Things to Know Before Hiking the PCT That Has Nothing to Do with Miles or Gear

(Three things people already talk about, and for good reason. And 5 things to note before you go, but won’t understand until you're out there.)

Part 1: The things people already talk about, and for good reason.

1. Don’t learn “hike your own hike” the hard way.

Everyone on the PCT shares one goal: Canada. But the number of ways people get there, or don’t, surprised me. Some hikers are what the community calls “married to the red line,” meaning they follow the official trail mile by mile, no detours, no exceptions. Others find their way to San Francisco, the Redwoods, or the Oregon coast and call that a win. Some people are going the complete opposite direction toward Mexico.

There are ultralight hikers with no tent and hikers hoarding luxury items in a two-person tent for one. People who sprint through the desert and crawl through Washington. People who quit at the first pass in the Sierra’s and people who thru-hiked twice and came back for a third.

There is no wrong way. But there’s a difference between adapting wisely and just following whoever’s in front of you. I learned this by getting an overuse injury trying to keep pace with experienced hikers. It sidelined me and cost me days I couldn’t get back. The trail teaches you this lesson one way or another. Better to learn it before you step off the monument than a hundreds of miles in when you’re clawing your way to Big Bear on a fractured toe.

2. If you meet someone you like, get their contact info immediately.

Trail time is not real time. You can hike near someone for two weeks, fall into an easy rhythm, share a campsite and a meal and something unique and genuine. But then lose them to a zero day, a resupply detour, a blister that slowed you down. I have been passed just by going off trail to poop! You may never see them again.

I met a girl from Germany in the Sierra’s. We got close, the way you do out there, when there’s nothing else to do but walk and talk and be honest. But we separated and I didn’t see her again on trail. However when it was over, we reconnected. She’s offered me her home and a tour if I ever make it to Germany. Her time if I ever needed a friend. I offered the same for my small beach town in Florida. That connection exists because one of us thought to get the number before we lost each other.

Over 400 people passed through the trail in six months. Some I hiked near the entire time. Some I met once and never saw again. The ones I can still call are the ones I made the effort for at the moment. Get the name. Get the number. You will want them later I promise… Not just for nostalgia, but because having people scattered all over the globe who would open their door for you is one of the quiet gifts the trail leaves behind.

3. Find a way to document your journey from day one.

I spent over 150 days on trail and I wish I could remember all of them. I can’t.

A single photo can bring back an entire day. Where I camped, what a water source looked like, who I was with, what I ate, how I felt on day 106 when I thought I had nothing left. The days I didn’t document anything are the ones that have gone quiet. Not the hard days or the beautiful ones. The ordinary ones. And some days those are the ones you want to go back to the most, because they were the ones that actually felt like living.

You don’t have to journal every night. You don’t have to write a book. Take a picture of a mushroom. Photograph the trail register. Write down the miles you hiked that day, one bug you noticed, the name of the lake you passed, what you ate in town and whether it was worth it. Small anchors. The memories don’t disappear all at once. They fade slowly, quietly, and you don’t notice until you have a dream of a place you know you saw but you can’t remember where. Start documenting on day one, not day thirty when you realize you’ve already lost something.

Part 2: Things to note before you go, but won’t understand until you’re out there.

4. Remind your loved ones early that communication will be limited, and choose your limited communication wisely.

You will not have unlimited service or battery on trail. The time you spend on your phone has to count.

Before I left, I wish I’d been clearer with people at home about what to expect. Instead, I had a friend who got worried every time they didn’t hear from me for a few days. That worry became my stress. Which is the last thing you need in the desert, when you’re rationing your headlamp batteries for night hiking to escape the heat. Or the 6-10 day stretch in Kings Canyon of absolutely no service. Eventually I set up a Garmin inReach with a simple system: one group message when I started walking, one when I stopped. Two lines or so. It was enough. Everyone knew I was alive and I could keep moving without stress.

But here’s the part nobody tells you: be careful who you call when you do have service. I watched trailmates use their one bar of service to call people who never believed in them or the trip. And they’d come away deflated every time, their peace scraped clean out of them. They’d hang up and the trail would feel harder than it had an hour before. The people actively supporting your journey deserve that call. The people who need convincing can wait until you’re home and you can say “I told you so”. The trail gives you a type of confidence that is genuinely hard to rebuild once it’s gone. Protect your peace like the same way you’ll protect your water supply around Tehachapi.

