Date: 2017-05-10
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Miles today: 0.0

The benefits of my newfound luxury of time included being able to spend 6-7 weeks as a trail angel on the PCT to assuage some of my karmic debt before heading east for the AT. I split my time between Scout and Frodo's in San Diego, tending to the needs of some of the 900 or so hikers due to pass through their doors this year, and then moved up to Casa de Luna, the Andersons' enclave of awesomeness in Green Valley, north of Los Angeles. This gave me the time to do a series of Humans of New York-style interviews with this year's hikers, which was a kind of proof-of-concept for a greater project to which I'm aiming to devote time in my real retirement. The 160-plus vignettes featured on www.facebook.com/Humans.of.PCT... received somewhere between 400,000 and 500,000 hits. These are some of my favourites.Dixie, Alabama. "I was an engineer before I started the AT. I woke up at 28 one day and [thought] I have two wonderful dog children and a good job and I'm freaking miserable. To me, I had all the ingredients to the recipe of happiness that society casts upon you but I wasn't happy so I decided it was time to get out. I quit my job and cashed in all my retirement. I hiked the AT with no real intentions of doing another trail but I started a YouTube channel [Homemade Wanderlust]. I didn't think anything would actually come of it but people started watching it while I was hiking. After I finished the trail, I had all these people asking me questions [like] what do you eat and what do you this and what do you that so I posted once a week on whatever topic -- water or packs or sleeping bags. Now I have almost 30,000 subscribers. I did an e-book and together with a lot of part time jobs, it essentially funded this trip. I'd never been on an overnight backpacking trip before hiking the AT two years ago and I haven't since then -- [the PCT] is my second overnight hiking trip. If I can do it, anyone can do it."Has the AT answered the question you were asking when you quit your job and started hiking? "Pretty much. I've never felt so much like myself than when I was on the AT. You go out to the trail and you become the person you really are because all the facade and all that crap just crumbles away. You have friends and whatever [in normal life] but in the trail community, it's like 'Wow, this actually fits'. Now I'm ruined for life, and I want everyone else to go out and ruin their lives like I did."Trudge, Washington DC. "In 1979, I didn't plan to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail but there was an accident at a place called the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant. I lived just over five miles away and the government said 'It's safe -- just stay inside and keep your windows closed but if you're pregnant you should leave'. We thought if it's not good for pregnant women, it probably wasn't good for the rest of us. I could have just stayed around and absorbed the radiation but instead I started hiking south from near the [AT] midway point. It was just luck that the trail just south of there passes through Harpers Ferry, where the Appalachian Trail Conference is, so I could get some maps. When I got to the southern end, I hitchhiked up to the northern end and hiked back to Pennsylvania. I've wanted to do the PCT ever since and it's taken me 38 years to get around to it."Bex, England. "As you can see, I'm a little bit larger and I want to slim down and get myself healthy again. If I left it to next year, there'd be no way I'd be coming, just the way that my weight and health was going. With the weight gain, I've got lazier and less confident. I was this weight for many years but about six years ago, I lost about six and a half stone (91 pounds) through diet and exercise. Then three years ago I lost my mum, my best friend in the world, and I just stopped caring. My mum died at 53 and I don't want to go that early. Back at home, the reaction [to my plan to hike] the PCT was often negative. The hiking community [at Scout and Frodo's] has been amazingly supportive. It's a huge factor. In the past, there's not been one single fitness challenge I've not been able to complete -- people have doubted me and I've proven them wrong. I'm human and I love that face people pull when you prove them wrong."Ox, Tennessee. "In 2010-11, I deployed with my battalion to Afghanistan and on January 29 of 2011, I lost two great Americans. Ox was the nickname for one of those, so I asked his father if I could use his name as my trail name. His name was Specialist Shawn Muhr. Over the course of 2011, I lost a total of five soldiers [in combat]. I knew them all, not like their platoon leader or company commander, [but] you feel a sense of responsibility and I never had the chance to just heal from that and decompress. When I retired in December of 2015, I decided to memorialise these young men and hike the Appalachian Trail and do some healing. I started the Appalachian Trail on January 29.""I carried the five young men's dog tags on my shoulder strap and that was my motivation when I was not feeling it during the AT. I said to myself 'These kids didn't give up, Ox, so you need to push on'. For anyone doing an endurance event, it's more mental than physical. I'm carrying the five dog tags on the shoulder strap of my pack on the PCT. Sharing this story has been healing. I didn't think it would be, but sharing my story is memorialising my fallen."What is it about long trails that's healing, particularly for military veterans? "There are many things. For me, it's the quietness and the beauty. All of my senses were on high alert. It reminded me of combat but it was kind of in my safe place, so when I was out on the trail I could smell things that normally I couldn't smell and I could hear so much clearer. I had no deadlines to meet and had the ability to do what I wanted to do. When I was out hiking, I was at peace. I expected some of that, but not to the degree that it happened. To build on that, the trail community renewed my faith in humanity. With the hikers -- the day hikers, section hikers and thru hikers -- and the residents in the towns neighbouring the trail, I have story after story after story of things they did. I never asked for any of it but they were there to help. "Reaching Katahdin was very emotional. I struggled [with re-entry]. My lower extremities were beat up pretty good. I'm a runner and I couldn't run. I got depressed and I don't know what depressed feels like, but I was depressed. I almost went back on the trail. The only thing that held me back was I was beat up pretty good. The solution was