Some Post-Hike Thoughts

Here are some musings on my thru-hike:

"Thru-hike"

The unofficial slogan of the PCT is "Hike Your Own Hike," and you'll often see people reminding others of the ethic of HYOH in public forums.  In truth, people did a lot of different things and called them "thru-hikes," and people argue passionately about what constitutes a thru-hike.  No one walked every step of the Pacific Crest Trail, there were too many necessary detours.  A lot of people walked an unbroken line from Mexico to Canada, which I think is about as valid as it gets, whether that unbroken line was on the PCT with the exception of a few short walking detours, or whether that unbroken line included huge chunks of road walking due to fire or snow.  Conversely, a lot of people skipped sections and still called it a thru-hike, whether because they weren't willing to walk a long section on the road designated as a fire detour, or just because they'd gotten off trail for something and wanted to catch up with their friends.

I'm honestly in between those two - I hiked every section of the PCT, as can be seen from the photos in this blog.  But I actually don't have unbroken footsteps from Mexico to Canada.  I can think of at least three breaks in that line - the first was actually back in Oregon, where I went the wrong way and ended up on the wrong end of the lake from the Shelter Cover resort.  I went back the next day and started to hike the 8 miles along the lake to meet the trail but that day was interrupted by a police officer before I finished, and the next day I just got back on the PCT and hauled ass north to meet my friends from Coos Bay before they got to Elk Lakes or whatever the next resort was to meet me for our Labor Day weekend hike.  So, my section south of Shelter Cove ended a few miles to the east of the PCT, but I got back on the PCT to hike north.  That was the first break in my continuous footsteps from Mexico, and those few miles bothered me for a long time.

Much later, when Chris and I came back down to Stevens from Manning and hiked north on the PCT, that wasn't where I'd gotten off the trail the day I'd hiked into Stevens.  On that day in September I'd been getting hypothermic and had hiked out the Surprise Creek Trail, which meets Highway 2 maybe 10 miles to the west of the PCT and across from the Iron Goat Trailhead.  I mentioned it as we drove by in October and James offered to drop us there instead, and I thanked him but said absolutely not.  Chris was about to sacrifice eight out of the ten days he had left before going back to work to re-hike the trail from Stevens to Rainy, and I had no intention of throwing ten miles of walking Highway 2 on top of that.  It's not that Chris wouldn't have done it if it had meant a lot to me - I really didn't want to walk it.  I'd road walked from Wenatchee almost to Tonasket before getting back on the trail, and I'd had enough of road walking.

When we got to High Bridge we half-walked, half-hitched into Stehekin to try to pick up my package, and then instead of walking the road all the way out to High Bridge the next day (it would have been tough to get a hitch to a closed ranger station ten miles outside of town with no homes or businesses near it) and then hiking the 20 miles from there to Rainy Pass on the PCT, we just walked out the road about a mile and jumped on another trail that went over McAllister Pass and met the PCT a few miles before Rainy.  So, we hiked from Stevens to High Bridge and then from Stehekin to Rainy, but not in an unbroken line from Stevens to Rainy.  The trail out of Stehekin was no shorter and was actually much more work because of McAllister Pass (the elevation for the PCT between High Bridge and Rainy is comparatively mild) and we even hiked through fresh snow because of taking this route so I didn't feel like we were wimping out in any way, but again, by this point I really didn't care - we didn't get a ride to Rainy Pass, we hiked there, and the trail we hiked there made more sense given where we started that morning and the fact that I have had enough road walking to last me a lifetime.

So, I walked from Mexico to Canada.  My footsteps were not unbroken, but I hiked every section of the trail, utilizing alternates in some places.  I was one of only 13 people in total that I know of that were at Stevens Pass or further south when the snowstorms hit that finished the section north of Stevens Pass after that, and we 13 hiked almost 200 miles of trail intermittently in snow.  If anyone wants to argue that this wasn't a thru-hike, they can eat my shit.  Literally, I will poop in one of those blue bags that mountain climbers use, and I will send it to them.  

