1.
I passed fast-food joints and car dealerships, unsure of whether I should stick out my thumb for a ride or spend a night in Ridgecrest and head back to the PCT the next day
2.
When I told him about hiking the PCT, he insisted on washing my clothes
3.
It seemed absurd to me that I’d been hiking in that snowy range all along—that the arid mountains I’d traversed since the moment I set foot on the PCT were technically part of the Sierra Nevada
4.
I hadn’t read Muir’s books about the Sierra Nevada before I hiked the PCT, but I knew he was the founder of the Sierra Club
5.
Or at least the version of prepared I’d believed was sufficient before I began hiking the PCT: I’d purchased an ice ax and mailed it to myself in the box I would collect at Kennedy Meadows
6.
When I told her I was hiking the PCT, she offered to give me a ride to the trail
7.
I followed the PCT along its rocky, ascendant course in the hot morning sun, catching views of the mountains in all directions, distant and close—the Scodies to the near south, the El Paso Mountains far off to the east, the Dome Land Wilderness to the northwest, which I’d reach in a few days
8.
Its western slope comprises 90 percent of the range, the peaks gradually descending to the fertile valleys that eventually give way to the California coast—which parallels the PCT roughly two hundred miles to the west for most of the way
9.
As the notion of quitting settled in, I came up with another reason to bolster my belief that this whole PCT hike had been an outlandishly stupid idea
10.
I’d planned to put them all to rest while hiking the PCT
11.
He’d been planning his hike for years, gathering information by corresponding with others who’d hiked the PCT in summers before, and attending what he referred to as “long-trail” hiking conferences
12.
Jardine was an expert and indisputable guru on all things PCT, especially on how to hike it without carrying a heavy load
13.
I wanted to hike the PCT, but I couldn’t! It was socked in!
14.
“We picked the wrong year to hike the PCT
15.
I realized that in spite of my hardships, as I approached the end of the first leg of my journey, I’d begun to feel a blooming affection for the PCT
16.
I stopped in my tracks when that thought came into my mind, that hiking the PCT was the hardest thing I’d ever done
17.
But hiking the PCT was hard in a different way
18.
Perhaps the impulse to purchase the PCT guidebook months before had been a primal grab for a cure, for the thread of my life that had been severed
19.
Hello, I said to myself in anticipation of what I’d say once I arrived at the store, I’m a PCT hiker here to pick up my box
20.
He lived in San Diego most of the year, he explained, but each summer he set up camp in Kennedy Meadows in order to greet the PCT hikers as they passed through
21.
He was what’s referred to in PCT hiker vernacular as a trail angel, but I didn’t know that then
22.
Didn’t know, even, that there was a PCT hiker vernacular
23.
He placed each item in one of two piles—one to go back into my pack, another to go into the now-empty resupply box that I could either mail home or leave in the PCT hiker free box on the porch of the Kennedy Meadows General Store for others to plunder
24.
They weren’t gearheads or backpacking experts or PCT know-it-alls
25.
On the PCT I had no choice but to inhabit it entirely, to show my grubby face to the whole wide world
26.
I’d only listened and nodded when Ed told me that most of the PCT hikers who’d come through Kennedy Meadows in the three weeks he’d been camped here had opted to get off the trail at this point because of the record snowpack that made the trail essentially unpassable for most of the next four or five hundred miles
27.
They caught rides and buses to rejoin the PCT farther north, at lower elevations, he told me
28.
He said that a few had ended their hikes altogether, just as Greg had told me earlier, deciding to hike the PCT another, less record-breaking year
29.
” The High Sierra and its 13,000- and 14,000-foot-high peaks, its cold, clear lakes and deep canyons were the point of hiking the PCT in California, it seemed
30.
It was the reason PCT hikers spent so much time talking about water purifiers and water sources, for fear they’d make one wrong move and have to pay
31.
The radical aloneness of the PCT had altered that sense
32.
If I didn’t opt to get off the trail at Trail Pass to bypass the snow, I’d soon reach Forester Pass, at 13,160 feet the highest point on the PCT
33.
I wasn’t rightly prepared to be on the PCT in a regular year, let alone a year in which the snow depth measurements were double and triple what they’d been the year before
34.
