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Thread: Start Date

  1. #1

    Default Start Date

    I am planning to thru hike the PCT. I would like to do after I graduate from grad school but I am not sure if a mid may start date will be too late. I have hiking experience and will be able to start to out hiking at least 15 miles a day maybe more. But will a mid may start be too late? Would going south on the PCT or flip flopping be wiser choices?

    Thanks for your advice!!

  2. #2

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    Starting mid-may would work going Northbound. I know several people who started May 9-12 who had no issues finishing in Canada. I started in April but was off the trail for 3 weeks in May due to an injury near Idyllwild on the 2nd week. That time off made me have an equivalent to a May 8th start. Starting a little later in mid May will mean a few things for you though:
    1) Possibly hotter temperatures in SoCal
    2) Less hikers around you so you will hike alone more. You will still see some, but you could go for days without seeing anyone.
    3) Need more discipline to get your daily miles in and not take too many zeros to insure that you finish at a decent time.
    4) The lighter your baseweight, the easier it will be to do bigger miles without injury.
    5) The PCT is good trail that is easy to do big miles on; particularly in SoCal. But just because you can do bigger miles, doesn't mean your body is ready to do them every day for weeks. Ramp up over the first few weeks. Or even better, start training ahead of time. Do some brisk walking with your loaded back everyday after school. Go out every weekend on longer hikes to get your body in shape for hiking everyday with a loaded back. It will make it easier on your body and allow you do do more miles to start with.

    If you stay disciplined, you will start to overtake some hikers in front of you so you'll have more company. But you'd need to watch the temptation to slow down to stay with them for long. If you are overtaking them, then they aren't going that fast and unless they speed up, they likely won't finish so you don't want to be with them for long. I really started to overtake other hikers in the Sierras (due to getting up earlier and hiking later then most so I was doing bigger miles) and finally felt that I was hitting the back of the main herd. A few I met there, I saw off and on through Washington to the border. But they speed up after I met them, or had suffered from injuries that slowed them down temporarily which is why I saw them, or had gotten off trail for 2 weeks for personal matters which is why I caught them. The ones that were just going slow or talking a lot of days off in town never finished as they got farther and farther behind until they hit deep snow in Washington.

    That said, there is nothing wrong with doing a southbound hike which would allow you to start in June. Washington is harder trail to hike then SoCal and would require some snow travel, but its also more scenic.

  3. #3

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    Thank you for the thoughts!! Staying disciplined isn't an issue for me. I had to do on the A.T. for multiple reasons.

  4. #4

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    If you don't want to deal with the heat and the lack of water and the lack of other hikers and the need to push really hard to get to Canada before snow makes life difficult, one option is to start at Big Bear or farther north. We intended to do a second thruhike of the PCT in 2009, but had a family wedding in May we had to attend in Maryland. Rather than fly back and forth, we decided to just start in Big Bear on May 12, which is accessible via public transportation and has a nice hostel. We were right in the middle of the pack of thruhikers. Big Bear is 265 miles up the trail, and the first couple of sections north of there have water, which made it easier to start more gradually, with 15-18 mile days instead of 20+ mile days. Our plan was to hike to Canada and then flip back and do the southern bit afterwards. As it turned out DH tore his meniscus, so we got off the trail at Walker Pass, but it would have been a good plan to get us to Canada without having to push all that hard. On our first thruhike, we started a week before the herd, averaged 19mpd, finished in late September and still had snow. Last year snow fell early and hard. Starting late and finishing before snow makes finishing a problem means a lot of big mile days. Doable, certainly, but not necessarily fun.

  5. #5
    PCT 2013, most of AT 2011, rest of AT 2014
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    I think Miner nailed it. A mid-May thru-hike wouldn't be especially hard if self-discipline comes naturally to you when hiking, and you are confident enough to be alone right away. You still have four to four and a half months (more if winter comes late to the Northwest) to finish the trail, and that's plenty of time. The challenge is, whereas the people who start in early- or mid-April have enough time that they don't always have to think about the entire trail--and in fact, a pretty common piece of advice is to only think about the trail in small sections, what's just around the bend so to speak, so you aren't overwhelmed by the scale of the journey--you don't have that freedom if you start in mid-May. You kind of have to be aware of the whole thing from the get-go because you don't have the leisure of a prolonged slow-down. You might find that bothers you, or maybe it doesn't.

    I started May 5 last year and by the middle of the Sierra I knew what I had to average mileage-wise to finish the trail by certain dates. I'm certain that no one else around me was thinking about that at the time. I wondered at first if it was a terrible thing to know and have looming over me, but to my surprise it never stressed me out, and I plodded away and finished the trail September 23, two days before a bitch of a snowstorm wiped out the entire PCT in Washington. So it worked out well for me, and that line of thinking never caused me undue stress.

    I knew several people who started in mid- or even late-May and were happy and finished their thru-hikes successfully. The only common thread among them was saying that they spent a lot of time alone at the beginning. I think that's true of anyone who starts after Kickoff, basically. I spent the night at Ziggy & Bear's house (mile 210) with one other hiker (Juma, a WhiteBlazer). Six days before me there had been something like 53 people camping there. The drop off post-Kickoff is immense, but it doesn't take long to start catching up to some of them, and once you do that, the density of people will stay pretty consistent the rest of the way.

    As a side note, and you might already know this: don't believe anyone who says that a fast pace and fun/beauty/enjoyment/fulfillment are mutually exclusive. That's the hallmark of a flaming moron who doesn't comprehend that people can be built mentally and physically in different ways, and have different goals. You'll probably hear it a lot before and during the trail when you mention your start date. I mean, I heard it and I started May 5 (and I wasn't really that fast). It's total garbage.
    "Hahk your own hahk." - Ron Haven

    "The world is a book, of which those who do not travel read only a page." - St. Augustine

    http://www.scrubhiker.com/

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