Our first 100 miles!

Good and bad surprises during our first seven days on the trail.

We arrived at the Mountain Valley retreat on Friday, March 31st, after seven days of hiking and we’re taking our first Zero Day (rest day) today. We’ve nearly completed Section A of the PCT, from Campo to Warner Springs. We have hiked through lots of mountainous, desert landscape but this year there has been plenty of water and snow. Here’s a visual summary, with the four thousand foot climb over Mount Laguna in the middle:

The good surprises:

• Cross-training works! To say I “trained” is an overstatement, but my backcountry skiing and Kristen’s 10-mile daily walks enabled us to set a new daily record of 23 miles and we’re easily averaging 15 miles/day. The only signs of wear: my sore bunions, blistered pinky toes, and Kristen’s broken baby toe. From Kristen, “There’s a bruise across half my foot but it doesn’t bother me.” Onward!

• We’ve had pleasant hiking temps and lots of water. Temps have been from thirty to sixty degrees and every “seasonal” creek is full. The one waterless stretch of twenty-four miles (Scissors Crossing to Warner Springs) had a fully stocked water cache— pallets of bottled water. I occasionally forgot I was hiking in the desert. As Kristen said to me, “I had a misconception that deserts are hot and dry - not so!”

• We’ve met lots of interesting people. For three days we hiked with our first “tramily” (trail + family). Barb (Cookies) and Eva (SpeedRoach aka “Bloody Pirate”) are an aunt/niece team from Seattle and Layla is a 32 year-old elementary school teacher from Switzerland. All three walk fast as Barb’s a marathoner, Eva’s a college sprinter and Layla’s thirty-two and she really trained. We also stayed in a tiny house hiker hostel in Mount Laguna with “Marbles,” Eddy W., and Jim— all in their thirties and forties with a collective 15 years of fun PCT trail stories. Marble self describes himself as “hiker trash” (think “dirtbag” as a term of endearment) since he thru hikes much of the year.

• Trail magic is real. Thousands of trail angels support hikers along the PCT. We needed a ride from the trail to the Stagecoach RV park near Julian and “Blaze” (a local legend and mobile physiotherapist) opened her van door before we even put our thumbs up. We needed a 35-minute ride to claim our free pie and hit the brewpub in Julian. When we asked the Stagecoach RV attendant for help, he handed us a sticky note with a number to text. “The Professor” picked us up, joined us for dinner, drove us back, then dropped us back at the trail the next morning. “The trail will provide,” is the common PCT refrain.

• The PCT really does follow the crest of the mountains. There are gorgeous views everywhere and the gentle 6% grade makes the frequent 2-4k climbs quite pleasant.

• The Far Out app, custom built for the PCT, makes navigation easy. It details every water hole, campsite, and made it easy for us to connect yesterday with Chery of the Mountain Valley Retreat. She’s hosting us to home-cooked breakfasts and dinners, along with yoga each morning and salt water yurt pool soak this afternoon. (We’ll hit the trail after yoga and breakfast tomorrow morning.)

• It’s fun to see the deep backroads of California. Mount Laguna, for instance, had only one open restaurant which closed at five. We hiked into town at 1:00pm had lunch there, then returned at 4:30pm for happy hour and dinner. There’s a French owner and the chicken pot pie special with croissant crust was to die for. Magnifique!

• I had hot chocolate with marshmallows on my 61st birthday! Simple pleasures. Thanks, Layla and Eva for the tasty birthday treat!

The bad surprises:

• Our first storm. We saw it coming for a few days, so did a 23-mile sprint to a trail town (Julian) to seek refuge. But the storm stalled and left us in momentary “stay or go” paralysis. We pressed forward and hiked in rain and occasional thirty knot gusts for five hours. But our rain gear worked well and we made it to our next campsite without hypothermia. Putting up our tent in the rain is problematic as the main tent is mainly netting— it’s the fly you put over it that blocks the rain. Kristen doom-scrolled her weather app, repeating, for a few hours, “But it says the rain will stop in ten minutes.” We almost set up the tent completely during a two-minute break in the rain but failed, resulting in a damp tent floor. Kristen reports the evening was “miserable” as she huddled on her camp chair under an umbrella. The storm reminded me of my youth on cold, wet sailboats but now I relished our modern rain gear. Our favorite new purchase: two six ounce carbon graphite umbrellas from Six Moon Designs.

• There’s better phone/internet connectivity than expected. It makes it harder to “let go,” though easy to text to arrange a ride to town.

• Snow shifting from a source of delight to adversary. Each new Powderchaser “snorkel alert” email drives me nuts as I know it will make the PCT even more challenging. I also know my pals are enjoying forty inches of fresh snow at Bachelor. (I did manage to ski 75 days before we began this trip.)

• The planning is still complicated. Two major snow storms in the last two weeks have shifted our plans again. All trails above 7,000 feet currently require snowshoes, crampons and ice axes, along with expert knowledge in their use. (It has been 40 years since I did a month of winter mountaineering with NOLS in Alaska— too long to claim expertise.)

Moving forward

Our new plan: hike fifty miles north from our current location in Warner Springs to the Paradise Valley Cafe in Mountain Center then find a ride 150 miles north to Agua Dulce, skipping the San Jacinto, San Bernardino and San Gabriel mountains. From Agua Dulce we’ll hike 200 miles north to Walker’s Pass— the gateway to the High Sierras— then double back to the section we skipped in the LA/Palm Springs area. (We’re hoping significant snow will melt the first two weeks of April - do us a favor and pray for sun.) Did I mention this was complicated?

The blue dot below is our current location and the blue line shows our desired hitch-hike route to Agua Dulce from the Paradise Valley Cafe. BREAKING NEWS: Greg and Cathy Long, currently in La Quinta, offered to give us a ride. The trail provides!

At a meta level, I’m really surprised by the level of interest in this blog (now 400 subscribers). My sense is many are living our journey vicariously but it’s also been a way to connect and share our plans with others on the PCT as we all navigate the record snowfall. Many thanks for the birthday wishes, cheerleading, comments, and questions. Special thanks to Jim Kean, a Tuck (Dartmouth) b-school classmate who did the PCT a few decades ago and passed on his lessons via his comments.

I’m signing off for today. Remember, it’s not an adventure if the outcome is known!

For more photos, you can also follow us here:

• Gib on Instagram

• Kristen on Instagram

Happy Trails!

Gib and Kristen

(Pudding and KarMMa)

PS. Notes on our trail names as we slowly shed our “real world” identities:

• The double “M” in KarMMa is for multiple myeloma and the “Kar” refers to CAR-T cells. KarMMa was the trial name (think trail name) for the pivotal trial that led to the FDA approval of the first CAR-T cell product for the treatment of refractory multiple myeloma, a capstone of Kristen’s career.

• I’m test-driving my trail name, “Pudding.” It’s testament to the 80,000 calories I will ingest in the next six months via Chocolate, Pistachio and Butterscotch Jello pudding. I’m trying not to take the trail name too seriously, it’s memorable, and I think the quirkiness suits me. Let me know in the comments what you think of my new trail name.