Why Am I Hiking The PCT In 2023?

I grew up in Northern California and spent much of my childhood hiking and camping with my family or through Boy Scouts. Doing so caused me to overlap with the PCT numerous times, to the point where it wasn’t really thought of as anything crazy – it was just another trail. However, for as long as I can remember I have been fascinated by the idea of someone hiking from Mexico to Canada on a single, continuous footpath. When I was a kid, my initial interest was due to the sheer magnitude – how could anybody physically walk for thousands of miles? However, as I got older and my experiences on trail became more of a conscious choice, that interest turned into viewing the trail as this mystical thing – almost like it existed in another world – and I became very interested in the challenging adventure that hiking the trail presented. I perceived (and still do) the trail as having an innate ability to provide the hiker with an adventure of a lifetime, which was confirmed as my consumption of PCT media increased. 

As high school flowed into college my interest in hiking and, more broadly, the outdoors decreased as the opportunity cost of doing these activities became hanging out and drinking beer with my friends – an activity that, at the time, I thought was the peak of human existence. While this trend would continue for the better part of the next decade, my first salient memory of the PCT is actually during this time. I was 20 years old, it had been four years since my last serious backpacking trip, and as I prepared to leave home for school in the Bay Area, my father and I headed up to Desolation Wilderness for a camping trip. We stopped at the Safeway in South Lake to pick up our food and, on the way out, my dad walked over to a guy that I thought was homeless and handed him a six-pack of beer, and wished him a happy hike. I asked my dad who that guy was and he said that he was a PCT hiker. If there is one moment that I can trace it all back to – the one moment that sparked this decision – it is this one. In that moment, the idea of hiking the PCT became real. I remember feeling overwhelmed because this ethereal thing, that I had read about but never really interacted with, finally had a name (which I have long forgotten) and a face.  

Fast forward four more years to May 2019. I am less than a year out of college, living in San Francisco, and working a job that I could not have hated more. As part of my daily procrastination/work avoidance strategy, I opened up Facebook and scrolled through my timeline to see a photo of a family friend standing at the Southern Terminus and a link to his hiking blog. I tactically went to use the restroom and proceeded to spend the next half hour reading all of the posts he had made up until that point. I was hooked. Over the next five months – and one new, somehow worse job – this pattern would repeat. I would see Soren (or American Pie as he became known on trail) post something and I would head to the bathroom to escape my current situation and transport myself hundreds of miles away to the deserts of southern California, the high peaks of the Sierra, or the lush forests of Oregon and Washington. It was during that time that all of the feelings I had when I was younger came back, though this time with a fervor that I tried my hardest to ignore. However, if you knew me during that time you would know that I did a pretty bad job of ignoring those feelings and, often, found myself talking to anybody who would listen about the trail, Soren’s hike, and how I myself wanted to do it one day. At the end of 2019, I was writing down goals as part of an exercise at work and one of the personal goals I wrote was to hike the PCT before I turned 30. Life, on the other hand, had other plans for me. 

A lot of life has happened since: another job change – but this time due to a COVID layoff, four moves including a stint in Portland, OR, and the acquisition of one high-maintenance cocker spaniel. Somewhere during this head-spinning change, I made the decision that I wanted to hike the PCT in 2023 but I was still struggling to put together a coherent sentence about why I wanted to do it. After one-too-many plugs on Backpacker Radio, I ordered a copy of Pacific Crest Trials (s/o Zach) and, as a part of the book’s recommendations, sat down to write out the reasons why I am hiking the PCT and how I would feel if I were to give up on the PCT. This is what emerged:

I am thru-hiking the PCT because:

1. I want to do the trail while it’s still possible (thx climate change)
2. I want to do the trail while I still can, physically and with life
3. I love hiking
4. I love California, Oregon, and Washington (west coast best coast amirite)
5. I am happiest when I am outside
6. Life is too short to defer happiness
7. Every single moment of every single day that I am sitting in front of my computer, I would rather be hiking
8. I want to be part of a community of like-minded individuals that care about the outdoors and want to spend their time in it
9. Being outside is better than being inside
10. I’ve worked my butt off to get here, time to cash those (proverbial) checks and do the thing
11. A bad day on trail is still better than the best day in the office (even when you WFH)
12. Gordy will forgive me
13. I need a break from a job, and profession, that takes a lot out of me
14. I want some time to evaluate the direction of my career and life
15. I want to. And when I want to do something, I do it.  

Now that we’ve got the bullet points and the long-winded story behind them, I think I can finally answer this question of ‘why am I hiking the PCT?’ in one sentence: I am thru-hiking the PCT in 2023 because I have wanted to do so for a long time and I cannot continue to ignore this desire; doing so would be a disservice to myself and would leave me wondering, for the rest of my life, what if?