The Snow

The early snowstorms were the big defining characteristic of the PCT in 2013.  Many of the season's thru-hikers had finished before they hit, but many had not.  I was among those who had not, and the greatest challenge after they snow hit was in simply deciding what was possible.  I say "deciding" and not "knowing" what was possible because at least to some degree it is a decision rather than a fact external to you.  Of course it's not completely internal.  The fact that the weather cleared after those snowstorms and stayed nice for weeks was critical, and the fact that friends donated enough money for me to buy snow gear was critical as well.  But part of it is internal.  When people said that it would be impossible to get through after the snow, I listened to them.  The snow was such soft powder that snowshoes were ineffective, and the danger of avalanche was real.  I didn't understand that the powder could very quickly settle, and that the same stretch of trail could be traversed without too much grief only a week or two later.  While most of the others quit and went home and the rest (including myself) went east to the Okanogan Valley to walk Highway 97, a few people waited to see what would happen.  I'm not sure what set them apart from the others - it may have been more knowledge of the North Cascades or more money with which to wait in town and to buy snow gear, but it may also have been simply more determination, I honestly don't know.

In the end, I finished because of Chris.  Looking back, I think I could physically have done it on my own, although I might have spent half a day retrieving my pack after it slid down that one steep descent where I fell.  But really, I wouldn't have.  I would have kept walking on Highway 97 to the Oosoyoos border crossing, and then would have caught a ride back to Wenatchee with Delaware Dave and Cream Tea, and would have walked up Highway 2 alone to join the road walk with the PCT.  I wouldn't have gotten back on the trail and hiked through the North Cascades in the snow alone - partly because I don't think it would be safe for me to do alone, but partly because the fact that Chris thought it was possible made me think it was possible.  Or maybe I should say, it was hard to believe that I could do it alone, but easy to believe that I could do it with him.

Whenever I have a completely new experience, I'm rocked by how many new things I realize I want to learn about.  I'd felt this the entire length of the PCT, wondering about geology and about meteorology and about the plant and animals I saw, but the snow brought those feelings on even more strongly.  I've never seen anything like the North Cascades in the snow.  This was probably partly because of my mental state - I'd been so miserable on Highway 97 and was so relieved to be back on the trail, but it was at least partly because of the landscape itself.  I want to learn how snow falls and how it settles and how it turns into avalanches.  I want to learn every technique for camping in it most comfortably.  And I want to spend more time in it - I want to take a trip just to trek and camp in the snow, because it is so very painfully beautiful.  

"Pay it forward"

I've never had people give to me like they gave while I was hiking the trail.  This includes donations on my blog from friends I haven't seen for a year, and also from friends I've never met.  This includes trail magic by established trail angels with bunkhouses for hikers, and people leaving sodas and beers in coolers along the trail.  It also includes everyone who picked me up hitchhiking, all of whom gave a stranger a little bit of trust and a little bit of help, and some of whom even ended up driving out of their way to take me to my destination.  It includes people working in businesses along the trail who went out of their way to help me in ways that they didn't profit from, some even in ways that cost them.  It also includes my friends who came to meet me along the way - It honestly includes so many people and so much generosity, that I'm starting to get choked up writing this.

There's a saying on the PCT, which is "pay it forward."  It means that if you're grateful for these things, you should focus not on paying the kindnesses back to the individuals who showed them (and how could you, in most cases) but on turning around and showing generosity to future classes of PCT hikers.  On the last legs of the trail Chris and I talked a lot about how wanting to give something "forward," and discussed what we could possibly do.  Chris has the gift of cooking, both in terms of making food that's really tasty, and also in terms of managing the logistics of cooking, making sure that the the right amount of each component of a meal is hot at the same time.  What's more, his mother used to do street feeds for homeless people in Seattle, so they have the collapsible tables and the warming pans and all of the necessary equipment to feed people in a public place.  I'd like to do something north of Stevens Pass since the last 200 miles of the trail were so meaningful for me, so we talked about maybe doing hot food at Rainy Pass or Harts Pass.