By bailing out like most of the other PCT hikers had, I’d miss the glory of the High Sierra
35.
The summit of Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the contiguous United States, was closer still, a short detour off the PCT
36.
Some PCT hikers had resupply boxes sent to Lone Pine, but I’d planned to push through to the town of Independence, another fifty trail miles to the north
37.
The amount I had left over was the amount I could spend on the PCT
38.
I was homesick, but I didn’t know if it was for the life I used to have or for the PCT
39.
I wrote Lisa a letter, asking her to purchase and send me a PCT guidebook for the Oregon section of the trail using the bit of money I’d left with her, and reordering the boxes she’d be mailing me for the rest of California
40.
In the morning, Greg and I walked out of Sierra City for a mile and a half along the shoulder of the road until we reached the place where it intersected the PCT, then walked together for a few minutes on the trail before pausing to say goodbye
41.
I’d left it that morning in the PCT hiker free box at the Sierra City post office as Greg and I strolled out of town
42.
I still didn’t know precisely where I was, but at least I knew I was on the PCT
43.
I got my pot and poured water and Better Than Milk into it and stirred, then added some granola and sat eating it near the open door of my tent, hoping that I was still on the PCT
44.
Now I wished for that ice ax with an almost pathological fervor, picturing it sitting uselessly in the PCT hiker free box in Sierra City
45.
Each step was also a calculated effort to stay approximately on what I hoped was the PCT
46.
It meant I’d followed the path of the PCT
47.
If I was where I thought I was, I’d covered forty-three miles of the PCT in the four days since I’d left Sierra City, though I’d probably hiked more than that, given my shaky abilities with map and compass
48.
I could have taken a side trail to it a day out of Sierra City, but I’d decided to pass it by when I opted to stay on the PCT
49.
It occurred to me that I could ask her for a job for the summer and quit the PCT
50.
After lunch, Christine drove me to the ranger station in Quincy, but when we got there, the ranger I spoke to seemed only dimly aware of the PCT
51.
The only reasonable place to get back on the PCT was where it crossed a road fourteen miles west of where we were
52.
The women were college students who worked at a summer camp; they were going right past the place where the PCT crossed the road
53.
The PCT was just beyond it, the women had told me as I’d climbed out of their van
54.
From the campground they said I could hike a short trail that would take me up to the PCT
55.
My heart leapt with relief when I came across the words WHITEHORSE CAMPGROUND, then it fell when I read on and realized I was nearly two miles away from the PCT
56.
If I walked up to the PCT as planned, I’d be walking into more snow
57.
From there I could follow a jeep road that wended its way north, ascending to the PCT at a place called Three Lakes
58.
The alternate route was about the same distance as the PCT, approximately fifteen miles, but it was at a low enough elevation that it had a chance of being snow-free
59.
All morning, as I walked west to Bucks Lake, then north and west again along its shore before coming to the rugged jeep road that would take me back up to the PCT, I thought of the resupply box that waited for me in Belden Town
60.
I’d used it only a few times experimentally before I took it on the PCT
61.
The PCT was just beyond it
62.
Before coming on the PCT, I’d imagined countless baths in lakes and rivers and streams, but in reality, only rarely did I plunge in
63.
I wore the shirt from Paco the next morning as I hiked back to the PCT and on to Belden Town, catching glimpses of Lassen Peak as I went
64.
“Are you, by chance, hiking the PCT?”
65.
I knew in an instant that he was a PCT hiker by the drag of his gait
66.
After we hung up, I signed the PCT hiker register and scanned it to see when Greg had passed through
67.
It was only once I’d decided to hike the PCT that I learned about the AT—the Appalachian Trail, the far more popular and developed cousin of the PCT
68.
The AT is 2,175 miles long, approximately 500 miles shorter than the PCT, and follows the crest of the Appalachian Mountains from Georgia to Maine
69.
About two thousand people set out to thru-hike the AT each summer, and though only a couple hundred of them made it all the way, that was far more than the hundred or so who set out on the PCT each year
70.
On the AT, resupply stops were closer together, and more of them were in real towns, unlike those along the PCT, which often consisted of nothing but a post office and a bar or tiny store
71.
