Thru-Hikers on the Pacific Crest Trail
“NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL stocking up on protein bars,” I said to the tall, unshaven man with 75 plus bars in his grocery cart. I was picking up a dozen bars for my husband, Tony, who has a thing for them. “What’s up,” I asked.
“I’m a skinny guy to start,” he said with an Australian accent, “and I’ve lost 35 pounds the past two months hiking the PCT [Pacific Coast Trail]. I’m stocking up for the last leg. I just ate two breakfasts.”
I had heard that August was prime time for PCT “thru-hikers” to hit Ashland, perhaps the most favored place along the entire trail to grab a few zero days (a day with no hiking), resupply, rest, and restore. Stretching 2,650 miles, the PCT takes three to four months to complete, with hikers averaging 20-30 miles a day, often through rigorous terrain. It’s certainly a good way to lose weight.
I wasted no time asking the question everyone asks: “Why?”
“For me, it’s about extending myself,” Will said. “I know it sounds lame, but I feel I need to go long to go deep.”
A few days later, Tony and I met a young German woman at Starbucks who was hiking the trail with her partner. The pair had saved for a year to purchase airfare and equipment and to meet the estimated $1,000 per month (per person) needed to subsist on the trail. Their visa was about to expire and they worried that they wouldn’t make it to Manning Park in British Columbia, the last stop on the PCT.
Again, I asked why.
“It’s like this,” Shira said. “I don’t want to be caught by routine. I don’t want to swallow ordinariness when I can inhale majesty.” “My English isn’t so good,” she added.
There is a phrase along the PCT, “Hike Your Own Hike.” It encourages hikers to hike according to their own goals and dreams and not succumb to other hiker’s expectations. “This is your hike. Hike it your way.”
As the name suggests, the Pacific Crest Trail traces the highest portion of the Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountain ranges through California, Oregon and Washington, roughly 125 miles east of the Pacific Ocean. It runs from the Mexican to the Canadian border. Some know the PCT as the trail on which Reece Witherspoon lost and found herself in the movie, Wild.
With more miles of designated wilderness and more elevation changes—from 13,153 feet to sea level—than any other trail in the United States, the PCT reigns supreme. It passes through nine of North America’s ecoregions, including high and low desert, old-growth and rain forests, alpine glaciers and meadows. “It symbolizes everything there is to love and protect in the Western United States,” says the Pacific Crest Trail Association, the trail’s administrative center.
I’ve been a casual hiker all my life, with a few special moments: hiking the 22 miles up and down Mt. Whitney in one day, backpacking in the wilderness north of Yosemite, hiking at 13,000 feet in the Simien Mountains in Ethiopia. The closest I will ever get to the PCT “experience,” though, is when the short trail Tony and I follow into the woods near our house crosses the PCT.
I’ve learned that the trail’s first champion was a 59-year-old armchair hiker, Clinton Clarke, who in 1932 recruited the Boy Scouts, the YMCA, and Ansel Adams (among others) to plan the trail and then lobby Congress to protect it. From 1935 through 1938, YMCA groups explored and laid out 2000 miles of potential trail, prefiguring most of today’s route. In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson signed the National Trails System Act and, for the next 25 years, volunteers organized by the Pacific Crest Trail Association joined the federal government in removing trees to create a trail corridor, erecting bridges to ford streams, engineering switchbacks and retaining walls—and hundreds of other tasks involved in trail building. In 1993, the PCT was officially declared finished.
Although solitude marks the PCT, a powerful sense of community links hikers. Often at the beginning of a thru-hike, some hikers form “trail families” that look out for one another and plan around each other’s needs. Hikers give each other “trail names,” often derived from a significant or humorous characteristic or event associated with the hiker—thought to be a better way of identifying a hiker than her or his given name. (How many Emmas or Johns are on the trail at any one time?)
Technology adds ties that bind. According to the U.S. Forest Service, thru-hikers have cell phone coverage roughly 70 percent of the time, providing a life line to critical bulletins and emergency assistance and allowing for almost daily communication among hikers. Not surprisingly, hikers also use their phones to post on social media. The Pacific Crest Trail Association encourages hikers to add their name to the “2,600 Miler List” when they complete the entire trail; to date, more than 5,502 people have hiked the distance, 87 more than once. The PCTA also invites hikers to write and share trail journals, which it posts and archives.
Alice “Stone Dancer” Tulloch writes:
I’ve often been asked how the death on the Pacific Crest Trail of my husband, “No Way Ray” Echols, has changed me. Ray and I were approximately 300 miles into a northbound PCT thru-hike when he apparently lost his footing and fell about 200 feet to his death. I was hiking about 20 feet behind him when he went around a corner and disappeared.
That cliff marks a sudden turn in my life. But I’ve come to see it as symbolic of how the trail changes each of us.
At Ray’s memorial service, someone asked me whether I would hike again. Instinctively, I said, “Yes.”
Less than two months after Ray’s death I was back on the trail in Oregon, hoping for solace in making miles. The main strength I found was a new acquaintance with fearlessness; I had already faced the worst the trail could deliver and walked through it.
We come to the trail for lots of reasons. Beneath them all, we want to find out what’s really important in our lives. The PCT answers us by stripping life down to its essentials. We shed not only ounces and grams, but also the mental clutter of our ordinary lives.
In the silence of the wilderness, we wrestle with the demons of our past and discover they are phantoms. In every hot, tired step we are undeniably physical beings. At the same time, our spiritual selves soar.
Undeniably, the PCT strings together some of the most amazing wilderness on this planet. Our time on it satisfies our need to belong to the Earth. We will always hold close to our hearts the Milky Way seen from a tiny sleeping bag on some improbable campsite at the edge of nowhere.
It is unlikely that I will ever again marvel at the Milky Way from a sleeping bag in the wild, but our move to Ashland has brought me closer to the Earth.
SUBSCRIBE
Add your name to the email “blast” announcing new posts. Please send your name and email address to: