I like to think we hiked the trail during what will come to be regarded as the Golden Age of the PCT, the early years of the 21st century. On the other hand, thru-hikers decades from now may very well look back on our time as the Dark Ages. “Those poor hikers!” they’ll say. “How did they ever survive?” Gary and I will go to trail events, and the young folks will look at our white hair and wrinkled faces and ask incredulously, “What was it like without GPS? Constant radio communication? On-trail entertainment systems?” Gary and I will drone on about how it was back in the day, and Mary will pretend she doesn’t know us.
It’s hard to imagine what the trail, its thru-hikers, its angels, and its adjacent town stops will look like 25 years from now, but speculation about the future is a game we thru-hikers like to indulge in. Will the growing accessibility of backpacking, thanks to advances in gear and route-finding technology, encourage hundreds more to head north from Campo every year? Would this strain the trail and its caretakers beyond their capacity? Or will an increasingly out-of-shape and game- and internet-addicted public turn its back on the long-trail experience? And would that mean less official support and funding for a trail that’s under constant threat from development and logging?
Trail angel Donna Saufley, who runs Hiker Heaven and likely sees more hiker traffic at her place in Agua Dulce than any other trail angel, isn’t concerned just with the effects of crowding on the PCT in 25 years. She’s worried about the effects of crowding right now. Every spring, she watches the majority of the 200 or 300 people who begin the trail at the Mexican border head through Agua Dulce in what is known alternatively as “the pack,” “the herd,” “the wave,” and sometimes even “the clump.” This concentration can strain the facilities, and the hospitality, of small towns along the way.
Donna believes that the trail gathering, the Annual Day Zero Pacific Crest Trail Kick Off (generally, but unpronounceably, known as ADZPCTKO), held at the end of April, contributes to the situation. At the time we hiked the PCT, the American Long-Distance Hiking Association-West had begun a tradition of hosting this party for thru-hikers at a county park 20.6 trail miles north of the border. It attracts former hikers, prospective hikers, trail angels, a few people selling gear, and a whole lot of people who turn out to show their support for the PCT and to enjoy the company of like-minded individuals.
Because of the kickoff’s timing—the last weekend in April—and its location so close to the beginning of the trail, not to mention the free food and campsites provided for thru-hikers, many people make ADZPCTKO their beginning date. They get their copies of the all-important water report, listen to presentations from experts, buy extra sunscreen from the little store next to the park, consume as much food as possible, and then, on Sunday morning, catch a ride with volunteer drivers to the monument at the south end of the trail. Some of the thru-hikers start walking a day or two before the kickoff, stop at the campground for the weekend, and then continue on. Donna believes the overall result is that dozens of people begin right around the end of April and move north in a pack, stretched out over about three days.
Other people involved in PCT issues believe the kickoff has a minimal effect, and that clumping occurs because, as backpackers meet each other along the trail, at town stops, and during zero days, a group dynamic takes over in which the more sociable hikers begin traveling in a loose group. This isn’t bad in itself; strong hikers can help the weaker ones until they develop harder muscles, and those with better route-finding skills can guide and teach the directionally challenged (among whom I include myself). One PCT backpacker, John Donovan, who died during his thru-hike attempt, would almost certainly be alive today if he had paid attention to what other hikers told him about getting through a snowy section of the San Jacinto Mountains in southern California. Donovan, a 60-year-old retiree from Virginia, had camped with a group heading toward Idyllwild in May, 2005. As they headed down the Devil’s Slide Trail, he apparently wandered off in a different direction and became thoroughly confused. Instead of backtracking, he kept going in the wrong direction and then tried to work his way down an impassable, steep canyon choked with brush. He vanished so completely that months of intensive searching failed to turn up a single clue. Donovan’s name became nationally known a year later, when two people wandered away from a group hiking down from a tramway near Palm Springs and got lost. The young couple from Dallas floundered through the boulders and thickets for three days and then stumbled upon Donovan’s camp—one year to the day from his last journal entry. They used his matches (almost miraculously waterproof after a year) to start a brushfire, which quickly brought a helicopter rescue crew to their aid. Only then did searchers find Donovan’s body.