There's could also be the possibility of teaming up with Ravensong, who has a house in Mazama east of Rainy Pass.  I haven't discussed this with her but I know she wants to start hosting hikers, and if we wanted to feed people it might be easier to do it there where we could just feed everyone staying at the house than to do it at a trailhead where we'd have to just choose certain days and feed whoever happened to come through on those days.  It would take some serious savings to do anything substantial but I think it would be great fun, and I could go down to Stevens and hang out with the Dinsmores until people started rolling in there, and then just hop up to Rainy and get things going.  Anyways, I'm really just thinking out loud here, but I'm excited at the idea of trying to give something to the next class of PCT thru-hikers.

Future Hikes

Another thing that Chris and I talked about a lot at the end was future hiking plans.  On one hand, I feel like one long thru-hike is enough.  It was more than six months of my life, and there are so many other experiences to be had.  In fact, one thing that I disliked about the hiking community was the way that people sometimes seemed to act as though thru-hikes were the only thing to cross off your bucket list.  Some people hike the same trail over and over and if that makes them happy then great, but I couldn't understand how people speak of them as celebrities, specifically speaking of how many times they've done the same thing.

I think I understand the source of it now, and I think I can articulate it with a comparison:  Consider international travel, where your world gets bigger both physically and culturally.  You see how much there is out there to see and travel through, but you also see how irrelevant your feats of travel are to 99.99999% of the people in the world.  You see a woman working in a field who doesn't know what you've "accomplished" and even if you had a common language and were able to explain it, she has a completely different value system that wouldn't assign value to it the way yours does.  The more you experience, the more you learn how big the world is and how small you are in it.  Now, compare that to the hiking experience.  The world gets larger physically, but it actually gets smaller culturally.  Almost all of the people that thru-hikers interact with are either other thru-hikers, trail angels providing services for thru-hikers, or people working in businesses that cater to hikers.  People who pick you up hitchhiking want to hear about the trail, and even in the towns that aren't hiker-friendly you're usually facing the situation with other thru-hikers, members of your own "community."  You have these amazing experiences in all of these beautiful places, and you constantly interact with people who treat you like you're special for having them.  It's really not too hard to see how thru-hikers start to feel like they're bigger parts of this world than they are.

Over the years I've tried to make my world bigger in so many ways - in 1999, at the age of 22, I became Private Pilot Single Engine Land.  I've flown solo cross country flights (that doesn't mean literally across the U.S., it means flights of more than 50 nautical miles each way), I've landed at unmanned airports, and I've flown over the lights of Seattle in the dark.  I have SCUBA certifications through Rescue Diver, and have seen a chimera in the cold water of Puget Sound and a shipwreck in the warm water of Bermuda.  I have a USPA A-license for skydiving, which requires about 30 jumps, and once dove through a cloud (which is completely illegal) with another skydiver.  We locked arms and fell into the cloud and the whole world went quiet, and for half a minute while this world turned he and I were the only people who existed anywhere.  I've earned a master's degree, I've published a peer-reviewed academic paper with equations in it that take up three lines, and I've earned a Fulbright fellowship.  I've moved across the world without a job, and spent three years contributing something of value to the country I landed in.  I've learned a second language, and have visited places that you only hear about when there is violence to report - I've been to Dagestan, and to Chechnya, and to Nagorno-Karabagh, and to Abkhazia.  I've been taken in and fed by poor people in mountain villages, and I've been made a guest at a wedding, the day before which I shot photos of the groom slaughtering and dressing the sheep for the wedding feast with his own hands.  When I met a guy on the PCT who was close to achieving his "triple triple crown" (thru-hiking the PCT, the CDT, and the AT three times each), I felt sorry for him.

