Pacific Crest Trail: the thru-hike where your start date is rationed

Fifty. That is how many northbound long-distance permits the Pacific Crest Trail Association issues per day for spring starts between the Mexican border and Sonora Pass — thirty-five of each date's permits released in a fall round, the remaining fifteen in winter. When a date fills, it fills.

No other American trail rations its beginnings this way. Demand climbed hard in the years after Cheryl Strayed's Wild (the 2012 memoir, then the 2014 film), and the rationed calendar is how the land agencies keep the border monument from turning into a parking lot. It also tells you what this trail actually tests. The Appalachian Trail asks if you can keep walking through pain and rain. The PCT asks you to commit, in a fall permit round, to the exact week you will stand in Campo the following April — before the winter that decides whether that week is any good has dropped its first foot of snow. Timing is the skill. The walking is what you do while the bet plays out.

• Start quota: 50 northbound long-distance permits per day for spring starts between the Mexican border and Sonora Pass
• Desert leg: roughly 700 miles, ending at Kennedy Meadows (mile 702)
• Official length: 2,650 miles, Campo, California to the Canadian border
• High point: Forester Pass, 13,153 ft, on the Sequoia–Kings Canyon boundary
• States: California, Oregon, Washington
• Typical thru-hike: about 5 months at roughly 20 miles a day
• Southern Sierra rule: Kennedy Meadows to Sonora Pass, continuous and within 35 days, under the permit's terms

Where the desert ends: the Kennedy Meadows hinge

When the animated dot sets out from Campo on the route map, watch for one turn in particular. For 702 miles the line works through creosote flats, chaparral ridges, and the wind farms above Tehachapi — country where hikers plan whole days around water caches and shade. Then, at a general store on the South Fork Kern River, the desert stops.

Kennedy Meadows is where northbounders trade sun umbrellas for bear canisters and ice axes, and where the store's porch applauds every hiker who walks in. It is the hinge of the entire year: south of it, heat math; north of it, High Sierra granite rising toward Forester Pass, the highest ground on the route at 13,153 feet. The dot makes that transition in a few seconds of animation. On foot it takes about three weeks, and the permit's terms require the next stretch, Kennedy Meadows to Sonora Pass, to be done in one continuous push. The full line, border monument to Canada with every switchback, is on the Pacific Crest Trail page.

How long does a PCT thru-hike take?

About five months. Most northbounders leave the border in April, settle into something near 20 miles a day, and touch the northern monument in September.

Faster hikers compress the season to four and a half months; hikers who linger in trail towns stretch it past five and a half. Neither is wrong. The season sets the outer bounds, and the season is made of snow.

When should you start a northbound PCT thru-hike?

Within the permit window of March 1 to May 31, most northbounders aim for April. The variable behind that answer is snowpack.

Start too early and you reach Kennedy Meadows while the Sierra passes are still buried. Start too late and May cooks you in the desert, then autumn threatens Washington before you get there. A deep-snow winter pushes the whole equation later; a lean one opens it up. The catch: your date locks in months before that winter falls, so hikers spend all spring watching snow-survey numbers and working the levers that remain — daily pace, town days, and how long to sit at Kennedy Meadows while the passes shed. If you are reading this in midsummer, you are early in exactly the right way. The fall permit round for next season is only a few months out.

How the PCT long-distance permit works

One document does most of the work: the interagency PCT long-distance permit, issued by the Pacific Crest Trail Association for trips of 500 or more continuous miles. It covers the permit-required wilderness and national-park land along the way and is limited to one per person per year.

It also carries real conditions. Your start date and start location are fixed once issued, and the southern Sierra stretch must be finished within 35 days of leaving Kennedy Meadows. Permits release in two rounds, fall and winter, through the PCTA's permit pages. Section hikers use local permits instead, and the crossing into Canada at the northern terminus has its own border rules — confirm them before counting on an exit through Manning Park.

Clinton Clarke's sixty-one-year rumor

The idea is nearly a century old, and for most of that century it was a rumor. In 1932 Clinton C. Clarke, chairman of the Mountain League of Los Angeles, proposed a border-to-border crest route and convened the Pacific Crest Trail System Conference to push it, pulling in the Sierra Club, the Boy Scouts, and the YMCA, with Ansel Adams on the executive committee. From 1935 through 1938, YMCA relay teams of teenagers under Warren Rogers scouted the line north in summer legs, and on August 5, 1938, the final team reached Monument 78 on the Canadian border. Congress designated the PCT a National Scenic Trail in 1968, in the same act as the Appalachian Trail. The footpath was not declared complete until 1993, sixty-one years after Clarke first put it on paper.

After the border monument

This is the second stop in a two-week walk through America's long trails; the rest publishes one trail each morning in the Outdoors Journal. Yesterday's opener told how the Appalachian Trail invented thru-hiking, and the two pieces make a useful argument: the AT tests persistence, the PCT tests planning. If a five-month season is more calendar than your life allows right now, begin with planning your first multi-day backpacking trip and scale up from there.

Every mile of the PCT's mapped line is on Outdoors — trace the Kennedy Meadows hinge yourself at theoutdoorsapp.com.

Hero photograph: Forester Pass, view north, Kings Canyon National Park by Dcrjsr, licensed under CC BY 3.0.

Sources

• permit.pcta.org
• permit.pcta.org
• www.pcta.org
• www.pcta.org
• www.pcta.org
• www.fs.usda.gov
• en.wikipedia.org
• www.halfwayanywhere.com
• www.dailyrecordnews.com
• time.com
• commons.wikimedia.org

Hero photograph: Looking north from Forester Pass in Kings Canyon National Park — at 13,153 feet, the highest point on the Pacific Crest Trail. by Dcrjsr, licensed under CC BY 3.0.