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After a year in front of a computer at a finance company, I made just about as dramatic a change in life-style as possible: I spent the next 6 months walking from Mexico to Canada, through some of the most picturesque, rugged wilderness in the country -- maybe even world.

A girl friend had first told me of the PCT years before. Apparently my response was essentially: "why would anyone ever do that?!" Obviously that was a different person. I met some thru-hikers on my cross-country bike trip a few years earlier. They were about to descend into the long hot stretch across the Mojave desert. They had a look about them that said: "why the hell are we doing this?" They weren't optimistic about the heavy snow-pack in the High Sierra, and they were considering walking up the 395 through Owens Valley instead.

Given that this was all the information I had of the trail, it's a little bewildering that I became obsessed with doing it myself. But one long weekend in spring I set off on a 70 mile backpacking trip into the local San Gabriel Mountains, and made it back in less than three days: that day I decided I could and would do the PCT some day.

Unfortunately my preparations for the trip were less physical than logistical: I gave 6 month notice at work (they didn't know what to do with that much notice, so they pretended I wasn't leaving until about two weeks before I left before frantically trying to replace me); I purchased maps and guides and pored over them repeatedly at night trying to will the time to pass more quickly; I borrowed a sewing machine and bought a bunch of cordura and ripstop nylon and made a crude backpack (I had evolved past polyurethane tarp and duct tape, thank god!); and I worked tirelessly to try to prepare things for my unfortunate successor at work. Nowhere in that list did hiking or physical training enter. I was in superb shape from climbing, after a long rigorous training program with my roommate, Steve, over the winter; I think I was subconsciously expecting that to support me along the hike somehow. In fact climbers are ideally unsuited for long distance hiking in many ways: toothpick vestigial legs, bulky lats and forearms, very little long distance endurance -- climbers are built for short powerful climbs, not endless miles slogging up and down gentle rocky mountain trails. I impressed some fellow thru-hikers early on by doing several pull-ups with my gratuitously over-weighted backpack on, but that is about the total extent that my superb climbing physique helped me.

Southern California

So when I found myself stranded by my future roommate, George, at the remote trailhead near Campo on the desolate Mexican border one fine afternoon in May 1997, I was as completely and totally unprepared for the reality of long distance hiking as anyone ever was. I'm embarrassed to say that when I'd weighed myself with my pack on the previous night I read off 220 pounds. I only weigh 130. To this day I have trouble figuring out how I managed to get my pack to weigh so much. Or why. It had something to do with the fact that I packed for the first time around 1am the night before, and had absolutely no time to reconsider my gear list. I'd thrown in 2 gallons of water (there's 16 pounds in one fell blow!), my entire bag of tools (including things like a grommet setter that I'd forgotten were in there -- grommet setters weigh a ton!), enough food to feed an army, ice axe, complete guidebook, letters and papers, climbing shoes, several sweat-suits, etc. etc. I'd planned not to re-supply except to buy groceries in towns near the trail, so I needed to carry all the gear I would need -- which is why I ended up with an ice axe in the middle of the broiling desert.

I staggered down the trail a couple hundred feet and sat down in the spotty shade of a greasewood bush. Okay, this obviously was not going to work. I pulled out the water, drank and poured out half of it, pulled out a few other heavy items, like guide book and tools, and put those in a plastic shopping bag. Now that I was capable of standing up again, I carried the rest by hand the long first mile of a 2700 mile trek. Fortunately the little town Campo has located itself conveniently in the middle of the trail one mile from the border. I sat down outside the post office and took everything out of my pack. A guy calling himself "Fireboy", a veteran of the Appalachian Trail, passed me and asked what I was doing: I told him I was on a "which-hunt" -- which things were going to stay, and which were going to go. I emerged with an enormous and satisfactorily heavy box, and maybe a 45-50 pound backpack. Of course, it turned out to be Sunday, and I had to search the whole town before I could finally pay someone to take my box and promise to mail it to my old climbing roommate the next day.

It was a pretty traumatic introduction to long-distance hiking, but the hard lessons are learned best. My "discovery" turns out to be at the very heart of the sport: I can't begin to remember how many times I've gone through my gear, either physically or in my head at night, looking for things I didn't need, or at very least could eke by without. Every additional pound on your back sucks out that much more of your very life and soul.

