The Hike Plan.

Stock photo, just getting into the spirit...

We board a plane for California 3 weeks from today, so the plan is coming  together.  Today, I finalised the miles we hike each day, the extra time required to climb the steep bits so we know when we'll finish each evening, so I could book where we'll be staying on our rest days, all that sort of thing.  

About every 7 days, we're coming off the trail for a shower and a nice cold beer.  Today I called every lodge/ranch, just to make sure the reservation was confirmed and that they stock cold beer.  Thank goodness I did.  The original plan meant we would arrive in a town called Belden during the same evening as a Techno Music Festival.  Can you imagine?  Taking your son half way around the world to connect with him, to bond, to, as Thoreau said, "live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and to see if we could not learn what it had to teach".   Can you imagine, in the midst of that, arriving to the repetitive percussion of a mind-numbing rave?  

To be fair, a rave in the Sierra Nevada Mountains would probably be pretty amazing, but not the sort of Rite of Passage we had in mind, so I changed that part of the plan.  Everything else has gone pretty smoothly.

Until, that is, I looked at the handy chart that Craig's PCT Planner creates for you once you've finished working out all the details.

The profile for elevation gain of the specific section of the hike we'll be doing.

Over the 26 days, we will hike 38,000 feet of elevation gain, or nearly 10,000 feet more than the height of Everest.  Or put another way, to the height that planes fly.  Or more than 7 miles of vertical distance.  Groan.

Here's the plan summary for when we'll be doing which part of the hike.

So you can see, from the 11th of August to the 20th of August if you think of us, just know that after climbing nearly 2,000 feet a day during that stretch, we're probably sleeping pretty well.