Some clumping of thru-hikers is inevitable on the PCT because people schedule their start dates so that they arrive at Kennedy Meadows after most of the snow has melted in the southern Sierra, but early enough that they still have a chance to reach Canada before the autumn storms begin. That’s a fairly narrow window, requiring people to leave Kennedy Meadows between June 1 and June 15 most years.
So whether the kickoff should be moved farther north and be held later in the year, as Donna and others have suggested, or remain at Lake Morena County Park in late April, as many others prefer, the end result may remain the same: a fairly compact group of thru-hikers in southern California, with smaller numbers in front and behind.
Donna and her husband, Jeff, plan to keep Hiker Heaven going as long as they can, and they say they’ll never get tired of thru-hikers, even when 50 or more are camped in their yard, necessitating the addition of camp toilets and canopies to the trailer and RV. But Donna has seen some indications that other people are getting tired of the sudden influxes of backpackers. “The first indication was a busy Memorial Day weekend when we were having breakfast at a local place,” she says. “I overheard one waitress telling another waitress about us: ‘Those are the people who are hosting the hikers.’ And she came unglued. Everyone has always been so positive, saying what a wonderful thing to do, but this woman was angry, because of the impact.” This experience forced Donna to view the wave through the eyes of a busy waitress. “You have 50 hungry hikers in one place wanting breakfast, and you have locals to serve, and the place only seats 25, and they’re running out of everything, running out of coffee mugs, running out of toast … and you’ve got disgruntled people,” she explains.
Donna will always be an advocate for thru-hikers, but she also knows how small-town residents feel about seeing disruptions to the very things that make small towns attractive. “If something interferes with getting their mail or their breakfast, they’re really grouchy,” she says. Portions of the trail have to be rerouted from time to time, and a bad reputation can cause trouble. The PCT was originally planned to run through the nearby town of Acton, Donna points out, but because of local opposition, it was rerouted.
Beyond the effect on trail towns, some PCT advocates worry that the growing size of the herd will lead to restrictions on the numbers allowed to use the southern desert’s campgrounds, and a reluctance by post offices to hold hiker boxes longer than two weeks. Some people have begun complaining about the appearance of water caches—which, to the untrained eye, do look as though someone dumped several dozen plastic jugs alongside the trail and just left them there. The larger concern, of course, is the effect of all this on the trail experience itself. Some of the most popular destinations in the West—such as Mt. Whitney in the Sierra and the Obsidian Trail in Oregon—have quotas. If thru-hikers in the southern desert have too much of an impact on that fragile ecosystem, PCT advocates worry that limits may be imposed on the number of hikers who can start on any particular date.
ADZPCTKO coordinator Greg Hummel opposes any rationing of start dates. “I don’t think the PCTA can do this, nor should they,” he wrote to me in an email. “I think they should be a steward for the trail and encourage good etiquette. Even though they do issue hiking permits, I think that they can only encourage people
to start over a range of dates. Each individual usually picks a start date based upon conditioning, expected hiking pace, and the weather conditions in the southern California ranges and the Sierra.”
Scott Williamson, who, having taken nine trips border to border, has spent more time on the PCT than anyone else, shares the concerns about crowding. In 2006, his second successful yo-yo, he started in mid-May, well behind the herd, and immediately noticed the difference from previous years. “The number of thru-hikers is beginning to exceed the carrying capacity of the water sources in the first 700 miles,” he says. “I saw a lot of garbage, feces, and toilet paper, but as soon as I got ahead of the pack, I didn’t see it.” Part of the problem is that use of the trail is getting ahead of the abilities of both professionals and volunteers to patrol and maintain the trail—and that’s compounded by the remoteness of many trail sections. The U.S. Forest Service in recent years has received between $1 million and $1.7 million a year for the PCT, according to Liz Bergeron, executive director of the Pacific Crest Trail Association (PCTA). That amount is augmented by PCTA and other private funding. But it’s not a huge amount of money for a trail that’s 2,650 miles long.
