As I returned from walking the Camino del Norte in Spain last October, I announced to my family that I was ready to thru-hike the entire Pacific Crest Trail (or PCT) in 2023. Several years had passed since my Appalachian Trail NOBO thru-hike back in 2019, and the PCT was still calling my name. It was time to consider another big thru-hike in North America.
Why this year, you ask? Probably because this upcoming October is when I will turn 50 years old. I needed a big achievement to mark the moment. And what better way to celebrate a half century of life than to finally thru-hike the trail I’d been dreaming about for so long?
Half the battle of taking on massive adventure like a thru-hike is just committing to it. I boldly announced my intention and I was committed. But then, reality came crashing down as a few obstacles cropped up to foil my ambitious thru-hiking plan:
First off, I had a health issue that I really needed to address. My episodes of the congenital heart arrhythmia I’d been dealing with for years kept flaring up more frequently, and my cardiologist recommended I undergo a heart procedure to correct the issue last December. This meant taking the time to heal at the end of the year and not pushing myself too hard in the early months of 2023.
As I recovered, Mother Nature added her own input to my plan – making the winter of 2022-23 one of the snowiest seasons in recorded history. The snow throughout California, especially in the Sierra Nevadas buried the PCT under excess snow levels further thwarting my plan. Any attempt at a NOBO thru-hike in 2023 was going to inevitably turn into a flip-flop hike while California thawed, and that looked nothing like how I hoped to experience on the PCT.
If those two hiccups weren’t enough to push me off course, we also made the decision to add a puppy to our family last winter, which meant she was entering full-blown adolescence during the peak of my summer hiking season. If I left home to hike a long-distance trail for 4-6 months, the entire burden of supervising the dog (and making sure she didn’t destroy our everything we own) would fall squarely on my husband’s shoulders. That wasn’t fair to him… or the dog.
So we were on to plan B with regard to my PCT hiking plans for 2023.
SECTION HIKER
After some soul searching and discussions about whether to just postpone my prospective thru-hike to 2024, I came up with a suitable compromise. I may not be able to do a full NOBO hike on the PCT this year, but I could section hike the 455-mile stretch of the PCT that winds through my home state of Oregon.
What better way to celebrate turning 50 years old than to explore my own backyard? After all, I absolutely loved hiking the 400-mile Oregon Coast Trail from Washington to California back in 2021. It showed me so much more of the state than I’d ever experienced before. Hiking the Oregon section of the PCT would be a more of that same type of exploration, except I’d now be hiking the volcanic interior of the state instead of on its rugged coastline.
I really fancied this idea of scaling back and hiking a shorter stretch of the PCT too. It would give me a genuine opportunity to savor this particular section of the trail rather than racing though it as fast as possible.
I’ve met so many PCT thru-hikers who hit the Oregon border and simply start laying down the miles. After nearly 1,700 miles of hiking in California, they seemed to turn on the jets and race through Oregon’s moderate terrain as fast as humanly possible all in an effort to get to Canada before the weather turned bad, the wildfires started, or their bank account went belly up.
A section hike of Oregon was essentially the opposite approach to this stretch of trail. I could take my time really exploring what my state had to offer. I didn’t have to lay down 20-, 25- or 30-mile days to ensure my success. I could just enjoy the journey at my own pace.
Tackling part of the PCT so close to my home also meant I’d have the luxury of returning to Eugene to resupply and recharge whenever I wanted to. I didn’t have to be uncomfortable for months at a time or force myself of hike thorough bad conditions – like high snow drifts, or record-breaking heat, or smoke-filled skies.
And what’s more, my friend Bonnie still had a 150-mile gap that she wanted to complete on the PCT heading from the California border to Crater Lake. So, if I played my cards right, I would even have her company for about one-third of my hike!
MY PRECIOUS FEET
If you’ve gotten this far into my post, you probably think the stars were aligning for my section hike. But things still didn’t go according to the new plan. Some of my other spring/early summer adventures impacted my PCT section hike more than I’d like to admit.
The first of these mishaps occurred in April while I was out hiking the 58-mile Highline Trail in Arizona. On the first day of my hike, I stumbled over a rock with such force that I badly jammed the big toe on my left foot. This impact pushed my toenail backwards and made it feel as I’d dropped a sledgehammer right on my big toe. And then I seemed to kick several more rocks with my injured toe over the next two days.
By the end of the short hike, my big toe was throbbing with every step, and my toenail turned black as the blood painfully pooled below the nail. Six weeks later I would eventually accept that I needed to go to the doctor to get the painful toenail removed.
Fast forward to the end of June and I did even more damage to my feet. This time the injury was courtesy of my climb of Mt. Rainier in an effort to bag my 47th state high point. The hike to the summit was fine. This time around, it was the descent that did me in.
As I plunged down 6,000 vertical feet on glaciers, rocks and snow while wearing rental boots and crampons, the double boots cut painful blisters into my soft skin. Nearly all the toes on my right foot ended up with wide open blisters on the top of them. The nail bed of my big toe on my left foot (where I was still missing my big toenail courtesy of my April hike) developed its own blister. The insides of my heels had blisters. The insides of my forefeet had blisters. It was downright ugly!! And all of this foot damage occurred just TWO days before I was supposed to start my PCT section hike at the California border!
Needless to say, my bandaged feet looked as bad (or worse) at the beginning of my section hike as they normally might at the end of one! It was not a good way to start of this summer adventure. Yet, I was not deterred.
And so, on Monday, June 26, 2023 – my friend Bonnie and I headed down to the California border and begin our hike north toward Washington. The rest, as they say, is history!
