PCT End Of Hike Summary
"A Summary Of My PCT Thru Section Hike"
This is the hardest post to write. I could probably update it and re-edit it every day for the next year and still feel like it isn’t an adequate summary. My goal with this blog was to give an accurate glimpse each day of what it was like to be on the trail, or off the trail, and do it with a little humor. Obviously, some days were more interesting than others, and many days were good days, and some days were not so good. I tried to emphasize the positive, but with the overriding goal of giving an accurate depiction of each day, it wasn’t always possible to be entirely positive in my posts. I think it’s important to understand that doing such a long hike has its share of struggles just like normal, every day life—in my mind, struggles are different than challenges. Even the best of days on the PCT have challenges just due to the very nature of what you are doing.
While I did not complete a thru-hike of the PCT, as I desired, I did hike over 2,000 miles and almost 80% of the trail. I feel like I hiked as much as I could, as far as I could without making any bad decisions to try to hike when and where it didn’t make sense to do so. Sure, I could have hiked a few more miles here and there, but doing so would have put me in unfavorable, or even dangerous, situations. One of my objectives for this hike was to not do anything that was intentionally stupid. Safety is more important than trying to accomplish some glamorous goal. I am mildly proud that I was perfectly on track with my detailed plan for the first 80 days and 1,500 miles, when I was stopped by my first fire closure near Mt. Shasta. Without any trail closures, I firmly believe that I could have completed the entire hike nearly on schedule (the unexpected difficulties with bad trail conditions in Washington may have delayed me by a day or so).
Doing a long hike is interesting in how your mindset changes over time. You start off as somewhat of a tourist, then transition into a determined hiking machine. The first 1,000 miles felt like a long and interesting backpacking trip. Everything after that, even when very scenic, felt like a mission. After enduring a couple of months on trail, you really become determined to keep going and finish the hike, or as much of the hike as is practical.
A very common question all thru-hikers get is what part of the trail was a favorite. For me, it’s pretty easy, it is definitely the Southern Sierra (from South Kennedy Meadows to North Kennedy Meadows), especially the section that overlaps with the John Muir Trail (JMT). There is amazing scenery, lots of water (at least thru early Summer), usually good options for campsites, lots of good trail, and great trail towns. Washington has some really great scenery that is different than the Sierra, but the really bad trail maintenance detracted from the scenery; it’s hard to enjoy the scenery when you are just fighting the trail all day. With improved trail maintenance and more tentsites, Washington would be a truly great place to hike, still hard, but great. Unfortunately, I only hiked a couple of days in Oregon, and I was really looking forward to seeing the rest of it; so, judgement on Oregon will have to wait.
To finish off, below is a collection of random thoughts I collected on trail that never made it into any of my daily posts:
- Doing a long hike does not make you an expert hiker, it just makes you a more experienced hiker.
- Doing a long hike does not make you awesome, it just means you had an awesome experience.
- Hiking is work, but it’s not “Work.” While hiking is hard work, both physically and mentally, and you put in long hours doing it (usually 12-14 hours/day), it doesn't feel like a job. A thru-hike, though, is definitely not a walk in the park. The way I think of it is that a long-distance hike is hard, but your life while doing it is simple.
- Hiking the PCT can’t be done without the help of others. Most of all, you really depend on strangers for water caches and water tanks, and getting rides from the trail to towns and back to the trail. And the trail magic that some provide, while not essential, is really very nice.
- Similar to above, you very much rely on public resources to do this hike. Living in suburban Southern CA all my life, I've never had much of a need to use public transportation, and I haven't really used public libraries for a long time. Both of these things were incredibly helpful on this hike. I definitely learned to appreciate, that for people without cars, public transportation is crucial. Libraries, while not crucial to the hike, were very helpful, especially using their computers.
- You can go a long time without showering or bathing with no negative health effects. You can also wear the same clothes 24/7 for many days with no negative health effects. However, three things hikers look forward to most when getting to town are showering, laundering, and eating.
- 50X The Minimum Recommendation: Health Experts say that a person should get at least 75 minutes of vigorous exercise weekly. One way to put a thru-hike in perspective is that the average thru-hiker is exceeding the 75 minutes weekly by about 50X that amount. From a fitness perspective, thru-hiking is definitely overkill.
- Flying and driving make the world seem small, hiking reminds that the world is large.
- Leaving Plato’s Cave: Sometimes while hiking I thought of the allegory of Plato‘s Cave (Google it if you don’t know it). An aspiring thru-hiker spends a fair amount of time looking at photos and videos of the trail, reading journals and blogs and books, and looking at maps. But all of these things are just shadows on the cave wall, a semblance of reality that leads to reverie. Being out on the actual trail, you see the real sites, you smell the real air, you feel the heat of the sun and the absence of it, you feel the wind, you feel the force of gravity going both up and down and even when it’s flat, you feel and see your legs post-holing deeply into soft snow, you feel hunger and thirst, and the real relief that is brought by food and water. While shadows on a cave wall can be interesting, and even entertaining, it’s much better to actually be out on the PCT. To truly understand what it’s like to do a long distance hike, you actually need to do one. It also reminds me of a Native American Indian proverb: “Tell me and I’ll forget. Show me, and I may not remember. Involve me, and I’ll understand.”
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