Hiking the 2,650-Mile Pacific Crest Trail
priceonomics.com
priceonomics.com
Things sure have changed! In high school I did a ton of hiking in the California mountains in the early 90s, including several week-long Sierra trips ending with Mt. Whitney. I would love to hike the PCT someday. I had no idea it required 20-25 miles a day. With elevation change that's a tough day hike, let alone a sustained average with a full overnight pack. OTOH, when I was hiking more, a week-long pack was more like 50 pounds, and now 25 is heavy?
Doing so comfortably is a different story. ($)
There's a huge cottage industry of lightweight gear manufacturers [1] (I curate a list) that you won't find in the big retail stores. Lots of focus on smart feature engineering, lightweight hardware and materials, consistent feedback from customers driving their revisions. It's been pretty neat to watch.
Plenty of these operations literally run out of a garage though, and Katabatic Gear used to be one of those. I believe Cold Cold World packs are all still made by the owner.
I have been immensely pleased with my "cottage gear".
Like Silverstorm, I've been incredibly pleased by the gear I've gotten from these smaller manufacturers. So much so that I built this website to help other people find them.
The weight fanatics still existed back then, drilling their toothbrushes and cutting off unneeded straps, but the industry has advanced and "lightweight" has become a mainstream goal.
Which, I think, is good. It's easy to take lightweight too far, but given that long term a very heavy pack is rough on the body even for fit people, I won't cry over the disappearance of 80lb hiking payloads.
I try to never carry more than 4 days of food and my base pack is downright light. It is pretty great. Call it about 7 lbs. I don't feel I give up very much comfort honestly. I like to go big distances and see a lot of things.
What are the trail accommodations for the PCT? The AT has wonderful, but primitive shelters along the trail, and spring water at some of the points which made the whole affair a LOT more manageable than it would otherwise have been, even though we went in a cold, rainy November.
Due to the pace required to complete the PCT, camping locations are generally located by time rather than location. That is, towards the end of the day, you just keep walking until you find a comfortable place to set up camp.
Appalachian Trail Distance: 2,175 miles Total Elevation Gain/Loss: ~515,000 feet
Pacific Crest Trail Distance: 2,650 miles Total Elevation Gain/Loss: ~315,000 feet
Continental Divide Trail Distance: 3,100 miles Total Elevation Gain/Loss: ~400,000 feet
http://equipped.outdoors.org/2013/10/total-elevation-gainlos...
AT: 236ft/mile average. PCT 113ft/mile.
Give me the 113ft/mile any day :)
As someone who spends a lot of time outdoors hiking and biking, the PCT has some interesting politics. The PCT expands or gets rerouted and the land that is taken over goes from being open to mountain bikes to closed. The forest service took a short term moratorium on biking and has basically made it permanent; yet in parts of the Sierras (especially around tahoe) mountain bike groups take it upon themselves to maintain parts of the PCT.
Many innovations in ultralight backpacking can be traced back to Jardine: the tiny backpack without a hip belt, wearing running shoes instead of hiking boots, carrying an umbrella, using a one-layer quilt instead of sleeping bag, using an alchohol stove, etc. It's all laid out in the Pacific Crest Trail Hiker's Handbook, which blew minds when it was published. Jardine had to hand-make most of his own gear to make it small and light enough; now you can go into REI and buy versions of most of it.
“The birth of the Internet in the late 1990s
revolutionized information flow, and exposed more people
to the trail. You could sit on your PC at home, research
about a subject to your heart’s content, then discuss it
and ask questions in online forums. These discussion
sites have a way of stoking passion, and I think that
passion started translating into more people taking
action, and tackling the trail.”
The internet has really empowered me to get out and maximise my time on the trail.
It's also allowed me to maximise my dollar...
I built a tool [1] to help people find cheap used (lightweight) gear purely out of my passion for the trail and the people.
I plan to attempt the PCT or AT some day, but their considerable length makes it a much bigger commitment than hiking the short 270-mile Long Trail. Unfortunately it's hard to justify taking 6 months off from education or employment—many people see it as a "hippy" thing to do.
At present, my plan is to hike the AT when/if I sell a startup. People seem to be more understanding of you taking out in nature when you're wealthy.
As for making the time, I quit my job to do it northbound in 2010. Best 5.5 months of my life, like your experience on the LT. If you don't have family obligations (partner, dependents, etc), go for it, provided you can afford a reasonable cost per mile and a few months afterwards.
Sorry, I meant that it's difficult to find a chunk of ~6 months.
How was your adjustment back into civilization? I somehow feel that it would be a challenge to find a new job afterwards, as so many employers have a strong bias against periods which look like "unemployment."
I hiked the trail in 2014 and found it to be one of the hardest and most rewarding things I've ever done.
I haven't done a 150 day hike, but I have done 100 - 150 day travel before.
Things like that are a great way of creating chapters in your life. Everything in the old chapter closes before you go. You stop working, get rid of 'stuff', move out of your living space and simplify down to essentials.
When you're done, a new chapter starts. In the new chapter, you'll do things differently because you get a new chance to start, and because a long break generally gives your brain a chance to bubble up what it think the long term priorities are.