That evening as the sun set over the desert and the crescent moon slipped behind a hill, I caught up with Fireboy. He had an equally rude, if less instructive, introduction to the PCT: he'd gotten lost by accidentally taking an illegal alien's trail at a sharp turn in the PCT and ended up in a field with an enormous bull, barely escaping with his life as he tells the story. He finally found the trail again after thrashing up through almost impenetrable thickets of manzanita. We'd meet and hike together periodically throughout the first half of the trail.

In our time together in those early days he initiated me into the social aspect of the long-distance trail. He explained about trail names and how he'd gotten his by almost setting himself on fire while cooking one night on the AT. He dubbed me "Tick" much to my initial displeasure because I apparently looked like a tick with my gigantic bulging brown backpack and my tiny hands and legs poking out. He introduced me to Otter Raving Maniac, a sweet heavy girl from Maine, and Steve and Amy from Montana (I think), all of whom had hiked the AT the same year as Fireboy and had kept in touch in the years between. We hiked together through the desert section that first week. Or sort of together: it seemed understood that we'd all hike our own pace, but somehow we'd always end up camping in the same place or meeting in towns later on. We parted ways in Idyllwild, that gorgeous mountain village in the San Jacinto Mountains east of Los Angeles.

My ankles had suffered from the still very heavy pack and the long hot miles. I hobbled into the campground there in Idyllwild barely able to walk. I stayed there with Otter and the occasional hiker passing through for a week. Still not healed and restless to get moving, I wrapped ace bandages around my ankles as tightly as I dared, cut two alder hiking sticks, and limped off. I was going to reach the top of Mt. San Jacinto at least -- something I'd wanted to do ever since I first saw it the year I moved to LA. What came after that would just have to take care of itself.

I made it to the top, giving myself tennis elbow in both arms from heaving myself up the 5000 feet or so mostly by using my walking sticks. The next stretch of trail is famous on the PCT: it descends from near the 11000+ foot peak all the way to the San Gorgonio Pass at 2000 feet, through which the San Andreas Fault runs, splitting the San Bernardino Mountains to the north (which top out at just over 12000 feet) from the San Jacinto Mountains to the south (over 11000 feet). It descends these 9000 feet in a maddeningly winding, overly gentle, 26 mile trail. The key difficulty going north is the complete lack of water. I started down early that morning figuring this was my last day on the trail -- there was no way my ankles could survive this! When I reached the dusky desert plain at the bottom that evening I was too exhausted to think. By noon the next day I was a new person. Re-forged in the fire of the desert, and tempered by the ice of the lofty mountain tops, my ankles emerged as if by miracle strong and healthy. I fairly danced up the rest of the trail that day after descending from San Jacinto. I don't question divine intervention.

I saw my first bear in the hot desert among a surreal landscape of eerily whining windmills: the wind howling through San Gorgonio Pass is steady and strong, now providing a fair amount of power for the desert Oasis, Palm Springs, nestled picturesquely in the shimmering desert in the shadow of towering San Jacinto, smack in the middle of the San Andreas Fault.

The time I spent in Idyllwild had not been wasted: I further reduced my pack. I avoided the ritual the AT hikers called the "Pack Gong", named after the Gong Show, where the victim would spread the contents of his or her pack out and go through everything one by one, while the surrounding audience would "gong" every item that was deemed unnecessary. The owner, of course, had veto power, but the peer pressure was sufficient to strip people of some of their most prized possessions -- as traumatic as it seems, this kind of pressure is exactly what you need sometimes to give up those supposedly essential non-essentials. My private pack gong wasn't quite as extreme, but effective nonetheless. Over the months I would continue to winnow down my gear until my pack was probably one of the lightest on the trail at the end: while trudging through the snow in late October in Washington, the two guys hiking with me at the time would sink thigh-deep with every step, while I was able to lightly skate on top of the wind-blown crust ahead of them.

While in Idyllwild I learned the technique of the "drift box". I took out my ice axe, spare shoes, climbing gear, etc. and mailed it ahead to myself. It was all gear that was supposedly essential, but which I certainly did not need in the coming sections of the trail. Things like my cup were tossed -- I just kept a small bowl and a spoon; those will suffice in a pinch for any meal I'm interested in cooking. All my repair gear was mailed ahead. All the maps were mailed ahead. I ended up with sleeping bag, bivy sack, rain shell, one sweat suit, compass, knife, toothbrush, bowl and spoon. There were probably one or two other things, but that was the gist. What good is a book, for instance, if you never have time to read because you're so tired from carrying a heavy pack? I'd made some questionable decisions, too, such as ditching the water filter. (Fireboy insisted he knew several people who'd hiked the whole PCT without a filter.)