Maintenance chores are shouldered primarily by volunteers who are limited in the amount of time they can spend hauling equipment miles into the wilderness in order to repair erosion or chop trees felled by winter storms. “It’s an old problem, which the Appalachian Trail has already faced,” Scott says. “They worked it out because of the large number of volunteers. The Appalachian Trail Conservancy can keep up with it. Here, volunteer efforts to protect the trail and get federal dollars are still in their infancy.”
Other trail advocates cite concerns about the resilience of the trail angels as a major issue for the future of the PCT. Donna Saufley’s waitress in Agua Dulce isn’t the only person whose opinion of thru-hikers has dimmed with greater numbers. People who live near the trail, whether they help backpackers as part of business or as a hobby, are bound to see some bad apples occasionally. As the number of hikers increases, so will the number of bad apples. And some people who in the past were eager to provide rides to trailheads, post offices, and supply shops, will stop doing it. The trail angels who make helping hikers a hobby express great enthusiasm for continuing their generous ways. But sit and talk with them for a few hours, and they do have stories of occasional guests who became pests, whether by being drunk and disorderly or by inviting non-hiking friends to move in and take advantage of the trail angels’ hospitality. These situations so far have been extremely rare. But even if most of the hikers stay on their very best behavior, there will be incidents, and word will get around.
Many trail angels are retired. Eventually, they might run out of the energy it takes to welcome all the backpackers who arrive at their doors, tired, hungry, and dirty—not to mention the energy it takes to pick up all the socks, sunglasses, hats, trekking poles, cameras, and gaiters that backpackers leave behind, wash them, sort them, and try to reunite them with their owners. When these wonderful people decide it’s time to buy an RV and see the country, I worry that there will not be enough younger people ready to take their places.
Greg Hummel, who hiked the PCT in 1977, believes the trail will become much more popular, but he doubts it will reach Appalachian Trail status, simply because it’s so much more difficult. I asked him what would happen if the PCT began to attract 1,000 northbound thru-hikers each year, as opposed to the current average of 250 to 300. What will be the effect on camping areas, water supplies, trail angels, and town stops?
“We are already seeing the impact of greater numbers on the trail and the supply points,” he replied in an email. “An inn in Idyllwild has begun to refuse service to hikers due to a bad encounter, and there have been increasing complaints about rude hikers ‘expecting’ trail angel services. Thus, greater numbers are likely to cause fewer angels continuing their services. However, I think that there is a flip side: We, the ADZPCTKO organizers, began sending out letters to the Chambers of Commerce of most of the southern California supply points, telling them exactly what services and items hikers want [in order] to encourage their members to take advantage of this by stocking up on the items and offering the specific services.”
As executive director of the PCTA, Liz Bergeron deals with the future of the PCT every day. For her, it’s not so much an issue of whether this spring or that campground can handle a crowd of thru-hikers, as whether this stretch of trail is about to be surrounded by a housing development, or that mile of trail depends on an informal agreement that needs the legal protection of an easement, which a future property owner wouldn’t be able to rescind. She has hiked several hundred miles of the trail (and her husband has hiked the entire distance), so she respects backpackers’ concerns about individual points along the trail. But her job is to focus on the bigger picture. If you were to write down every single issue that could affect the PCT, you could paper a wall with issues—in fact, that’s exactly what Liz did a few years ago, at a gathering of all the various groups interested in the PCT, from hiking and equestrian groups to land-use professionals and volunteers. Those issues ranged from damage to specific parts of the trail by off-road vehicles to damage to the Sierra Nevada by air pollution to broader issues, such as establishing a PCTA presence in more towns along the route.
