The Rolling Home - Pacific Crest Trail

Written by Emily Bennington & illustrated by me, for The Rolling Home Journal 2018

“I first learned of the Pacific Crest Trail in 2016 whilst scrolling through nature books in a bookshop in London - a one-foot by 2,650-mile dusty ribbon stretching from the Mexican to the Canadian border across the United States. Every year an unknown number of people to hike it in its entirety, carrying only the packs on their backs, walking 10, 20, 30 miles a d sleeping under the stars. It's a feat that takes many an average of five to six months to complete than six weeks after first finding out about the trail I had booked a one-way flight to California 20 and had just finished university and felt disenchanted by the world of work and relatic mortgages and student debt. Nothing made sense, but somehow this did. I'd never heard of distance hiking before, and whilst I liked being outdoors I wasn't exactly outdoorsy - the most backpacking experience I had was three days in Wales whilst I was still in school. Th where I trailed at the back of the group with an overstuffed backpack, clutching my asthm: in one hand and a map which I didn't know how to read, in the other. Was this a good idea?

I arrived at San Diego airport in the early evening, flushed and nervous. I'd spent the flight looking down on the dusky peaks and cracked earth and imagining myself traversing those mountains, a tiny speck in the landscape. I tried to picture myself walking till my feet bled, pitching my tiny tent amongst the chaparral, searching for water in a dry, barren landscape, making all of this my home. l pared my belongings down to one small backpack and the clothes on my body. I'd spent months living on my friend's living room floor and saving every penny to buy a tent, a backpack, a stove, all those precious pieces of gear which would become crucial to my survival and enough money to live on for six months on the trail too. In a few days, I would be dropped off by strangers at the Mexican border at sunrise, then I'd start walking north, I'd walk and walk and walk all the way to Canada.

Whilst the PCT seemed completely nonsensical and incoherent to my friends and family, to me nothing had made more sense, perhaps in my entire life. My mum was inconsolable; when I first told my Dad he scoffed and said: "Well, there's no way you're going to be able to do that." Friends, family and complete strangers expressed great concerns for my safety, especially as a solo female hiker. Okay, you're going to do this, but surely you're not going to do it alone? Won't you like, get eaten by a bear or something? A 21-year-old girl alone in the American wilderness seemed inconceivable. Fast forward a year and I was standing in the middle of the Mojave desert with no idea what I was doing, only that it felt right.

The first day, I hiked 20 miles, the second day, 12, I just kept hiking and it felt good. I was filthy and thirsty, covered in that desert dust which gets everywhere, I'd find it in my hair, my mouth, I tipped cupfuls of it out of my shoes. Later, when I got to town and had my first shower, the water from my body would run black. Thorny manzanitas tore holes in my pack and scratched my arms and legs but I didn't care. It was so hot I could feel my skin burning, even under my shirt. "That feeling is just because the air is so hot and dry", another hiker would later tell me, "your skin isn't really burning off". I tried to be conscious of the marks I left on the trail, I packed out all my trash including toilet paper. I learned how to not waste water - even drinking the murky water I used to clean my pot. I dug 'cat holes, peed on the ground, and buried my menstrual blood (which I tipped out of my moon cup). I gradually started to realise that I really did know what I was doing. I was no less prepared than anyone else and more prepared than some. I didn't mind the hardships- maybe sometimes I minded the hardships.

In the first week, I wanted to quit. I wanted to quit many times, I love this but it's too hard, it's 1 long I'll never make it. I can't walk 2,650 miles, no one can. A few days in I quietly decided that quitting wasn't an option and I didn't consider it again. Pema Chodron once wrote, 'Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found, and I thought about this often. I tried to absorb the pain and the discomfort, It's all par it, I told myself, You chose this. I repeated to myself. If it was too hot I'd think, in a few hours it be cool and dark, if I was hungry, which I was far too often, I'd think about the food I'd eat we got to camp or the ice cream I'd eat when I got to town in a few days. I pulled myself together: eventually, I'd find myself transcendentally grateful to be there.