time. I gave back through volunteering and working on my cabin."Anonymous hiker. "I'm hiking this year because my marriage ended, but I'm like the opposite of Cheryl Strayed in 'Wild'. She went out on the PCT to go way outside her comfort zone with this big adventure. I'm doing it because I've got years and years of mountaineering and hiking experience and out here, I understand all the rules. I proved to be spectacularly bad at being married so this trip is to remind myself that there's stuff I'm actually good at. I'm on the trail because I'm going into my comfort zone."JD, Indiana. "I lost 80 pounds so I'd be in shape to do the trail. I was up over 300 pounds when I started. When I first got a bicycle, I couldn't ride it a mile and a half, but then I built up to 30-40 mile rides. I rode the bike first to lose the weight and then started hiking."So you could barely ride a mile and a half and now you're doing a 2,650 mile hike? That's really impressive."It's been a good journey so far and it's going to get better."Whisper and Jim, daughter and father from Massachusetts. Whisper: "The big reason why I wanted to hike [the Appalachian Trail last year] was because hiking is very therapeutic to me. I had a lot of stuff going on in high school. When I asked [my dad] about doing the AT, instead of what I expected him to say, which was 'Why don't you volunteer here and spend a semester at home?', he said 'Why don't you do the whole Eastern Continental Trail' -- which goes from Quebec to Florida -- 'instead of just doing half of the Appalachian mountains?'. [The hike] was really amazing. I mean, there is something about being surrounded by trees that just changes your brain chemistry. I decided I was going to hike the PCT while I was hiking the AT."Jim: "When she told me about hiking the AT, I thought it was ambitious and I was a little nervous [but] I thought 'This is something she wants to do and I'm not going to kill the dream'. I said 'Sure' and the next day she had a website and she was fundraising. She was a better person [after the trail]. She was at ease with the world. She was a great person anyway. When I was 17, I hitch-hiked up to Maine and I tell it as if it's a great adventure, and she's walking the length of the country." Anonymous hiker, California. "I'd wanted to hike the PCT before I got really, really sick about eight years ago. I had one of the worst cases of valley fever, which is in the dirt in southern California. Ninety per cent of people get symptoms like the flu but one in a million get as sick as I was -- liver, pancreas and kidney failure. The hospital told me I wasn't going to make it. I spent eight and a half months in a hospital bed and it's taken until now to stabilise my health enough to do the hike. I'm carrying eight pounds of medical equipment. I was supposed to start a month ago, so I didn't have to deal with keeping my insulin cool in the desert, but I got hospitalised for a week. I can't get my feet wet because I get diabetic ulcers. I can't be a purist and do every foot, but I can do as much as I can."(Interviewed at Buckman Springs Rd, mile 26.4. He declined to be identified in case his insurer saw this post)Miya and Kaden, Oregon. Kaden: "I'm 10. Mom went in a meditation, looking for a job. The meditation told her to go to a trail to get away from society so she looked up trails and the PCT was the first trail that came up." Miya: "I just put in 'long distance trails'. We started researching it and it's well-travelled and kids have already travelled it and we decided that that was what we were going to do. This was almost a year ago, and I've found out my eyes are getting worse and it's perfect timing because I have to leave my job anyway. I'm a project manager in the biopharmaceutical industry. Basically I was told in my meditation that it would come to me what I'm supposed to be doing next and to get away from society and to clear my mind and my body. I have glaucoma. It's treatable but I have an extreme glaucoma so they can't keep my pressures down. I've had it 22 years and I'm hoping I won't go blind but I'm already having blindness in my right eye. That's my thought: experience life with him while I have full vision and here we go."Tine, Belgium. "Originally the plan was to sail around the world. My husband and I were going to finish work in five years (in 2020) and then sail the world. Two years ago he got cancer and died."Were you tempted to go and sail around the world anyway?"I'd done some sailing courses in Belgium but, no, that was more a dream of him. I read a book, Wild, while on holiday in Sri Lanka and I thought I'd do this. Not many people thought I would do it."Maggie, Pennsylvania. "My friend Sarah and I are shaving our heads and donating our hair to Pantene [Beautiful Lengths] before starting the trail. Long hair has been part of my identity for so long. I think it's going to go one of two ways -- I'm going to either cry or piss my pants. I'm probably going to cry but really, I don't know."Postscript: Maggie got in touch to say that "Sarah Komisar donated 17inches and I donated 20 inches!" Asked which of the two predicted outcomes panned out, she replied: "Neither. It was a really fun time!"Breakaway, Oregon. Today you completed the last of the fire closures you missed in last year's hike, finishing the entire trail 364 days after you started it. Congratulations!"Thanks! These are totally honourary Washington conditions -- it was misty and windy and cold. I figured it was fitting to finish my last empty section. I felt like I'd done the PCT when I reached the monument last year but it's cool to say 'OK, now I've really done everything I can'. I had some time off and there were a lot of places I could do some spring backpacking but I figured I'd come back here and meet the Class of 2017 and help out at the Andersons. It was a good way to use that time -- I've met some pretty rad people."What's with the Buckfast Tonic Wine? "I hiked a lot of the trail last year with this Irish fellow called Shepherd and I'd heard of this stuff and I kept asking him about it. I met up with him this past winter in Salt Lake and he'd got this for me when he went back to Ireland for Christmas. It's apparently the Four Loko of the British isles -- fortified wine with caffeine in it. It's been 'cellaring' since then. I think I'm really too old to be drinking this but I'm curious. It doesn't taste that bad. Or that good."You brought your finisher's medal with you."I ordered it sometime last fall and it showed up sometime over the winter when I was in Utah."Have you worn it before?"No. Today was the first time I opened the package. It really feels like I'm finished and it's good."