Re: Thru-hiker Envy
Posted: Wed Jul 06, 2016 2:26 pm
I'm not sure envy is the right word, but...I *do* find a lot of the thru-hiking experience to be a positive thing. (And not just the part about getting 5 months off work.)
My introduction to thru-hiking was simply running into PCTers in the 1990s and early 2000s while they traipsed through Oregon and Washington. For the most part they seemed happy and incredibly fit. One thing I really picked up on was their sense of camaraderie. You'd see trail registers where PCTers were leaving happy notes for other PCTers hiking one, two, ten days behind them. People would hike together for a while, then get behind and hike solo or with another group, then catch up with the original group...You had a loosely-defined "cohort" you were hiking with all summer. Calling it a rolling party seems a bit harsh. To me what it looked like was a set of people who had taken on something ambitious, and when they hiked together or ran into each other they got to bond over that experience and share stories. Sometimes, lifetime friendships developed out of that. In other words, on the social side I saw nothing but the positive. You do not get a taste of this ongoing social experience when you do a series of short trips in disparate places.
I have section-hiked parts of all three states. By section-hiking I was able to cherry-pick the prettiest stretches, so I didn't have to deal with the "filler" miles. The required "filler" miles of awful trail are the one thing that would keep me from doing a traditional thru-hike. Or, maybe I'd just skip sections of the Mojave and northern CA and southern Oregon and leap ahead, breaking all the rules. I might do the Washington State section of the PCT next summer, because a friend wants to. We'd do it mid-summer, before the PCTers get there. Another friend wants to do the Colorado Trail one day, and that appeals.
The endurance-sport aspect of thru-hiking is actually a big part of the appeal to me! When you are training for things like 50k races, something I did in the past, and if you're in love with the wilderness like I am, you start fantasizing about what it might be like to do your endurance training in a true wilderness setting rather than in urban open spaces. Personally, I love the idea of getting the kind of uber-fit that you'd get after walking 25 miles a day, day after day. It just feels so damn good, when your body becomes that kind of machine.
As someone mentioned, thru-hiking can be a great way to get introduced to whole new areas that you then want to go back and explore later in your backpacking career. That was exactly the result of my JMT hike in 1999.
The Trail Angel experience is really cool. Nobody wrote about that.
Finally, there is the appeal of the resupply not far off the trail. Sure, resupply is a lot of logistics. But I find the idea and the experience of resupplying in a nearby town, and then getting right back on the trail, to be much more appealing than my current reality, whereby each trip to the Sierra no matter how short requires a 3-8 hour drive each way. I retain a lot more of the "mountain feel" when I'm resupplying in Bishop or Ollalie Lake or Stevens Pass, rather than driving back home.
All that said, these days I'm wondering if cross-country travel has spoiled me for most on-trail travel. Maybe if I returned to some of the sections of the PCT that I enjoyed back-when, I'd get disappointed and you'd see me hopping the first train back to Ionian Basin.
- Elizabeth
My introduction to thru-hiking was simply running into PCTers in the 1990s and early 2000s while they traipsed through Oregon and Washington. For the most part they seemed happy and incredibly fit. One thing I really picked up on was their sense of camaraderie. You'd see trail registers where PCTers were leaving happy notes for other PCTers hiking one, two, ten days behind them. People would hike together for a while, then get behind and hike solo or with another group, then catch up with the original group...You had a loosely-defined "cohort" you were hiking with all summer. Calling it a rolling party seems a bit harsh. To me what it looked like was a set of people who had taken on something ambitious, and when they hiked together or ran into each other they got to bond over that experience and share stories. Sometimes, lifetime friendships developed out of that. In other words, on the social side I saw nothing but the positive. You do not get a taste of this ongoing social experience when you do a series of short trips in disparate places.
I have section-hiked parts of all three states. By section-hiking I was able to cherry-pick the prettiest stretches, so I didn't have to deal with the "filler" miles. The required "filler" miles of awful trail are the one thing that would keep me from doing a traditional thru-hike. Or, maybe I'd just skip sections of the Mojave and northern CA and southern Oregon and leap ahead, breaking all the rules. I might do the Washington State section of the PCT next summer, because a friend wants to. We'd do it mid-summer, before the PCTers get there. Another friend wants to do the Colorado Trail one day, and that appeals.
The endurance-sport aspect of thru-hiking is actually a big part of the appeal to me! When you are training for things like 50k races, something I did in the past, and if you're in love with the wilderness like I am, you start fantasizing about what it might be like to do your endurance training in a true wilderness setting rather than in urban open spaces. Personally, I love the idea of getting the kind of uber-fit that you'd get after walking 25 miles a day, day after day. It just feels so damn good, when your body becomes that kind of machine.
As someone mentioned, thru-hiking can be a great way to get introduced to whole new areas that you then want to go back and explore later in your backpacking career. That was exactly the result of my JMT hike in 1999.
The Trail Angel experience is really cool. Nobody wrote about that.
Finally, there is the appeal of the resupply not far off the trail. Sure, resupply is a lot of logistics. But I find the idea and the experience of resupplying in a nearby town, and then getting right back on the trail, to be much more appealing than my current reality, whereby each trip to the Sierra no matter how short requires a 3-8 hour drive each way. I retain a lot more of the "mountain feel" when I'm resupplying in Bishop or Ollalie Lake or Stevens Pass, rather than driving back home.
All that said, these days I'm wondering if cross-country travel has spoiled me for most on-trail travel. Maybe if I returned to some of the sections of the PCT that I enjoyed back-when, I'd get disappointed and you'd see me hopping the first train back to Ionian Basin.
- Elizabeth