First week on the Pacific Crest Trail

On June 16th, 2024, I left my house and set out for the Pacific Crest Trail. Due to various loose ends that I thought I had tied up, I changed my northbound hike that I had scheduled for an April 30th Northbound Start Date to June 17th Southbound start date and I arranged to get a ride to Mazama, then nearest town to my start point of Harts Pass from a Trail Angel. The only task left was actually getting myself and my gear together.

The night before, I went through all my gear, and I packed all the food that I thought that I'd need so that I could go on the PCT. I heard that it was possible to store food in the Bear Lockers up at Harts Pass, so I brought both a Bear Canister as well as my Ursack bag, thinking that I could haul both of them and get rid of the bear canister temporarily until I could get down to the Sierras later in the year. This was my first mistake.

The second mistake was the fact that I didn't own a lightweight fleece sweater. I owned only heavier fleece sweaters, and I decided that my base layers and other t-shirts would be fine.

My third mistake was leaving my ice axe at home due to fear of getting this item across into the US on Amtrak Cascades. My fears were entirely unfounded, and I would have be able to bring my camping gear across without an issue.

On arriving in Mount Vernon and meeting up with thee other hikers, we stayed at Dan's house overnight and then made our way to the PCT Lions Den the next morning. After we were dropped off at the Lions Den, Flaming Hot was brought back down to Rainy Pass and he began his first attempt to Northern Terminus. Later that evening, I saw Flaming Hot come back into camp, and looking defeated, he admitted that there was too much snow for him to continue and he lost the trail after Cutthroat Pass.

We heard on Facebook that someone got injured that Sunday trying to make it to Northern Terminus and had to be resuced by a Navy Helicopter dispatched from the base on Whidby island. This definitely deterred us, and I went to camp and met with G-String, Jokes, Captain and the Southern Oregon family who were hiking the PCT. They made their Harts Pass attempt and they then decided to skip ahead to Rainy Pass and Stehekin. I originally decided that I'd wait an entire week, since I needed to deal with my final pay and severance from my job. That said, I didn't want to get "stuck in the vortex" and overstay my welcome at the PCT Lions Den, since this happened to so many hikers.

So, on Wednesday morning, I packed up my tent and hauled myself down to the Mazama General Store and hitched up to Harts Pass, eventually getting a ride up to the pass from a US Border Patrol Agent. I asked him about patrolling the border, and he told me that they actually hike the trails regularly depending on the conditions and that the RCMP do the same at the Canadian side. Of course, I'm almost certain that this is complete bullshit, because I couldn't picture a cop hiking up the trail from the Manning Park Parking Lot to the PCT Northern Terminus, but I'll have to file an Access to Information Request to see if this ever happened. I do know that the RCMP did put a wilderness camera at the border and that they do take pictures of people who leave the clearcut and head north to Monument 78 Camp and Manning Park from the border, so who knows?

Once at the trailhead, we met up with a PCT 2023 thru-hiker Shortcut, who decided to pay it forward and dropped muffins and a cooler full of Ranier Beer, Coca-Cola and Mountain Dew Baja Blast. I drank a Baja Blast, had a Costco muffin, and proceeded to head up the trail with Flaming Hot. We left around 11:00 AM. We also left with an asian woman from the Netherlands whose name I can't remember, but she immediately went the wrong direction and Flaming Hot had to run back and find her, while I kept hiking up to Slate Peak trying to get a better view and yelling her name. Flaming Hot then caught up with me at the top of Slate Peak where I took a break since I wasn't fully acclimatized to the elevation.

The thing that I found interesting is that you don't notice you're having elevation problems unless you're using a heart rate monitor of some type. When I was hiking for the first few hours, my heart rate was close to maxed out at elevation, but at the end of the day, hiking up the same elevation again, it was actually lower because I was more used to the elevation. It didn't feel like I was tired, or maxing out because my muscles were tired, but my heart had to work harder to provide the oxygen because there was less oxygen at 7000 ft than at sea level. I'm certain that I'd be prone to altitude sickness if I went higher than 7000 ft without chilling at this elevation for a day or two to acclimatize.

