Warner Springs

Taken on my ascent into the San Felipe hills. That's Granite Mountain in the background. I descended from a pass on the westside of the mountain (on the right) and passed through the desert valley. You can just make out Scissors Crossing from where I hitched to Julian. It was nice to look back and see all that I had hiked.

San Felipe Hills

The last 35 miles have been challenging but steady. My left IT Band has improved but the right one started acting up, so some of the down hills have been painful. I left Julian one afternoon around 3 PM. The sun did not show any mercy as I ascended into the San Felipe hills. However, the payoff was the beautiful campsite I found at mile 85, which was tucked away from the wind. As great as it is to meet new and interesting people everyday, I quite enjoyed the solitude of this day and the remoteness of my campsite. Also, as I ascended the San Felipe hills I was able to look back on Granite Mountain, which I had descended from a couple of days prior, and the desert floor I crossed to reach Scissors Crossing, and I felt a small sense of accomplishment. 

Sunset from camp.

The next day I hiked to a water cache at mile 91. Volunteers manage to forklift in palettes of bottled water for hikers, and this provides the only water in the San Felipe hills which runs between Scissors Crossing, at mile 77, and Barrel Springs at 101.4.18 miles to Barrel Springs. One of the biggest challenges of the desert is planning for long miles without reliable water sources and carrying sometimes up to 12-15 lbs of water between sources. The San Felipe Hills were beautiful. However, sometimes very small sections of the trail, which is mostly sand in this section, run out into (what I estimate to be) the 60 degree rocky slopes of the hills. A slip on one of these run offs could be very dangerous, but this is relatively easy to avoid so long as one is paying attention. (Staying hydrated helps with that!)

Forget the Hunger Games. Hiking the PCT is the Thirsty Games.

On the way to Barrel Springs I hit the 100 miles mark! Only 26 more to go. Not every 100 mile mark will feel as momentous, I'm sure. But this one was nice because it was the first 100 and because it felt encouraging. I set up camp at Barrel Springs with the plan of hiking the 9 miles to the Warner Springs community center the next morning.

Philosophical Ramblings

When I left the next morning I encountered a piped gate that was secured shut with a chain. At first glance the chain looked like it was locked and that there would be no way to open the gate, which had barbed wire fence on either side. In addition, there were no trespassing signs posted and the PCT sticker on the gate looked scratched out. The trail ahead was clearly the PCT, so I was confused. This was on BLM territory. For a brief moment I thought I might have inadvertently gotten mixed up in a Y'all-Qaeda scenario (Malheur National Wildlife Refuge) and that if I jumped the gate I might get shot. Fortunately it was only my stupidity at work--the chain was looped around and easy to remove so that one could pass through the gate and move forward on the trail. Still, this got me thinking about public lands, environmental conservation, Leave No Trace, etc. More generally: what is the ethical relationship between humans and non-humans? While I'm not clear on the details, I generally think that what grounds facts about ethical obligations and value are facts about the autonomy of persons, things like the capacity to make plans and follow through with them, and maybe also the motivations and intentions of persons. As a consequence, I tend to think that non-human things are valuable only insofar as humans give them value. Sometimes I worry that this general attitude about ethics is in tension with my love and appreciation of the wilderness and compulsion to support environmental protection and conservation. For example, if I thought that ecosystems had intrinsic value, value that is independent of human activity, or that ecosystems had rights, then it would be easy for me to justify why I think that the preservation of ecosystems through  means such as national parks is important and that we should utilize natural resources in a sustainable way that preserves the ecology. But at the end of the day, I just cannot bring myself to take on this starting assumption, i.e. that ecosystems have mind independent rights. However, I think that it is relatively easy to find the importance of the environment more generally as well as the value of national parks for humans: it has aesthetic, psychological, physiological significance for humans, and, more generally, it provides important resources for human life that should be preserved for future generations, and provides for a robust scientific understanding of human existence (e.g. in understanding climate change and perhaps how to preserve and reproduce important resources).

