The Omnivore's Dilemma

Most thru-hikers eat garbage. Take a moment to appreciate the irony. After careful selection of a particular pack or shelter, taking into consideration weight, features, materials, durability, cost--they go to the store to load up on Pop Tarts, Kraft macaroni and cheese, and as many candy bars as they can carry. Beyond doubt, many, many aspects of this trip will challenge the limits of my endurance, but in the kingdom of my mind neither cold, nor heat, nor mosquitoes, nor fatigue are as likely to damage my morale as the food.

Look, I get it: hunger is the best seasoning, and the cooking arrangements are limited. Boxed macaroni and cheese will never have tasted so good as it will after a long day on the trail; it won't be more than a few weeks before food equals fuel, full stop. But a staggering portion of the thru-hiker's shopping list leads me to aisles of the grocery store that I have never visited in my adult life. I've never cooked a Knorr packet of anything. After leaving Reed, food transitioned from a pleasant hobby to a driving force, and for the last five years I have made it my business to learn how to make all sorts of food from real ingredients, at work and at home, sometimes even collecting those ingredients myself. The kitchen is my laboratory. I've graduated to making jam, pickles, crackers, wine, cheese, bread, and candy bars from scratch. I make Pop Tarts from scratch. D'you hear? I MAKE POP TARTS FROM SCRATCH.

And having pampered my system on this kind of high-octane fuel, I am expected to start filling the tank with DIESEL.

For a while there, I flatly refused to think about it. I knew that if I got hung up on my adamant dismissal of gross processed food, I would never get this journey underway. Eventually it occurred to me that I could handily compare thru-hiking to the culture of a new and foreign country. I happen to know that there is no point hankering after crusty bread while you're living in Japan, there's no point pining for peanut butter when you're living in Spain, and there's no point wishing for fresh milk in Antarctica. It doesn't help. It just fosters discontent. But everywhere I've been, I've found at least one uniquely delicious thing that I never encounter anywhere else, so there IS a trade-off. Life Lesson #700: Eat the food before you with the understanding that you will not have to eat it forever, find out what it is that that culture does best, enjoy it vicariously--and move on.

With that in mind, I will demolish my share of Snickers (and Pay Day, and Almond Joy, and every other shitty candy bar that I'd normally replicate at home, plus mountains of chocolate), but that doesn't mean I have to buy into the befuddled all-Snickers-all-the-time mentality shared by many, because this is my hike. I can do better than that. For what it's worth, one of Boomer's cautionary tales from his first year had to do with food. He lived on garbage, lost too much weight, and with nothing left in reserve, his emotional state followed a predictable but terrifying roller coaster directly related to his caloric intake. He'd trip over a tree root and feel like he simply could not go on, the trail had defeated him. Then he'd go to town, wolf down a pizza and a quart of ice cream, and feel like he could conquer the world, what was all the fuss about? He had to take a week off in northern California to eat and restore a little stability. Generalization alert--I think that for various culturally-instilled reasons, first-world women spend more of their formative years growing accustomed to being hungry than first-world men, so the light-headed empty-belly feeling doesn't scare me for a day or a week--but there comes a point, with thru-hiking's daily exertion, when the sensation of hunger can't keep pace with the body's needs, and a Snickers bar is not enough to stave off the crash. Good food means a good mood, as well as a healthy body. I want to enjoy my hike, not just survive it.

let's all go to the bar

Braaten's Pack Light, Eat Right offers some excellent advice. It didn't tell me a great deal about nutrition that I didn't already know, but it spells out the kind of adjustments necessary to fuel walking 20+ miles every day, and dispels some of the myths. How to avoid hitting the wall, and what to do if it happens. The importance of eating often--snack, snack, snack, all day--to maintain consistent energy levels. Drink a lot of water--a lot--how to tell when you aren't drinking enough, and what to do if you hit that [much scarier] wall. No-cook recipes. Clever hacks for ramping up calorie counts. With a little attention to what you're putting into your mouth you don't really need to take vitamins, and with all the processed trail-food you really don't need to take salt tablets, but she offers shortcuts for getting vitamin C and electrolytes, too.