Anyway, after trekking through a lot of snow, we eventually made it to Windy Pass where there's a natural mountain spring. I stopped to get water and re-hydrate, because I felt like I needed to do so, and Flaming Hot moved on to the terminus with another hiker who passed us. I hung behind for a bit waiting for the slower woman, and then decided to move ahead solo. This was a mistake because as soon as I made it near Tamarack Peak, I had problems traversing a snowfield at around 1 PM, and after constantly postholing and falling off the "trail" due to the snow tracks turning into complete slush and hitting a tree well, I decided to turn around and go back for my own safety. I did try to self-arrest during my fall, but the ice axe cut through the snow like butter and there was absolutely no resistance offered.

Once I ended up stuck in the tree well, I considered for a minute using my Garmin InReach beacon and calling SAR, but then two Australian Girls, one of whom was Beck, came and helped me get out of the tree well. We hiked back together to Windy pass where they went ahead and left me to get back to camp. I was going much slower, and eventually I made the call to stop at Buffalo Pass and eat, since I realized that the only thing that I ate was a Cinnamon Bun at the Mazama General Store and part of an orange. I considered setting up camp at Buffalo Pass overnight and recovering my energy, since the snow hiking sapped it completely, but the hail made me change my mind and after eating a Mountain House Beef Lasagna at Buffalo Pass, I headed back to Harts Pass.

I eventually made it back to Slate Pass, and I decided that instead of hiking the PCT down and dealing with more snow, that I would instead do a road walk, and I managed to get a nice picutre of Harts Pass with a rainbow. I arrived in Harts Pass at 9 PM, set up camp and tried to go to sleep. Unfortunately, the cold temperatures and my body pumping out moisture throough both sweat and breath caused massive condensation in my tent and this dripped down and completely soaked my camp quilt, causing me to wake up at midnight. I then did my best to huddle and attempt to get sleep, but I only managed four hours of sleep that night, and I may have barely avoided hypothermia. I then woke up at 4:30, immediately made myself a breakfast of dehydrated fruit, oatmeal and an Untapped Maple Syrup packet and a Counterpart Instant Coffee, and I set out ot figure out how I was going to dry everything out, tear down camp and get out of Harts Pass.

I spent a day up in Harts Pass watching the US Forest Service cut firewood and setup the Ranger Cabin to welcome this year's thru hikers, further emphasizing the point that I was up there WAY TOO EARLY, and I had a USFS Ranger do a permit check, stamp my permit and give me a PCT Tag for my backpack. Now that I have the stamp, I've officially "started" the PCT. It wasn't until 2:00 PM that a Volkswagon Synchro Vanagon showed up at Hart's Pass with Alastair, one of the hikers that came up with me from Mount Vernon. He started his hike, and I rode back down to the General Store and walked back to the Lions Den with my pack, ready to give up on Washington Section L of the PCT for this year, because there's too much snow and I don't need to kill myself getting to a terminus that I was literally just at three weeks prior for my shakedown. I then decided to buy new trail runners and a new tent in Winthrop since not having my sleeping quilt drenched in my own condensation is worth the $500 I spent on a tent in a trail town, and I SHOULDN'T need boots for the next section. The following day, I mailed a bunch of things I wasn't using back to my mailbox in Blaine, WA, and I started on the next section of the PCT.

My first hitch out of Mazama back to Rainy Pass was super fast, and I talked to this general handyman who drove a truck about what he called the Singularity. Of course, I don't believe in the AGI bullshit since I know roughly how Large Language Models work, but it was an interesting conversation. Once I got to Rainy Pass, I grabbed my pack and headed on the trail, only to realize that I left my Bear Spray in the box of his truck. Fortunately North Cascades National Park only has Black Bears, and given that I'm a massive fat ass, I currently weigh as much as a Black Bear and felt less threatened by them than I probably should. The hike to Six Mile camp in my new HOKA Speed Goats was pretty slow but only becuase I kept stopping and taking photos of the views and the wildflowers. The hike was the picturesque ideal of what the PCT is in people's minds when they're like "Fuck it, I'm going to hike a long trail". There were deer that had absolutely no fear of humans, and I eventually ran into a Boy Scout Troop when I went down to the creek to get water at one of the overnight hiker camps.

