I’ve known about the Pacific Crest Trail for as long as I can remember. Growing up in Seattle, it was simply part of the background radiation of outdoor life, something that existed in the same mental category as topo maps and trailhead signs. It never held much mystique for me. I was raised looking up, not out. Mount Rainier to the south, Baker and the Pickets to the north. Peaks were the point. Trails were how you got to them.
My dad never saw the appeal either. He was a Pacific Northwest mountaineer of a particular generation and temperament. When the PCT came up, his reaction was dismissive and consistent. Why would anyone want to walk that far when there were peaks to climb? To him, distance without elevation gain was a category error.
I didn’t disagree exactly. I just found myself drawn to a different axis of difficulty. I’ve spent a lot of time on foot carrying weight, moving through terrain where the miles add up quietly and the novelty wears off early. Long days where the work isn’t dramatic, just persistent. You learn quickly that walking is less about strength than tolerance: tolerance for repetition, for discomfort, for unfinished thoughts.
So when I finally decided to walk the PCT, it didn’t feel like a departure. It felt like a continuation.
Last year was supposed to be the year. I had a permit. The planning was complete enough to be reassuring. The start date was set. And then, as often happens, the part of life that doesn’t care about plans asserted itself.
My dad had been dealing with spinal compression issues after a fall the previous summer. What was supposed to be a single, complex spinal fusion turned into something less tidy. His wife, my stepmother, had a rotator cuff repair scheduled ahead of his surgery and was temporarily out of commission herself. Someone needed to be there, and the math was straightforward.
My twin brother lives in Porto, Portugal. We worked out a rotation. He would come in first, cover the early stretch, and I would follow to handle cleanup and continuity. It was a sensible plan, and for a while it worked. Then my dad needed another surgery, and the handoff reversed. I came back north and stayed.
Six months is a long time to live in someone else’s medical calendar.
I was in Bellingham, effectively on pause. I could have treated that time as an interruption. Instead, I made use of it. I joined the Bellingham Senior Center’s weekday hikes, twice a week, and another informal group of mostly late-sixties and seventies men who walked together regularly. We hiked. We argued about politics. On Fridays, we ended up at the same dive bar for suds and chips.
It wasn’t heroic. It was ordinary, and it mattered.
Those men weren’t training for anything. They weren’t optimizing. They were showing up, moving, paying attention to their bodies, and then sitting down together afterward. Watching them quietly dismantled a lot of unhelpful ideas about what endurance looks like later in life. There was no narrative arc. Just continuity.
While I was in Bellingham, my wife was doing something equally unglamorous and equally consequential. We had retired and bought a house in St. George, Utah, after settling decades of deferred maintenance on our family home in Idaho Falls and closing out businesses. She was down there alone, unpacking boxes, learning a new place, building routines.
St. George was a deliberate choice for us. Fewer months where your face hurts from the cold. Access to the desert and canyon country. And, most importantly, grandchildren. Two girls, four and five at the time. They’re five and six now as I write this, and they’ll be older again by the time summer comes around.
That mattered too.
By the time the season passed, the decision not to go had long since stopped feeling like a decision. It was simply the correct response to the constraints in front of me. The permit expired. The trail remained where it had always been. What changed was my understanding of readiness.
I didn’t fail to start because I lacked commitment. I didn’t start because the walk wasn’t the most important thing that year. That distinction matters more than it sounds.
The year I didn’t go taught me something useful. Intention is easy to confuse with inevitability. Permits, plans, and declarations feel solid right up until they aren’t. What carries you forward isn’t resolve. It’s alignment — between timing, responsibility, and what you’re willing to leave unattended.
This year looks different. Not simpler. Not cleaner. Just clearer.
And clarity, it turns out, is a better place to start from than certainty ever was.
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