‘Failure’ on the PCT

HYOH and let go of expectations

My Pacific Crest Trail experience has been absolutely nothing like I expected.

I am currently writing from the SureStay Hotel in Tehachapi, California. Today is my 32nd day on trail and officially one month since I left the Southern Terminus on May 18th. I have hiked somewhere in the realm of ~480 miles and am contemplating what it actually means to be a thru-hiker.

When I was in high school, I read ‘Wild’ by Cheryl Strayed which essentially kicked off the thru-hiking craze as we know it now. I was immediately enchanted by the idea of walking from Mexico to Canada with nothing but what I could carry and spending long days walking in beautiful landscapes. She wrote:

It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B. It had to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles with no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.

Her words spoke to me on a primal level. My interest in ultrarunning, my love of the outdoors, my desire to push myself further and longer than I ever have before were all reflected by the experience she wrote of.

My love of Strayed’s words led to a first date in the backcountry of Colorado for my first backpacking trip (my mom was quite alarmed by this) quickly followed by a 3 day long solo trip in Indian Peaks Wilderness, which I now call home many years later. Backpacking has led me along the Tonto Rim of the Grand Canyon, from end to end of Catalina Island, and from Denver to Durango on the Colorado Trail. My fondest memories of my time in the outdoors have been a product of the simple act of packing a backpack with some gear and enough food and water to get me from A to B.

So why has the Pacific Crest Trail, the trail I have dreamed of nearly everyday since I was 17, been so tremendously shitty?

I have spent weeks on this trail questioning what is different this time around. I’m no stranger to long days on my feet, particularly with a few 100 mile race finishes under my belt since my last thru-hike on the Colorado Trail. I’m familiar with 20+ mile days of backpacking after my time on the CT climbing up and down mountain passes for a month. I love to suffer and I love to grind out miles with nothing but my own thoughts keeping me entertained. So, why am I feeling incapable of finding the joy and mental grit to make it through the desert here?

To be honest, I think the biggest piece of advice I would have for someone considering a thru is to come into it without any expectations. I started the trail with a friend and sacrificed hiking ‘my own hike’ - a mistake I also made on the CT that I cannot believe I did again here. More than anything else, I hoped that being on trail again would have the same magic that it did on the Colorado Trail. Days were really long and hard there, but at the end of it I always had Val and Ash to carry me through and laugh about the hard days with. The back of the PCT bubble, having started towards the end of May, is sparse and I don’t feel the same level of connection with the people around me as I did in Colorado. I’ve wondered if it’s me, if it’s tapering off SSRIs, if it’s getting older, if it’s grad school that have made this experience so fundamentally different than before.

The beauty of a long thru hike is that it is not defined by a few days or even weeks. This experience is nearly five months long and encompasses so many emotions and thoughts. My first month on trail has been really, really hard emotionally as well as physically. From SSRI-induced heat exhaustion to the near-constant swelling and blisters of my feet, my body does not feel like home to me right now. I do not trust that my body is adapting to heat or properly recovering because of the medication I have only just gotten off of. I even have the ‘brain zaps’ everyday although they are quickly getting better. I have always trusted and listened to my body and it is so alarming and disorienting to feel like it’s not following through on it’s side of the bargain. It does not feel like my body and that has been so scary to deal with in an experience where you rely so heavily upon it.

After hiking a 25 mile day out of Agua Dulce during the hottest part of a June heat wave, I decided to hitch out of town and skip 88 miles ahead to Tehachapi. I really wanted to skip all the way to Kennedy Meadows where the cooler, more stunning Sierra Nevada awaits. Luckily, some friends from earlier on trail had just reached Tehachapi and I could join them for the coming miles as well as move into a new hiker bubble and have a different social experience than before. My skip to Tehachapi in some ways feels like a failure - I set out to walk to Canada from Mexico in one push! You’re not a true thru hiker if you don’t walk every step of the PCT!

Fortunately, that is perfectionist bullshit and thru-hiking is so much more than being a purist about trail. What we don’t see on social media is the reality of skipping bits of trail, flip-flopping, and piecing together the PCT in the best way possible that is so common when you’re actually on trail. Skipping 88 miles of trail doesn’t invalidate the hundreds of mile of trail I have already hiked nor the thousands that I will have hiked by October. I have felt like a failure for most of my days on trail and I have decided that from Tehachapi onwards, this experience is my own and I will let go of my expectations in order to find joy in the daily grind of hiking.

The sheer irony of all of this is that Cheryl didn’t actually hike all 2,650 miles from the southern terminus to the northern terminus of the trail. She began not far from where I sit now - at Tehachapi Pass on Highway 58, where I’ll begin hiking again tomorrow morning. The literal ‘Queen of the PCT’ hiked from Tehachapi to Cascade Locks, about 1100 miles of trail. A good lesson to be learned here is that hiking does not define who I am. What I do is not who I am. This experience is what I choose to make of it and I am absolutely committed to making the choices (and bubble skips!) that feel right to me.

Happy trails!

Six (Mak)