An Introduction

For a few years now I've had a yearning to attempt to walk the Pacific Crest Trail. The PCT is a 2650+ mile running from US Border with Mexico, up through California, Oregon & Washington before finishing just inside Canada. As the name implies, it follows the crest of a line of mountains all the way which in order are : The Lugana, San Jacinto, San Bernadino, San Gabriel, Tehachapi, Sierra Nevada, Klamath and Cascade mountain ranges. The trail reaches it's highest point, 4009m, at Forester Pass in the Sierra Nevada, and it's lowest point, 55m at the Cascades Locks where the Bridge of the Gods marks the Oregon Washington border over the Columbia River. The trail passes through 3 national monuments, 7 national parks, 24 national forests and 33 federal wildernesses.

The plan is to leave my job at the beginning of April, fly to Southern California in Mid April, and start the Pacific Crest Trail on the 20th April 2013 and finish 5 months later in mid September.

Why hike the PCT and why hike it now?

Two of my most memorable holidays as a child and teenager were RV holidays that I took with my family around the west coast of the US. The first took us through some of the most stunning scenaryI have ever seen, Arches National Park, Monument Valley, Meza Verde, The Grand Canyon, Death Valley, Sequoia National Park and many more. The second saw us further north visiting Mt St Helens, Mt Ranier, The Rockies, Banff National Park, Lake Louise, Jasper National Park  and a lot of other places I can no longer remember. The main reason I've decided to hike the PCT now is that I want a break from the real world, and especially the tedium of office life. Much as I enjoy working and living in France, I've always wanted to take some time before I get too much older, and before I get saddled with a mortgage, or something similar. When I left school at 18 a gap year didn't cross my mind as I was so excited at the prospect of going to uni in manchester, one of the biggest student cities in the UK. It was when I was nearing the end of my MSc that  first started seriously thinking about taking some time off and what to do. Thats when I first came across the Pacific Crest Trail.  At first I planned on only taking a summer off between uni and starting work in the autumn, and initially I thought about attempting some or all of the 282 Munroes in Scotland. It'd actually gotten a good deal of planning done for the Munroes before coming across Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods (a great read incidently), which is an account of his time spent walking up the Appalachian Trail, a well kown long distance hiking trail which traverses the length of the Appalachian mountain range up the eastern seaboard of the US. From the AT it wasn't long before I stumbled across the PCT, and it's much, much more wild cousin, the Continental Divide Trail which together make up the triple  crown of long distance hiking totalling more than 12000km (and yes some crazy people do hike and have hiked all three!). Very quickly I could see that the PCT was the goldilocks option. The AT looked way too tame and nowhere near interesting enough for my liking, but in contrast the CDT looked challenging in the extreme, too much for a novice thru-hiker such as myself. The PCT however, looked like the perfect middle ground and I decided almost instantly that the PCT was what I wanted to do. As I started researching the PCT I quickly discovered it was not something I could do on a whim. Right at the beginning I knew if I were going to have a go at it, I would want to attempt a thru-hike, and a PCT thru-hike means a fairly limited starting window 2 weeks either side of the beginning of May. Any earlier and the snow won't have melted in the Sierra Nevada rendering them impassible, any later and the deserts are too hot to cross in southern California. As I did my initial research into the PCT in summer of 2009 I realised there were two options. Option 1 was to do it straight away and take a full year off starting in the autumn of 2009 and ten looking for a job 12 months after that. In hindsight I would have loved for this t have been possible, but it would have meant taking out a loan to fund the trip as I had no money in my bank account and lots of student debt. It would also have been difficult coming back as most graduate programs do their recruiting in the summer for the autumn intakes. This left option 2. Option 2 was to put the PCT out of my mind for a few years and prioritize gaining work experience and earning money to fund my trip whenever that might. I did indeed more or less forget about the PCT for a couple years whileI got stuck into my first proper job and before I knew it was doing the 9 to 5 at a desk sat in a chair in front of a computer settling into office life. It wasn't really until a few months ago when I heard about a book called Wild, an account of a young woman attempting a couple sections of the PCT, that I decided that I would give the PCT a go in 2013. So here I go!