What does a long-distance hiker want out of her food? Maximum energy for a minimum of weight, bulk, and spoilage. In practice, this means dehydrated food--water is monstrously heavy and available on the trail, to be added as needed--and a lot of fat. Mmm, faaaaat. Ideally, you could just travel with a bucket of clarified butter! But that would summon every bear within a hundred miles, and I couldn't drink butter straight anyway. It's reassuring to see a few familiar foods get top billing: nuts and peanut butter, Nutella, chocolate, olive oil. After that, cereal bars, powdered milk, granola, trail mix, dried fruit, cookies, and candy. Tortillas and pita are the way-breads of choice, because they pack down so easily, but crackers are good, too. Cheese, hummus, foil-pack meats, like tuna and chicken, and jerky if you can stand it, help to round out the proteins. Drink mixes. (Carnation Instant Breakfast + instant coffee = Hiker Mocha.) So far so good. I'll miss toast and eggs, but all of this beats the hell out of pemmican and Special Cabin Biscuits.

"After six months of eating the same stuff, my favorite food items during this trip were anything that contained chocolate. My least favorite items were anything that didn’t contain chocolate. Next time I go on a long trip, I’m only bringing chocolate, at least for breakfast, snacks, and dessert."
-Andrew Skurka, upon finishing his 4700+ mile Alaska-Yukon expedition

"taste adventure" instant soups

Dinner-time will pose the biggest challenge, because after coasting through the day on something remarkably similar to (if less "instant" than) the above-listed diet, I normally settle down with a vegetable "salad" as big as my head. Summer and winter, cooked or raw, this is what I eat the most, and there are bajillions of delicious seasonal permutations. Vegetables aren't much of a feature of trail life, as you can imagine, and I can already tell that this is where I'm going to hit a wall. Thru-hikers turn to a hefty carbohydrate supper, because it's easy, filling, and provides fuel the following day. Noodles, instant mashed potatoes, instant rice, oatmeal, couscous, instant soup--you get the idea. Extra calories (and flavor) appear in the form of dried cheese sauce, dried alfredo sauce, dried pesto, olive oil, Butter Buds (what the fuck are Butter Buds?), meat, maybe dehydrated vegetables. I am so out to sea on this one, it isn't even funny. They're all SO SALTY. Salt is magic, don't get me wrong, but it's just too much. During trial-runs for Top Ramen, Taste Adventure soup, and even organic quick-cook quinoa, the inside of my mouth felt cured before I'd finished half a portion. I'm still trying to sort it out, this dilemma, and I guess I'll just have to learn as I go.

I only have five food maildrops to fill at the start, thank heavens, so in the absence of any proven trail-food theory I decided to load them up with as much shelf-stable homestyle hippie chow that I can muster: all those idiotically expensive food bars from the co-op; almond and sunflower seed butters; good chocolate; salmon; homemade granola and trail mixes; anything at all from Trader Joe's. I also ordered a bunch of packaged meals from Outdoor Herbivore, a little company out of North Carolina specializing in vegetarian hiking food, whose good-earth practices will hopefully equate to less salt, more flavor. The selections have twee-sounding trail names like "Switchback Soup & Stuffer" and "Sunrise Breakfast Scramble" and "Lickety Split Lentils"; and "Coconut Chia Peel," which could be either a meal or a facial treatment. If I like them, I might order some more and have them delivered to Ashland.

outdoor herbivore meals & sprouting bag

But most exciting to me: SPROUTS. Yes, you heard right. The desert will be too dry, and the Sierras too bear-ridden, but starting at Echo Lake I will carry a sprouting bag and seeds, and grow my own greens on-trail. Paul sent me the link to Outdoor Herbivore's sprouting kit as a joke, but it felt like a message from the heavens. Sprouts? SPROUTS! THAT'S IT! That's the answer! So simple! So genius! Just rinse the seeds a few times a day, and you've got vegetables in less than a week! Radish and alfalfa and broccoli and lentil and mung bean and...! I WILL HAVE GREEN FOOD! I knew there had to be a way! I will look forward to those sprouts from the day I set foot on the trail to the day I open that box. If a tortilla wrap with tuna and crunchy sprouts sounds good now, a thousand miles later it's going to taste AMAZING. Sprouts! I am SAVED! I can hike the PCT!

Oh, and how much food? For a woman of my size, reckoning on two pounds of this kind of dry, high-calorie food per day ought to be more than adequate. Two pounds of fatty food every day. About four thousand calories. Every day. Plus milkshakes, onion rings, sushi, and monster salads on town days. I've never eaten that much in my life. If I can keep the caliber of my food on par with my lofty expectations, I think I'm really going to enjoy being a bottomless pit.

