I recently hiked along the
Pacific Crest Trail with my Dad. We went from Steven's Pass to Snoqualimie Pass in 6 days, although in retrospect, we could have made it in 5 days with some effort.
Generally we did around 14 miles per day. The views got progressively better as the trip went on.
The main thing I remember from the first day was the very beginning of the hike - looking at the ski lifts at Steven's Pass.
On the third day, we took a multi-mile wrong turn, which provided a nice view of Mt. Ranier a long with a good dose of regret. We also camped by a river; I managed to convince my Dad that washing off in the river was a good idea, using a shirt as a wash cloth. It felt great to me, but the shirt never dried; a sock would have been a much better idea.
The fourth day was the beginning of the really great views. I remember coming over a crest and looking out onto a dead forest of dead trees (there had been a fire that had recently ravaged the hillside). Just then, the wind howled through the trees, moaning a bit. Deeply eerie.
It was around this time I started making up bits of free verse.
"Knees: the windows to the legs stream once hot mascera; rubbed on hands, the Forrest Lord's stigmata."
"They say experience makes wisdom: a shock of white running through a punk's green. But Orion had no Eve: forever dumb, he spray paints himself red and green, his age seeping over his brothers."
Probably some more that I've (thankfully) forgotten.
The fifth day was amazing. The first half of the day was spent climbing to the top of a ridge via a plateau. The rest of the day was spent walking along a trail set into the side of a mountain range (a bit down from the actual crest). It was all at once intimidating and inspiring to be able to see where we would stop for the night.
This was probably also some of the worst hiking conditions we encountered. Huge stretches of the trail were over massive rock slides composed of rocks the whose average volume of 4 fists with a reasonably high standard deviation. This sort of terrain is the least stable I've ever walked on for extended periods of time; it is extremely unstable and forces one to move slowly or be at high risk of injury (I rolled various ankles 7 times this day). There were also many sections of the trail that were extremely dangerous: where the trail narrowed significantly for short sections adjacent to a long, steep drop. When the trail material is so unstable in the first place, such conditions warrant extreme caution.
Midway though the afternoon, clouds drifted over the trail. At first it was really neat to watch clouds come over a ridge line - part of which managed to maintain integrity and drifted onward, and part of which sunk down the mountain as mist. The awesome factor quickly dissipated as the entire trail was enshrouded in clouds. We ended up camping and waking up in clouds.
The final day was had some nice features like
Kendall's Katwalk, but the best part of the day was the fact that the trails were composed of dirt. I flew down the mountain, past a stump the Forrest Service was rigging with dynamite, and hit the parking lot by 1300.
A few general observations:
As my dad correctly pointed out the name "Pacific Crest Trail" is a bit of a misnomer. Only on one day could we really have said to have walked along a crest. We would regularly ascend and descend 2k-3k feet in a day. Over rough terrain this is extremely strenuous work and, although we were able to maintain a pace of over 2 mph for significant periods of time, this speed is clearly not a reliable baseline.
Camping at low elevations is almost uniformly miserable. It generally ended up being both hot and humid. Washingtonians are lucky here: there are tons and tons and tons and tons ... of high altitude alpine lakes. Alpine lakes are awesome.
There are a significant number of nature hippies in Washington, and most of them are, right at this moment, on the PCT. I have a reasonably substantial beard, but I was consistently put to shame by 85-90% of the people on the trail. It was almost disturbing how much most of the hikers resembled each other.
Trail crews are freakin' awesome and should be given every reasonable support. I've built a bit of trail so I know how strenuous it can be. Those guys have to hike in their tools before they can even start. And most of them are volunteers. Y'all are awesome.
A few things I learned:
1. Weight is evil. The best way to reduce weight is to not bring stuff you're not going to use. I probably spent 1/2 the trip thinking about the stuff in my pack I knew by halfway though the first day I wasn't going to use the entire trip.
2. Make sure your pack is properly adjusted. I probably sped up by a factor of 2 by properly adjusting my pack. The basic principle is that you want your pack to exert as little force on you as possible. This means making sure the pack is strapped as tightly to you as possible minimizing unnecessary pack movement, making sure your load is distributed as close to you as possible minimizing load torque, and making sure as much of the load is on your hip instead of your shoulders, minimizing fatigue.
In practice some of these goals are contradictory (at least for my system). In order to minimize pack wiggle, I had to tighten the shoulder straps, reducing the load bearing directly on my hips. I generally found that as the day went on, I tended to loosen my shoulder straps, trading a bit looser pack for one that hung more directly on the hips.
3. Walking sticks are awesome. Before this trip, I was very anti-walking stick. I saw them as mostly showy and of little practical use. Over the course of the trip, I started to use my (one) walking stick very hard - so much so I had to trade off hands due to wrist/hand fatigue.
Walking sticks seem to excel in three main areas. The first is climbing. Instead of pushing up with a single leg, I can push up with leg and an arm. When wearing a 50 pound pack, this makes a significant difference.
The second area is going downhill. The use of a walking stick to "pre-step" means that legs have significantly less shock to deal with, allowing for longer and quicker steps over rough terrain.
The third area is stability. When crossing difficult terrain like streams or eroded sections of mountain trail, a stick can serve as an anchor, helping to prevent an accident. Additionally, walking sticks help to minimize the damage done by accidents. After I started using a walking stick, I continued to roll my ankle occasionally, but the effects seemed less severe. Instead of being forced to the ground, I was able to quickly shift my weight to a combination of a leg and an arm.
There are a few downsides to walking sticks that have to be weighed carefully, though. First, while they are generally quite light weight, they do add something to the total count. Second, they can sometimes get stuck, particularly when trying to navigate particularly rocky terrain. I almost tripped a few times due to my stick.
All in all, walking sticks seem to provide significantly more utility than they cost.
4. Salt is super-important. I started feeling quick sick on the fourth day and eventually ate some salt and felt better within a few hours. I was regularly drinking a gallon per day and sweating probably 90% of that out. While food generally includes some measure of salt, I would highly recommend people bring salt with them as a supplement.
5. As I get older, I tend to appreciate the benefits of high(er) quality equipment. There were several items I could have replaced with higher quality items that would lead to a siginificantly improved experience. I am not quite there yet, but I am slowly moving towards the buy-good-tools-that-last camp instead of the buy-the-cheapest-thing-that-works camp.
Update:
Apparently we gained a total of 12850 feet and lost a total of 13910 feet over roughly 70 miles - an average grade of 7.24%.
Below is a chart of the elevation profile.