And there are still so many things I haven't done.  I've never been to India, or to sub-Saharan Africa, or to Southeast Asia, or South America - I've hardly even been to Europe.  I don't know how to ski or snowboard, which looks like great fun.  I've never flown a glider, although one day my masters advisor took me aside and said that he thought I was like him, and that flying a plane felt too much like driving a car and skydiving felt too much like falling, and that if I was like him, that I wanted gliders because they actually felt like flying.  I understood him instantly, but have still never flown any kind of glider.  I've never seriously studied a non-Indo-European language, which would make learning Russian look like learning to ride a bike.  I've never never learned any Latin dancing, or been to Mardi Gras or Carnival.  I've never learned to play the guitar, or traveled through the southern United States and explored the folk music there.  I've never had a baby grow inside me, or taught a child to read.  I've never built anything of value with my own hands.  But I have completed a thru-hike, so I can cross that off of my list and worry about something else now.  I didn't spend the rest of my life flying Cessnas after earning a pilot's license, and I don't need to spend the rest of my life hiking after thru-hiking the PCT.

On the other hand, this country is so big, and I just started to see it on the PCT.  For all of my time abroad I've done very little travelling in my own country - this was really my first time, and my world got so much bigger both in terms of landscapes and in terms of culture.  I found that some stereotypes I'd had about the U.S. are not true.  One thing I'd always believed was that Americans don't have a culture of hospitality, that they don't take strange travelers into their homes and care for them the way that people in so many traditional cultures do, yet I've been shown more hospitality on this trip than I can even mentally process.  Another thing I'd believed was that the United States was basically culturally homogeneous, and that everyone was just watching the same national television networks - John Steinbeck decried the erosion of local culture all the way back in Travels with Charlie, and I assumed that the process had long ago reached completion.  How then, could I explain Seiad Valley, the separatist town in northern California?  I was also amazed at how many different landscapes I walked through in just the three western states (even in each state alone), and there are 47 more states in this country - how different would the views in Colorado or Montana be if I hiked the CDT?  And how different would the regions of the U.S. vary culturally?  What would I learn about our country's history in Georgia or North Carolina if I hiked the AT?  Hiking one or both of the other long-distance trails would not be repeating the same experience, it would be discovering completely new regions of the country.  So, while I'm not planning to hike either trail next year, I think they probably do belong on the bucket list.

Chris said something, though, that I think is important to understand.  I can't remember his exact words, but the gist of it was that while there's more glory in a thru-hike, there's more enjoyment in a section hike.  You get more of a sense of accomplishment out of walking from Mexico to Canada, but you can take the time to really enjoy what you're hiking through in a section hike.  I think that anyone who's thru-hiked the PCT would agree that the sheer number of miles and the limited duration of the hiking season necessitate a speed of travel that precludes being able to fully enjoy the areas that you travel through.  Even if money isn't an issue for you the snow will be; specifically it determines how early you can enter the High Sierras and how late you can hike the North Cascades.  Even if you take the absolute longest amount of time that you can for the hike, there will still be many days where you don't stop to photograph or even appreciate an amazing view because you're trying too hard to make time.  There will be days when you come to the most idyllic spot and feel drawn to it, but you can't stop there and camp because you have to get 10 more miles in before you stop for the day.  And if you're like me and don't manage your time very well, you'll probably miss seeing some cool things because you're night hiking, trying to make up for miles that you didn't make earlier in the day.

Chris actually had a good basis for comparison on this issue - he had hiked the Washington section of the PCT a few years before his thru-hike, and seemed to have enjoyed that more.  However, I think while that was in part due to the issue of having to rush, it was also due to the fact that he just plain loved Washington.  I remember him telling me all the way back in California that even in the High Sierras he hadn't seen anything as beautiful as the North Cascades, and for a long time I couldn't believe that.  The High Sierras are the famous part of the trail, and the John Muir Trail (which is basically the PCT through the High Sierras) is so famous that the number of permits issued is capped, and depending on where you want to start your hike may even be issued via lottery.  And those mountains were amazing for me - Seeing the 360 degrees of the horizon below me on top of Mount Whitney?  The long, slow climb up to Muir Pass?  Nothing had the same openness and intensity of landscape, until the section in southern Washington that included the Goat Rocks.  But Washington held even more for me.  Nothing made me feel like I'd come home until the woods and rivers north of Stevens Pass, and nothing surpassed everything I had seen before until I saw the North Cascades covered with snow.  Maybe I wouldn't have appreciated Washington the way I did if I hadn't walked through so much to get there, but Washington was more meaningful to me than anything else I walked through, and I want to explore this state more fully, without having to walk through a thousand miles of desert to get there.