Call it a life reboot with a disk reformat and OS update. Sometimes you need to take the server offline for a while to bring it up to spec.
Is this because the 'everything' you're doing instead right now is so awesome that dropping it to do a 150 day hike, no matter how great that would be, is inconceivable?
Or is it because the practicalities of dropping the 'everything' for 150 days aren't reasonable?
If the former, good for you, that's a nice problem to have!
If the latter, really try to separate what's a hard, impassable limitation from what's just a deeply-ingrained habit of your current lifestyle, or a fear about how deviating from your current lifestyle vector might negatively impact your future.
Using your time to do what your really want to do very rarely closes doors, on the contrary it's far more likely to open an awful lot of them (and windows, too!) in ways you can't imagine until you do it.
Knowing nothing of your situation, I apologise if you do have actual, hard, limitations right now (dependant family members, no money to live off while unemployed, etc). But if you don't, you're in an incredibly privileged position that won't last forever. Take advantage! Don't just read about awesome stuff, make a plan then go and do it!
One of the biggest things I learned was that through hikers are all a little strange. Have you ever had a grown man introduce himself as Hello Kitty while keeping a straight face?
I can't describe the jealousy toward others who can simply take off and do this. If you're young and reading this, and are thinking about it -- just do it.
Kids are awesome, but once you have them, achieving an extended adventure like this becomes seemingly impossible. At least until they're grown up.
Why not hike north to south, starting in Washington in early spring?
In fact, the many 10k+ft sections of the PCT in California are likely the reason not to start EARLIER than April.
PCT: Almost all accessible by pack animals. 500 more miles. Grades are easier. Trail is much, much easier. Less elevation gain than the 2100 mile AT. Mostly out in the open. Better scenery overall. Supplying is harder. Level of fitness required to complete it about equivalent to AT. Water is hard on the PCT.
AT: Here on the east coast, where I live, we don't have majestic mountain ranges. To compensate for this we blaze our trails up and over every mountain in sight. The elevation gain is much more than on the PCT. Parts of the AT can be brutal. You could do 20-30 per day on the PCT whereas 20-30 on the AT would be a significant challenge. Water and supply is much easier on the AT. Springs are everywhere and it is very easy to manage. Often referred to as a "Long Green Tunnel" because of how closed in everything is. The elevations are lower so you don't often break out of the tree line. Bugs, bugs bugs in the summer. Cowboy camping is harder to do on the AT, but quite feasible in many parts of the PCT. Also the trail terrain on the AT is much harder. Rocky/uneven, that is implied by my other comment on the PCT, but to be clear, it is rocky and in some parts downright brutal.
The PCT is logistically more difficult than the AT. The AT is physically more difficult than the PCT. Both are long distance hikes where, once initial physical issue have been conquered, become more of a mental challenge than physical challenge.
The PCT seems to be more hostile to feet than the AT. Lots of hikers have a difficult time figuring out the right combination of miles, shoes, socks, and so on during the Southern California part of the PCT. Blisters are very common. The AT's ups and downs can be more hazardous to ankles and knees. Hiking poles are common and useful on both.
Resupply options on the PCT are less frequent than the AT leading to longer sections between resupply than on the AT. There are only three or four shelters on the PCT so camping locations must be thought out in advance (i.e. consulting maps to identify level ground) or discovered en-route. You have to be prepared to dry-camp as stopping for the day at the last water source will cut into your daily miles too much.
Weather can be challenging on either trail but the 'season' for hiking is much longer on the AT than the PCT. PCT hikers can't spent lots of time in town if they want to finish before the snow arrives in Washington.
I'm happy to answer any more specific questions.
Yogi's books are really two-in-one, a planning guide and an on-trail guide.
Pretty impressive for a 2500 mi trek! I think my bag weighs something like that biking to work most days.
Halfmile Maps http://www.pctmap.net/.
I personally wouldn't want to rely 100% on a phone. It would have to be ruggedized, you would need a way to charge it daily, and it would have to have all the maps (which for this purpose are detailed topographic maps) stored locally, as there is no cell coverage in a lot of wilderness areas.
Most of the time on the PCT, maps are superfluous. The trail is well defined with clear signs. Even so, it's always a good idea to pay attention to where you are and what the area around you is like. If something goes wrong (injury, medical emergency, wrong turn at Albuquerque), that knowledge could save someone's life.
For emergencies I do carry a SPOT though: http://findmespot.com/en/index.php?cid=100
Many hikers in 2014 carried only a smartphone and solar charger (or external battery) for their navigation, camera, journal, flashlight, music, and so forth. The smartphone apps [2] that use Halfmile's GPS data [3] can easily get you from Mexico to Canada.
The sCharger-5 [4] is the unofficial solar charger of the PCT, I carried one last year as did many others. The West coast is sunny enough that you attach it on top of your pack and have 5 volt USB power most of the time.
[1] http://www.yogisbooks.com/pacific-crest-trail/halfmile-map-s...
[2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.tadteam.ha...
That seems like a pretty damn good rate to me, for such a tough trek.