She's 27 and just got a master's degree and quit a job and is going to have to start a career. A relationship with somone she loved seems to be over.

She says her parents are still in love. And that she could never marry someone who doesn't backpack.

She knows the names of flowers along the trail.

She says she likes to do things for herself and hates to accept help.

She has a lot on her shoulders besides a backpack.

Emily added Jim to this trip late in the game -- a last-minute additon to a 10-year-old JMT dream.

He's someone she knew in high school. There doesn't appear to be a romantic relationship.

She tells me that she doesn't know the trail, isn't sure what's ahead, doesn't know how to start a fire.
She's grateful to have someone with Jim's skills along, she says.

Jim -- I call him Dudley Doright, but not to his face -- is self-appointed rescuerer of all -- especially journalists who want to talk to people and write in notebooks and try to find a satellite signal instead of marching to where he's decided camp must be that night in order to keep everything right on schedule.

He's extremely capable. Tall and strong, a valley boy raised on outdoor adventure. He's been backpacking on his own since he was 13. The He's had the Tilley hat--with it's lifetime guarantee since he was 13. Also the green hiking shorts. They used to be too big, now they're too samll.

He can start campfires and read maps and walk through the pain of the blisters.

He apparently knows one line of one song and it's "Yo-ho, yo-ho, a pirate's life for me." He sings it a few times a day.

He likes to say, "We're in it to win it." He says that a few times a day, also.

In the evenings around the campfire he always laughs a loud laugh and says, "Oh-ho! Good clean fun!"

He just took the bar. He' s going to be a real estate lawyer. In "real" life he lives in a big city and works at a law firm. I realize that if I saw him in "real" life I probably wouldn't recognize him. We always wear hats and sunglasses out here. To me he's a guy with a wide grin in a Tilley hat. I only know what his teeth look like.

Maybe he's hiking so he won't think too much about whether he passed the bar.

But, I think mostly he's hiking because he's a young, strong guy. And young, strong guys like to do things other people can't.

Darrell asks me if I think they'll make the whole John Muir Trail. The question startles me, because it never occurred to me that they wouldn't.