I started a 10-to-20-year PCNST project in April 2001. My plan is to do cover about 50 miles of trail (100 miles of dayhiking) per week session, once a month from April through October, with one longer backpacking session each year in August, all roughly during the week from first quarter to full moon.
For one or two persons, perhaps it's best to hike twenty-mile days "out and back" - walk ten miles north, then retrace those steps back to the car, covering ten miles of the trail each hiking day, but in both directions. That eliminates car shuttle problems. In southern California, dayhiking back and forth also avoids overnight backcountry camping. By avoiding overnight backpacking, loads are much reduced, and water management becomes much less problematic.
This page describes the past. Future plans are here.
I've also created a separate rogue's gallery of successful PCT finishers in 2001.
How to view the pictures: Pictures are organized in directories labeled by date and Wilderness Press map number; thus the start on 2 Apr 2001 at Campo, map A1, is under 2001-04-02-a01. Click on the directory of interest to get a index of small "thumbnail" pictures, then on the particular thumbnail to get the full 640x480 image. It may be easier with some browsers to turn off javascript. Beware of a few hi-res images in the 500KB-1MB size range that will take a long time to download; image sizes are stated below thumbnails, and hi-res image names usually start with "h" instead of "p".
I've recently reorganized these directories. Please report dead links to PCNST at oakapple.net.
Soledad Canyon to Agua Dulce 10 mi 2200-3200 2nd lowest DONE Agua Dulce to Bouquet Canyon 10 mi 2500-4600 5th lowest DONE Hwy 138 to Cottonwood Cr 17 mi 2900-3100 lowest DONE
April 28-May 3 2002 - Mt San Jacinto area from five miles north of Fuller Ridge trailhead to Coyote Canyon Road.
A true crest trail wouldn't pass over any moving water, and certainly not the Sacramento, Klamath, and Columbia Rivers. Of course, observing the Pacific Crest faithfully around those basins would involve a lot more high dry multiple-use desert plateau starting north of Tahoe, through Henness Pass, the Bald Mountains, Beckwourth Pass, Mt Ina Coolbrith, the Diamond Mountains, Fredonyer Pass, the Caribou wilderness, the Warner Mountains, through southeastern Oregon and southern Idaho, and continuing on to the Continental Divide Trail from Yellowstone to Glacier Park. It's so dry that it's kind of hard to tell from a map where the watershed boundary is, because rather than "shed," the little water falling tends to sink in and pop up somewhere else. The actual turning point on the PCT is on map L3, on peak 8166, where rather than following the crest north to Webber Peak and Henness Pass, the trail turns west and down to Jackson Meadow Reservoir, consigning the hiker eventually to the water and the bugs of the middle and north forks of the Feather River, rather than hiking around them.
I started thinking about this when I noticed that the southern terminus trail boundary monument was not on the highest boundary point around, and the trail alignment there probably has more to do with Border Patrol requirements than anything else. Anyway Campo Creek is flowing west when you cross it, toward Tijuana, so the crest is definitely east of the trail there, and perhaps the trail doesn't catch up to the actual crest until reaching Laguna Mountain above Long Canyon.
The PCT was originally intended to link up the John Muir Trail and Tahoe-Yosemite Trail, near the divide between the Pacific Ocean and the Great Basin, and the Oregon Skyline Trail and Cascade Crest Trail, which divide the Columbia Basin from the rest of the Pacific drainage. Places where such drainage divisions are indistinct - southern Washington, southern Oregon, northern and southern California - were the last to obtain definitive trail alignments.
The good (?) news is that all the newly- constructed trail in Southern California has amazingly long gentle grades so that elevation gain is practically painless, compared to the parts of the PCNST elsewhere that were constructed before 1968.
A lot of trail alignment in Southern California was chosen to minimize private and Indian land, which all seems to be reserved for casinos - the first two conversations I overheard in San Diego county were about trips to Indian casinos.
The Forest Service took the Tejon Ranch , "a diversified real estate and agribusiness company" - NYSE symbol TRC - to court to gain an easement and finally won - a very poor alignment for all that trouble, and perhaps didn't have the heart to force the matter elsewhere. The Tejon Ranch has a different attitude toward "strategic" easements, including one with Enron.