So, I suppose the logical conclusion here is that if I tackle another thru-hike, the next one will be something (a) shorter, and (b) more northern.  Chris and I talked a lot about the Pacific Northwest Trail, which runs south of the Canadian border from western Montana, through Idaho and eastern Washington, and then heads south across the entrance to Puget Sound, through the peninsula's rain forests, and ends on the Washington coast (map).  I think it's about 1,200 miles, slightly less than half the length of the PCT.  I'm assuming that the latitude and altitude would necessitate a much later start date (I think most southbound PCT hikers don't start until June), but nevertheless would bet that a summer devoted to this trail would allow a hiker to spend a lot more time in places along the way.  And how beautiful would that country be?  From the high northern mountains to the coastal rain forest, I'm getting a little heady just thinking about it.  Chris recently posted comment with a link to a PNT trail journal on my last blog post, so I guess he's thinking about it too...

Readjustment

Readjustment to "normal" life after a thru-hike is a popular theme and it seems that any "wrap-up" sort of blog post should address it, but I don't have this one figured out yet.  I've been at my brother's house for a few weeks now and he's been incredibly generous with his space and with his refrigerator, and my nephew has been incredibly generous with the use of his new laptop, on which I'm writing this.  Tom and Merrie, my second parents, have been incredibly generous as always, letting me drive their extra car on their own insurance until I can scrape together a few hundred dollars and get it transferred over to my own name.  I just got a job in the kitchen at a nice Greek Restaurant, but not soon enough.  My bank account is overdrawn because my automatic withdrawal for my monthly phone bill bounced in it this week, and I won't get my first paycheck until a week from Wednesday.  I'm working in the kitchen in my hiking clothes, because all of my other clothes are in my sister's garage in southern California - I don't even have a pair of shoes I can go running in, and no one in my brother's household is close to me in shoe size.  The grey and the rain and the inactivity have me so depressed that I spent my day off yesterday entirely in bed, streaming episode after episode of the show Bones on NetFlix and trying not to feel anything.

I have one little thing on the immediate horizon to look forward to, which is that I'm speaking at Fish Expo on Friday.  FishExpo is actually officially named the Pacific Marine Expo, and is the west coast's largest trade show for all things related to the fishing industry.  What am I speaking about?  When I first left Portland, back in February, I didn't head straight south but instead drove out to Astoria and then drove south along the coast from there.  The purpose of the Astoria stop was to catch the Fisher Poets Gathering, which I'd been hearing about for years but had never been to.  Fisher Poets takes over Astoria for a few days every February, and is large enough that five or six concurrent sessions are held in bars and cafes throughout the event.  I went expecting a bunch of artists pretending to be fishermen, and was happy to find that I was wrong - it was a bunch of people who had spent good chunks of their lives fishing commercially, and who had creative ways to relate their experiences.  There was poetry, spoken word, and songs, all to some degree connected to fishing.  The presenters on the schedule were all invited ahead of time, but there were a couple of open mike events and I scrawled a few paragraphs on a napkin for each and joined in.  I made friends there with Steve Schoonmaker, and he squeezed me into the program on the session he was hosting.  Later I was asked by a woman writing her dissertation to contribute what I'd performed to a book she was putting together, and after that I was included in an e-mail to the presenters asking for volunteers to speak at FishExpo.  Not too many people volunteered so there wasn't any competition; in fact, I ended up with almost 15 minutes of speaking time, which is more than it takes to read the two pieces I have written.  So, I guess I should get cracking on that, because our session is from 11:30 AM - 12:50 PM this Friday...