I eventually made it to Six Mile camp, and it was extremely nice with a nice stream and a composting toilet I've only heard referred to on YouTube as "The Tank". You're not supposed to pee in the toilet, and there's no walls anywhere around the composting toilet, so you're just sitting, shitting and starting at the wilderness. I had the camp to myself for an entire hour until Abby, a hiker from Toronto, and Flowers, another thru-hiker, both arrived. Abby decided to skip the snow, and was starting her thru-hike at Rainy Pass, and Flowers actually made it all the way up to Northern Terminus. The next morning, I headed out and did the last twelve mile hike down to High Bridge. I stopped at the High Bridge Campground, which is extremely nice but decided to keep moving when I saw the warnings that bears were going into the tents of thru-hikers. I also broke my trekking pole going down a switchback when I slipped on some loose gravel. I eventually made it to High Bridge Ranger Station at 3:30 and decided to wait three hours for the bus because I didn't want to do the long road walk. Unfortunately, this meant that I got to Stehekin just late enough to get a crappy camping spot in the hiker campground and I wasn't able to get a hotel, since at this point, despite only hiking for three days, I haven't slept in a real bed in over a week and needed a town day. I wasn't able to fully get into a hiking groove like I was in Berg Lake or Laugavegur.

The following day, I ran into G-String and Jokes, who told me that there was more than three feet of snow in Suattle Pass and that they were going to skip. Abby then showed me the snow report from postholer, and after checking that and the reports from Facebook about the other passes, it became clear that all of Washington past 6000 ft had too much snow and that it made sense to get off the trail. Since spending time in the United States just waiting for a thaw costs a lot of money, I decided instead to pack it all in and head back home to Vancouver.

Getting off trail in Stehekin to Vancouver is a two day process. The first day involves taking the Lady of the Lake boat from Stehekin down to Chelan. You can either stay in a hotel in Chelan, which I did because I booked it before I intended to leave the trail, or you could book in Wenatchee (which I would do if I had to do this again). Then you have to take the intercity transit down to Wenatchee and book a Northwestern Bus to go back to Seattle. Once in Seattle, you need to take either a bus or the Amtrak Cascades to Vancouver. I'd recommend the bus for speed, because the train will get stuck behind freight due to freight getting priority. I, of course, have the extra step of either taking the Skytrain back to my house.

So, are you quitting?

No. I am not quitting the PCT. I am going back to Wenatchee on July 4th, and deepnding on the snow levels, I may either re-attempt Harts Pass or go back to Stehekin and continue my hike southbound. I did learn a lot of lessons about myself on the trail, such as that I have an annoying rotator cuff injury and that after about four hours, I have to have a long and sustained break. I also learned that I need to eat a real meal for lunch and that a bullshit energy gel does not cut it because I will get extremely upset and my whole mental outlook will be absolute trash without eating a real lunch.

The break from the trail does mean that I have the opportunity to take my family down to Portland for the weekend for a nice family car camping trip so we can see Formula E and the Overland Expo PNW. One thing that I realized on the PCT is that spending time with my daughter is actually important, despite her being a teenager and seemingly not wanting to hang out with me most of the time.

Also, I was right for wanting to stay online on Friday. There were in fact hiccups with my pay that I needed to get sorted out with my former employer, and that definitely is a factor as to why I decided to head home and spend time with family instead of sitting around in a campsite or a hotel room buying food from a local restaurant in the Lake Chelan area. Even with the road trip to Portland, I'm saving myself $1500 in hotel fees, since a hotel stay costs about $150 USD per day on average and waiting until Facebook decides the trail will be relatively snow free is super expensive. I can use that money by spending time with my kid and taking them to check out some events.

So, I'm taking a break for the following reasons:

• Injury - Existing Rotator Cuff issues, Blisters, vague knee pain from falling and hitting my knee on something that was under snow
• Financial - I have money, but I don't have sit around in a hotel for two weeks doing nothing money
• Weather - There's simply too much snow for me to be on the PCT right now

I'm hoping that by July 5th, I'll be refreshed enough to make it back out on the PCT and I'll finally be able to crush some miles. Given that a lot of people are beginning their hikes at the beginning of July, I don't consider the pause to be catastrophic, but it does mean that I have to be doing twenty miles per day to make it to the border before my permit runs out and that I lost my buffer. It also means that it's likely that Washington Section L will not be the only section that I skip on the PCT, but I'm almost certain that there will be a fire closure, so I can only hope it's not on a part of the trail I really want to see.