nodded, then turned to me. “Sure, that’s not a problem. We’ve got time. Hop in and we’ll turn around and drive back down there.”
Back at my lifeless Mazda, the three of them converged on the defunct vehicle. I popped the hood and they searched high and low for the mechanical failure. They were three generations: grandfather, father and son, out there to hunt for deer. They poked around, peered at the engine, under the vehicle, tapped things, checked hoses, asked me to try starting it again, listened intently to the pathetic whine of the engine turning over and over without success, conferred with each other as to what the problem might be, asked me if I had the manual, which I did. They looked through it, tried a few things…and yet nothing. They were left as perplexed as I was, despite their collective years of automotive know-how. It was certifiably dead and going nowhere fast.
Another truck rumbled up the road at one point and stopped when they saw the four of us crowded around the Mazda. More hunters. The guy in the passenger seat stuck his head out the window.
“Looks like you got a problem?”
“Yeah”, I replied. “My truck cut out and won’t start. We’ve been trying to figure it out, but no luck.”
“I see,” he said. “Well there’s a mechanic in Happy Camp. That’s pretty much your only option.”
“Okay…the thing is I don’t have any cell phone reception. So I guess I’ll have to hike into town to get it towed.”
“Well let me take a look, I think we got service up here. We’ve got Verizon and it works all around these parts.”
He grabbed his phone.
“Yep, it’s workin’. You’ll need to call Dave. He’s the only guy that can tow you out of here.”
Long story short, I managed to get through to Dave the tow truck driver. He didn’t really want to come out there, because he said finding people out that maze of forest service roads was a recipe for failure. Half the time he couldn’t find the person. But finally he agreed to give it a try. I gave him as clear of instructions as I possibly could. As long as he headed for the Johnsons Hunting Ground Trailhead he would find me. There was only one way to get there at the end.
I thanked both of the truckloads of hunters and they took off up the road to the trailhead.
The sun was going down. It went, and I stayed there by the truck in the darkening silence. No more vehicles came along. It got dark, and kept getting darker. Eventually I heard a noise coming from down the road, a long ways off. It gradually got louder until it was clear that it was a vehicle, a big one. It was rumbling and groaning up the mountain. Finally I saw headlights way down the mountain through the trees, pointing my direction and heading uphill. Ten minutes later a tow truck came roaring slowly around the corner, bright headlights blaring on me and my ghost of a truck.
He pulled into the wide pull-out and jumped out.
“A bad place to break down!” he shouted above the low roar of his engine.
“Yeah really,” I wholeheartedly agreed.
He towed me down the mountain to the highway and dropped me off at the only mechanic in the sleepy town of Happy Camp. No one was there. It was 8:30 pm at that point and town was just about as dead as my truck. The tow cost $350. He wasn’t the mechanic, so he left me and the truck parked outside the shop and then moseyed off. I would have to wait until morning to have it looked at.
There was a motel in town. But I didn’t have much cash to work with, even less now after the tow and I still had a broken truck to fix. I slept in the back of the truck curled up in my sleeping bag under the infinite blanket of stars splashed across the dark northern California sky.
Chapter 2.
I slept some. Woke up early in the morning to the cloudless sky just starting to brighten. The town was still as quiet as could be. I lay there for a while, no hurry to get up but couldn’t go back to sleep.
A few cars puttered by. I crawled out of my sleeping bag, looked around at not much going on, found a nearby tree to take a leak behind, rustled through the supplies stuffed into my backpack and found some muesli for breakfast.
Eventually the mechanic, Darrell, showed up and the shop opened. I explained my situation and he agreed to take a look at the truck as soon as he could. I waited around, walked up and down the main street of town a few times, used the bathroom at the shop to splash some water on my face and hair, waited some more.
A few hours later he came back with the verdict: the fuel pump was out. Normally he could order the part and it would arrive the next day. But there was a problem. A big problem. He was going into surgery for hip replacement in a few days, and today was the last day that his shop was open before the operation. He couldn’t get the part today. He was closed tomorrow and for the next several weeks to recover from the operation. There was absolutely nothing he could do for me at that point. My only option left was to have the truck towed to the next small (but slightly larger) town of Willow Creek, which was eighty miles away down the same curvy road I’d driven up the day before. That would be an even more expensive tow than the first one. And then there would be the cost of fixing the thing. By the time this was all over, I was going to be left with zero dollars.
I considered my options. There were basically two at that point. I could have the truck towed to Willow Creek, get it fixed and be left flat broke, if I could even cover the cost of the repairs. I didn’t have a credit card at the time. Or I could abandon it and cut my losses.
Then I thought of a third way out of this. As long as I was considering abandoning it, why not ask the mechanic if he’d like to buy it? There was nothing to lose.
“How much do you want for it?” he asked.
“How about $1,600?” I said, off the top of my head.
He went back to the shop and flipped through a Kelley Blue Book that he had handy on a shelf.
He walked back to me, stuck out his hand and said, “Deal!”
“Alright!” I said as I shook it vigorously.
He didn’t have the cash on him right then. He promised he would pay me after the surgery and recovery was all over in a few weeks. I took him at his word. For one thing, I had no options left other than to trust him. And besides, I knew where he worked.
I would be hitchhiking out of there, something I had a great deal of experience with, about three-and-a-half decades worth. I was forty-four at the time and I first started hitchhiking when I was a kid, around eight or nine to the best of my recollection. Back then I lived with my parents and younger brother out a dirt road a few miles from the little town of Willits, which was several hours south of where I was now in Happy Camp.