They’d probably been given trail names by their fellow hikers, another practice that was far more common on the AT than on the PCT, though we had a way of naming people too
72.
It was 134 miles away at McArthur-Burney Falls Memorial State Park, which had a concessionaire’s store that allowed PCT hikers to use it as a resupply stop
73.
By the time we paid our bill, we’d decided that when we hiked away from Belden in the morning, we’d follow a combination of lower-elevation jeep roads and the PCT for about fifty miles before hitchhiking a bypass of a socked-in section of the trail in Lassen Volcanic National Park, catching the PCT again at a place called Old Station
74.
I sat holding my pen, only thinking of them and also of the things I could tell him about my time on the PCT
75.
I’d been savoring the company of the women all day, grateful for the kinds of conversation that I’d seldom had since starting the PCT, but it was Brent I felt oddly the closest to, if only because he felt familiar
76.
It was true—the PCT was open to both hikers and pack animals, though I hadn’t yet encountered any horseback riders on the trail
77.
“I’m hiking the Pacific Crest Trail,” I repeated, gesturing by way of elaboration to the woods that edged up near the road, though in fact the PCT was about nine miles west of where we stood
78.
As I explained to him what the PCT was and what I was doing on it, I saw that Jimmy Carter wasn’t bad-looking
79.
The man who’d picked them up was only going to take them about twelve miles east, to the junction of the next highway we needed to catch a ride on, which would take us north and then back west to Old Station, where we’d rejoin the PCT
80.
I went into the whole PCT shebang, explaining about the trail and the record snowpack and the complicated way I had to hitchhike to get to Old Station
81.
It was early but hot already as I walked the road to the place where the PCT crossed it
82.
The PCT had taught me what a mile was
83.
“You a PCT hiker?” the woman behind the counter asked
84.
She’d decided to get off the trail here and return to Colorado to do several day hikes near her home for the rest of the summer instead of hiking the PCT
85.
It was me against the PCT when it came to my toenails, I realized
86.
By nightfall four other PCT hikers joined my encampment
87.
John and Sarah were from Alberta, Canada, and hadn’t even been dating a year when they’d started to hike the PCT
88.
People came and went in waves, sometimes gathering in little circles around me to ask questions about the PCT when they noticed my pack
89.
“I’m hiking the PCT
90.
I’d planned to leave them in the PCT hiker free box as soon as my new boots arrived
91.
It was a woman who first thought of the PCT
92.
Though a small group of hikers immediately embraced Montgomery’s idea, it wasn’t until Clinton Churchill Clarke took up the cause six years later that a clear vision of the PCT began to coalesce
93.
His vision went far beyond the PCT, which he hoped would be a mere segment of a much longer “Trail of the Americas” that would run from Alaska to Chile
94.
He believed that time in the wilderness provided “a lasting curative and civilizing value,” and he spent twenty-five years advocating for the PCT, though when he died in 1957 the trail was still only a dream
95.
Rogers was working for the YMCA in Alhambra, California, when Clarke convinced him to help map the route by assigning teams of YMCA volunteers to chart and in some cases construct what would become the PCT
96.
Though initially reluctant, Rogers soon became passionate about the trail’s creation, and he spent the rest of his life championing the PCT and working to overcome all the legal, financial, and logistical obstacles that stood in its way
97.
I’d read the section in my guidebook about the trail’s history the winter before, but it wasn’t until now—a couple of miles out of Burney Falls, as I walked in my flimsy sandals in the early evening heat—that the realization of what that story meant picked up force and hit me squarely in the chest: preposterous as it was, when Catherine Montgomery and Clinton Clarke and Warren Rogers and the hundreds of others who’d created the PCT had imagined the people who would walk that high trail that wound down the heights of our western mountains, they’d been imagining me
98.
It was what I knew before I even really did, before I could have known how truly hard and glorious the PCT would be, how profoundly the trail would both shatter and shelter me
99.
By evening the forest opened into a wide swath of what can only be called wilderness rubble, a landscape ripped up by its seams and logged clear, the PCT picking its way faintly along its edges
100.
Sometimes that meant that the land would remain untouched, as it had been on most of the PCT