Back in California!

We hiked 105 miles from Echo Lake to Sierra City & are now enjoying Labor Day weekend in Lake Tahoe. I outline our gear, pack weight & the realities of Luxury Light thru-hiking. Plus, a 4th rescue!

KarMMa and I were hiking along Echo Lake when I texted a former colleague who I recalled had a house nearby. I got a response within moments:

“I’m away, but here’s the location pin for the cabin. Take my boat across the lake and buy a bottle of wine before the store closes at 5! Bill is 6 houses to the north — say hi.”

This is the joy of being back in California, near Lake Tahoe, where many friends and family are willing to pitch in as informal Trail Angels. We followed the directions and ended the evening with dinner at Bill’s house, followed by an evening cowboy camping on a lakeside cabin deck:

Did I mention the cabin had Starlink internet? The adventure continues!

Where are we now?

Ten days ago, after crossing into Canada and a five-day break in Bend, we re-started the PCT from Echo Lake, just southwest of Lake Tahoe. Our nephew, Aidan Pearson, drove us into the Sierra, and we hiked north for 100 miles from Echo Lake to Sierra City. Trail Angels Rainer and Carrie Brachmann picked us up and hosted us for Labor Day weekend at their house in Truckee, along with our daughter, Brit, and her boyfriend, Ali.

Some highlights:

• Desolation Wilderness — just north of Echo Lake — is gorgeous. We were treated to idyllic sunsets over Lake Tahoe, a full view of the Sierra as we crossed over the 9,390-foot Dick’s Pass, and toured the backside of the Palisades Tahoe Ski Resort.

• As we approached Donner Ski Ranch, Patrick Somers asked for a list of things we craved, then picked us up at the trail and took us to his home at Donner Lake for the evening. He delivered everything on our list, including watermelon, beer, margaritas, vanilla ice cream, strawberries, salmon, and many vegetables.

• Another rescue! As we headed north from Donner Pass, we intercepted Speedy, heading south. We had hiked with her and her boyfriend, Swivel, on the Oregon Coast Trail in June. While we waited for Swivel, Speedy explained that her boyfriend had diarrhea for six days, couldn’t stomach food, and walked at a very slow, 1.5-mph pace. When Swivel finally arrived, KarMMa gave him four monstrous pills. Her diagnosis: Swivel’s water filter, way overdue for replacement, had failed, and he had a water-borne parasite, most likely Giardia. Rainer and Carrie picked the two of them up at I-80, fed, showered, and laundered them, and by the next day, Swivel destroyed a six-pack of Haagan-Daaz ice cream— just as we arrived at Rainer and Carrie’s house. Here are Rainer, Carrie, Swivel, Kristen, and Speedy— all healthy:

It’s fun to be back in California. It feels like Oregon, where we often visited old friends and colleagues along the trail, making it a true “luxury light” experience. The only downside is that we had to carry bear-proof food containers through Desolation Wilderness, adding 2.5 pounds to each pack. Ugh.

I’ve had a computer this weekend and had time to reflect on our journey, so I outlined our “Rookie Mistakes” and built a little “Gear and Weights” spreadsheet to detail the realities of “Luxury Light” thru-hiking.

Rookie Mistakes

The day before KarMMa and I started the PCT, we met Barney “Scout” Mann (a triple-crowner and author of “Journey’s North”) and his wife, Frodo. When I asked for advice, he was reticent. Looking back, I think he knew the PCT experience is radically different for everyone, given your start date, previous experience, weather conditions, age, economic background, and personal preferences. You can give very little generic advice without knowing more about the hiker.

Like most things, we learned about thru-hiking through experimentation, mainly through mistakes:

• We failed to understand the extent to which plans would change. When we started, we knew we would skip the High Sierra, given the record snowfall. I meticulously built a spreadsheet outlining a plan to schedule food box deliveries to post offices along the trail. The mistake: I reordered the spreadsheet rows, copying and pasting all the High Sierra rows to the bottom of the spreadsheet. But with significant pivots to the Oregon Coast Trail, the Rogue River Trail, and then the PCT in Oregon and Washington before flipping back to hike the PCT in northern California, my spreadsheet is now a disaster. Outline a “fuzzy vision,” but expect lots of change. Don’t build an overly detailed plan.