I think that the aesthetic and historical value of natural landscapes justifies certain conservation practices. Consider the following analogy with the Mona Lisa. Great effort is placed into preserving this painting. If someone were to deface the painting, it would be wrong not because someone's private property was destroyed, but because it would destroy something that humanity collectively values for its aesthetic and historical significance. The compilation of paint on a canvas itself has no intrinsic value but instead its value derives from the intentions of the artist and the significance humanity invests in the resulting product. I think something similar can be said for natural landscapes. Though it is likely that there are no intentions behind the formation of natural landscapes (theists might disagree), most people appreciate the beauty of a sunset on a remote beach, the expansive views from Yosemite Valley, etc. And it is partly in virtue of these aesthetic qualities these environments and ecosystems are considered valuable. I think that this fact at least in part justifies certain conservation practices such as Leave No Trace. Leave No Trace principles promote the preservation of natural environments, and hence the aesthetic and historical value of these environments, by limiting human impact on these environments. For example, if someone were to build a condo high-rise in the middle of Yosemite Valley, this would be nearly equivalent to defacing (and hence destroying) a great work of art. It's not that Yosemite Valley has intrinsic value or that it possess mind independent aesthetic properties. But humanity (or a large portion of it) invests these natural landscapes with aesthetic and historical value. So the responsible thing to do is to act in ways that preserve these environments. Perhaps this argument is too weak for some. Maybe some could not care less about aesthetic or historical value or some think that the natural landscapes have mind independent value. For the first, all I can say is that I think that human intellectual activities such as cultivating aesthetic attitudes towards just about anything (even something as abstract as a mathematical theorem) is critical (maybe even essential) to distinctly human existence. As for the second, all I can say is that push comes to shove (all things being equal), people should act in ways that preserve and promote the flourishing of human existence. Of course stronger arguments could be made on the basis of other aspects of the environment such as its provision of important resources for human life that should be used in a sustainable manner and its contribution to a robust scientific understanding of human existence. But aesthetic and historical considerations have been the most salient for me on this hike.

On our second day of hiking, Michael provided an interesting and strong argument for why he does not eat meat. He wanted me to convince this argument was bad and give him reasons to eat meat since he thoroughly enjoys it. Basically, he argued that the pleasure he derives from eating meat does not outweigh the suffering the animal endures either when being raised in terrible conditions or in death. I said the best way to challenge the argument is to either show that the overall positive consequences of meat consumption (and the industry overall) do justify eating meat (e.g. less environmental impact, economic benefits, etc.). Or to challenge the assumption that what ultimately matters to how we should behave are facts about pleasure and pain. As I mentioned above, maybe be what ultimately matters to how we should behave are facts regarding the autonomy of persons, things like the capacity to make plans and follow through with them, the motivations and intentions of persons, and the capacity to project value onto the world. So, why should I care (ethically) about eating (most) fish? Fish don't seem to make plans or have higher order cognitive capacities. Besides, what's a fish ever gonna do for me?  Fish exhibit behaviors the indicate pain responses, but do fish feel pain the way humans do, i.e. is the quality of the pain anything like what it is for humans? I suppose this is an empirical questions, but I'm skeptical that they do. I do worry, however, about the following potential objection to such an anthropocentric attitude towards animals and the environment. Imagine a civilization of beings that are more cognitively advanced than humans, e.g. we are to them as ants or fish are to us. These beings base their moral* beliefs (beliefs about how they should behave as opposed to how they might in fact behave) on their cognitive capacities. (I'm not sure if I should make it so that moral* propositions are equivalent to moral propositions.) Humans lack certain cognitive skills that these being think are fundamentally important to moral questions. We might even say that what these beings experience as pain is considerably more phenomenologically rich than what humans experience. So to some of these beings human life has no intrinsic value and humans are simpletons that are not (very) morally* relevant. Hence they feel they are justified* in treating humans as means to an end. I'm not sure what to make of this at this point. Maybe some of these beings would argue that the moral* thing to do is to prevent the suffering of humans despite their cognitive simplicity. If this is the case, which if these beings actually exist I hope it is the case, then why should I not take on the same attitude towards cows, fish, maybe even insects? This is a bit unclear to me at the moment, but something I've been thinking about on the hike.

On the way into Warner Springs.

 Warner Springs

On the way to Warner Springs I passed Eagle Rock. Warner Springs is a very small community: it has a post office, a golf course, and an elementary and high school. However, many people in the community open up they community resource center for PCT hikers to camp, wash their clothes in a bucket, and take a bucket shower!

Camp at the Warner Springs resource center.

Most importantly, the main building of the resource center is warm, and it has been chilly here (last night was in the low 30s). I stayed here two nights to let my knees recoup. On the first night, someone came to the resource center to let the hikers know that the elementary school was having a spaghetti dinner fund raiser. For $5 you got a plate of spaghetti, salad, bread, and a drink. About 15 hikers went over. A kitchen cooked meal certainly hit the spot. But I think it was really nice for us hikers to go support the elementary school of a community, that for some crazy reason, cares and invests so much time and energy to crazy thru-hikers.

Cow on the trail.

Eagle Rock!