Author: Fancypants

Today, we lost over 3,500 feet of elevation, and are camped lower than we’ve been in nearly two months. While this doesn’t mean the trail was some crazy plummet down a mountainside — those 3,500 feet were stretched out over twenty-three miles — it says we’re definitely in different country than we’ve been in before,…

There’s been a big change in how we’ve approached the trail since leaving South Lake Tahoe a week ago, and I haven’t talked about it yet. Up until now, while we’ve had a general idea of about how many miles per day we should be hiking, we haven’t set ourselves a specific per-day goal. This…

As we leave Sierra City, it’s clear we’re in a different world now. It’s not completely clear where the “High Sierra” ends and “Northern California” begins on the PCT, but, if I had to pick a place, this is probably it. Suddenly we’re in different terrain: huge chunks of these woods have been logged, which…

For nearly the past month, we’ve had spectacular weather on the trail. It’s been sunny nearly every day, and the worst days were cloudy or had a tiny bit of sprinkle. This is not usual for the High Sierra, where afternoon thundershowers are almost more the rule than the exception. We’ve been delighted, however, as…

I know it might sound silly, but the fact that we crossed I–80 this morning seems like a big deal to me. It’s kind of crazy walking underneath an interstate — in what looks like a drainage tunnel, to boot — and realize that if we just got on that road (erm, with a car,…

Well, there isn’t any snow out here, either — but, otherwise, we sure could’ve done a lot of skiing today. As we move north along Lake Tahoe, we keep passing steep, bare ski runs, stationary chairlifts, “Danger — Ski Area Ends Here!” signs, and so forth. They’re all pretty bizarre things to actually hike through…

It’s amazing how fast crowds disappear. We woke up this morning by a mountain lake, camped right next to three Russians and with easily a half-dozen tents within a couple of hundred feet. Yet this evening, we’re camped all by ourselves, and we saw almost nobody today. In the space of twenty-four hours, it seems…

It’s the Fourth of July, and we’re in Desolation Wilderness, right by Lake Tahoe. Desolation is one of the most popular places to camp in the entire Sierra — and this is probably the single most popular weekend of the year to do it. This all means we are not alone, and not alone in…

Around midday today, Bucket and I were sitting underneath a gazebo of sorts in a park in Reno, waiting for our clothes to dry. (We’d sprayed them with Permethrin, an insect repellent, and it takes them a couple of hours to dry.) We had our clothes spread out around us, and our backpacks with us.…

We caught our first glimpse of Lake Tahoe as we came over a rise in the trail in the early afternoon, lurking as a giant blue blur in the distance. Even from far away, I felt a happy familiarity: here we are, back in a place I’ve been to many times…but this time, we’ve hiked…

I’ll never forget where I was when… I heard the Supreme Court made marriage equality the rule across the land. (A moment I found deeply moving…justice and equality!) I was standing on top of a mountain about forty miles south of Lake Tahoe, looking across into a distant valley, wondering if maybe this meant there’d…

We don’t leave California for another 640 miles yet, but today it felt like we were in a completely different country. There may be a severe drought in most of the state, but everything we saw today was lush, lush, lush. Ever since we dropped below 10,000 feet soon after leaving Sonora Pass, the hills…

If there’s one well-kept secret on the trail so far, it’s Sonora Pass. This intersection of the PCT with CA–108 — one of several beautiful, two-lane highways through the Sierras — is absolutely gorgeous, incredibly accessible, and seemingly known about by almost nobody. For any Californians reading, if you want an amazing day hike or…

We awoke with a start this morning, just before six A.M., to our tent shuddering. I thought maybe one of the side poles had fallen over, but, peering out from underneath, everything looked intact. Then we heard a noise like a bear can falling over. There, about fifty feet away, was a juvenile black bear,…