And Now, I'm Going to Go Walk from Canada to Mexico...

Quick thoughts on life-changes and the process of a not-yet thru-hiker preparing to head out on the Pacific Crest Trail

After several years of keen anticipation, I find myself less than three weeks away from departing on my first attempt at thru-hiking a long-distance trail. Along with my girlfriend and hiking partner, Kait, I’m headed out on the Pacific Crest Trail this summer, and I cannot capably put into words how joyfully excited I am to step foot on the trail.

It’s a strange feeling to finally put my departure on ‘paper.’ I’d originally hoped to write this in 2015 (but, as I realized later, fortunately that initial plan fell through), and have eagerly waited since September 2016 for our departure date to arrive. As we draw closer, I continually find myself lacking the proper words to describe how I’m feeling, so I fall back on continuously repeating, “so stoked!”

Quick note: the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) is a long-distance, National Scenic Trail, which runs approximately 2650 miles from the Mexican border to Canada, following (roughly) the crest of the Sierra Nevada and Cascades. The trail crosses all but one of the ecosystems found in North America, and has more than 450,000 feet of elevation gain across the entire route.

It is one of the three major long-distance trails that makes up the Triple Crown of LDTs in the USA (the others being the Appalachian Trail and the Continental Divide Trail). Yes, it’s what Reese Witherspoon hiked in that one movie, and no, we’re not afraid of bears.

The last 10 months have been agonizing and invigorating, a cacophony of adrenaline, tribulations at work and the struggle to stay in the moment while awaiting the glorious start-date in July. Preparation has taken a front-seat to almost all activities, as we push to prepare for an undertaking that we undoubtedly will never be prepared for.

“[To be completely accurate, we’re not actually walking from Canada to Mexico in a straight shot. The majority of PCT hikers opt to hike Northbound (NOBO) from Mexico, starting anywhere from March-May. As we weren’t able to start that early in 2017 (and didn’t necessarily want to go NOBO), our choice was to either hike Southbound (SOBO) from Canada to Mexico, or start in the middle, hike to one border, then flip back to our original start and head to the other border (flipflop).

We’ve opted to flip from the California-Oregon border, and I couldn’t be more excited about it. We’ll head 950 miles NOBO to Canada, before flipping back to OR and heading another 1100 miles SOBO to Mexico. A fully-planned flip is rarely done on the PCT, and has a weird stigma amongst douchey hikers on their high horses, but it allows us the best chance of completing the trail, and places us in the Cascades and the Sierras during the peak of their summer beauty. We’ll experience both the Northbound (NOBO) and Southbound (SOBO) waves of hikers, but have a completely different experience as we blaze north from Oregon to Canada, before flipping back to head South through California to Mexico.]”

Amidst the many challenges and changes I’ve experienced while preparing for the trail, I managed injured my knee in a troublesome way while on a training hike in March. After some sort of knee trauma while on a fairly-tame hike, I developed a feeling under my kneecap akin to having some loose razor blades in there. The diagnosis: chondromalacia patellae (in layman’s terms, my kneecap is off-track and grinding on my femur bone with every movement).

The fact that there is no real cure or surgery to fix this condition became a daunting mental challenge for me, affecting me in a way I’d never experienced before. I’ve never had a debilitating injury, and the inability to walk without limping for 2 months wrecked my mental game severely. Never had I considered that I might not be able to physically do this trail, let alone not walk more than a mile in my life without agony.

Luckily, with dedicated rehab and attempts to reactivate my glutes and release my body from years of weightlifting and desk-job damage, I’m relatively pain-free at the moment. Already, the trail has been teaching me life lessons, despite not yet having started. Now, I simply will have to learn to listen to my body, pace myself in new ways and find a way to hike until I have finished the trail.

Kait has her own challenges for this trip, different from mine asides from the physical training and equipment prep. As she has worked through the challenge of putting career aside for 5-or-more months and the uncertainty of our lives post-PCT, she’s grown and challenged her normal mindset, and we’ve continued to mature our relationship as partners both on this hike and in life. I’ve read nothing but incredible stories about the after-effects of couples who rose to meet the challenges of trail life and made it to the end. I am incredibly excited to see the benefits we’ll reap as a couple in addition to personal ones.

The intricacies of prepping for a thru-hike are quite overwhelming, yet decidedly fun. From overhauling our current gear to align with an ultralight mentality (the lighter you go, the longer you’ll go), to nutrition planning and reading the history and issues with each of the resupply stops we’ll make, the legwork to get ready for the trail has kept us astonishingly busy over the past year. I am particularly excited to freely ingest 4000 calories in a day and still be losing weight. If the hike is anything, it will be delicious; after all, ‘hunger makes the best sauce,’ right?

16000 calories, 8.2 lbs = a few days of delicious, high-cal food.

This writing, much like my life and apartment currently, is disjointed and flushed with excitement. Appropriately, our journey starts on Independence Day, and I’m certain we’ll both find a new level of independence from comfort and regular society as we embrace the suck and push on through the 2650 miles. In just a few weeks, we become hiker trash (hiker talk for starving, dirty thru-hikers) and step out into the majesty of the West Coast’s best wildernesses. Lots of updates to come, but none so exciting as finally being at the starting point and being so stoked get going!

Grateful that these views, which we normally have for a night or two at most, will be ours every night for the next 140 or more days!

Owen Mullin, 2017. This article originally appeared on medium.com.