When Liz looks at the trail, the first things she sees are the 30 or so small sections where private property issues of one sort or another have to be dealt with right away. “Our biggest problem is the 200 or 300 miles of trail that are not fully protected,” Liz explains. “As you hike the trail, there are areas that cross private property. We may or may not have permission to pass. Typically, permission to pass looks like an 8-foot easement. When the property changes hands, the next owners may not honor the easement even though they’re required to do so. We’ve seen fences go up across the trail.”
When addressing very specific trail issues, Liz has to remind herself and others that her job is to protect the trail—or else there won’t be one. “So our number-one priority is to protect, and number two is to keep the trail open,” she says. “There is a possibility you would not be able to hike on a continuous trail from Mexico to Canada if we don’t address these issues. You’d have to get off the trail and go around a new housing development and then get back on.”
For sure, there’s nothing like hiking down a heavily traveled highway or through a trashy trailer park to degrade the trail experience.
Liz and her staff have to know land-use issues as well as any big-city planning department. When I talked to her, she was negotiating a conservation easement to protect about a mile of trail in a crucial link in Oregon; keeping an eye on several parcels up for sale in Washington; and dealing with a southern California housing development that seemed likely to put some people’s backyards right smack on the PCT. “If people are unaware they’re going to have a national scenic trail in their backyard, that could be a problem,” she notes wryly.
Scott Williamson agrees that the biggest threat in the next 25 years is encroaching housing developments, especially in the first 700 miles of trail in southern California. He is also concerned that residential development could threaten sections in northern California, near his home in Truckee. Formerly focused on logging, Truckee is turning into a popular location for retirees and owners of second homes, especially among skiers. He’s worried that these new landowners will ignore easements allowing backpackers to cross their private property.
Scott’s secondary concern, after residential development, is the effect of logging and the road building that goes along with it. “The road building is almost as bad as the logging itself, because, as you know, once you build a road through an area, you’ve permanently altered it,” he says.
Logging is one of those issues that sharply divides thru-hikers from the residents of many of the small towns they travel through. Many residents see logging as a good thing, providing jobs not just for loggers, but for truckers, mill
workers, real estate agents, and restaurateurs. However, like many highly mechanized extraction industries, logging companies tend to move into an area, take what they want, and then move out, providing a few temporary jobs while permanently damaging the forests and streams upon which many tourist-oriented businesses rely. Many city dwellers also defend logging, not just because they recognize the need for wood for home construction, but also because they perceive logging as equivalent to fire protection, thinning out the overgrown forests so that a lightning strike is less likely to result in a catastrophe.
What small-town and city residents alike don’t see is what backpackers see when they walk through an area that’s been cut over. Logging rarely makes an area more fire-resistant. Loggers take out the biggest trees, which are least likely to burn, and leave behind the smaller, less marketable but more flammable trees. Worse, they leave behind piles of slash—the limbs and tops that are cut off the trees before the trunks are hauled away. These piles of dead limbs and forest debris are a bigger fire hazard than anything the loggers remove. Perhaps worst of all for backpackers is the maze of dirt logging roads snaking through forests, encouraging erosion, wiping out trails, and making route-finding a lot harder than it should be.
The future of the PCT depends on many factors, but none more so than the people who walk it. Many in the thru-hiking community are concerned that the trend toward fewer people backpacking will mean less people on the trail, and therefore fewer people advocating for this important resource. ADZPCTKO’s Greg Hummel, who works as a geologist in crowded southern California, believes more people from overseas will visit, offsetting the possible slacking of interest here. “On one hand, I hope this is wrong and more people get into outdoor activities, as I know that it is one of the best things for my soul and theirs,” he wrote to me. “On the other hand, I sense a great slacking of physical fitness. I walk from Union Station in Los Angeles to my work three days a week and have tried to get others who ride the free shuttle to join me, to no avail.”
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