Month: May 2015

When you think of the elements you need to withstand hiking, several come to mind immediately: heat, cold, rain, snow, and the like. Yet we’ve discovered that, out here, there’s another one that’s every bit as important: wind. We’re also learning and re-learning this lesson constantly. When we camped at Fuller Ridge, it was so…

If it sometimes seems like our journey alternates between desire for the open trail and desire for creature comforts, well, that’s about how it feels to us, too. So far, it’s been a good rhythm: just about the time we start to get really smelly and gross after hiking for several days, we end up…

This trail changes so fast, it’s unbelievable. Yesterday afternoon, we were freezing our butts off, wading through slush and snow as it was 33° outside. This afternoon, we were sweating in the hot sun, trying desperately not to touch any of the poodle-dog bush that was absolutely everywhere on the trail. Last time I mentioned…

We’d only been asleep for twenty minutes when the storm started. The sound of snow landing on our tarp was new to us, yet we both knew that’s exactly what it was. The wind howled, the tarp bucked, and the snow kept coming…for hours. We were warm in our sleeping bags, yet couldn’t fall asleep,…

Yesterday, we got to look down on oceans of clouds from high above. Today, we were inside oceans of clouds. And you know what those oceans of clouds are? Cold. We’re in Southern California in May — in Los Angeles County, even! — and we, and all of our fellow hikers, were freezing all day…

Most people only get to see what we saw today from inside an airplane — and airplanes are a whole lot less pleasant than where we were. Once our road walk back to the PCT was done this morning, we spent the entire rest of the day hiking on high ridgetops above the clouds, looking…

Sometimes, all it takes is a single moment to make you remember a day for a very, very long time. Today’s was what you see above — except that, trust me, the pictures don’t even come close to doing it justice. You’re standing on top of a mountain nearly as high as the ones in…

It’s not all bad, you know, hiking this trail. For example, we get to see beautiful things, take glorious showers…and, today, sit in natural hot springs in the middle of the desert. It was awesome. What? So, it turns out that the Pacific Crest Trail runs directly through the middle of

We hiked twenty-two miles today, through desert mountains that were different than anything we’d hiked through before, and beautiful in their differentness. I know I wrote before about how the terrain always changes out here, but today really demonstrated it: we walked through