• Backpacking and thru-hiking are different sports. We started as backpackers, with frequent two to seven-day trips. With backpacking, you visit a specific destination with a known route and itinerary. Before the PCT, our packs were forty pounds, and we hiked 10-14 miles daily. With PCT thru-hiking, you walk 2,650 miles, and your mileage builds to more than 20 miles/day. You need lighter gear to make the higher mileage feasible, and you spend less time in camp each evening, which means you need fewer “creature comforts.” We suspected we would need different gear for the PCT but were unwilling to swap out our tried and true backpacking equipment. With perfect hindsight, we should have made these changes sooner:

  1. Get rid of Gore-Tex. Our Gore-text backpacking gear — pants and jackets combined — weighed two pounds each. After six weeks on the PCT, we upgraded to lightweight rain gear. Each of us now carries about eight ounces of waterproof gear. We also saved three ounces each with ultra-lightweight rain covers for our backpacks.

  2. Invest in ultralight backpacks. Each of our “Granite Gear” backpacks is about 3 pounds. After four months, we finally ordered new ultralight packs that weigh 1.5 pounds. They’ll arrive in early October.

  3. Buy a single-wall, Dyneema tent. Our “tried and true” Big Agnes tent, with a separate “fly” (the double wall), weighed about 3.5 pounds. Our new Durston tent, which uses my hiking sticks as tent poles, weighs 1.5 pounds. It’s made of high tech Dyneema Composite Fabric which is crazy light, strong and waterproof.

  4. One pair of shoes is enough. We each began with a spare pair of water/camp shoes. Modern trail hiking shoes dry quickly, and you can change into fresh socks each evening, so you don’t need extra shoes.

  5. Don’t bring backups. At the beginning of the hike, I got a spare water filter as I was worried I would lose or break it. We also brought two headlamps each in case one died. Now, we have a single one-liter “Be Free” Katahdin squeeze water filter that weighs three ounces, and we carry just one headlamp each. If you lose or break something, you can replace it within a few days.

• Bring a complete set of pajamas. Initially, I wore underwear and a t-shirt inside my sleeping bag, but you need to cover your entire body to keep your bag from getting stinky, and you can’t wear your dirty daytime clothes. (Think about sleeping in the same sheets for six months without washing them— sleeping bags require professional care.)

• Experiment to see what works. There are no rules for what to carry. We each left our one-pound chair behind for a week. KarMMa, who spends time sitting at her stove, finds her chair is worth the weight. I’m happier saving nine ounces by using a three-ounce 1/8-inch thick mat to sit and lie on. Experienced thru-hikers highly recommend eight-ounce umbrellas. We both tried carrying these “hatbrellas” but seldom needed them. Also, they were strapped to the side of our packs and snagged branches when not in use, so we ditched them.

• Things change with time, season, and geography. Early on, I discarded my shoe gaiters as needless clutter. But by late summer in Oregon and Washington, when the ground was dusty, I started wearing gaiters again to keep my feet clean. Depending on the long-term weather forecast, we’ve been throwing a lightweight down jacket in and out of our backpacks for the last two months.

• Manage water carefully. At 2.2 pounds per liter, water is heavy. The rule of thumb is to carry one liter per person every five miles. But you can carry half as much on a cool day or drink lots of water in the morning to minimize water requirements. For dry camping (a campsite with no water source), we learned that 4.5 liters were sufficient for dinner, breakfast, and a few hours of hiking the next day. Early on, KarMMa and I carried 1.5 to 2.0 liters, but now we carry an average of one liter each.

• Our nighttime food storage has evolved. Most PCT hikers store their food inside their tents, but because we sleep in a space equivalent to a single bed, we often store food in our outside tent vestibule in an open Walmart grocery bag. But in Washington state, we were attacked by mice. (Super rookie mistake: In the middle of the night, we brought the bags into our tent, but the mice were still inside the bags— they sprinted around the tent walls like they were in a bike velodrome.) So, I started hanging bags in trees. But mice can climb the ropes and quickly entered our open Walmart bags, so we switched to closed nylon bags. And while I am good at hanging food bags in trees — out of the reach of bears — bears are much more intelligent than I thought. Bears took ten bear hangs down in one season in Desolation Wilderness. My guess is for the rest of the trip, we’ll sleep with the food inside our tents. Mice seem unwilling to chew through tent walls, and there are no reports of tent-slashing bears— yet.

• The balancing act of what to carry isn’t as simple as need/comfort/joy v. weight. Safety is another consideration. Kristen’s 1-pound medical kit has rescued four hikers, and we each carry a Garmin rescue beacon. Another consideration is time. We’re considering carrying a 3-ounce electric pump to blow up our air mattresses because it saves time and avoids the mildew caused by inflating the pad with moist breath.

• A twelve-ounce battery charges our electronics for six days. Early on, I worried about using up our battery. I used old-fashioned cord headphones so I wouldn’t need to recharge my Airpods. But I switched to the simpler Airpods because we never drained our battery. While everyone is intrigued by solar panels, every hiker I ask tells me their solar charger is worthless — they’re not worth the weight.

