some of my backpacking equipment. A 109-liter pack, a white gas folding stove, and a lightweight down sleeping bag were the first major purchases I made. I was soon able to test this gear. In California, Andrew and I had decided to go on a hike as soon as we got back to Oregon. We chose the Rogue River Trail, the first trail that Andrew, Guy, and I had traversed together. The launch site was the Grave Creek boat ramp. We hiked from there to Foster Bar, a distance of forty miles, and then turned around and hiked back. We covered eighty miles in nine days. The new gear worked great and there were no mishaps, except during the last night we spent on the trail. I got food poisoning (or something symptomatically very similar) and was so sick I could not sleep. The next day we hiked nine miles back to Grave Creek. I nearly passed out a few times.
In June of 2008, my roommates and I decided to abandon the green Avery halfway house. I had planned to move to Eugene and into a house with some other friends of mine, but this was not slated to happen until early August, just before my departure date for the big hike. As a temporary solution, I moved into my sister’s apartment in Eugene. It was there that I began logging a journal for the PCT trek. The first entry records my basic plan of attack and some of my reasoning for attempting such a preposterous journey:
6/25/08
I have recently decided to undertake a great and somewhat ridiculous project: I will hike on the Pacific Crest Trail from the California border to the Washington border. This trans-Oregon adventure has been resting dormant in the back of my mind for a while, but recent changes in my circumstances have convinced me to pursue it now. Specifically, I find myself with no commitments, unemployed, and with a decent amount of money in savings. I will probably never get the opportunity to take this much time to myself ever again, so now is the time. The excursion will commence in early August, immediately following the two-week road trip I’ve planned with my Corvallis friends. Start to finish, the trek will span about 460 miles. I will carry all of my food and supplies with me—no restocking points. I will go alone.
To prepare, I’ve purchased some new equipment: a new pack, sleeping bag, stove, and compass. The pack is 6650 cubic inches (incredibly large). The sleeping bag is goose down and weighs less than three pounds despite being the extra-long version. The stove is a white gas backpacking stove with a 30-oz fuel bottle. As a result of their largely unfounded worry, my parents have given me a satellite communications device, the operation of which I have yet to figure out. It must have cost quite a bit. It also requires a paid subscription to operate, which I am reluctant to purchase.
Arranging my menu should be a fairly simple task. I’ll need to calculate how many days I’ll be on the trail and estimate how much food I’ll eat per day. With a light pack, I know I am capable of three miles per hour. Given that I will have a rather heavy pack on this trip, I probably should not count on hiking more than twenty miles per day. At eighteen miles per day, I could theoretically accomplish the entire 460 miles in about twenty-five days. Of course, I’ll need to factor in a few days for rest. Also, if I am dropped off on I-5 (I plan to hitchhike to the beginning and from the end of the trail), then I will need to hike an extra thirty miles south to get to the border, where my south-north trip will begin with me retracing the thirty miles I just walked to get from the intersection of the PCT and I-5 to the California-Oregon border. This sounds inefficient, but it’s the only realistic way I can hike the entire Oregon section. I will start at I-5 in Oregon, hike south on the trail to reach California, then hike back again to I-5 and continue onward to Cascade Locks on the Columbia River. Adding rest days and this additional thirty miles should put the trip at about a month. My pack and gear without food should weigh no more than twenty pounds, so if I limit myself to one and a half pounds of food per day, I’ll have a sixty-five-pound pack. This is at least 50 percent heavier than any pack I have carried, and although I am sure I can achieve it, I have never actually hiked eighteen miles in one day, even with a thirty-five-pound pack. Is this sounding crazy yet? To limit weight, I am considering leaving the stove and cookware at home. That will mean eating nothing but dry, cold food for one month. As long as that food is high in calories, I should be able to pull it off.
Today I printed some topographical maps of the Oregon PCT. They are quite detailed and will be very useful. Some guy edited existing maps by inserting mileage from the Mexican border to various landmarks on the trail. Encounters with civilization (stores, restaurants, highways, etc.) are also listed—not that I should need them.
This project sounds insane, I know. But once I complete it, I should return with such a great sense of accomplishment that I will never again doubt my ability to do anything. The absence of self-doubt is the only sure-fire way to do whatever you want in life. This trip is only the beginning.
The road trip mentioned in the entry was another excursion I planned to fund with my petitioning cash. My Corvallis friend and former Avery housemate Nick had proposed that a few of the Avery alumni go on an extended road trip of the western U.S. As I had the money and certainly the desire to visit places I’d never seen, I eagerly consented. The goal was to leave in mid-July. Nick had already done all the planning, and had told us that we would visit eight National Parks. One of these was Yosemite, home of the famous Half-Dome. I had formulated the idea that sandals might be a worthwhile investment for the PCT hike because of their low weight and good ventilation, and the hiking we were planning to do on the road trip would be a great way to test this theory.
Shortly before we left on the road trip, I realized the folly of my intended food plan—the one and a half pounds of food to be consumed on a daily basis. I realized that there was simply no way of knowing exactly how much ground I could cover in a day, especially considering how heavy my pack would be. I reworked the numbers, assuming that a pack 50 percent heavier than normal would slow my pace by about 33 percent. The food quantities I came up with still seemed very likely inadequate or possibly superfluous—there was just no reliable way to tell how fast I was going to travel. I then developed a brilliant eating schedule:
7/10/08
New plan. Rather than estimate the amount of time I will spend on the trail and then estimate how much food I will need in order to exist for that amount of time, I’m just going to estimate how much food I will need to fuel my efforts for a specific distance. Basically, I need to guess how far a pound of food will take me and then do the math for the 460 (or so) miles. Assuming I take only calorie-rich food, I imagine I could travel ten miles on one pound of food. Therefore, I should bring forty-six pounds of food.
This new method of food estimation just occurred to me a few minutes ago as I was sitting on the couch. It is superior because it is not based on my rate of travel, which is as yet an unknown. I previously proposed three miles per hour (or whatever I said in my last entry), but it could be more or less than that. Reason, or reasonableness, would seem to make me think that I am incapable of maintaining that rate for an extended amount of time, especially with such a heavy load. My personal motivation to achieve the unthinkable, which seems to be the driving force in this ridiculous Pacific Crest project, says otherwise.
The rest of this entry I will include for the sake of completeness, and to demonstrate my tendency to be foolishly stubborn at times. It showcases an embarrassingly illogical endeavor:
. . . just the other day, my motorcycle quit on the highway about ten miles outside of Florence. Unable to summon aid by phone, I commenced pushing. I quickly realized that this was a great test of my physical stamina, and I began to use the odometer on the bike in conjunction with the watch on my wrist to calculate my rate of travel. I was able to achieve twenty-minute miles [unreadable] . . . This was happily surprising. Of course, I was on smooth, flat ground, my load was on wheels, and I only pushed for about an hour and a half before I was able to contact my father using my phone. Never mind that. I knew I could have gone all day. Remember the time I walked from the U of O to the Eugene airport in under three hours? . . .
I’m leaving on the aforementioned road trip in three days. I hope to acquire hiking sandals before then so I can have an adequate testing period. After the trip, I’ll have