One morning, hiking out of town and listening to music on my headphones, I took a step and a huge rattlesnake coiled out from the dust inches below my foot. It rattled and hissed furiously and went to strike me but I was already running in the opposite direction. If that rattlesnake bites you, you will be dead. If you don't hike the 25 miles to town today you'll run out of food. If you drink that last drop of water now, you'll be thirsty later. These simple facts were as reassuring as they were frightening My priorities were only to meet my most basic needs, and there is peace in that. I also found friends; people who I could laugh with and camp with at night. In town, we piled into motel rooms three to a bed, crammed into every corner. We were strangers bound only by a shared goal - to walk from Mexico to Canada. These new friends would become the people who would coax me on when 1 wanted to quit, who I came to call my 'trail family'. Later, in the Sierra Nevada mountains when the landscape became alpine and treacherous, we learnt to keep each other safe, to travel together in the snow at high altitudes, to kick steps for one another and cross raging rivers together.

Last year saw the highest snowpack in the High Sierra for decades and by June, when I reached Kennedy Meadows, the so-called 'entrance to the Sierra' where the terrain begins to transform and become alpine, it had only just begun to melt. The tops of trees poked out of snow drifts. But as the snow began to melt it transformed trickling streams into raging rivers. Many hikers turn back when they reach Kennedy Meadows. This is the most remote part of the whole trail, with no roads or phone reception for over a hundred miles - those of us who continued were warned that we could find the route impassable and be forced to retreat. I bought crampons and warmer layers and prepared myself for days and perhaps weeks of snow travel. I proceeded into one of the most beautiful scenes I will perhaps ever see, the Sierra Nevada mountains completely encased in snow.

The snow carved different shapes out of the landscape and the trail, usually so well marked, disappeared. We left Lone Fine and entered the Sierra Proper on the 4th of June, my birthday, My friends woke me up in my tent with chocolate cupcakes lit with candles and a Platypus bottle filled with wine which they'd carried from town. Over the next few days, we ascended to 11,000 feet, 12,000 feet, and eventually 13,000 feet, the altitude making our muscles ache and our breathing laboured, We forded rivers and ascended vertical isy passes, I was unprepared for these conditions and terrified of plummeting to my death or being rushed away in a torrent of ley water, lt one particular tiver crossing - Tyndall Creek, we found a sketchy snow bridge, marked away in places, and beneath it, a rating white water torrent. Where the snow had melted there was a five-foot gap which would have to be jumped across to reach the snow bank on the other side. There was no alternative way across.

We devised a system for rivers like this - one person crosses first, then we threw our packs to that person so we could each cross unencumbered. The first person then stood sentry on the bank to catch each person in turn as they leapt across. As I prepared to cross, my friend Spider gripped my arm and said quietly 'Don't waiver, make your jump and commit to it...and we love you?' I took a deep breath and made a long, clean jump, my friend on the other side grabbed me by the shoulders as my toes touched the bank. For a second, I was relieved to have made it, then I heard shouts from my friends on the other side. I looked down and realised with horror that the snowbank I was standing on had splintered off and was now being rushed downstream in a torrent of water, for a second I was suspended above it, held in mid-air before we both fell backwards onto soft, solid snow. We held each other, shaking for a long time. 2017 on the PCT would come to be known as the year of Fire and Ice, it will be remembered as a year in which a record number of hikers lost their lives to raging river crossings and icy crevasses and a year when forest fires destroyed huge sections of the trail.

After travelling like this for a hundred miles we reached a side trail where we hiked 7 miles to a campsite and took a ride to Bishop to rest up for a few days in a hostel. It was there that we collectively decided that we would not continue in these conditions. We rented a pickup truck, stuffed it with hikers and drove 500 miles north, a section of trail where the conditions were not as severe and the river crossings far less dangerous. Whilst I returned to hike this 500-mile section, thus completing my thru-hike of the Pacific Crest Trail, my idea of ‹ing a continuous footpath to Canada was shattered. Deaths are not common on the PCT and every death hits the community hard. Hundreds of miles later I spoke to a hiker who'd lost a friend to a river crossing, he told me how had tried in vain to get her to turn around before it was too late but she'd continued alone, determined. The trail is a tendency to consume people, it becomes your whole existence and purpose. It makes otherwise reasonable people take unreasonable risks to reach Canada. I'm not the same person I was before the PCT, I don't think any of them are really. I spent five months calling the trail my home, and I feel incredibly lucky to have done so, but last year was a lesson to myself and to everyone that even in this increasingly urban world, wilderness is still just that, wild, and often treacherous.” See more on Emily’s Instagram here.