Luxury Light: A List of Our Gear (+Weights)

There’s a lot of tension in our Luxury Light “fuzzy vision.” But at least one component is measurable. Here’s the gear I carry and the weights for each item. I started with my personal “base weight,” which means all the equipment I have except for food and water:

With no shared resources, my “personal base weight” is close to ten pounds.

Shared resources

KarMMa and I split our shared resources 50/50 by weight. The shared equipment KarMMa packs is our 3.5 pound kitchen kit— gas, stove, cups, plates, utensils—plus her one-pound chair and another half pound of assorted items— water bottles, repair gear, tools, and electronic cables.

Here’s the detailed list of the shared gear I carry:

My “base weight” — my stuff plus my share of our common resources— is fifteen pounds. Because KarMMa and I split the shared weight 50/50, and she carries about the same amount of personal gear, her base weight is 15 pounds, too. (I don’t have the detailed list of KarMMa’s gear and don’t want to overwhelm you with details.)

Wear weight

The last category outlines the items I wear or carry in my pockets daily (which aren’t counted in base weight):

I’m not sure how important it is to reduce my wear weight, given my body weight has dropped by fifteen pounds, but I am open to feedback.

So, each of our base weights (no food or water) is about fifteen pounds. For perspective, ultralight hikers carry less than ten pounds, and zealots get down to five pounds.

Total weight

Our total weight is a function of the number of days of food we carry— from two to seven days. A ballpark estimate for food weight is three pounds daily for the two of us, and our average water weight is 2.2 pounds each. Because I am heavier than KarMMa (and eat a little more), I carry more food than she does. I carry 4-5 more pounds of food at the beginning of each multi-day hike.

Here are future opportunities to lighten our packs:

• We’ll save a pound or two, each, when we get our new Atom ultralight packs.

• Many thru-hikers carry quilts instead of sleeping bags. With quilts, you sleep directly on your mattress. This provides a five-ounce weight saving compared to sleeping bags.

• We can afford freeze-dried food, so I’ll bet our total food weight is less than most twenty-year-olds operating on tight budgets. But given food is a large percentage of pack weight, it pays to manage food weight carefully.

Plenty of items on our lists are open for debate. Given I developed my third hernia and have persistent shoulder and rib pain due to pack weight, I emphasize “light” more than KarMMa, who focuses more on “luxury.” Her frequent refrain is,

“I need something to look forward to.”

KarMMa continually reminds me that carrying a one-pound chair would only increase our total base weight by nine ounces. (I’d leave my current 3-ounce mat behind). My share of this increase would be half, so my pack weight would only increase by 4.5 ounces. But the one-pound chair is symbolic for me. It feels wrong to carry a one-pound chair when you aspire to be an ultra-light thru-hiker.

If any ultralight thru-hikers read this essay, I am interested in your thoughts on further reducing our pack weight. For everyone else, do you lean towards luxury or light?

What’s next?

Here’s the map of the 450 miles we’re currently focused on, from Echo Lake at the south end to Mount Shasta to the north. We completed the bottom quarter of this section this past week, and tomorrow, Rainer and Carrie Brachmann will drive us back to Sierra City to continue our hike. We plan to complete this northern California section by September 23rd when our nephew, Aidan, picks us up and drives us back to Bend.

“Real life” competes for our time in late September when we each co-host a conference. KarMMa’s event is for women in biotech, and mine is the “Product Leader Summit,” an invite-only event for 120 VP-level product leaders in Palo Alto. (It will be 50/50 male/female with 20% black/Latinx.)

We hope to spend time filling in the gaps in our PCT journey in October, so the big remaining remaining hole will be the High Sierra, which we plan to do next summer with Luc and Lucy. By the fall, we will have hiked close to 2,650 miles— the length of the PCT. But this total includes 512 “bonus miles” from the Oregon Coast and Rogue River Trails. We won’t complete the PCT this year, but you can’t accuse us of laziness!

If you like this essay, click the heart icon. We also enjoy reading your comments and questions are lots of fun.

NOTE: To like or comment, you’ll need to subscribe to this newsletter. The dialog box suggests you might need to pay, but I don’t collect credit cards, and the newsletter will always be free. So, go ahead and click the subscribe button. That way, each essay will automatically be delivered to your inbox —you’ll never miss one!

Happy Trails,

Pudding and KarMMa

(Gib and Kristen)

PS. For more photos, you can follow us here:

• Gib on Instagram

• Kristen on Instagram

PPS. If you want a best guess of where we will be when or to see the crazy spreadsheet that powers our PCT resupplies, click here.