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We woke up this morning just the other side of Selden Pass, our last pass before we got to the outpost of civilization called Vermillion Valley Resort. Selden Pass is the first pass northbound that’s noticeably lower than the others — it’s 11,000 feet instead of 12,000 feet. That might not sound like a big…

After yesterday’s show of every kind of beauty you could ever find out here, everything we saw today seemed to pale in comparison. Yet that’s only by comparison; the places we were today are still part of the most beautiful stretch of the entire PCT. We’re camped tonight on a small hillside above a gorgeous…

Today was the most beautiful day of hiking of my entire life. That’s not exaggeration, that’s simple truth. I almost don’t want to even write about it, because it was so perfect. I want the photos alone to tell the whole story. (If you click through to only one set of photos at the bottom…

Our days are absolutely defined by passes: going up, being on top, and coming down them. They’re our landmarks, our goals, and our nemeses, all at once. This section of trail has a mountain pass every 10–30 miles; most passes are at or over 12,000′, while the valleys in between range from 8,000′ to 10,500′.…

It’s incredible how much more tiring it can be hiking up and down these Sierra passes compared to everything we’ve done before. We’re doing two-thirds or three-quarters of the mileage we used to do, yet end up utterly exhausted at the close of the day. Part of it’s quantifiable: we climbed 3,600′ today to reach…

The stretch of trail we’re entering now may just be the most beautiful backpacking I’ve ever done in my life. (The PCT follows the JMT — the John Muir Trail — for the next roughly 200 miles, and we’ve hiked the JMT, so I’ve been here before.) We’re camped tonight at Rae Lakes, three incredibly…

It sounded like thunder, only it just kept going on and on for a full minute or so, just after we’d made camp for the evening. It took us a few moments to realize what we’d just heard: part of a mountain falling down! The Sierra are full of faces that are just loose scree…

Even if you don’t normally look at the photo gallery I add to the end of every post, take a look at this one. (Hover over one to see a bigger version; click or double-click to go to Flickr, to see the full-size version.) Some days the mountains make you hold back, like yesterday —…

Tonight, we’re only eight miles from where we camped last night, unexpectedly — and gladly. While we were planning to go over Forester Pass, the highest point on the PCT, today, and yet tonight it still remains nearly five miles off. Instead we made camp at something like 3:15 PM — incredibly early — and…

Today, I felt like more of a hiking badass than ever before on this trip, or even in my life. We climbed the tallest mountain in the continental U.S. through snowfields and ice on rocky ledges, hiked for 15 hours straight, and walked 23 miles while ascending and descending over 5,000 feet each. As Bucket…

If there’s one word for what I feel these days, it’s this: anticipation. Anticipation because I know exactly what’s coming next — we’re about to get to Mount Whitney, and, with it, hit the John Muir Trail. Bucket and I hiked all 220 miles of the John Muir Trail in 2012, and so we both…

We’re camped above 10,000 feet for the first time on this trip these past two nights. In fact, we’re only 40 feet higher tonight than we were last night. Yet if you think that means we had a flat, easy walk today, well…yeah. No. Now that we’ve made it to the Sierra, the trail just…

Mile 712.76: 36.14393 N, 118.14433 W, 7962′. This is where the High Sierra begin. You come over a pass, make your way through a small pine forest, and then, as you exit the forest, you’re suddenly in a spectacular High Country meadow like only the Sierra have. It goes on for miles and miles, grass…

If you’d arrived by car today at the Kennedy Meadows General Store, perhaps the first thing you’d notice on the way in is, well, that there isn’t much to notice. Kennedy Meadows itself is a burgeoning metropolis of two hundred people, stuck on a back road in the southeastern Sierra Nevada. It doesn’t even have…

These past few days have, unquestionably, been the most miserable hiking of our entire trip. It’s as if the California desert, deciding that it hadn’t been sufficiently desert-like for us so far, decided to pack all the heat it could muster into these last few days before we climb into the mountains. It was in…

Ninety-five degrees is not what you want to see on the thermometer when you’re out here, pretty much any time at all. It’s especially not what you want to see when you have to hike, and doubly so if you have to climb. Today was the first day we made a pretty major modification to…

Today, we finally managed to escape force ourselves to leave Lake Isabella…not an easy thing to do, given how unbelievably nice it’s been to relax for a few days — but this is actually called “hiking the Pacific Crest Trail”, not “a tour of Southern California hottubs”, after all. So after waking at 5 AM,…

Today was our last day of relaxation before we head out for the trail and are off to the High Sierra. Not only was today relaxing, but it felt a little like Christmas: all the stuff we’d ordered two days ago showed up today. Getting new gear on the trail is about a million times…

So, on Saturday, while everyone was getting ready for Memorial Day barbecues, I was hiking through crazy heat and sand and intense wind. I’m hoping that this makes it feel slightly more balanced when I tell you that today, when everybody was at work, I was basking in a pool on top of an inflatable…

We started our PCT hike really, really early this year — April 8 is nearly three weeks before the traditional start date for through-hikers. We could do this because of the snow, or rather the lack thereof: usually, if you start too early, you’ll hit the High Sierra before the snowpack has melted, and find…