Haven’t you ever thought about how glorious it would be to get outside and go for a long walk?
Heather Heron sure has, but her idea of a long walk might differ from yours. After she graduated from high school this year, she embarked on an adventure unlike any other: hiking the Pacific Crest Trail across some of the most scenic landscape from the southern border of the United States to its northern border.
It’s a stretch of 4,270 kilometres that took her less than six months to accomplish, but what does that translate into in terms of shoes?
“Most hikers go through around four to five pairs of shoes, but I only went through two. I just wore mine out till their deaths,” she said.
If you’ve heard of the Pacific Crest Trail then it’s probably because of Cheryl Strayed’s memoir, Wild, or the Reese Witherspoon movie that it was adapted into a few years ago. According to the Pacific Crest Trail Association’s website at www.pcta.org, it was first proposed by Catherine Montgomery in 1926 though it wasn’t really confirmed until much later. Eventually, it was designated as one of the first National Scenic Trails in 1968, and for good reason. It crosses 26 national forests, seven national parks, five state parks and four national monuments. It goes from the desert to the top of a mountain range from its start near Campo, Calif., through Oregon and Washington, ending on the border at Manning Provincial Park in British Columbia.
Reportedly, hundreds of thousands of people use the trail each year, but I suspect that the young Heron is one of a very few, if not the only one from St. Albert to do so.
It begs the question: why? Aren’t there easier ways to celebrate turning 18 and becoming an adult?
The way she describes it was that once she learned about it, she immediately knew that it was something she wanted to do.
“I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t leaving anything undone. I wanted to make sure I was not always going to be just sitting at home and dreaming about things I wanted to do. I wanted to be going out and starting to get them. I just found out it was there so I felt like I should do it. Get out my way. I’m going.”
Her reasoning sounds more than a bit like the old George Mallory quote about climbing Mount Everest. “Because it’s there,” he was reported to have said.
At first, her family and friends weren’t convinced about the sanity of the idea. Heron would set off on her own with spurious cellphone signals and only her wits and the contents of her pack as resources to deal with what may come. But the young woman’s reasoning was less on the rash and impulsive side and more in line with joie de vivre and carpe diem. She eventually got her family’s full support, but some of her friends are still apparently unconvinced.
“A lot of people don’t understand why someone wants to go walk in the woods for six months. They were like, ‘Why don’t you just go to Mexico and hang out on the beach?’ They weren’t as excited as they could be for me. Some of them were super excited and supportive, and some … it just went over their heads as to what I was doing.”
That’s not to say that her long trek was as easy as, y’know, a walk in the woods. There were adventures. There were unexpected encounters. There were lessons to be learned. She started learning them right from the start.
Somewhere near Campo, Calif.
The bus dropped her off “in the middle of nowhere,” she said, and she was left to figure out how to get onto the path. Walking around, trying to find the border, she came upon a metal wall. A local told her that she could sleep there. “OK,” she thought, “that sounds safe.”And it was indeed safe. She was being well watched over by trained observers.
“Around 2 a.m. the border patrol came knocking on my tent door. Right off the start, it was rough. I was like, ‘What’s going on?’ and they were, ‘Who are you?’ It was kinda scary right off the bat.”
The good thing is that she didn’t get into any legal trouble. She was thrilled at what lay ahead for Day 1 on “the trail.”
“Quickly, you accept that this is your life and you get out of vacation mode. You realize that your life is waking up and walking and then eating and going to bed. It’s a nice transition to feel like the trail is your home after a while.”
Her agenda was to complete the journey in six months. Her feet might have been more fleet than she originally anticipated, however.
“It turns out that I was better at walking than I thought I was. I quickly realized that I was going to be done in just over three months so I started slowing down and taking a lot of little side trips while I was there.”
The other thing that she soon realized was that she wasn’t exactly alone. There were some “sketchy encounters” but she always felt safe. Trail life comes with trail family: people who are there for the same reason she is. Just like any family does, they stuck together for company, for solidarity, and for safety, especially when hitchhiking, an activity she didn’t do alone unless necessary. Sometimes, you get into someone’s vehicle and soon realize how unsafe and vulnerable you are.
Sticking with her new friends would prove to be a good decision when it came time to take a side trip for camping supplies. She and some fellow Trail-ers hitched to Reno.