When I repacked, I discovered that the pack was about four times too large. So I removed the entire back panel (it was just a glorified bag with shoulder straps) and tossed out the internal frame. When I walked out of camp with three days' food, I couldn't have been carrying more than 30 pounds. You can't imagine the difference 60 pounds can make on the morale! I could have been out on a day hike; indeed I've met people who do carry more than that on day hikes. I suppose it is no wonder that my ankles healed afterward.

I learned in the following weeks that it is entirely possible to hike more than 30 miles in a single day and even to keep it up for a few days in succession. Those re-supply towns don't look so far apart when you're pulling off mileage like that.

The infamous stretch of trail routed through the Mojave to avoid the private land holdings of the mammoth Tejon Ranch passed almost trivially: I raced down out of the mountains in the early afternoon and headed into the desert as the sun hung low in the sky. Stopping at about the halfway point well after dark, I rested till just before day break, then race-walked the rest of the way to the spring at the foot of the Tehachapi Mountains in the glorious early morning sunlight. It is 40 miles all told with no water for most of the distance, despite the fact that you are literally walking on top of the LA aqueduct, tantalizingly just out of reach inside a sinuously winding concrete pipe. Timed carefully like that, the miles slid past effortlessly, while the soft light played with shadows and colors on the far-reaching vistas of desert mountain ranges on every side.

I was racing to try to reach Kennedy Meadows by June 26th. Kennedy Meadows is the PCT equivalent of Damascus on the AT. Perhaps 100 people will attempt to through-hike the PCT each year (30 or 40 might finish). Because of snow lingering in the high country of the High Sierra, there is a bottleneck south of the first high passes near Olancha Peak. Because of time constraints due to early snows in Washington, you want to start as early as possible, but at the same time you can't get past the High Sierra until the spring snow melt. The result is almost all 100 people through-hiking the trail pass through Kennedy Meadows in the space of a couple days. Alas, I missed it by one day! The day before I arrived there were over 20 people, I met only 2.

High Sierra

The next stretch largely follows the old John Muir Trail, built by the PWA in the 30's. It is, by itself, probably the most beautiful stretch of trail anywhere on the planet. (Although I haven't been to New Zealand yet -- I'll be able to compare next January!) The trail climbs one pass after another through the most pristine, exquisite, rugged, rocky mountain scenery imaginable. Sparkling lakes and glowing wildflowers dot the landscape between jagged snow-capped peaks and thundering mountain rivers.

That time of year, the first days of July, there is still enough snow left to deter the hordes of backpackers that descend upon the wilderness in August and September. We PCT hikers had the trail to ourselves, breaking trail over the snowbound passes, the first to cast eyes on the budding red paintbrush and penstemmon, and the bright blue polemonium perched on the highest crags.

Since I was at the tail end of the group, I left my ice axe behind. I loaded up my pack with junk food (that was all I could find in the tiny store there in Kennedy Meadows) and staggered off. Headed North. On the airy patches of snow high above rocky cirques, I would stab my walking stick into the icy hard snow, hold on for dear life, placing one foot at a time in the foot prints hammered deep by the 100 hikers preceding me, extracting the stick and repeating. On the far side, I would skid down the north slopes, skiing on my feet the best I could so I could leap clear of hidden rocks and large sun-cups. There was a particularly dangerous 30 foot couloir at the top of Forester Pass (13000 feet) and an overhanging cornice on Mather Pass that trail-breakers literally had to punch a vertical tunnel through, although even the followers like me still had to essentially climb the last 5 feet of sheer ice. I had to wade across no more than 3 or four streams -- almost every stream had a dry crossing up or downstream from the trail, especially if you felt nimble enough to boulder hop a bit (a long walking stick helps tremendously). Mosquitoes bothered me only two or three days... although on those days they were unbearable.

Upon reaching Tuolumne meadows -- a major milestone, because it is an important re-supply point -- I finally caught up with the PCT horde, including Fireboy. Having left me in Idyllwild with bum ankles, he was convinced he'd never see me again. We each had lots of stories to share that night. (For example he'd taken a side trip to climb Mt. Whitney in his tevas!) I hitched a ride down to the Valley to meet some old high-school friends and climbed with them for a week.