After school, a school bus would take me out the paved road about three miles and then drop me off (alone, because my younger brother took a different bus) at the bottom of our dirt road. From there it was another mile-and-a-half to our driveway. Sometimes my parents would be waiting to pick me up. But more often than not, they weren’t. Both my mom and dad worked at the hospital and had strange hours, sometimes working during the day, sometimes through the night. If neither was available then I was left on my own to walk the mile-and-a-half home to our cabin in the woods.
At some point I came up with the idea of hitching rides with neighbors. I would walk a short ways up the road to a good spot to take a seat and read a book, and then wait there for a car to come along. I must have seen hitchhikers elsewhere at some point, because I knew to stick my thumb out to flag them down. It worked, and I started making use of it regularly over the following years of my youth.
Later, when I was in high school, I would sometimes skip taking the bus so I could hang out with friends in town. Afterwards I would hitchhike from town all the way home. I also went on some hitchhiking adventures to neighboring towns. In the summer of 1990 when I was eighteen and had graduated from high school I flew to London, England for a summer of backpacking around Europe. I hitchhiked through England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland and several countries of mainland Europe.
In the spring of 1992 I was going to university in Juneau, Alaska and had a summer job lined up in Denali National Park. Juneau was on Alaska’s panhandle, whereas Denali Park was in the interior of the state. The only way to get there was to fly or else go by ferry and then drive through British Columbia and the Yukon provinces of Canada. When my semester of university was finished up, I took the ferry up to Haines, then hitchhiked north through Canada and back into Alaska to Denali Park. Little did I know at the time that I was a week behind Chris McCandless (subject of the book and movie “Into the Wild”), who had just hitchhiked part of the same route, then hiked into the wilderness north of Denali, west of the tiny town of Healy.
Later during the 1990s I would be homeless for several years, living as a vagabond, hitchhiking all over the western US. I returned to Alaska at one point and hitchhiked the same route from the panhandle to Denali Park for another summer of work. A few years later I flew to Hawaii and hitchhiked around the islands. I could go on with the hitchhiking stories. Point being, I had plenty of experience and wasn’t too worried about getting out of that small town in remote northern California without a truck. I’d been in worse spots before.
I started to think about what I needed to do next to get out of there without the Mazda and with all my stuff. I couldn’t hitchhike with everything I owned that was scattered throughout the truck.
Luckily there was a post office almost directly across the street from the mechanic. It was a weekday and it was open. I decided I would find some boxes, pack up some of the stuff, mail it to my mom’s house south of there (where I was headed next anyway) and then hitchhike with my big backpack south from Happy Camp down to Willow Creek on highway 299, west over to the coast and highway 101 and then south down to my mom’s house in Ukiah. It would probably take a couple days. No problem.
But while I was attempting to organize everything in my mind, what I would take and what I would mail, I thought to myself: Why the heck don’t I go for the wilderness adventure anyway? That’s what I came here to do. The trailhead was a short drive away. And there was another trailhead that was even closer to Happy Camp than where the truck had broken down. The road going out to that trailhead was right at the south end of town.
I had no time constraints. I was homeless at the time, or without a home anyway, traveling around the world with no plans to settle down anytime soon. If I could get myself out to the trailhead, I could still do what I drove out there to do. After a few days of enjoying the peace of nature I could hitchhike down to my mom’s, mission accomplished (sort of) and then figure out what I was doing next in my life. Although I was now without a truck, at least I had some unexpected cash from selling it (once the mechanic followed through and paid me back).
I decided to head for the wilderness. It was late September, the end of camping season. It was now or else next year, or maybe the year after that or who knew when.
With that decision made, the plan was to pack up some of my unnecessary things in boxes, yet be fully prepared for several days of backpacking in the wilderness. I just had to pick and choose what to take with me and what to mail off to lighten my load.
I got everything sorted, mailed two boxes, packed up my backpack, said goodbye to Darrell the mechanic and the truck. I started hiking through sleepy Happy Camp to the south end of town and the road that led from there to the trailhead where I would start the hike into the wilderness. It was about two in the afternoon at that point and I had plenty of daylight left. There was a campground on the paved road about a mile before the trailhead. All depending, I would shoot for camping there for the night or, if I got lucky with a ride, maybe start the hike into the woods later that afternoon.
My pack was heavy. I had a few things I normally wouldn’t have taken into the wilderness. My sleeping bag didn’t always keep me warm enough, so I had an extra blanket. I had two cameras and my laptop computer so I could back up any photos or videos I took, as well as use it to charge up my cameras. I had extra warm clothing since I wasn’t sure how cold it would be. The forecast called for snow the following week. But most likely I would be out of there before the snow hit. The next few days were supposed to be sunny.
I decided to wait at the end of town where the road headed out to the wilderness and try my luck with a ride in order to hopefully save my legs. I stood there for thirty minutes or so, and a truck pulled over with a large water tank on the back.
I opened the passenger door.
“How far you going?” I shouted to the driver.
“Just a couple miles up the road,” he said. “I’ve got to fill this thing up.”
I got in and hauled my pack up onto the seat with me.
He was working for a construction operation somewhere down the main highway, and they filled up the truck with water at a creek up the road. We left town behind and drove up the road that wound along beside the creek and through the trees. He dropped me off a couple miles later, where there was a pullout between the road and the creek, where he could back his truck up to fill it up with water. I hopped out, strapped on my backpack and started walking up the road. That was the last vehicle I would see for the rest of the day.
To be continued…