Start Date

We have a hard start date: Earth Day, April 22nd. It seems auspicious.

The Kick-Off begins on the 26th, but recollecting my experience of similar events in the past, I preferred to skip it, and leave early. I'm happy to meet my fellow hikers on the trail. Indeed, looking at this year's snow report, I imagine that many hikers, more ambitious or more experienced than I, intend to go haring out the gate much sooner, probably starting about now. My theory is that I'd like to allow my body a relatively gentle first couple of weeks, to build strength and adjust to a new lifestyle; but while there are many words to describe my personal failings, lollygagger is not one of them, and once I find my legs I expect that my hiking style will follow suit. And I'm no mountaineer. No point getting to the Sierras too early.

As soon as I'd bought a ticket I emailed Boomer, since he'd mentioned, months ago when I first asked his advice for planning this trip, a network of folk in San Diego willing to put up prospective hikers and ferry them to the trailhead. He forwarded my information to Scout and Frodo--former thru-hikers, now trail angels heading up the southern California hospitality brigade--and within 24 hours I'd been promised transportation from the airport and to the trailhead, lodgings, dinner, and any other assistance a humble pilgrim could ask for. If they don't have enough floor space at their house for the incoming wave of hikers, they'll call up another trail angel and find room at someone else's. They do this for literally hundreds of hikers every year. They say simply, "We enjoy helping you start on your adventure." No fee, no PQ, no interview, no background check, no questions asked. Just people helping each other. It's...incredible.

While I'm here I may as well address the elephant in the room: as anybody who's been paying attention will by now have divined, Paul is going, too. I can't say why or when, exactly, he decided to embark on a thru-hike, and I don't think he knows, either. That's for him to elaborate if he so chooses. It works out pretty brilliantly for me, since Paul's the only person I know who'd be interested in this particular brand of madness, and his backpacking experience might prevent me from dying of my own stupidity in the first week. It works out for him to store his belongings at my parents' house, and my mom will oversee our maildrops. We'll be flying south and starting together at Campo, and I'm delighted that he decided to join this adventure. That said, there was never a minute when I thought it would be a good idea for us to thru-hike together. Paul's a full foot taller than I am, for one thing, so we travel at very different speeds. He's got a bum knee, a bum ankle, a bum shoulder, and the attention span of a fruit bat; in turn, I'm about as even-tempered as a hornet, and as social as an oyster. It's kind of funny, because I think we are each more likely to finish because the other is going, but there's no way in hell we'd survive five solid months of one another's company. We'll hike in tandem, independently.

Navigation

You might think that, for all the other challenges involved in a thru-hike, the PCT is pretty easy to navigate. It's one long line, after all, a path between two points, and you're standing on it. Follow the trail. Head north.

white blaze

Actually, from what I've read that's a pretty accurate assessment of the Appalachian Trail. It's very well-marked. A rectangular white blaze flags a rock or tree at every junction or hesitation, indicating the way. Carrying an elevation profile might help you organize your days, but a thru-hiker wouldn't necessarily need maps, they're more a point of interest, a way of interacting with the surroundings. Like a bird book. It'd be hard to get lost along that long green tunnel unless you went blundering blindly into the woods on purpose.

Partly because many hikers come to the Crest after completing the AT, therefore, both the official and cottage-industry publications about the PCT state loudly and repeatedly, "This trail is different, folks. YOU NEED MAPS." No white blazes. Frequently no signage at all. Junctions, jeep roads, snow fields, washouts, wildfires, even boring plant overgrowth might obliterate parts of the trail, demanding route-finding or (sometimes) a detour. Owing to the fact that the PCT often traverses much deeper wilderness than the AT, too, the stakes are a bit higher if you mistakenly head off in the wrong direction. You must have a way to navigate.

For a long time the Wilderness Press guidebooks provided navigation by narration. Experienced thru-hikers described the features of the trail with real words strung together into sentences, printed on paper and bound into books. New editions appeared periodically. (None recently.) The Data Book condensed this meandering discourse into a mathematical "crib sheet" of waypoints, indicating the locations of pertinent landmarks (road crossings, water sources, towns) by calculating the milages between. Good old Forest Service and USGS maps provided topographical details when the trail was snowed under (if you know how to read them). GPS appeared on the scene for the wealthy or the worried. Yogi started publishing her Town Guide in 2007, including not only updated information about the trail itself, but valuable notes on the types of resupply available in each town: perennial trail angels, where to do laundry, where to get fuel, addresses, phone numbers, and operating hours of post offices, stores, motels, and restaurants. The paper-weight for all this information adds up, of course. By long-standing tradition, thru-hikers cut their guidebooks into pieces, carrying only the pertinent pages for a given section, burning them as they go.

