Well better late than never as they say. Back in August I spent 11 days on the PCT, hiking from Crater Lake to Mackenzie Pass (Sisters, OR). This was the 1st long distance hike I had done. A buddy joined me for the first 3 days, but then had to bail out at Crescent Lake. All in all it went really well. Weather was good and my timing was such that i didn't encounter any wildfires. Luckily we had departed CL just before the wildfire there caused road & trail closures.
My set up worked really well. I have a HH Ultralite Backpacker hammock. I converted it to whoppies w/ Dutch clips and that made set up super quick. I did a lot of prep to drop my base weight and was able to get it down to 18.5lbs, with food, H2O, & fuel I ended up between 30-35 lbs depending on how much food & water I had.
Trees were never a problem, it is Oregon after all
Some of the things I learned;
- most thru-hikers were only carrying 2 liters of H2O max. I had a 3 liter bladder & two 0.5 liter bottles. that extra 4+lbs was noticeable and for the most part water sources, even as dry as this year was, were available to support only carrying 2 liters.
- Wearing 2 socks or socks & liners are a must. I ended up with blisters simply because I couldn't keep the interior of my boots dry during the day. Even drying them out during lunch breaks wasn't enough.
- I used a sawyer squeeze filter and my buddy had a pump style filter. both had their pros & cons. We used the pump quite a bit at the start because most of the water sources were still lakes that were very low. Bit it did take 2 of us to use it efficiently. The sawyer was trickier to use in still lakes but still worked well. I saw a fair number of thru hikers that simply screwed the sawyer filter on the top of a 1 liter plastic water bottle. They would simply drop the bottle into teh lake and fill it up, then screw the filter back on and they were done.
- I use a sleeping pad, the static V, and it worked very well. But there were still a couple of cold nights (low 40s & high 30s) and when any part of my body came off the pad it was only a matter of minutes before the cold woke me. I may need to consider an under quilt in the future.
- trying to maintain 4K calories/day is tough. Carrying enough food to do this is one issue, simply from a weight stand point. But also I found I just wasn't hungry enough to eat that much food. I ended up with extra food, much of which ended up in the hiker boxes of various resupply points. The flip side is i ended up dropping on average 1lbs a day.
- Cliff bars suck / Larabars are awesome
- People were very cool. Both the hikers & the folks at the campgrounds (staff & campers).
It was a great experience and I plan to more of the PCT next year.
Here are some pics
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Originally Posted by 5Archer
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