Test Case: The 18-Mile Enchantments Hike Was Among The Most Painful Experiences Of My Life. Can I Face It Again?

Six years ago, my best friend Brenna convinced me to thru-hike the Enchantments, a steep 18-mile trek in North Central Washington, which I hiked with a right leg that refused to bend during the final eight miles. It was one of the most physically painful experiences of my life, both because my knee felt like a power drill was boring into the side of it and the downhill portion of the trail is so sole-punishing it felt like my feet had exploded inside my boots. We also had to wake up at 4:00 a.m., without even having a plane to catch. The experience was one of those awesome-awful lifetime achievements that I swore I would never go through again.

This summer, Brenna decided that we should brave the hike—which we fondly refer to as the Death March—another time. Though the hike is grueling, the payoff is spending a day in some of the most beautiful wilderness in the world. (A multi-day trip is not a viable option: The Enchantments are so popular that getting a permit to backpack along the trail is the outdoorsman equivalent of seeing a unicorn ridden by a Leprechaun.)

I told her she was out of her mind. It would only be worse with half a dozen years tacked on as we meander toward middle age. The hike has a way of finding your little weaknesses and then exploiting them until you are fighting back tears. Example: the first time around, I got blisters on my shoulders from my backpack straps. Ridiculous.

Then I got curious. Could I conquer the Death March the second time around? Or would it defeat me again?

Ignoring all rational thought, I agreed to accompany Brenna. The week before the hike, I decided to make sure that I kept up my workout routine to hit the trail strong. That Monday I pulled my calf muscle doing something inelegantly at boot camp. I could barely run during Thursday’s soccer game. It seemed like God’s way of warning me to stay out of the mountains. But I decided to ignore God’s wishes as usual and try to tough it out.

In the meantime, my stepmom determined that she wanted to cross the hike off her bucket list, and my dad—whose bucket list includes the item “Never do the Enchantments day hike”—reluctantly agreed to join as well. Group suffering brings you closer as a family.

After my alarm clock notified me that it was still the middle of the night but time to get up anyway, I loaded up my backpack with the solemnity of a woman heading to face the firing squad. We left the trailhead at 6:30 a.m. and made it to Colchuck Lake—four miles in—without any trouble. We also navigated the dreaded Aasgard Pass, which rises 1,900 feet in less than a mile, with only a little grumbling from me about how I wanted to murder Brenna. The pass is where you first see mountain goats, who at this point are so used to seeing people that they walk around you like you are a piece of living room furniture. (Brenna and I slowed the trek down by an hour or so by taking approximately 3.4 million pictures of goats, as anticipated.)

After lunch, my dad and I each popped a Vioxx, an anti-inflammatory drug that was withdrawn from the worldwide market in 2004 due to safety concerns, from his ancient hoard. I am pretty sure the pill was too old to have any effect, but I was willing to risk the warned-about potential heart attack or stroke just to take advantage of any placebo effect.

As we started out through the upper Enchantments, a group of girls warned us about an aggressive group of mountain goats—three adults and a baby—down the trail. We laughed it off until we noticed that we were surrounded by a gang of goats—three adults and a baby. They blocked the trail and stared us down. As I prepared to protect myself with a hiking pole if it came to that, they ambled away. We won the staring contest, apparently.

As we began our descent, Brenna and I split up from my parents to prove that we didn’t need adult supervision. Somewhat shortly thereafter we got lost—we took a branch of the trail to a lakeside campsite populated by shirtless guys in hammocks, so it wasn’t all bad—and my dad had to find the main trail. We also noted that a lot of groups of young people dressed for outdoor music festivals—tiny shorts, heart sunglasses, etc.—were passing us on the trail. It’s like they just woke up and decided to hike 18 miles instead of listen to Dave Mathews. Kids these days.

The final six miles of the hike are the worst. It’s at this point that your brain tells you that the hiking should be done, but your eyes tell you that you have a long way to go. All of the mountain-goat pictures pushed our hike into the evening hours. They say on this hike not to get too excited when you see the parking lot, because there are still miles to go at that point. However, we hadn’t yet seen the parking lot.

The good news, though, was that my knee was holding up and my calf was only a little bit annoying. Maybe it was the Vioxx, maybe I was distracted by my increasingly lucid dream of shoving Brenna off a cliff, or maybe my six-years-older body was just more awesome than the 20-something version.

By the time we reached the end of the trail, it was pitch black outside. We were so eager to finish that we didn’t pull our headlamps out, which resulted in us going the wrong way about five yards from the parking lot. We finished the hike at about 9:30 p.m. I celebrated by drinking a Diet Coke. I usually like to cap off a grueling hike with a trip through the Taco Bell drive-through, but I was too tired to make the stop. That’s some serious tiredness, folks. The recovery the next day wasn’t even that bad, so long as I didn’t move much.

Brenna says we need to do the Death March every six years as some sort of self-torture tradition. Before I would have told her she’s crazy, but now I would actually consider it. I dreaded doing that hike again, since it was so painful the first time. But the second time around made me realize that the best way to overcome a fear like that is to face it again—perhaps with the assistance of expired medication prescribed to a relative.

Time to start training for Death March 2022.

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Allison Peryea is a shareholder attorney at Leahy Fjelstad Peryea, a boutique law firm in downtown Seattle that primarily serves community association clients. Her practice focuses on covenant enforcement and dispute resolution. She is a longtime humor writer with a background in journalism and cat ownership. You can reach her by email at [email protected].