Then Apple invented the iPhone.

Within the span of a few years, it's become possible to consolidate camera, GPS, compass, altimeter, cellphone, alarm clock, timer, personal computer, data books, journal, auxiliary flashlight, endless entertainment--iTunes! YouTube! Hulu!--and god knows what else into one very tiny package. You can Skype with your mother and order new socks from the top of Mt Whitney. Even in areas without cell service, you can still take pictures, record your thoughts, listen to music, and navigate with a single device that weighs less than a paperback book. Solar chargers have attained an efficiency and reliability to allay any worries about running out of power. As long as you don't drop it during a stream crossing, the iPhone is probably the best thing that ever happened to ultralight backpacking.

A few years ago a hiker called Halfmile, armed with a GPS, mapped the length of the PCT with exceptional care and precision, then made the maps available online, in pdf form, for free--which is to say, you can download and print the most current and reliable maps ever made of the trail from home, if you like. That's pretty amazing. Still more amazing, you can download those maps into your smartphone. Halfmile's even developed an iPhone app with the PCT waypoints--practically a living guidebook. Paul's got the latest and greatest iPhone 5, so when he arrives at a confusing junction, he'll be able to consult the waypoints or digital maps and proceed without ever having had to resort to a paper printout.

I don't need or want a smartphone in my daily life, so I don't have one. (Call me backward, but I could make lists of the things I would rather invest my time and money in: Chickens. A KitchenAid. Flying lessons. A thru-hike.) When I realized how many devices I might wind up carrying on this trip for communication purposes, however, I issued a general plea for a used smartphone, and Silas very generously mailed me his old iPhone 3G. Thus armed I should be able to take snapshots, read email, order socks, and call my mother.  I haven't yet figured out how to write a blog post, but I'll get there. The one thing I've discovered this smartphone absolutely cannot do, ha ha, is navigate. I can't download any pathfinding app currently on the market, because the operating system is too old. I might be able to manage pin-drop emails with Google Maps to let my folks know where I am, but the GPS won't be able to help me much on-trail. They hadn't even developed an internal compass for this model.

Which is fine, because I ordered paper maps. All 474 pages of them. Old school.

trimming maps to make them fit in ziploc bags
photo by Paul

I like maps. I've got maps hung all over my house--of the world, of Alaska, of Antarctica, of New Zealand--marked with dots and lines. Maybe it's my way of organizing information and memory. I feel kind of defensive about taking maps on the PCT in this digital age, but carrying paper maps doesn't strike me as any more ridiculous than carrying camp shoes. HYOH, right? Besides, they're so pretty.

(Future hikers, please note that a printshop in Portland called GISI will produce every last one of Halfmile's maps, in full color, double-sided, for $70 plus shipping. It took me awhile to learn this, and maybe I can spare someone else a bad day by passing the message along. The local printshop, by comparison, quoted me $414 for the project; FedEx Kinko's wasn't far behind; UPS wants $0.50 per page.)

ley lines

I've divided my enchantingly lovely topo maps into packets, with correlating pieces of Yogi's Town Guide and the Data Book, to join the appropriate maildrops. This is probably overkill. If anything gets tossed, the Data Book, somewhat dated and the hardest for me to make sense of (it's all numbers, gah), will go first. I'll pitch "spent" pages of both books as I pass through each town. But I really don't want to have to burn the maps. They're too nice. I've an idea about keeping notes on them and sending them home again in sections. 

Resupply

In The Worst Journey in the World, the process of laying supply depots for upcoming forays onto the polar plain proved nearly as arduous as the journeys themselves. Imagine pulling a sledge loaded with several hundred pounds of pemmican and Special Cabin Biscuits across the Ross Ice Shelf. Resupplying my stores of food and equipment along the PCT, by comparison, will be a cake walk.

