Woman Heeds Call of the Road Less Traveled

Chances are, if you run across a little old lady dressed in purple spandex and leading a saddled goat any time soon, she’ll probably be in front of you.

Sandra Johnson, a 66-year-old South Pasadena woman, is undertaking the monumental task of hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, from Mexico to Canada, for the second time.

A trail junkie, the grandmother of three long ago forfeited her job and home to heed the call of the wild.

She was a professor of fashion design at Pasadena City College until 1991, when she took a leave of absence to hike the trail for the first time. Somewhere along the way, she got turned off by the vacuous glitz of the fashion industry and turned on by Mother Nature, she says.

When she returned to Los Angeles, she quit her 37-year teaching career, moved out of her home and put her possessions in storage--all to spend as much time hiking as possible.

“After I’d been out on the trail for six months, I knew that’s where I belonged,” says Johnson. “I gave it all up because I wanted to be outside.” She wants nothing more than to spend the rest of her days climbing pine-studded summits, crossing flower-strewn meadows and plodding through baked deserts--far from smog-choked Los Angeles, which she calls “captivity.”

“We humans, we’re not designed for modern living,” says Johnson. “We were designed to roam around.”

In seven years, she has logged more than 15,000 miles on some of the country’s harshest treks.

With her slight build, white buzz cut and heavy black glasses, Johnson has the gentle presence of a favorite, yet eccentric, aunt. She speaks softly and spices her dialogue heavily with “honey” and pats on the arm.

Between trips, she stables Wind, her goat, with an acquaintance in Sunland, and beds down in a parking lot across from a 24-hour gym in Pasadena where she showers and keeps her muscles limber. Her monthly Social Security check of $600 is spent on fuel and camping supplies.

“Instead of doing all of this when I was young, I’m doing it now,” she says. “I need to do this so I don’t say one day, ‘What if?’ ”

Her children have accepted the fact that their mother doesn’t knit and bake cookies, although they do worry about her safety.

“She’s not your typical mother/grandmother,” said Lisa Downs, her daughter, who lives in Washington.

“I find what she does a bit odd at times, but if that’s what makes her happy, that’s fine with me.”

Johnson took her first stroll in the woods at age 49 when a friend took her to Angeles National Forest one December weekend. She saw the snow-covered Mt. Baden-Powell rising 9,400 feet in the distance and told him, “That’s where I want to go.”

With a pair of Kmart boots on her feet and a bottle of Dom Perignon, she huffed and puffed her way up the mountain in a foot of snow until she stood triumphantly on top, where she saw the Palmdale desert stretching to the north and the glitter of Los Angeles to the south. After chugging the bubbly to celebrate, she promptly took a nap in the snow from exhaustion.

“I was totally hooked,” she said. “I’d made it.”

She took a mountaineering course at the Sierra Club and bought proper gear.

Since then, she’s hiked the 270-mile John Muir Trail, the 2,600-mile Pacific Crest Trail and the 2,100-mile Appalachian Trail--all solo.

“I love being alone. When you’re with a group of people, you’re part of a group,” she says. “When you’re by yourself, you’re part of everything.”

Despite her children’s concerns for her safety, she says she’s safer in the woods than in the big city.

She’s run across a few bears and snakes in her journeys, but has never felt threatened. And when her arthritic knees and hammer toes start bothering her, she just grits her teeth and keeps marching toward the horizon.

Her days run according to sun time. She rousts herself from her sleeping bag when the first rays pierce her tent and marches until the golden orb melts into the horizon, when she relishes a freeze-dried dinner near a campfire.

She’s become a trail maven, and gives lectures at the Sierra Club and A-16, a camping store in West Los Angeles.

Gear companies use her to test products ranging from protein bars to boots. At her suggestion, Gregory Mountain Products, a backpack manufacturer, designed a women’s pack with a canted waist belt and adjustable shoulder harnesses.

“She’s a hard-core lady,” said company owner Wayne Gregory. “She totally blows everybody away in the outdoor industry.”

And she has used her background in design to invent a few items of her own, including a lightweight tent, a water bottle holder and seamless polypropylene clothes that won’t chafe skin--items she eventually hopes to patent.

Her latest big adventure is a second jaunt down the Pacific Crest Trail. During the summer, she’s hiking the Pacific Northwest, and she expects to return to Los Angeles County in October.

At the end of the two-year undertaking, she’s planning to publish a guide in loose-leaf format that will have a chart describing the trail on one side with a corresponding topographical map on the other. When it’s done, she’s planning to package the guide in 75- to 100-mile sections and sell it in sports stores.

She says the guide will be more practical than the two existing ones, which are bound books. Because most people hike only segments of the trail, they are forced to either tear out the pages they intend to use or lug the entire book along.

Bob Ballou, the executive director of the Pacific Crest Trail Assn., a 2,600-member group that maintains the trail, said such a guide is long overdue.

“It’s a great idea because it won’t include a lot of the dialogue that’s in the current guides,” said Ballou. It will be especially useful for the approximately 75 people who walk the entire trail in one hike each year, he said.

“There’s not many people her age that want to rewrite a trail guide for the PCT,” said Ballou. “She’s one of a kind.”

Association volunteers drop off food for Johnson at prearranged sites along the trail and shuttle her between the trail and her van, where she types her observations into her battery-operated laptop.

To measure elevations, which range from 140 to 13,200 feet spanning six ecosystems from low desert to high alpine, she’s using two altimeters and two pedometers. She carries 25 pounds on her back, and Wind, her 1-year-old alpine cashmere pack goat, carries 15 pounds.

Wind is a practical traveling companion, foraging for her own food and following unswervingly at Johnson’s heels. She understands six commands: stop, in, come, no, stay and OK (to calm her down).

After being separated from her leader for any length of time, Wind affectionately greets Johnson by rubbing against her legs like a giant cat, or by nuzzling her cheek, while Johnson clucks over her like a mother hen.

On the road, the pair bunk in the van together--Johnson in her handcrafted bed, Wind in hers--and Johnson says the animal is clean and quiet.

“She chews her cud once in a while, but she doesn’t snore,” Johnson joked.

When she’s too weak to hike anymore, Johnson says she plans to cash in some mutual funds she inherited from her parents and build herself a little log cabin somewhere along the trail.

With a big pasture out back for Wind, of course.