The next stretch from Tuolumne to Lake Tahoe is almost as beautiful as the High Sierra, with spectacular views, deep green lakes, and multitudes of wildflowers that flourish in the volcanic soil of the northern Sierras. The Sierras were probably the height of my trip -- in top form, I was hiking 25 miles a day on the JMT (a pretty good feat), and 30 miles a day to Tahoe; I was as healthy and happy as I ever was. I met a man, also named Jason (Pokey on the trail), who described being moved so much that he would shout from the sheer overwhelming joy of freedom. It's a feeling that a lot of long-distance hikers seem to share; something that's impossible to describe or share with someone who has never done a long trip like that. Sometimes it's hard not having anyone to share that with, being surrounded by people who can't possibly understand that that feeling is forever a part of you afterword, that all other experience is colored by those moments of supreme joy and contentment and peace.

Northern California

Not long after leaving Tahoe, you get a glimpse of the first of the great Cascades volcanoes, Mt. Lassen. But it's Mt. Shasta that is the real symbol of the PCT, I think. You see it from the hills south of Lassen, and it follows you on the horizon for months, literally, as you pass Lassen, traverse the infamous Hat Creek Rim, detour west past the rugged impressive Castle Crags, through the remote Trinity Alps, Russian River Wilderness and Marble Mountains, and still farther on you can look back from Pilot Knob, Crater Lake, or Mt. Thielsen, and sure enough Shasta is still poking up above the curve of the earth overseeing your glacially slow progress ever northward. Yet in all that time you never go near it.

Unless, of course, you can trick someone into giving you a ride to the base, and you climb it on one of your "rest" days. Or two. The other Jason and I met at Castle Crags, and over a game of poker with several other hikers, including Cap'n Marcus and Breaking Wind, both from Hawaii of all places, we decided to do it together. Marcus had just come back -- we were not very difficult to convince after hearing his tale! The mountain is over 14000 feet, but the trick is that the base is barely 4000, and even the trailhead is just over 7000. We camped at maybe 8000 feet. The next morning I awoke at the break of dawn to find that Shasta had turned into a virtual Christmas tree, with a steady long line of headlamps lighting the way up Avalanche Gulch: people were trying to get as early a start as they could. Ah, but it is nice to be in such great physical shape! Probably the last to start, I still reached the peak first some 6000 vertical feet later. Ha! I wish I could say that it was a fair competition and I'm just better than everyone else, but alas, no, I'd be the last one up if I were to do it now. I napped at top, huddled in the lee of a rock pile to escape the ferocious wind, admiring the most tremendous view you'll ever see, before heading down. Down is the fun part: there is a 3000 foot luge run carved into the softening snow from hundreds of people glissading down. I found a group of people at the top waiting for the snow to soften enough for it to be safe. I didn't know anything about it, figuring they were just hesitating from fear, so I jaunted up and threw myself down the slope without even looking (lest I be paralyzed from fear, too!) Yee ha! That was the most exciting joy ride I've ever been on. About 15 minutes later I gave up trying to push myself along the gradually leveling slope and leapt down the rest of the snowy slope in giant moon steps.

That was a turning point for me on the trail. A few days afterward I came down with giardia (from drinking out of the Sacramento River!) I'll forever remember the first night I was sick. I'd collapsed beside the trail somewhere with a tremendous view and decided to wait there till I died (at least that's about how I felt at the time). Night came on and I built a tiny fire to lighten my spirits a bit (I'd built about two fires on the trail so far -- they were extreme luxuries; I hate to make that much of a mark on the landscape). Later that night I woke up and smelled smoke. Too much smoke. I felt around in the dark and the ground was scalding hot everywhere around the fire -- the duff beneath the soil had started smoldering. When I dug down a bit it flamed up and spit sparks into the racing wind. I panicked, totally forgot I was sick, and poured every ounce of water I had in a circle around the hot spot, at least containing the fire. I dug a trench around that to the rock beneath the duff to make doubly sure. But now there was a problem: I had no water and water was very scarce on this stretch of trail. I remembered a wet spot a little while back on the trail, so I stumbled off that way the best I could. It was so dark that I couldn't see my hand in front of my nose. But starlight makes the trail glow just the slightest bit brighter than the surrounding blackness in your peripheral vision. It's enough. After what seemed forever, I caught the glint of a star reflecting from water. I got on my hands and knees and felt around the area until I found a place I could sit and wait while my water bottles slowly trickled full. I vividly remember sitting there that night: I made that trip several times, bringing water back to douse the fire, then returning finally one last time to get enough drinking water to last the night. Meanwhile, sitting there waiting for the seeping spring to slowly fill my bottles, I had a superb view of 90% of the sky, full of stars, watching one of the best meteor displays I've ever seen -- it turned out to be a particularly good Perseids shower that year, and it just happened to occur on that night.

