The Pacific Northwest Trail Ends When the Continent Does

Ron Strickland got stuck on an idea in 1970, halfway through a Harvey Manning hiking guide: one continuous footpath from the Continental Divide to the Pacific Ocean. He was a Georgetown graduate student at the time; the fixation outlasted the degree. Four years of scouting put a preliminary route on paper, the Pacific Northwest Trail Association followed in 1977, and five Oregonians walked the entire line that same summer. Then the federal government told him no. The official 1980 feasibility study concluded that designating his route was "neither feasible nor desirable."

Strickland kept at it for twenty-nine more years. On March 30, 2009, President Obama signed the Omnibus Public Land Management Act, the Pacific Northwest Trail became a National Scenic Trail, and American thru-hiking gained the only major route that starts in grizzly country and finishes on a Pacific beach. A trail that ends when the continent does.

• Length: about 1,200 miles (PNTA figure)
• Termini: Chief Mountain Customs, Glacier National Park, Montana → Cape Alava, Olympic National Park, Washington
• Western terminus: the westernmost point in the contiguous United States
• Grizzly country: roughly 400 miles of the route, Glacier to eastern Washington
• Average thru-hike: 68 days, most finishers between 60 and 75
• Season: July–September, nearly everyone westbound
• Crown to coast: three national parks, seven national forests, a quarter of the miles in designated wilderness
• Designated: March 30, 2009 — Omnibus Public Land Management Act

From Chief Mountain to Cape Alava

Westbound — the direction nearly everyone walks — the trail leaves the Chief Mountain Customs station on Glacier National Park's Canadian border and aims for the ocean: across Montana's Rockies, through the Idaho Panhandle, over the North Cascades, down into a strange saltwater interlude through the Puget Sound country, and finally up and over the Olympics. Three national parks. Seven national forests. About a quarter of the mileage inside designated wilderness, and two other national scenic trails crossed along the way — the Continental Divide Trail at one end of the journey and the Pacific Crest Trail deep in the Cascades.

Trace it on the map below, or open the full route on the Pacific Northwest Trail page. Watch the dot's final minute in particular: it walks out of the Ozette rainforest, steps onto the sand at Cape Alava — the westernmost point in the contiguous United States — and runs out of land. No summit sign, no border monument, no trailhead. The route stops because the continent does.

How long does the Pacific Northwest Trail take?

Roughly two to two and a half months. The Pacific Northwest Trail Association puts the average thru-hike at 68 days, with most finishers landing between 60 and 75.

That is a shorter commitment than any Triple Crown trail, but these are not equivalent miles. Long stretches are unmarked. Some are unbuilt — the PNTA is blunt that sections of the route demand bushwhacking and real navigation skill rather than a groomed tread. Fifteen miles a day here is a different job than fifteen miles a day on a blazed corridor, and the 68-day average belongs to people who understood that before they started.

Permits: three parks, no master pass

There is no coordinated thru-hiker permit for the PNT — nothing like the long-distance permit the PCT operates. You assemble the paperwork yourself: overnight backcountry permits for Glacier National Park at the start, North Cascades National Park in the middle, and Olympic National Park at the finish, each issued by that park on its own system and timeline. The PNTA's planning pages walk through all three. The thousand miles in between run mostly across national forest land, where the permit question largely disappears and the planning shifts to water, food carries, and bear storage instead.

When to start a westbound PNT hike

Early July, heading west. The season runs July through September, and the PNTA recommends leaving Chief Mountain once the bulk of the snow has melted out of Glacier's high country.

The calendar cooperates in that direction: you cross the Rockies behind the melt, take the hot interior ranges at the height of summer, and arrive on the Olympic coast in September, where the last days are paced by tide tables as much as by mileage. Mid-July, when this article publishes, is right about when each summer's westbound class walks out of Glacier and into western Montana. The series ends on the day its last trail's hikers are just hitting their stride.

Fifty finishers and four hundred grizzly miles

The PNTA counted 65 to 75 attempts in 2019 and says upwards of 50 people thru-hike the trail in a typical year. Fifty a season. Against the foot traffic on the Triple Crown routes, that is a rounding error.

The solitude gets paid for in bears and navigation. Roughly 400 miles of the route, from the eastern terminus to eastern Washington, cross grizzly range, which means food-storage discipline from the first night out; black bears live along all but about 70 of its miles. Add the unmarked sections and the trail asks for a hiker who can read a map when the tread quits. None of that is a reason to stay home. It is a reason to show up competent, which is exactly the filter that keeps the finisher count at fifty.

The last trail in the series

This is the fourteenth and final article in our long-trails series. If the PNT's arithmetic tempts you but the route-finding doesn't, the Pacific Crest Trail is the groomed, social version of a Pacific-state summer. If the emptiness is the whole point, the Continental Divide Trail drops the fixed route entirely and lets you argue the line yourself. And the whole series — every trail from Springer Mountain to this beach — is gathered in the Outdoors Journal.

Fourteen trails, one map: every route in the series renders in 3D on Outdoors, saved and searchable for whenever the idea stops being hypothetical.

Hero photograph: The western terminus of the PNT at Cape Alava in Olympic National Park by U.S. Forest Service — Pacific Northwest Region, Public Domain Mark 1.0.

Sources

• www.pnt.org
• en.wikipedia.org
• www.pnt.org
• www.pnt.org
• www.pnt.org
• www.pnt.org
• www.fs.usda.gov
• en.wikipedia.org
• commons.wikimedia.org

Hero photograph: The western terminus of the Pacific Northwest Trail at Cape Alava, Olympic National Park — the westernmost point in the contiguous United States. by U.S. Forest Service — Pacific Northwest Region, licensed under Public Domain Mark 1.0.