PCT Day 64 – SoBo Flip – Arbitrary

Communication Facility on Hat Creek Rim (mile 1391) to campsite at Lassen NP boundary (mile 1365)

Total PCT miles hiked: 873

Due to our early start Keith (Starman) and I arrived at the Sierras when there was still a lot of snow, and decided it wasn’t safe to attempt a crossing given my skill level. We elected to flip up to northern California and hike southbound (SoBo) back to where we left off near Lone Pine – giving the snow a chance to melt out. During this flip the PCT milage will be counting down, but I’ll include a tally of our total milage hiked so that you can keep aprised of our progress in a linear fashion.

Tonight we’re camped just outside the boundary for Lassen Volcanic National Park. A campsite chosen exclusively because on one side of the boundary line we need to house all our food in a a bear cannister, and on this side of the line we do not. We’ll camp here tonight and tomorrow we’ll cover the 19 miles of the PCT that run through the park to the next boundary line where the bear cannister is no longer needed. It’s an arbitrary set of lines which, I’m pretty sure the bears don’t give a royal fudge about. But the line wasn’t built by bears, but by humans and we love arbitrary lines.

Take the PCT for example, on paper, according to national boundaries, the trail runs between the Mexican and Canadian borders. In a romantic sense it travels the height of the country. In practice, the trail starts just a few miles south of the small town of Campo, CA a top a small rise in what would be an open field were it not for the decrepit border wall. Campo itself would be unremarkable were it not for it’s proximity to the trailhead. The northern terminus of the trail is no more significant than a point in a dense forest, somewhat north and east of the city of Seattle. Geography class taught me that these places, these borders, have meaning. But when you stand at the southern terminus looking at that ugly wall, the one that everybody crops out of their photos, you realize how irrelevant it is. How arbitrary than on this side of a glorified fence we’re Americans and on that side they’re Mexicans. At this point, everything falls apart. Who decided that you need a bear cannister on this side of the line but not that side? Why did we decide there are three meals in a day and why is the first one the most important? Why is it called Wednesday? How come the trail has to zig zag around this ridge when we could go up and over for a tenth the effort?!

Which is all a very convoluted way of saying that when you’re walking down a trail watching it go hither thither and can see on your map that there is a very direct dirt road to your destination it can become apparent that your entire life you are surrounded by the choices of others that through time we have all come to accept as the norm, within our respective communities of course. And that for the most part you have chosen to accept these rules. That even now on this hike, something that until a few years ago was still seen as pretty out of the norm, your aim is largely about following the prescribed trail. And where there is a pervasive culture in which deviating from the trail is seen as cheating, somehow breaking the thru hiker code of conduct. It’s a feeling I’ve internalized despite generally disagreeing with. How did we all start out on this wild adventure with the goal to do it as uniformly as possible?

What am I even trying to say here.

It is apparent as a hiker that the PCT and the culture surrounding it are going through a growth spurt and are experiencing the normal growing pains associated with popularity. The trail is moving from counter culture to mainstream and some people just don’t like it. However, this happens to all niche activities as they are picked up by the masses. Ultra running had this happen a decade ago, and then too people laid the blame on a book, or in ultra running’s case, two books: Ultra Marathon Man by Dean Karnazis and Born to Run by Christopher McDougal. And just as we’re seeing now, people will make the argument that the changes in the sport are largely negative. A lot of this argument boils down to: it was better back in my day because I say so. I had a trail angel tell me that Wild was the worst thing to happen to the trail, just minutes after telling me how they’ve been able to put in better signs along the stretch near his home because of money from the PCTA. He couldn’t seem to see the connection between more hikers and an increase in money. Though the reality is with both thru hiking and ultra running the catalyst for change was slower to arrive and the result of larger factors at work. Running always sees an uptick in participation when the economy is tanking, and growth in the outdoors industry has been ticking up for years.

But people want an easy scapegoat in the same way they want easy lines and boundaries laid out for them. When there were only a hundred thru hikers or less each year it’s easier to define yourself by the achievement. You know where you belong and the community feels close. But as something becomes more poplar the box gets a little bigger and a little bigger until you can’t see the edges and you feel lost in the tide of mass participation. There are so many unfamiliar faces you can’t easily tell who is in the group or out. So you redraw the box, make it smaller to include just the ‘back in my day’ folks. But not everybody has the benefit of age, so in order to shrink the box maybe you put rules on the activity, arbitrary lines in the sand to divide thru hiking purists versus the plebian hoard. Even the way in which folks refer to these hardcore rule followers as purists is problematic; as though anything but strict adherence is tainted or dirty. But again, it’s something to hang your hat on, it’s someone to be. The Harry Potter sorting hat quiz has been taken millions of times, you think that’s a coincidence? Humans love having a quick shorthand to identify ourselves, recognize others, know we’re not alone.

Which of course we’re not, we’re all unified by our need to belong, to fit in. And maybe that’s the worst realization, that you’re just like everybody else, and you’re the only one who can see all those boxes you keep drawing in the sand.