[pct-l] FW: The amazing hike

[marge at prothman.org (Marge Prothman)]

Here is the answer to an email I sent to Brads Mother, re the start date of
21st May and the end date of July 29th.

-----Original Message-----
From: Rudy Wilson Galdonik [mailto:rudy@rudywg.com] 
Sent: Monday, September 22, 2003 3:54 PM
To: Marge Prothman
Subject: Re: The amazing hike


Marge:

Thanks for your e-mail.  Brad flew to CA on Tuesday, May 20th.  Friends
drove him to Campo on Wednesday, May 21st which is when he started his hike.
He did take "0" days including the three at Yosemite when his sister and I
visited him.

My update from July 29 is what is misleading.  It states "The call came in
on Saturday, at 9:40 EST. . ."  Brad arrived in Manning Park on Saturday,
July 26th - I didn't have the chance to send out the update until 3 days
later (July 29th).

As a writer, I STINK at numbers (sort of at the level of HIKER'S STINK) and
so trust me, I counted out the days several times to make sure it was a 67
day hike.

Glad you enjoyed the updates.  Sorry for the confusion.

Take care,
Rudy

Here is an excerpt from the answer I received from an email I had sent to
Brad:
,.....................................
Marge, 

I don't have my journal posted, but there are updates that were written and
e-mailed to an audience of a few hundred people while I was gone. The
updates are on the PCTA website.

I began my hike on the 21st of May and made it to the Sierras in the second
week of June. I didn't need snow shoes, but wouldn't have felt safe hiking
without my ice axe, especially since I was going solo.

I think if I were carrying more weight, the snow may have been more of an
issue, but my total weight with pack and all was around 145. This allowed me
to 'skip' along the top of the snow when a lot of hikers would post-hole.

Not only did I not use snowshoes, I wore my Salomon AX pros the whole way.
This made for a few days of wet, cold feet, but I was wearing 100% wool
socks so they'd dry in my sleeping bag at night.

I met a some volunteer fire fighters at Rainy Pass and they weren't going to
let me hike the last 70 miles to Canada because of the fires. We went into
town, called the forest service and were told I was going to be ok. There
was a lot of smoke in the air, but from what the USFS said, the fires were
some 20 miles east of the trail.