I thought I would have more to say on this subject, but I don't — at least not for now. In 2019 I attempted to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. It was an unusually wet year, high precipitation. The preceding two decades had mostly been drought so 2018 and 2019 were outliers for how wet that they were. In 2018, two hikers had drowned in river crossing, and so everyone was on alert. The passes and the crossings were treacherous.
The conditions caused the usual bubble of thru hikers to disperse — some people flying north, some people hanging out, some people going wherever they thought they could hike. It was a weird year.
I was very much a journey type, so my hiking partner and I decided that we would go straight south to north. In practice, this meant that we spent a lot of time hanging out in various towns, bottlenecked by the conditions in the passes, which we deemed unsafe.
It’s a tricky calculus. You need some of the snow to melt, but you can’t wait too long because you’re losing days left in the season. I was losing a lot of days. Eventually my hiking partner had to give up and I went on alone.
I was late getting north. In another year I probably would have made it safely but this was a wet year. I was one of the last hikers in the field and approaching the Goat Rocks in the Cascade mountains of Washington.
I came to a knife's edge covered at times in waist-deep precipitation, snow and ice. I saw that someone else had made the traverse before me and so without really thinking about it — although I had been warned many times by people in town and by other hikers and by my own intuition — I attempted the traverse.
Almost immediately, I got into a situation where backtracking would be as treacherous as going forward. And so I walked the knife’s edge through deep snow in beat-up trail runners and short shorts.
I had an ice ax — not with me, of course, it was packed up. I thought I was done with it after the Sierra Nevadas and so it had been mailed home to my parents house.
I was scared. I didn't think that I _would_ die, but I certainly knew in that moment it was a possibility. It's a weird quirk where you don't really know where your line is until you've crossed it and I had definitely crossed the line. I did not want to be where I was with the sun setting, no GPS, no one else in sight, and the last people I had talked to over two hours away, not knowing what my plan was, with steep drops on either side of me where I could easily lose my gear, break a leg, break my neck, break my hand, lose a finger, freeze to death, suffer from hypothermia and frostbite.
The consequences of failure were not something I wanted to think about.
I slipped sometimes, but I never fell and then, somehow, over a matter of footsteps, over a stretch of time that seemed like an eternity, but which couldn’t have been more than a few hours, I managed to make it to a wider part of the trail and lose elevation.
My mantra the whole time had been: Don't look down. Just keep moving. You'll get through this.
To my shock and great delight, it worked. Well, I had no choice but to keep moving. I was freezing. I was shocked for sure. I didn't know how to process what had just happened and I still had miles to go to get to tree line and some kind of shelter, so I hiked on.
I made it to a tent site after dark, hiking with my head lamp, pitched my tent, got into my sleeping bag to warm up and watched some Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood, which I had downloaded to my phone in town. I couldn't sleep until the early hours because of all the adrenaline my body had released.
Many months later, when I finally had a chance to make some music, this is what came out.
Like what you hear?
You can download this song as an MP3 for free on the Substack website. Please note, this only works on the website, not the app.
1) Click the three dots to the right of the fast forward button. A little option bubble will appear.
2) Click Download MP3. The download should start. Most MP3s aren’t bigger than 10mb.
3) The file will have a name like: “Andy%20Futuro%20-%20Everything.”
4) Click the file to play or add it to whatever music player you use. Despite the funky file name, the song should be properly tagged with my name, the album, genre, album art, and other information.
Like so:
Yep, I add all the information manually. These are artisanal handcrafted MP3s.
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Just so you know…
The absolute best way to support me is to become a paid subscriber. Each of these songs takes dozens of hours to make (or more). A predictable income lets me dedicate more time to composing, and spend less time committing acts of banditry to put gruel in my bowl.
Plus, as a paid subscriber, you’ll get access to all my writing on Substack and some musical bonus content only available here.
I have a ton of music ready to come out. I need your help to make it happen.
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