by Wendell Cayton

High above the land of Microsoft we trekked, 97 miles in 6 days on the Pacific Crest Trail. From Washington’s Stevens Pass to the resort village of Stihekin on Lake Chelan, three of us hiked, reliving our youth and testing our will against miles of some of the most beautiful, but rugged terrain in the country.

I’m here to report that there was nary a Starbucks in sight, even though we were within 100 miles by crow flight of the Seattle epicenter of caffeine culture. Perhaps most important for our mental well being and escape, we found only one place where we were able to check in with our offices by cell phone.

Thus isolated we were forced to entertain ourselves with tales of yesteryear, spiced by the lies and exaggeration that are the privilege of age. An ex-Army Ranger Captain, an ex-Marine Captain and a former college football star can do a lot of tall tale swapping in 6 days!

Despite this isolation, it is very apparent that high-tech has indeed permeated even this most primitive of recreational pursuits. Ergonomically designed, individually fitted packs bore our loads, a far cry from the Trapper Nelson, one size fits all, that I lugged 45 years ago as a Boy Scout.

We swapped notes on the merits of the special sock arrangements we each wore to prevent blisters that were bound to show up on our office-softened feet. Shirts of special fabric and cut, designed to wick away the moisture of labor, and dry quickly when drenched by the daily reminder that this wasn’t your average walk in the park, have taken the place of the chambray work shirts I have worn in the past. Pants of similar material with zip off lower legs for the warmer days have replaced yesterday’s Levis.

Food? No problem. A meal for two in a 2 oz. tin foil pouch can be fixed in less than 5 minutes by adding two cups of boiling water, sealing the pouch and waiting for the water to be absorbed. For you weight conscious, that’s 3 ounces of weight and approximately 2,000 calories per day. Oh yes, hiking like this beats the heck out of any diet plan. In a typical 15-mile day, a male like myself will burn 5-6,000 calories.

We did take the kitchen stove with us…like personal computers…today’s stoves are getting smaller and more powerful each time I wander by an outdoors store. Mine folds into a rectangular plastic container less than the size of the smallest cell phone. When attached to a fist-sized canister of fuel, it was capable of boiling a quart pot of water in less than five minutes!

Unfortunately, the proliferation over the years of humans in the back country, plus centuries of other animal use, has rendered drinking from those clear mountain streams risky businesses. No problem. Small, hand pump filters can be used to filter out bacteria and parasitic inhabitants of the water who can turn a trip such as ours into a stomach torture test. If pumping and filtering is not to your liking, the modern version of the awful water “putridification” tablets I remember from the jungles of Vietnam have given way to tablets utterly tasteless and capable of killing all that “walks, talks or swims like a reptile” in the water.

Upon our return to the land of coffee from a stand, cell phones and the other distractions of modern society, I see where another judge has slapped the hand of mighty Microsoft. Will these troubles ever end? Probably not, as long as the century-old anti-trust laws are used as a basis for measuring what is suitable in the 21st Century entrepreneurial environment.