There are two standard approaches to resupply: mailing ahead and buying as you go. They are not mutually exclusive. Each has its benefits and pitfalls, and each has enjoyed a few years or decades of supremacy. Once upon a time, no more than a handful of towns lined the trail, and a thru-hiker necessarily carried an enormous load of food, ate it up, then either foraged or went hungry until he reached the next town (see: Eric Ryback). That's "resupply as you go" at its most daunting. In the realm of my imagination, if you couldn't shoot, clean, and cook a rabbit--and a host of other creatures--you probably wouldn't be able to hike the PCT. But then, in my mind, these early hikers were more aptly explorers, like Lewis and Clark, with all the rights and privileges and problems thereunto appertaining. 

As more small towns sprang up in California and hiking became more recreational, people sought to enjoy the traverse, rather than just surviving it. Somebody hit on the idea of mailing boxes of supplies via General Delivery to the towns along the trails. This would enable one to resupply at more frequent intervals, allowing one to carry a lighter load and a smaller, lighter pack; mitigated bouts of starvation; and best of all, a reliable infrastructure was already in place. Put that postal system to work! For a long time this seems to have been the most convenient (and economical) approach. Rural areas didn't necessarily support grocery stores--perhaps people still grew a lot of their own food?--and small grocery stores or gas stations might not stock suitable travel food, or only at very high prices--but the majority of towns definitely had a post office, or at least a small business, like a gas station, that would accept boxes. Hikers prepped a few dozen parcels of dehydrated food at home, mailed them ahead, and collected them along the way. You might not get a lot of variety in your diet this way, but the system worked.

The trend seems to have reversed significantly of late. Not too surprising that during "times of economic hardship" backcountry resorts shut down, and mailing rates increase. Due to budget cuts, post offices in many trail towns offer only limited hours and services; some have closed entirely. There are a lot more hikers now, too, so small businesses might not have the space (or inclination) to accommodate hundreds of resupply packages for a lot of smelly itinerants. (Regrettably, it only takes one rude sheepwit to convince a business that it isn't worthwhile to accept hiker packages.) Some resorts and stores decide to compensate for the annoyance of vagrants washing socks in their sinks by charging a "holding fee" on hiker packages. This can range from $5 to $20 per box. Even compared to the high markup on groceries from a small town store, once you've paid for contents, postage, and collection, the financial benefit of mailing supplies to yourself is negligible.

People living in rural areas, of course, have cars, and they drive to adjoining towns to take care of their commissary needs; hikers may have no choice but to hitch a ride in order to do the same. So here's my theory: if there's no post office on trail, and you have to hitch to a town in order to collect a resupply package of oatmeal and ramen that cost more to mail than to fill, then why not save yourself the inconvenience (and expense) of the postal service altogether, and just go to the goddam grocery store? Then you can pick out whatever you fancy eating at the time! And inhale a quart of ice cream while you're standing in the checkout line.

Reading other hikers' accounts, I see that some prefer not to have to "bother" going to the store, to deal with the stress of meal-planning when they are already tired from a long day of hiking, and I saw the logic behind this for, I think, forty-eight whole hours before I realized that in my case it's bull-malarkey. I love buying food. An hour at the grocery store better restores my sense of well-being than an hour at the spa. And without engaging too much with the question of what I will eat on this trip, because I'm not quite ready for that yet, can I just state one obvious fact? You can't put a cucumber in a resupply box. You can't put strawberries in a resupply box. You can't put any fresh food in a resupply box. The dearth of freshies is going to drive me crazy, and town days will loom large in my mind for the promise of salads as much as showers. Hell or high water, I will find a way to buy fresh food. 

With the exception of Warner Springs, southern California is so riddled with settlements that getting from the trail to the nearest Safeway or mini-mart every four to seven days poses little challenge. The areas so desolate as to require a long hitch, I'll likely be delighted to get off the trail to stand in an air-conditioned supermarket for an hour, regardless of how "out of the way" it may be. Just another aspect of thru-hiking, right? Most of the Sierra is so remote that you either carry a huge load through the mountains and enjoy the unbroken wilderness, or you gracefully integrate longish side trips to resupply points as part of your journey. Northern California looks like the real crapshoot. A few places lie so conveniently close to the trail that I intend to send myself a food box; other places, there's a small store where I might eke out a resupply if I'm not too picky and not too many ravenous male hikers were there ahead of me; other places, it seems like I won't have an alternative, I must find a ride to an adjoining town. It isn't until Oregon and Washington that the wilderness grows thick enough, and the gas stations skeezy enough, to warrant consistent maildrops. But I can hardly imagine what or how much I'll want to eat by then, so there's no point putting them together now. I'll send those boxes ahead from Ashland and Portland, later. 

