The Backbone Trail 2021
Channel: Devin Schiro
Date: 2023-03-12

After returning home from the Pacific Crest Trail last summer, I found myself in a restless state. It was mid-September and the 2021 long distance hikers who reached the Canadian border began trickling out their commemorative photos at the northern terminus. There wasn’t a day I could open this app and not be confronted by enviable images of people successfully completing the quest I couldn't finish. It was all but guaranteed to whip me into a frenzy of aggravated FOMO.

After days of watching the new posts roll in, I'd finally had enough. I needed a new journey and a way to soothe my self-loathing. After scouring the internet for local options, I found something that seemed to tick all the boxes.

Enter “The Backbone Trail,” a 70-mile continuous footpath from Oxnard to Santa Monica. This relatively new trail is still not really developed enough to be hiked from point to point, and the logistics are quite awful. This may have been enough to discourage me under normal circumstances, but I was spiraling, and perhaps my risk assessment was less than calibrated.

Over 6 days and 5 nights, I marched over the exposed Santa Monica Mountains, stopping continuously to bury myself under whatever shade I could find, trickling water on my body and trying to stave off heat exhaustion. The sweltering conditions were nearly unbearable, and every stream I crossed was bone dry.

I kept asking myself “how can this be so much harder than what I just endured on the PCT?” Maybe I was finally tapped out. Maybe I left during too warm a week. Maybe I was still chasing something that can’t be bought in sweat and struggle. It’s been a year and I still don’t know. 

What I do know is this; my week on the Backbone Trail brought me a to single revelation I've carried with me in the full year since it's completion. The conclusion that after 35 years, I have at long last fallen out of love with Los Angeles. It was somewhere up there on those ridgelines overlooking a polluted cityscape, blinded by white haze from a sky devoid of wind, that I was faced with the desire to leave LA once and for all.

#shorts #backbonetrail