It was much different than I expected; than I remembered.
We really have broken the planet. Despite the early date, the first hundred or so miles of the PCT were hit with an unseasonal heatwave. There was very little camaraderie as we trudged slowly from one water source to another, sweating buckets all the while. No fun or whimsy, no – just folks dropping out left and right. We accidentally formed a bubble of twenty or so hikers, and we ended up losing several people every morning: they couldn’t take it, they weren’t having fun. Understandable. Regrettable, but understandable.
I sweated so much that my long-sleeved sun shirt crusted solid. Not the best look. I imagine that was at least in part because the hormone pills I started taking the day before I began my hike had lowered my heat tolerance somewhat. But even so…
Many old oases weren’t as I remembered them. Some of them had warning signs about homeless folks stealing water. In the desert. Good for them, no?
Quite a few more trail angels and small quasi-hostels popped up: houses in strategic locations where the homeowner would sell sodas, beers, and snacks out of their fridge (with the living area locked away), with a little price menu and with the whole arrangement working on the honour system.
More heatwaves.
Almost died while trying to ascend Mount Baden-Powell: it began snowing as I went up. I had all of my snow gear. Made it to the very top, despite the path being covered by the earlier snow. At the peak, there was no trail at all, just a steep layer of thin ice – the kind that even an ice axe would have a hard time latching onto. It was 4pm and I could either sloooowly shuffle forward in hopes of finding some flat surface to camp on, or go back down, which I ended up doing, a bit more rapidly than anticipated. Discovered the braking limits of my ice axe the hard way.
In a sizable percentage of alternate universes, my snow gear-induced pride probably killed me on that slope.
Once I made it back down (thank you so much, local angel – you know who you are!), I decided to leave for the Julian Dubuque International Film Festival in Iowa a few days earlier than planned. They put me up in an amazing AirBnB for ten nights, fed me and other filmmakers twice-daily buffets, and screened my “Please Don’t Send Help” three different times. It was amazing, utterly amazing.
Sidenote: it was so ridiculously wasteful to buy one festival-fancy outfit (they would not have appreciated my track pants and a dirty shirt) and then donating it to charity just two weeks later. Funny, but wasteful.
And then I flew back to the PCT, learned there was another snowstorm in my absence, and ascended the mountain for the second time, with far less snow and danger. (And no, I couldn’t walk around it: the highway was partially destroyed by a gigantic rock slide. Poor Wrightwood can’t catch a break!)
One interesting observation: there were a lot of hikers who used AI to plan their route, often with hilarious results. Some of them relied on water sources that simply didn’t exist, and they had a rather bad time, what with the desert and all. Others used AI to pack so much food (and that’s on the easiest stretch, with towns every 20-30 miles!) that they had to use the extra space in their buddies’ backpacks to store it.
And a lot of people cheated… It seemed endemic, really: in 2022, if somebody chose to hitchhike around a part they didn’t feel like hiking, they’d stay mostly silent about that. In 2026, that became something they bragged about. The rumour mill kept exaggerating the nature of perfectly normal obstacles, like a climb out of Julian or a few dozen miles of burned forest. The rumours made them sound like insurmountable challenges, and so more and more folks skipped, and laughed about it, and gave the side eye to myself and the few other hikers who chose to hike every mile.
I know, I know, there’s that expression, “Hike your own hike.” But that just got ridiculous at some point: if one person brings a motorcycle to the marathon, they’d get laughed out of the race. But if 95% of the runners are revving their engines and then claiming their medals at the finish line, that’s downright ridiculous, no?..
I wasn’t the only “returner” who tried to repeat the grand PCT adventure: there were quite a few more. I wondered if that was because of the news and the general stress of the world. When I wasn’t alternating between overheating and freezing, the silence sure felt nice.
…through it all, I continued writing at least one story per week.
There were more heatwaves. More skippers. More side-eyes and weird reactions when I’d say (after being asked, mind you) that I liked to hike long days (25 or so miles daily) or that I cowboy-camped (because I personally didn’t like the time commitment of tents, despite carrying one) or that I wasn’t going to skip any miles. Back in 2022, none of that seemed controversial.
A few lasting friendships were made, but not many. Ah well. The clouds sure were pretty, though.
Finally, after reaching the windmill town of Tehachapi (mile 560 or so) and checking the weather forecast for the next 100+ miles to the Sierra section and seeing that there’d be yet another goddamn heatwave, I decided to call it quits. My objective for this second through-hike was to have fun, and that was the opposite thereof.
Later, I learned that one of my new friendos, a giant bear of a man – trail name “Arches” – also quit the trail, but a bit later, at mile 700, at the foothills of the Sierra. He’d suffered through that heatwave and had to wait in Kennedy Meadows South until the mountain passes melted somewhat, and during that short time at the local hostel, he contracted norovirus and finally had enough. Poor guy.
Even later, I learned that wildfires shut down the final stretch of the PCT yet again – for several weeks in August and September, from what I understood (it has since reopened) – resulting in the same heartbreak in 2026 as back in 2022. Even if I’d somehow powered through those remaining 2,100 miles, I still wouldn’t have gotten that finish-line party I always yearned for. Heh.
And as for me, I gave away a lot of my hiking supplies (yay hiker boxes), bought a new set of clothes at the Walmart that was used to us hiker trash, did a bit of research, and picked Phoenix as my next temporary destination. It was somewhat close (only 18 hours by bus, via Los Angeles) and it was one of the few places hiring for election-related jobs in early May, being a swing city in a swing state and all. I rediscovered my love of canvassing, had some quaint experiences, got banned for life from two separate shopping complexes, and then traveled to three different cities to do special canvassing projects for my company. (Yay overtime!) It was interesting.
Then there was Worldcon in late August, where I screened my short film “How to Prepare for Time Travelers in the Workplace” and made quite a few new friends, though under a different name. Leveled up my writing somewhat, too.
This, here, now, is the final stage of my Feral Artist Nomad journey: I shall return to Montreal on November 5th. (Assuming, of course, the US doesn’t erupt in a civil war and/or invade Canada, which the orange madman has not quite ruled out.) After thirteen months of traveling, and changing a fair bit (see the next post), I will finally be home.
I look forward to staying put, no matter how long that may last.