I survived that night and stumbled on. After a day of sickness, I would have another day or two of feeling good. The only problem was I was extremely weak because I essentially got no food to stay down during the week that it took me to get to Seiad Valley. I even tried to continue from there, as I arrived on one of the days I was feeling good, only to get sick again and hitch a ride back into town the next day. I stayed in Seiad Valley for about a week. A bar-owner gave me a ride into Yreka where I went to the hospital and got a prescription of Flagyl. I immediately started recovering, but I lingered for a few days to recover some strength. My confidence had finally been shaken. I carried a bottle of iodine with me when I finally left town. The ironic thing in this story is that the first full day back on the trail was my longest: I did just over 40 miles crossing the Oregon border all the way to the I-5. I think it was because I had lost so much weight while I was sick.

Oregon

I decided to hitch a ride into Ashland, OR. I rarely hitchhiked; I would usually just walk -- after all you're hiking 2700 miles, what's another 2 or 3? But Ashland was very inviting, and it was 15 miles away by foot. I swear I hadn't so much as stepped onto the shoulder and put out my thumb when I turned around and there was a guy already pulled over and waiting for me! We explored the town together and he took me to a meditation workshop that he'd come up to attend. I replaced my shoes and re-supplied and stayed around to rest a day after he left. Returning to the trail proved to be more difficult. I waited about 3 hours for a ride before giving up and walking the 15 miles instead, arriving at the trailhead just after dark.

I never quite got into the trail again. I took a few days off at Crater Lake when some friends came down to visit. I took a few more days off a week later to visit some more friends in Eugene. By time I reached the Three Sisters and Mt. Jefferson (the next major landmarks), the first winter storms were starting to roll through. I was snowed on heavily north of Mt. Jefferson, where I huddled in a pathetic open shelter one night shivering from hypothermia with every article of clothing soaked through, including my synthetic sleeping bag. The following day I dried out in a toasty little cabin with a blazing wood-stove. That's where I met Paul. It turns out that Paul had been following me a week or so back the entire trail, reading all my trail register entries trying to piece together who I was. I think I disappointed him tremendously! At any rate, he'd passed me in the night while I was shivering miserably in the shelter, and I'd caught him at this little mountain resort. We hiked the rest of the trail together: we mutually agreed that the weather was starting to get dangerous, and that we'd really be better off hiking together.

The weather let up for a few days between Mt. Hood and Adams. The views of Ranier and St. Helens were spectacular, as was the fresh snow on the peaks of Hood and later on Adams towering above us. Autumn was well underway, and the mountain sides were covered with crimson and purple huckleberry fields. It was one of the most spectacular stretches of trail because of the time of season and weather. We opted to bypass the official PCT and descended the dramatic Eagle Creek Trail into the Columbia River Gorge. The trail is literally blasted into sheer basalt cliffs, passing behind one spectacular waterfall and past dozens of others. It is hard to overstate the beauty of this verdant and incredibly steep gorge.

Washington

At the Oregon-Washington border we stopped briefly to take a side trip into Hood River to re-supply, where I replaced my cotton sweat shirt with a fleece jacket and bought a length of fleece fabric to use as a liner in my old pulverized sleeping bag. I replaced my shoes, too -- this was my fourth pair. I didn't replace my shoes frequently enough; probably my greatest mistake after drinking indiscriminately from the Sacramento River. Each time I replaced my shoes I would feel like a new man for the next few weeks; I just didn't realize how much of my foot pain was due to beat-up tennis shoes. It would sort of creep up on me before I suddenly realized what the problem was. This fourth pair was a bit more heavy duty than the previous three, as I was anticipating heavy snow before the end. They caused no end of pain for the first few days, but then suddenly, as if a switch had been flipped, one day they felt great.

Our next major snow storm hit Paul and me in the Goat Rocks. We debated our course before going on, but decided that the narrow maps provided in the guide book just weren't sufficient to tell us how to get to civilization via any route other than the PCT itself, which disappeared into the snow and clouds ahead of us. So we plowed on, finding ourselves instantly blinded by whiteout and howling blizzard. Paul distinguished himself by being particularly adept at locating cairns. I pulled out my compass, and we navigated by dead reckoning, going from one cairn to the next. There were tricky moments when all features disappeared, and we couldn't even see our hands. I'd poke my stick around praying that I wasn't about to step off a cliff. Once at a time like this, I saw a black speck: was it a boulder 100 feet ahead? No, it turned out to be a pebble on the side of the sheer cliff an inch from my face! We took pictures of ourselves grinning like devils in the lee of one ridge: this was the most excitement any of us had probably ever had. What a rush! We were cold and wind and snow-blown, but we were having the best time of our lives. Finally the clouds lifted a bit and we gradually emerged from the storm into a fresh winter wonderland.

