If you’ve been reading this blog for a while now you know that I’m a sucker for thru-hike stories. To me it’s the ultimate hiking accomplishment to finish a trail from end-to-end and I often romanticize the notion of one day completing my own thru-hike of a major trail. Or perhaps I’ll focus on hiking all the trails in my state just like this guy did.

Anyway, postcrescent.com published an article about Troy Ristau and his successful thru-hike of the Pacific Crest trail from the Mexican border in California to the Canadian border in Washington state. The trail snakes across 2,650 miles of the most scenic terrain in the US and crests some of the highest peaks in the Sierra Nevada (including 13,153 foot high Forester Pass). Ristau took about 4 and a half months to complete the hike and arrived at the end of the trail in relatively good shape. According to the article he didn’t get sick during the trek (rare for long distance hikers) and went completely stoveless (see my previous post on camping essentials).

The Pacific Crest Trail is a relatively new long distance hiking route having been completed in just 1993. By contrast the 2,175 mile Appalachian Trail was completed in the 1930s. About 300 hikers set out to thru-hike the Pacific Crest Trail each year and generally just over half actually complete the journey. Hats off to Mr. Ristau, perhaps he’ll inspire some of us to start our own hiking adventures!

Related posts:

1. The Pacific Northwest Trail
2. Hiking every trail in the White Mountains
3. The triple crown of hiking
4. NC Mountains to Sea Trail
5. Hiking the entire Pinhoti trail in sections

Tags: pacific crest trail, through hike

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 5th, 2008 at 6:12 am and is filed under backpacking, hiking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.