5. Keep a list of every person you meet.

I kept a running list of every hiker I crossed paths with. By the end, there were over 400 names. When I didn’t catch someone’s name, I wrote a note instead. What they looked like, what made them memorable, something they said, something I noticed etc.

A girl I met near the start, had written me down in her notes as “the girl with the pink and camo pack” and I wrote her as “the girl who brought a slinky.” We didn’t exchange names but had really good conversations. We separated and went four months without seeing each other. Then I was in Oregon and there she was and we both remembered each other instantly. We finally got the names. Four months of existing in each other’s memory with nothing but a description.

That list also saved me at trail registers. If you know who’s nearby, the register becomes a conversation instead of just a logbook. You start to understand the rhythm of who’s ahead and who’s behind. It is a reminder that the trail is not just a solo endeavor and more like a loose, wandering community. Which is exactly what it is.

6. Ask yourself a hard question at the start. Then ask it again, and again.

Before I left, I wrote down a few questions. I answered them. Then I answered them again halfway through the desert when I was desperately seeking shade from a Joshua tree because I thought I might die from the heat, in the Sierras on top of Pinchot pass when I could see the whole world, and again in Oregon after swimming in crater lake, and again somewhere in Washington while I was avoiding packing up my tent in the rain.

My questions were simple:

• What am I afraid of?

• What does success mean to me?

• What do I like about hiking?

• Who and what do I miss from home the most, and why?

• What’s my latest intrusive thought?

My answers changed every single time. Not a little but completely. My fear of rattle snakes in the desert, became a fear of slipping off the infamous knifes edge in goat rocks wilderness in Washington. My fear of wanting to leave trail in North California when the miles were nothing but ruin from burn scares, became “What if I cant finish because of snow” by the time I got halfway through Washington. My definition of success shed about four layers while I watched the sunset at Evolution lake and became much simpler. The person I missed most shifted more than once.

That’s not instability. That’s the whole point. The trail doesn’t just move your feet forward but also your mind. Pay attention to what moves, and write it down so you can see who you were when you started.

7. Have a loose plan for after, but not a deadline.

The re-entry was harder than the trail itself. I didn’t expect that, and I don’t think most people do.

I came home to a world that had kept moving without me, and it expected me to slot back in immediately like nothing ever happened. Some of my trailmates had quit their jobs and had no money left by the end, nothing waiting, nowhere to land, no plan and no runway. The transition swallowed them. Others had a firm start date for a new job or school, and they spent the final weeks of their hike counting down rather than being present. The clock was all they could see.

I didn’t start with a plan. One came to me on trail, slowly. It came in pieces, a direction, then a first step, then something that resembled actual movement. And having that pursuit waiting for me when I got home saved me. Because without something to walk toward when the trail ended, I think I would have fallen into a real darkness. The trail is so full and so alive that coming home to ordinary life without a bridge can feel like stepping off a cliff in slow motion.

I’m not saying you need a five-year plan. Trust me, I thought I would have time to make one on trail. You just need a direction. Something that gives the next chapter a first sentence before the last one ends.

8. You will live a whole life in five to six months, and you will have to mourn it.

When I finished the PCT, I was a different person than when I started. Not in a way I could fully explain to anyone who hadn’t done it, and not in a way that showed on the outside right away.

The quiet removes society’s constant stimulation and slows everything down. Significantly. There are no notifications, no small urgencies, no noise designed to keep your attention fractured. And in that slowed time, everything that is buried underneath you gets room to actually surface. I faced beauty, conflict, inspiration, and desperation in one day. I faced existential questions I didn’t even realize I was carrying. I faced other people’s worldviews up close, for days at a time, with nowhere to retreat. I faced defeat on climbs that didn’t care how determined I was, and triumph on the morning of Mount Whitney when I summited before the sun and felt like the only person alive.

Life outside moves so fast that when you go home, if you go home, it will be as if nothing changed. Everyone will have had the same routine, watched the same shows, complained about the same things. The world will hand you back your old life like a coat you left at the door.

Yet everything will have changed.

Just not for them.

That space between who you became out there and who the world still expects you to be, is real and terrifying, and it takes time to work through. Give yourself that time to really digest that.