In the desert near Agua Dulce, north of Los Angeles, hikers along the Pacific Crest Trail who reached mile marker 502 encountered a cistern of water that smelled bad and tasted worse, with a dead rat floating inside. They got out their filters and refilled their bottles anyway. “Will update if I get sick,” one wrote on a message board to those coming up behind.
The message was just one sign of how global warming is affecting life along the trail, where, during a hot season nearly devoid of rain, water tanks and caches were more important than ever, the last line of defense against dehydration. At least some hikers were willing to take their chances.
Thru-hikers on the PCT spend up to five months walking from Mexico to Canada through a landscape that ranges from high desert scrub to giant sequoias, basalt craters and alpine meadows. The route changes slightly each year, meaning that the trail’s official length, 2,650 miles, is really only an estimate.
What is a fact now is the imprint of climate change, felt along the whole trail in the form of weirder weather, bone-dry soil and, most of all, the increasing threat of wildfires. Fire is a hazard that leaves other hazards in its wake: meager shade, disruptions to streams and water sources, “blow down” trees you have to clamber over or walk around, and fine black soot that lingers in the back of hikers’ throats and aggravates open blisters. Fire scars — the blackened expanses a wildfire leaves behind — can take days to walk through.
More than 1,600 miles of the trail run through California. Over the last decade, record after record for high temperatures, droughts and wildfires have been broken in the state. Last year, the Dixie fire, the largest in California history, burned 85 miles of the PCT. It was the first fire ever to cross the crest of the Sierra Nevada.
In late July, I intercepted the main burst of northbound thru-hikers — the so-called bubble — on a 40-mile section of trail north of Mount Shasta as it jogs west over rugged granite peaks toward the California-Oregon border.
“It used to be a race against getting to Washington before the snow; now it’s that and fires,” said Melanie Graham, 32, who started her hike March 15 to give herself the best chance of finishing before smoke intervened. Hiking near Lassen Volcanic National Park, she’d tried to imagine the vista as it was before the Dixie fire, a sharp volcanic summit wreathed in forest stretching to the horizon. Now it was an island of green and gray surrounded by something that felt hard to see as forest. “The peak was just gorgeous, but everything in the background was decimated,” she said.
A Single-File Summer Camp
Even without the threat of climate change, any hike so long means planning around the seasons. Travelling from south to north, as roughly 90% of hikers do, means trying to get through 700 miles of high desert before triple-digit temperatures set in but not so soon that you enter the Sierra Nevada high country when it’s still buried in snow — and then 1,000 miles later, getting safely out of the North Cascades before the first fall snowstorms.
The trail was originally proposed in 1926 by Catherine Montgomery, an educator and avid hiker from Bellingham, Washington, but it would be nearly 50 years before the PCT emerged as a sanctioned route in 1973, crossing a patchwork of parks, national forests and even a smattering of private land. For decades, thru-hiking remained a fringe pursuit: According to the Pacific Crest Trail Association, it wasn’t until 2000 that more than 100 hikers completed the trail in a given year. That changed with the visibility brought by Cheryl Strayed’s bestselling memoir, “Wild,” which was adapted in 2014 into a film starring Reese Witherspoon.
The trail has developed its own subculture over the years, with an atmosphere somewhere between a spiritual pilgrimage and a single-file summer camp, blending long stretches of solitude with the ambling camaraderie of fellow hikers and “trail angels” who assist with advice and logistics. “Tramilies,” or trail families, hike and camp together. Trail nicknames, like Lemony Snicket — “I experienced a series of unfortunate events on-trail,” Graham said, explaining hers — replace given names for months at a stretch.
Anyone planning to hike 500 miles or more along the trail generally gets a long-distance permit from the PCTA, with start dates spread across March, April and May, to reduce the effect from too many people camping in one place at one time. Of the several thousand hikers who get a permit, more than two-thirds drop off before they reach Oregon.
So far this year, despite heat waves and paltry snowpack, there has not been a megafire along the trail. That’s unlike in recent years, when thru-hikers have confronted a barrage of disruptions, either in the form of smoke and active fires forcing them off the trail, or the closing of trails through past burns to give the ecosystems time to stabilise.
In 2021, the fire season in California started in January and did not let up throughout the summer. Before my trip last month, I spoke with Andrew Carter, 65, who started the trail in April 2021, days after retiring from a career in marketing. Fires forced him off the trail on three occasions, including August 31, when the US Forest Service made the decision to close national forests across California because of fire risks. (Already, some 6,800 fires had burned through 1.7 million acres). When the forests reopened two weeks later, Carter walked through smoke, envious of the fellow hikers who’d had the foresight to don N95 masks. He finally gave up altogether on September 24. “It took me three or four weeks before I stopped coughing,” he said. — NYT
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