PCT 2021! – An Early Exit

Fire. Lots of it. Blow Downs. Too many to count. Nature Hugs. Maybe a little too much love from Mother Nature.

We’ve ended our 2021 attempt to reach Canada. We did complete hiking all of California, which is just short of 1700 miles of the 2650 mile Pacific Crest Trail.

We came for fun and beauty. We got a lot of both. However, fires started breaking out early this year, long before the typical lighting storm season began. Snowfall was low in California leading to another drought year. While snowfalls were high in Oregon and Washington, early heatwaves melted the snow quickly and they also moved into drought conditions.

Fires raging. Conditions worsening. Overgrowth and trees over the trail from maintenance postponed or delayed due to COVID-19. Bottomline: Less fun and only smoky views with no sign of conditions improving. The combined results lead us to declare the end of our 2021 hike when we reached Callahan’s Lodge in Oregon, just north of the California border.

With less than a 1,000 miles to go, we hope to be back hiking the PCT. However, it won’t be in 2021.

To see all of our adventure on the PCT in 2021, here is a playlist from YouTube:

Also, Top Rock captured a number of interesting scenes, most of which are not included in the YouTube media. We lacked connectivity when on the trail where the videos for YouTube were produced. He also purloined a few of his favorites from Kedger’s media, so you might recognize some from the YouTube videos. New photos are at the bottom. Here are links to his media shares:

Southern California (0 new)

Sierra (46 new)

Northern California (157 new)

Oregon (6 new)

Note from Ken: Oregon link should be good until we finish hiking that section in the much later future. However, I plan to remove the Southern California, Sierra, Northern California albums later. (When I run out of room, or when the alerts that I’m running out of space begin to annoy me.)

Until next time…

Fair winds