The Trail Provides

A NoMi hiker takes on the Pacific Crest Trail

By Emily Burke | July 15, 2023

I didn’t have what I would call an “outdoorsy” childhood, even though I grew up on Old Mission Peninsula surrounded by freshwater and forest. The closest I ever came to a camping trip was a giggle-fueled night in a friend’s backyard tent. 

But one summer in high school, I was assigned a book for summer reading that changed my bearing, setting me on a course that would form the basis of both my personal and professional identities.

An Idea Takes Root

A Walk in the Woods, authored by the acclaimed Bill Bryson, is a chronicle of Bryson’s own thru-hiking attempt on the Appalachian Trail (AT), a footpath that winds from Georgia to Maine. At the time I first read it, I had never heard of backpacking, let alone thru-hiking, but the idea of constant motion in hushed, verdant forests, of having nothing on my to-do list but walking for months on end, took up residence in my over-scheduled, anxiety-riddled brain. The trail became a symbol of escape, and soon, most of my dreams about the future revolved around that 18-inch-wide swath of dirt. 

I applied early decision to a school in New Hampshire, a choice that, looking back, I now realize was almost entirely based on the simple fact that the trail ran through town. When I didn’t get in and went to school in central North Carolina instead, I took weekend trips to the mountains just to feel the slip of the clay under my trail runners, to see the dappled sunlight through a tunnel of rhododendrons. I took field ecology classes and planned for a career where I could be outside on trails. I was convinced that I would take to the AT after college, but like many post-grads, the pressure of starting a career got to me, and I delayed. 

Until 2015. That January, I found myself back in Traverse City, living with my mom, sleeping through the dark, gray mornings to avoid facing what I perceived as failure. I had dropped out of my PhD program in wildlife behavioral ecology after just one semester, and I felt ashamed and embarrassed. When I started looking at master’s programs in a related field and found one in an Oregon town along the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT)—the west coast’s answer to the AT, running from Mexico to Canada—I knew that the time was now. 

I would walk the 1,718 miles from the Mexican border to grad school.

Every Last Detail

When I look back on the first few months of that year, I mostly remember the chaos of the preparation. Resupply boxes addressed to far-flung dots on the map—filled with Clif bars, maps, and dehydrated mashed potatoes—took over the spare bedroom in my boyfriend Andrew’s apartment. (I had convinced him to come with me at this point.) 

I agonized over gear choices. Should I spend the extra $200 for a sleeping bag that was 6 ounces lighter? I stayed awake at night, half-worried and half-excited, thinking about the unknowns. Would my body handle being at extreme altitude for weeks on end; would we find water in the desert; would we be able to navigate fording raging rivers of glacial melt in the Sierra Nevada? 

And because I was unemployed at the time, I went on long training hikes almost daily, my pack filled to the brim with all my new gear, eyes squinting against the falling snow.

Walking the Walk

The first few days on trail were physically and emotionally intense. By lunch on the second day, I was huddled under a stunted oak tree, weeping with the enormity of the task I had set for myself—of the terror that I couldn’t do it, that I would fail at a large endeavor for the second time in a row—and the physical discomfort in the form of blisters, chafing, sunburn, and the unrelenting desert heat. 

Yet after a long cry, I got up and started walking, mostly because there really is no other choice when you’re in the middle of the wilderness.

Over the course of the next three and a half months, as we slowly made our way up the spine of California, I experienced more lows, but they were always balanced with the kind of bliss that comes only (at least for me) from the combination of endorphins, constant fresh air, and being disconnected from the “real world.” 

We were rained and hailed on for three days straight after we passed through the town of Tehachapi, but waking up to an incandescent, peaches-and-cream sunrise, the vastness of the Mojave spread out before us, on the fourth day made it worth it. We ran out of food on a 10-day stretch in the heart of the Sierra that, once the snow and altitude were factored in, turned into 12 days. But while looking for a place to sleep around dusk on the eleventh day, we happened upon a campfire tended by a friend we had met hundreds of miles earlier, gratefully accepting his extra Snickers bars and tuna packets. 

Once, Andrew slid 500 vertical feet down a mountainside during a snowy traverse in the northern Sierra, but later that day we got to watch a bear forage for grubs in a downed pine log for what felt like an hour; it never knew we were there. The highs always followed the lows, the beauty born from the beast.

Doing It Solo

When we reached southern Oregon and I stopped to start my Master’s program there, Andrew continued, reaching the end of the trail at the Canadian border in late August. In the years after, I completed my graduate degree and launched my career in conservation, and we moved back to Michigan, got married, and bought a house in Leelanau County. But the mountains were never far from my mind, and every year I dreamed of hiking from southern Oregon to Canada to finish the trail. 

After a dashed attempt in 2020 when the trail closed because of the pandemic, in late July of 2022, I was finally standing at the trailhead outside of Ashland, Oregon, embarking on a solo 930-mile journey, backpacking alone for the first time. I was nervous to be in the wilderness by myself for weeks on end, but I found that I felt deeply comforted by the Douglas fir forests I had tramped through for two years during my master’s work studying barred owls. 

It was, in fact, incredibly empowering to be a solo female who was completely independent: I relied on nothing but my wits, my experience, and my body to climb mountains, walk across lava fields, ford icy-cold rivers, and escape a too-close call with a wildfire. I felt powerful—something that our patriarchal society does not often allow women to feel—and I felt, for perhaps the first time since I was a young child, finally free of the expectations and obligations thrust on me by others and then, by extension, by myself.

“The trail provides” is an oft-quoted refrain in the long distance hiking community. During my first hike, it gave me a sense of success when my professional confidence was flagging, and on my second, it imbued me with a feeling of unwavering self-assuredness, of knowing with absolute certainty that I can do it on my own. 

To be clear, the trail is not a silver bullet; not everyone’s story is as “lost to found” as Cheryl Strayed’s Wild may lead us to believe. But the simplicity of doing nothing but walking all day, every day through stunning beauty for months on end necessitates, by its very nature, a new perspective. And this new outlook can translate into a rearranging of your idea of your place in the world. 

A place that feels a little less like you’re lost in the wilderness.

Make It Through the Thru-hike

There are many practical guides for backpacking long trails—I likely wouldn’t have had the confidence to embark on this journey without Yogi’s Pacific Crest Trail Handbook, for one—but here are a few of the more salient things I’ve learned first-hand:

- Ignore others’ fear-mongering. In many ways, American culture perpetuates the myth that the wilderness is a scary place—the idiom “out of the woods” is just one example—but in reality, as long as you’re prepared, in reasonable physical shape, and know how to properly assess risks, backpacking is probably safer than many other routine activities (like driving).
- Deserts get really cold at night. Bring gloves!
- For longer trips, buy shoes one or two sizes larger than normal. Most peoples’ feet swell. 
- Speaking of shoes, learn what the footprints of your hiking partners look like.
- The risk of sunburn is much more serious at high elevations, especially when hiking on reflective snow. Reapply often, even in weird places like the rims of your nostrils.
- Don’t get so focused on making miles. Take the time to swim in a trailside lake, nap in a meadow, and have a leisurely lunch at that epic viewpoint. That’s what you came for after all, right?