[pct-l] sections A & B

[sierra_marmot at yahoo.com (John Randall)]

Getting from Mexico to Canada isn't really the point.  As Jonathan Ley said, he hiked not "to do something" but "to become someone."   Remove the caches at Frontier Mail, the GATN road, Rodriguez Canyon, etc. and you have a section A that is extremely difficult to hike, but is natural.   The same goes with Sections B, E and F.   
 
A trail connecting the Mexican border with the High Sierra is unnatural almost by definition.  Most of the trails in the Sierra have roots to the 1840s or before; shepherds like John Muir drove sheep to places like Dusy Basin.  The trails we follow today are mostly hundreds of years old.  But, in order to compete with other long-distance trails we've gone out of our way to force something where a natural event would not have happened.   The PCT in SoCal is not natural.  There is no historic reference--i.e. an Indian or animal path, unlike that in the Sierra.  The PCT in Southern California has no historial reference.  It is a man-made project; artifical.
 
Is it impure to have an eighteen-hundred mile hike that starts at Kennedy Meadows and continues for four months to the Canadian border?  Jeez, I hope not.  The major problems that occur on a full PCT hike occur in SoCal, and that's only because By Definition the PCT is a Mexico to Canada experience.   
 
What if The Definition is wrong?   What if hikers gathered at Kennedy Meadows for ADZPCTKO in mid-June and headed north?   Or San Gorgonio Pass?  Or even Idllywild?  The trail would be as long as the AT.  Is that the problem?  Does the PCT have to be longer and harder than the AT?  Apparently so.  AT-envy? Is it not just good enough to be long and difficult?  
 
Make no mistake.  I'm a PCT bigot.   But, I think we're tunneling our resources in the wrong place.  The realities of our West is that without the water from the Sierra and Rocky Mountains, all land would be the same as most of Mexico; as it mostly is.   I think we're force-feeding a PCT Mexico-to-Canada trail mentality because we want it to be longer, wider, bigger and better than our East-coast brethren.   
 
Most of the PCT through SoCal is artifical; true, a challenge; but artifical.  I'd like to see us re-define the PCT as starting at Kennedy Meadows.
 
I'm sure I'll be flamed and re-flamed for my opinion, however please understand that I've been hiking in SEKI for the last twenty years, and I'm entitled to my opinion.  
 
Thanks,
 
john "marmot" randall
 
 
 
 

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