WHAT IS THE PACIFIC CREST TRAIL?
My mom still calls it the “PCP.”
We’re heading to the airport now, meeting up with my hiking buddy Alex and his family before the two of us fly to San Diego to begin our crazy adventure. We’ll launch from Campo, a small railroad town in Southern California, in a couple days and begin the 2,650-mile hike north from the Mexican border up to Canada along the Pacific Crest Trail.
The trail has become this thing that Alex and I have talked about wistfully for the last year with our friends, and over the last few weeks with anyone else who would listen. Most of the time we get polite uh-huhs or references to pop culture. Knowledge of the trail is surface-level at best.
Beyond that thing that was too much for Lorelai Gilmore to start and Reese Witherspoon to finish, the PCT is a federally designated scenic trail that passes through three states, seven national parks, two dozen national forests, and more than 50 mountain passes. Inspired by conservationists like John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt, the trail is the realized dream of oilman Clinton C. Clarke, who lobbied for the trail’s creation in the 1930s. By 1968, after millions of dollars raised and countless volunteer hours logged, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the National Trails System Act, which created both the PCT and the Appalachian Trail.
The PCT starts in the hills near the Mexican border, and passes through the forests of the San Bernardino Mountains, careens across mountain ridges around Los Angeles, and then along the San Andreas Fault in the Mojave Desert. The heat is intense here and shade is rare.
From there, we’ll head into the Sierra Nevada Mountains and get into the real heights of our journey. After a scenic hike through the meadows of the lower Sierra, we’ll pick up the John Muir Trail, climb the 14,500-foot Mt. Whitney, and cross eight passes above 11,000 feet. We’ll also hit some major snow. For that, Alex and I have ice axes to carry and microspikes for our shoes.
Then we’ll head to the last section of California, where the land turns volcanic and the climate goes from dry to waterfalled. We’ll hike toward Mt. Shasta, pick up the Cascade Mountains, and head into Oregon. Generally tame in elevation, this is where hikers start to pick up miles, zipping by the Three Sisters Wilderness, Crater Lake, and Mt. Hood.
We’ll enter Washington crossing the Bridge of the Gods over the Columbia River into the land of huckleberries and lakes, on the way to Mt. Rainier. The last section of the trail is still a challenge, as we go up steep passes and down deep canyons several times. We’re also going to get wet here, as the rainy fall soon approaches near the end of our trip. Come late September, if all goes well, we’ll cross the U.S.-Canada border, three hours east of Vancouver.
It’s a tough hike, to say the least. But it’s one that will surely change us in ways we can’t even fathom. Even after knowing all this history and the general overview of where we’re headed, and even after a year of researching the best gear and resupply strategy, the truth is that our knowledge of the trail is also surface-level. We don’t know how difficult the snow will be in the Sierra Nevada. We don’t know what it’s like to sleep under the stars. We don’t know what it will be like to hike 30 miles in between water sources in the desert. We don’t know how insane mosquitoes will get in Northern California. We don’t know what our trail names will be. We don’t know which “Trail Angels” or hikers we’ll meet. We don’t know what it will feel like hiking behind a waterfall in Oregon. And we don’t yet know the joy of seeing Boundary Monument 78 in Manning Provincial Park, British Columbia, at the end of our journey.
I’ll let you know when we do.