“The guy who picked us up was a scary guy. He kept trying to take us to his house. He kept driving off path. We kept having to correct him. He was driving all over Reno, which is quite a big city. Finally we just said, ‘let us out’ and he parked the car in the middle of the interstate and we all hopped out.”
Some would say that they were lucky in that situation. She said she developed a lot of confidence from being on trail, getting to know how to work with people and having your trail friends with you to back you up.
Trail friends sometimes also come with gifts, like the one who found cheap Paul Simon tickets. They hitched into Hollywood for that show, another thrill of a lifetime.
She also took another side trip to climb Mount Whitney, the tallest mountain in the contiguous U.S. It goes up 4,421 metres to look over the rest of the Sierra Nevada range. There, she needed to wake at 2 a.m. to get over the mountain passes before the snow melted, else she would find herself in hip-deep snow all day.
“That was a long, hard section but it pays off because you’re going over just beautiful mountain ranges. You’re so isolated. There’s no experience I’ve ever had like that. It’s quite amazing.”
California to Oregon to Washington
Heron’s trail family had a lot of Americans, naturally, and a bunch of Canadians, too, with others from Singapore and Iceland. Mostly, she said, they were from Germany.The company sure helped to make the walking easier in many respects, as did the spectacular scenery.
“Northern California went by pretty fast. Oregon went by even faster. The whole state of Oregon we walked through. It’s just trees and lakes … beautiful. You can go pretty fast in Oregon as well. Oregon is where you get your trail legs, which is when you can just hike as many miles as you want. We would sometimes be hiking as many as 40 or so miles a day.”
Washington, however, rained tons, she said. She got sick from the weather and needed to take a few days off. Sickness doesn’t necessarily mean hanging out in a wet tent for days on end. There are trail angels who you might find along the way who are generous enough to offer a bed to sleep in or food.
“When you’re sick and you’re on trail, you just have to power through and keep going because you can’t really stop halfway through a section because then you run out of food and (face) bigger problems.”
Still, it probably wasn’t as bad as the night in northern California when she woke up to find out her tent was no longer waterproof during a bad storm. There was lightning and it was close, too.
“Four litres of water got into my tent. It was this huge, crazy night. It was probably my craziest night on trail. I was just running down the mountain after I decided to throw everything into my pack because my tent wasn’t keeping any water out. I was at the very top of this mountain. I threw everything into my pack and started running down. There was thunder and lightning everywhere.”
At one point, she saw a light below her and thought at first that it was a rescue crew coming to the aid of any hikers. She soon got close enough to determine that it was a bunch of trees that had been hit by some lightning and were on fire.
“That was a pretty crazy night. I ran for four hours after that. I think I totalled 40 some miles that day. I slept in a puddle and I ran till I found a road. I slept on the side of the road.”
Despite the hardships, she got through Washington with her trail family and found the marker at the northern end. People often touch it as a symbol of completing the journey. And then, just like that, after the longest journey by foot, she was done.
“It’s funny. It’s a big buildup and then you just get there, give it a tap and then we all just sat down. ‘What should we eat for lunch? What’s next?’ It was a shock and none of us realized it was ending because we’d just been walking on this same path for five months.”
A review, a prelude
All in all, it was a pretty good boost to her fitness level.“I feel like I could do a lot of walking if I needed to,” she joked.
She learned how to travel alone and travel light, but did she learn anything else about herself?
“I never really had what I would call a crystal ball moment, but you learn what you really need in life and you learn what you really want in life,” she philosophized.
Wiser now, she sees better how material things serve more to weigh people down and how friendships lift them up.
“Life on trail was just so simple. You really come to value your friendships a lot more. When I was on trail, the friends I made on trail became my family. We would hike together. We would eat our food together. We camped together. You just become so close and you’re in such vulnerable states because you’re doing such a hard thing every single day. You just come to camp exhausted. You become really close with everyone around you. There’s this unsaid friendship when you meet another hiker. You’re immediately friends because you’re out there doing the same thing. Coming back from trail, you really value good friendships a lot.”
So what’s next? She’s already back to work, saving up for the next big trip, and taking some courses through Athabasca University so she can still work on them online no matter where in the world she finds herself next.
Wherever that next adventure is might involve sailing or maybe rock climbing. Another long distance hike lingers in her thoughts and hopes though. The Pacific Crest Trail, after all, is but one part of both the Triple Crown of Hiking and the Great Western Loop, too.
There’s something about it that makes her want more.
“It’s kind of addicting. It’s a thrill drug.”
