Hikey Mike

Tomorrow morning I will be waking up on the border between Mexico and the USA to take the first steps of what I hope will be a 5-month hike to the Canadian border. Over the last few months I’ve largely answered two questions from everyone I’ve talked to about it:

• What is the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT)?
• Why on earth would you want to do that?

The PCT is a 2,650 mile National Trail passing through California, Oregon and Washington with 5,000 people a year trying to walk from the southern border to the northern border of the country. The path leads through the deserts of Southern California, the highest peaks of the Sierra Nevada mountain range and some of the country’s greatest national parks. By walking this route in one single attempt (thru-hiking), I will take around 5 million steps and climb almost 500,000ft (the equivalent of 17 Everests)

The why is slightly more unique to each hiker. I first heard about the PCT almost 10 years ago after finding a love for hiking through a walk around the Pembrokeshire coast and a 10 day hike across Japan. Looking for my next adventure, I found the book ‘The Last Englishman’ about a man travelling halfway across the world to walk border to border across the American wilderness. Shortly after I read ‘Wild’ about someone completing the same route and knew that one day I would attempt it myself.

In the decade since, I have completed (and failed to complete) multiple hikes across the UK, France, Spain and Portugal with the PCT always being at the back of my mind, however an illness last year left me with the feeling that if I didn’t commit now I may never get the opportunity again and so after a week on the Portuguese Coast in September to check I was still physically capable, I finally commited to this adventure.

Over the last 6 months I was successful in the application process for one of 5,000 permits, left my job and spent most waking moments either training, researching or planning, bringing me to here. After an 11 hour flight, 4 days in Los Angeles and 24 hours in San Diego, I am now at a campsite in Campo, a town of 3,000 people on the Mexican border. Tomorrow morning I will walk half a mile to the border wall and to the monument marking the southern terminus of the PCT.

The campsite is run by volunteers that have previously hiked the PCT, and I’ve spent the evening getting advice from them and meeting other people that will also be starting tomorrow. One of the volunteers said that he always tells people about to set off on their hike to think of day one as ‘someday’, because they’ve spent years of saying some day I will hike the PCT and now they’re finally here. I have been saying some day for the last ten years, and now it is only ten hours away.