So this is what the plan looks like, constructed after much study of Yogi's Trail Town Guide, Wandering the Wild's food resupply outline, and Craig's PCT Planner. I'll prepare five parcels from home, mailing the first at the beginning of April, leaving the rest with Mom. (This also gives her an opportunity to send me treats from Trader Joe's.) I like having a plan. It makes me feel very clever and prepared. Later, when I cast it impatiently to the four winds, I'll feel like I'm being very clever and rebellious.

Another Kind of Caravan

Funny to think that last year at this time Silas and I were bouncing around New Zealand's south island in a campervan. And it was raining then just like it's raining right now.

People always laugh when they see this photo. "THAT was your van?" Yes, it was. The Hippie Camper! Ashley Dale would've been proud. "Do you have a picture of you driving it?" No, I don't. Si took a few shots of me behind the wheel during the trying first couple of days of our rental, and they were such bad photos (or I was so stressed out at the time) that he agreed to delete them. "There'll be more pictures!" we said. Oh well.

New Zealand was full of campervans and caravans. Both tourists and Kiwis go on extended movable holidays; it's the thing to do. Everywhere we went we were surrounded by travelers frying eggs over butane cookers. Some Kiwis turn it into a way of life. Si and I stumbled across a real, live Gypsy Fair on the west side, complete with beautiful handmade wooden caravans. The Lost Gypsy Gallery in Papatowai is probably my single most favorite memory of the whole trip.

After three weeks I got pretty fed up with the Hippie Camper, but I love caravans, of course I do--they're self-contained portable houses. Don't think I haven't considered outfitting my own. Before accepting the baking job in Port Townsend I looked wistfully at a couple of craigslist ads for decommissioned Blue Bird school buses--I could turn one into a latter-day Parnassus on Wheels! But of course the problem with modern caravans is the driving. I hate driving.

I expect that everyone can see more or less where this is going.

I wanted very badly to make my own backpack for this hike. Ray Jardine sells a kit with instructions and all the necessary materials. But the longer I looked at it, the more uneasy I felt. No padding, no hip belt, no suspension. And fourteen ounces. I may as well hike with a flipping bindlestiff. The efficiency of a pack that light seems to rely a great deal on the knowledge of the hiker--Jardine's the same age as my father and he's been backpacking for most of his life, so hooray for him--but I can't overstate that I don't really know what I'm doing. I'm relying on research and other peoples' experiences in order to outfit this adventure. (And almost equally on my own adaptability once I get going.) Sound advice from these purveyors suggests that a thru-hiker nail down all the rest of her gear and then choose a backpack to accomodate the load--it's essentially a container, after all. So I put it off.

mariposa

At the approximate two-months-to-start date, though, newbies like myself need to have chosen most of their gear in order to allow an opportunity to get used to the stuff. Mid-February was decision-making time. After I'd let go of constructing a custom-fit backpack with my own hands, there were really only two contenders: the ULA Circuit and the Gossamer Gear Mariposa. As far as I can tell, they are essentially the same pack, with a mysterious weight discrepancy of 13oz. To be entirely honest I picked the Mariposa for no better reason than it was lighter than most, and I liked the look of it. (Which is pretty much the same way I picked out the Hippie Camper.) How many decisions, great and small, boil down to such nebulous inclination?

I'm pretty pleased with my purchase thus far, but there's a lot riding on a backpack--literally--and it feels like bad luck to make too many sweeping, optimistic claims about my caravan before it's successfully suffered through a few hundred miles of abuse. (The Hippie Camper revealed an electrical short--no turn signals, no gas gauge, no lights, no odometer--before we were ten minutes away from the rental agency.) Ideally, true to its name, the Mariposa will metamorphose from a harness that fits over my shoulders into an extension of my person. I don't want to jinx it.

The minute it arrived on the doorstep, however, suddenly the trip seemed that much more real. Still so much to do! The following day I gave notice at work. That same week I applied for a thru-hiking pass with the PCTA, sent off my paperwork for an Entry to Canada permit, and took the hokey four-question quiz to issue myself a California fire permit. I've cobbled together a working resupply plan, though I still don't have any socks. Things are lurching forward. Gadzooks, I leave in less than two months!