How is it fair that you can walk 1,000 miles, and still not even be halfway to your destination? It's demoralizing at best. I mean, what's so great about Canada anyway? It's about the journey, not the destination right? I am really looking forward to hiking through Washington state in particular, but unless I speed up quite a bit, it's going to be cold, drenched in rain, or worse, blanketed in snow, by the time I get there. And if I speed up, how will I even have time to see, much less enjoy it? I'm supposed to be trying to stay emotionally present out here. Barreling down the path trying to make it to the end doesn't sound very present to me. And anyway, I don't like the idea of hiking big miles all the time. Walking is hard. Sure, I can do it, but I don't want to keep doing it like that. One week of hard hiking is all well and good, but a month? A whole month of averaging 20, 25, 30+ miles a day? Two months?? Not for me, no sir.
Sigh....
But...I want to do the whole trail. I wouldn't have come out here if I didn't want to walk the whole thing. And it would feel so good to finish in one season. Think how badass it'd be to post that picture on Facebook of you at the Canadian monument in October! You'd get SO many likes. No one would ever question your badass-ness ever again. If anyone even tried, someone'd be like, "Oh that girl? No she's definitely a badass. She walked to Canada. It's pretty far." There's probably some kind of sign you could wear all the time so people know you're unquestionably a badass. Plus, there's all these totally non-superficial reasons for wanting to hike the whole trail, like the fact that it's absurdly beautiful out there in the wilderness and the absolute freedom of living a nomadic, minimalistic lifestyle. How often in life do you get a chance to have an incredible adventure like this? You love the trail. Why wouldn't you want to do the whole thing?
I dug myself into a mental trench running over these thoughts again and again while I spent a few days resting in South Lake Tahoe. (And for the record, trench-digging is not a restful business.) While I was in town, I met another hiker who was feeling a lot of the same pressures as me. Her name was Little Foot.
Little Foot is a big-ass-section hiker from Colorado, and she loves the PCT. She grew up in San Diego, and started hiking the PCT with friends a few years ago. She had already completed the first 100 miles, and decided that she would add the next 600 over the course of this summer. She did it. And then she quit her job, broke her lease, and kept going. Aside from the similarity of our trail names and our generally silly dispositions, Little Foot and I bonded over our new-found hatred of the pressures of "CANADA". We found the general conversation among our fellow hikers, all about miles and worry about not making it, to be largely exhausting.
We were commiserating about our frustrations over beers one night at a bar in town. That night I had just booked a flight to visit family out east for a wedding in about 3 weeks. I had found a deal on a round trip flight I couldn't pass up, and had just decided I would find a way back from Reno for my flight one way or another. As I was telling Little Foot my plan to hike up and find a ride back down, she suddenly chimed in, "why don't you hitch up, and then hike back down?" Southbound?
Some gear inside me that had been off its track for a while suddenly clicked into place and started to turn.
"Oh my god. That's EXACTLY what I want to do."
I said it before I realized the words were coming out of my mouth, before I knew I wanted to say them. I actually took a mental double-take, I was so surprised.
"It is? Really? Why? Is it even possible? It's several hundred miles, could I even feasibly hitch that far? Maybe there's a train or a bus...but it might be expensive...how far up would I have to go? How far could I go? 400 miles in 3 weeks? More? Less? Maybe..."
As I was thinking all these things, aloud and in the middle of a bar, Little Foot sat and watched as a plan started to take shape in my brain. I hadn't even made a concrete decision when she quietly interjected. "Can I come?"
I looked at her and grinned. "Hell yes."
I can't explain it. I don't know exactly why I reacted that way, or how I knew with such strong feeling that I was meant to southbound Northern California with Little Foot. But that's how, less than 48 hours after that conversation, Little Foot and I found ourselves standing in front of a Chevron gas station on the main road through South Lake, thumbs out and holding a sign:
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