Good read: PCT after report essay

[Hobbes]

So, except for a few remaining SOBO hikers presently walking through the SoCal desert towards the US-Mexico border, the 2016 PCT hiking season has come to a close. As usually seems to be the case, there were a couple of good blogs that stood out from the others. I thought this hiker's after report essay was particularly good, so I figured I'd present a few excerpts and a link to the full entry:

The thing about thru-hiking is…you’ll hear about people who do this thing, this crazy thing, taking time out of their lives to hike thousands of miles in the wilderness, and you’ll think YES. That. I want to do that. You’ll keep it a secret for a while, finding a few hours here or there to pore over thru-hiker blogs, learning about how they did it – their gear, their planning, their journey, their struggle, their triumph. The spark inside you burns deeper. You shift from dreaming to doing. To buying gear and planning. Figuring out the how and the when, how much it will cost, what gear you will carry. Telling the ones you love who inevitably shake their head in disbelief, and ask “why?!”

You can’t photograph how ridiculously heavy your pack felt when you put it on fully loaded, at the heaviest it would ever be, laden with six days of food and six liters of water for the first long waterless stretch of trail. Or the slight panic you felt inside when you realized you could barely lift this bag out of the trunk of the car, so how could you possibly put it on your back and walk with it for the twenty miles you plan to conquer that first day, let alone twenty miles the next day, and the next day, and the next day. But for the first of many times on the trail you act like you know what you’re doing, that you know you’re going to make it even though you’re completely clueless, and then it’s on, you’re strapped in, it really doesn’t feel that bad and you start hiking.

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[davepctjmt]

Thanks for posting this - my wife and I (both former PCT thru hikers) thought that by some distance this was the best depiction of a thru hike that we've ever read. Somehow she encapsulated the sensation, emotion, as well as the inexplicability of such a journey.