We camped that night below snow level, deep in a forest. Paul discovered how to start a fire despite every inch of the ground being completely water-logged: he set up a can of sterno, then stacked a huge teepee of really narrow twigs above this, followed by larger wood. It was all soaked to the core, but after a few minutes the sterno had dried and incinerated the twigs and was rapidly boiling away at the larger fuel. We stacked wood all around the fire, and with constant attention we were able to get a blazing fire going and kept it roaring all evening until all our gear was thoroughly dried. That's another day and night I will not forget any time soon.

We got another few days of good weather after that, but clouds and occasional drizzles never let us forget that winter was about to arrive in full force. I received a shipment of goretex pants and jacket in Snoqualmie that I'd ordered from REI a week or so before: I felt as prepared for the bad weather as I'd ever be.

Leaving town we ran across Cap'n Marcus sitting dejectedly under a tarp beside the trail. He'd lost heart and left the trail during the last storm, but had changed his mind and had just gotten back on. I think he was just about to change his mind back when we came along full of optimism: we were gonna make it to that darned Canadian border no matter how much snow was flung at us! I offered to carry his tarp as an extra incentive, and he immediately agreed to join us. (Having a tarp in addition to bivy sack is important in very rainy weather, otherwise you suffocate in a completely closed-up bivy sack, drenching yourself in the moisture you lose through breathing all night long.)

The next wave of storms hit us immediately, pissing snow and rain on us for several days. We completely missed the Alpine Lakes Wilderness -- I suppose that's a fairly common complaint for hikers in Washington, though. Snow started mounting day after day, night after night. We reconsidered at Steven's Pass but forged on. The constant snow was getting pretty fierce by now. Near Red Pass we were flailing in waist-deep wind-crusted snow that was sucking every ounce of energy from us. We made 15 miles our last day on the trail, when we decided to leave the trail and maybe road-walk the rest of the way. I slept well that night having finally made the dreaded decision to leave the trail. But the next day was to prove even more trying than the last!

We plunged down the mountain side, planning a short cross-country trek to a trail near the bottom of the valley. We had no concept of the mess we were getting ourselves into. Repeated avalanches had mowed down vast swaths of forest, leaving a tangled rat's nest of maples and willows and stuff I didn't even recognize. Occasionally we'd find where a bear or elk had bulldozed a path through the tangled forearm-thick trees and we could make some good progress. But most of the time we'd have to fight for every foot of ground, prying trees apart to make room for our packs, pushing through briers and thickets of drenching undergrowth. It was a new level of misery I'd never even dreamed possible. We tried wading the rushing river for a while, but Paul was losing feeling in his feet pretty badly, not having waterproof socks like Marcus and me. I think we made about 5 miles that day. Tempers raged, and relief was nowhere in sight. We camped the best we could on the 45 degree slope: we found a relatively non-soaked depression behind a fallen tree. Paul's tent was the main difficulty, as I could flop my bivy sack down just about any where, even just a crook in a tree had sufficed one previous (uncomfortable) night. But a new day brings new wisdom. Within an hour of starting the next morning, we emerged onto a trail -- oh, glorious trail! -- at precisely the right spot (rather miraculous, actually). I guess we'd passed The Test, because the rest of the walk out was a breeze, through spectacular old growth forest. Of course, when we reached the trailhead we realized that there was still a tremendously long stretch of dreary roads to walk.

We passed Darrington, headed north, and decided to cross the shoulder of Mt. Baker, despite 10 miles of trail that would almost certainly be deep under snow. We stayed the night in the fire lookout overlooking Mt. Baker with a stupendous view of the North Cascades buried in high overcast, Glacier Peak off to the southeast where we'd just come from, and Ranier way in the south. At night we could see the glow from Seattle. Marcus distinguished himself as a superb story teller, particularly of pirate stories. He chose his trail name as a variant on his favorite pirate, Captain Morgan. (Privateer, really, he would say, not a pirate.)

I think it was two days later that we stood on the Canadian Border with Marcus' family who'd come up from Seattle to meet us. Yay. It was an extremely anti-climactic ending to five and a half months of hiking. Although we did walk from Mexico to Canada, I will never shake the disappointment that I never finished the trail. The last 140 miles (that would have taken less than a week in good weather) remains a tantalizing mystery.