[pct-l] Fwd: Post Office resupply stops

[Brick Robbins]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Craig Giffen <cg at lunky.com>
Date: Sat, Jun 12, 2010 at 12:38 PM
Subject: Re: [pct-l] Post Office resupply stops
To: Brick Robbins <brick at brickrobbins.com>


Ah, I've been talking to Cate this morning.  Ugh, I'll subscribe to
the list and/or can you forward this to it in response to the other
comment?
===
The PCT Data Book is a more comprehensive list. Craig's planner
provides a sort of vague idea of where places are. I wouldn't put a
lot of faith in its accuracy. For example, I hiked at a consistent
2.5 miles per hour for 13 hours per day. At that rate his planner has
me finishing in 2.7 months! In reality I took something closer to 5.5
months.
===

Uh, sheesh, the reason it took 5.5 months is because you were not
WALKING 13 hours a day.  Walking time is time spent actually moving.
It is simple math. No planner is going to be accurate to you if the
numbers you feed it don't reflect reality.

Other than a handful of folks doing the trail in record time...who
hikes for 13 straight hours? This would be waking up at 8am and not
stopping for breaks, meals, etc until 9pm, every single day.  This is
why the default hours per day is a more reasonable eight hours.  I
think only one day on my whole hike did I ever have 13 hours of hiking
in....and it wrecked me.  (I walked 32 miles to reach Highway 50 in
the Sierras so I could hitchhike out to a concert, met Bruce Hornsby
too!).  When I wrote the planner 13 years ago (yikes!), based on the
people I polled, eight hours seemed to be a reasonable estimate of
time spent actually walking on the trail each day after meals, breaks,
etc were subtracted.

Over the years I've removed data from the resupply stops simply
because I'm not active in the trail life and there are other more
up-to-date resources out there.
-Craig