Walking 320 miles in Muir’s footsteps

MERCED COUNTY, CALIF. —  The rangy young hiker trudged along the narrow shoulder of Pacheco Pass. Trucks clanked loudly by, close enough to make his baggy pant legs flap in their wake. Grit blew. Trash swirled.

And the smells! Car exhaust. Smoking tires. Overheated clutches.

When you walk in John Muir’s footsteps, it’s not supposed to be like this.

“Every car that passes you has a different sound, and you wonder which one will be the death knell,” Alex McInturff said as he walked along California 152, hiking poles bristling from his loaded-down pack.

The night he crested Pacheco’s summit, his dreams were filled with flashing images and “the same kind of anxiety I felt during the day as the cars went by.”

What a difference a century or so makes. In the spring of 1868, Muir landed in San Francisco and walked to Yosemite Valley -- the famed conservationist’s first ramble through the Golden State.

Muir called Pacheco “this rich garden pass” and enthused in an 1872 essay that it dropped him into a Central Valley that resembled “one flowerbed, nearly four hundred miles in length by thirty in width . . . bounded by the mountains on which we stood, and by the lofty, snow-capped Sierra Nevada.”

The 320-mile hike is believed to have been replicated only once before McInturff strapped on his backpack in San Francisco and hit the road April 6. The goal of the Stanford University earth sciences graduate student is to see how California manages open space from its most picturesque city to its most famous park.

McInturff, 23, hopes to reach his destination early next week. But even by the midpoint in his nearly six-week journey, a few things had become abundantly clear: Much of Muir’s garden “of peerless grandeur” has given way to vineyards, orchards and row crops. Smog and dust obscure the Sierra Nevada.

Government agencies and private organizations struggle to maintain the largest remaining swath of wetlands in inland California. And, in a state renowned for backcountry trekking, it’s now awfully hard to hike the beaten path.

Legal campsites are few and far apart. Parks and preserves aren’t linked by trails. Maps don’t tell a hiker everything. (Where in East Oakland is it safe to walk?) And with all due respect to Google, not all of California has been scrutinized by cartographers. (Do you turn right or left at that windmill in the San Luis National Wildlife Refuge?)

Gone are the days when a camper as blithe as Muir -- one friend wrote that the naturalist “knew less about camping than almost any man I have ever camped with” -- could walk for nearly two months across California with a plan like this:

“We had plenty of time and proposed drifting leisurely mountainward . . . by any road that we chanced to find; enjoying the flowers and light, ‘camping out’ in our blankets wherever overtaken by night, and paying very little compliance to roads or times.”

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McInturff spent a year plotting his adventure -- the route that might approximate Muir’s, the places to sleep, the people to interview about the California landscape, the occasional ride for a side trip, the libraries whose Internet access would allow him to post to his blog. (McInturff’s entries can be found at www.muirwalk.blogspot.)

He borrowed a one-man tent from his dad and a backpack from a friend. He packed one extra shirt, two pairs of socks, a rain shell and a first-aid kit that would be tapped regularly for blister relief.

Itineraries, directions and phone numbers were tucked into a Ziploc bag for protection from storms. McInturff brought a journal for observations and a well-worn copy of “Paradise Lost,” a nod to Muir, who traveled with Milton’s masterwork. McInturff also carried Muir’s account of his California transect, an exuberant paean to the natural beauty of “the Great Central Plain.”

Today, the Central Valley struggles with rampant growth, choking smog and high rates of poverty, unemployment and foreclosures. Even Muir rued that the region’s charms are “fading like the glow of a sunset, -- foundering in the grossness of modern refinement.”

But he was so awed by the profusion of wildflowers that he marked off a square yard and counted them. He found 7,262 in bloom, some purple, others a “pure, deep, bossy solar gold, as if the sun had filled their rays and flowerets with the undiluted substance of his very self.”

Granted, McInturff was trekking a few weeks past full bloom, but on the busier byways of western Merced County in late April, about halfway through the trip, it was easier to catalog garbage than gold fields.

Heading east on California 152 before taking a sharp left on California 33 toward Gustine, McInturff scouted the highway’s shoulder. Since leaving home, he had stumbled on a new Samsung cellphone and passed a generous scattering of mattresses.

“Some of the things look almost placed,” he said, musing over the artistry of found objects. “A plastic thing of laundry detergent next to a plastic thing of whey protein, perfectly parallel.”

McInturff has found that California’s litterbugs have strong preferences about their cigarettes; empty Marlboro Lights boxes surpassed any other brand. If the detritus of this 12-mile day was any indication, however, their tastes in beverages are diverse: Starbucks and Peet’s, Bud and Modelo, Red Bull, V8, Dairy Queen and SunnyD.

The most interesting discard McInturff had passed so far, he said, was a testament to the loneliness of the long-distance driver -- a box with a picture of a naked couple that once held something called the “Jackmatic Supreme.”

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McInturff passed through San Luis National Wildlife Refuge on an SPF-30 afternoon, fording streams, skirting curious cows, counting snowy egrets and wary coyotes, their ears pricked up at full attention.

He spent the day in the company of biologists -- first Dennis Woolington of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, then Chris Hildebrandt of Ducks Unlimited, a hunting and conservation group.

For McInturff, a city boy of liberal leanings, it was an eye-opening outing. He had set up the two separate meetings expecting a clash of views on how best to manage the region’s wetlands, the rough jewel of western Merced County.

Instead, he found a partnership. At 9 a.m., he and Woolington pored over a map on the dusty hood of the biologist’s pickup, talking about the Grasslands Ecological Area, which includes a complex of privately owned duck clubs.

McInturff: “Do they still hunt?”

Woolington: “Yep. The reason these have stayed wetlands is because people want to duck hunt. . . . They also recognize they’re maintaining habitat for more than duck hunting.”

The endangered giant garter snake makes its home here, along with the largest wintering population of lesser sandhill cranes in the Pacific Flyway. Between 800,000 and 1.3 million waterfowl winter here, Woolington told him.

A few hours later, McInturff was hiking with Ducks Unlimited’s Hildebrandt, who talked about the impact of drought, the restoration of habitat and the unnatural nature of California’s pancake-flat wetlands.

“Every wetland is a managed wetland. The only way you get water is opening up a screw gate,” he said.

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?”

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