Pacific Crest Trail Thru-Hike #1: Intro and Gear

The Pacific Crest Trail is where my passion for hiking truly began. Earlier in life I had hiked plenty of miles and slept at too many sketchy campgrounds, but my thru-hike of the PCT was my very first foray into backpacking, and is when and where I fell in love with the outdoors.

Jill (then girlfriend, now wife) and I were living in Massachusetts when the Pacific Crest Trail first became known to us. We had both graduated college in Oregon before shipping up to Boston (aka flying) on a whim in search of a new adventure. The Pacific Crest Trail first entered our world when Jill stumbled upon Wired’s 2011 PCT thru-hike blog. Jill became infatuated with Wired’s story: her strength, her struggles, and her persistence.

In turn, Jill introduced me to the Pacific Crest Trail and together we were amazed at the grand scope of such an undertaking. How could something so huge and amazing exist? How could anyone actually complete such a monumental, awe-inspiring journey?

A couple of years rolled by after our initial discovery of the trail. We had moved to the San Francisco Bay Area where I worked as a Starbucks store manager and Jill began her career as a civil engineer. As time slipped by the Pacific Crest Trail swam through our thoughts, scratching at the insides of our skulls as if it were a memory that didn’t yet exist, lingering in the back of our minds like a story from a past life waiting to be relived, retold.

It was a dream that we decided to make a reality, and so we started the planning process, first figuring out financially how long it would take for us to build up enough savings to quit our jobs and survive for a year without income (we assumed work wouldn’t be found easily after the hike was over, and we were right), and then came the logistical planning.

The Pacific Crest Trail

Two years of scrimping and saving went into padding our bank accounts while we purchased all of the gear and guide books that we thought we needed in order to not die out there on the trail in. The first month would be all desert walking for crying out loud, and then we were going to climb into the snowy Sierra Nevada? Good grief Charlie Brown.

Suffice it to say we had enough time to analyze the upcoming trip down to every detail. We over-planned and spent too much money on unnecessarily new and shiny gear, but we wound up having one helluva good hike. It was the most awesome experience of our lives.

Jill and I blogged every single day of our hike. At night in our tent (and the occasional motel room) one of us whipped out our phone and wrote down the day’s story into our WordPress app. We took turns journaling the journey, then uploading the words and our pictures for our friends and family to see.

Long story short— after our adventure was over I edited the posts and we turned our backpacking story into a book called Adventure and The Pacific Crest Trail. It was something I created for the two of us to have and look back on to relive our trail memories, but I found that others were interested in reading our story as well.

Now that I’ve created Better Hiker, I want to share some of my story with you here on the website. You can still buy the book for easy reading on your Kindle or to see the beautiful pictures in print on your coffee table, but you’ll get a chunk of it here as well, for free.

I must admit that journaling in a tent on our phones after a long day of hiking didn’t result in Pulitzer Prize winning posts, but the writing has been refined through editing and the entires became more descriptive and engaging as we journeyed further into our Pacific Crest Trail hike. I hope you enjoy our story and that you learn something from it, whether it be through our successes or failures.

PCT Thru-hike Gear List

Here are the gear lists we started with. Some of you veteran long-distance hikers will see that we were well-stocked and weighed in well above any diehard ultralight limit. Newbies take note: you don’t need a bowie-knife. My father offered me his blade before I left on my trip. I accepted it, thinking that it would look badass strapped to the side of my pack, and I also didn’t have the heart to turn him down, though I wound up mailing it home by the time I arrived at Kennedy Meadows.

Since Jill and I thru-hiked the Pacific Crest Trail together we shared a few items like our tent and battery which helped cut down on each of our individual base pack weights. Though the weight of each item is reflected in the tables below, the totals were adjusted to reflect the shared usage items that were only carried by one of us. Do these lists look similar to what you would have taken on a thru-hike?

Jill’s Pacific Crest Trail Starting Gear

Arthur’s Pacific Crest Trail Starting Gear

GENERA GEAR

We’re packed and ready to walk, let’s head out onto that trail! From here on out the posts are going to be the journal entries from our daily Pacific Crest Trail grind. You’ll get to experience the highs and lows Jill and I lived while backpacking this amazing National Scenic Trail. Happy trails and happy reading. Click here to go straight to the next post or follow the link list below.

Do you have any questions about our decision to hike or the gear we took?

Thru-Hike the Pacific Crest Trail With Us

Follow along each and every step of the journey.

1. Intro and Gear (this post)
2. First Trail Day
3. Lake Morena & Cibbets Flat
4. Trail Names
5. Dumb Ways to Hike
6. Angels and Paradise
7. Bears and Snakes and Dudes, Oh My!
8. Sometimes You Pee Your Pants
9. Not So Wild
10. Mt. Whitney and Kings Canyon