It is March 1st.
Seventeen days and a wake-up.
The walking has increased now to two dog-walks a day. Not heroic distances – just the steady rhythm of movement. The neighborhood loop in the morning. The same loop again later in the afternoon. A mile and a half each time, pack on, dog trotting along with the quiet patience of a creature who understands routine better than most humans.
Preparation, at this stage, is not dramatic. It is repetitive.
Robert Pirsig wrote in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance about the quiet discipline of attending to systems. Not romantic adventure. Not the sweeping story we tell afterward. Just the methodical, almost meditative attention to whether things actually work.
These weeks feel like that.
This week I made a change in packs. The Mariposa 60 – sleek, modern, respectable in the ultralight world – has been retired to the closet. In its place I pulled out my old Army ALICE Large rucksack.
It is not fashionable.
It is not ultralight.
But everything fits.
And by everything, I mean everything: the BV500 Bear Vault that will be required for the High Sierra, along with the ice axe, microspikes, and the additional gear that the mountains insist upon whether we would prefer to carry it or not. The Sierra, unlike internet forums, does not negotiate about weight.
With all of that loaded, the scale now reads 37.5 pounds.
That number got my attention.
Then I realized I had only loaded about six days of food. The Sierra requires closer to ten. So the truth is heavier still.
But that discovery also leads to a practical insight. Only about six days of food fits comfortably in the bear canister in its original packaging. The freeze-dried meals come wrapped in thick mylar designed for twenty-five years of storage. I only need ten days of storage. When the time comes at Kennedy Meadows South, the Sierra food will get repackaged into zip-lock bags and packed tighter.
Another system adjustment.
This is what these weeks are for.
Stress-testing systems. Thinking through carries. Checking mileage, elevation, wind exposure, and weather patterns. Discovering which assumptions survive contact with reality and which quietly fail the moment a scale or a pack frame becomes involved.
Meanwhile, a small conversation unfolded on the PCT 2026 Facebook group. A younger hiker asked the perennial question about San Jacinto: when and where and whether to carry microspikes and an ice axe.
Another woman in her sixties from the Pacific Northwest answered first. Then I answered.
Our responses were essentially identical.
We are starting with both.
Because we are old.
Because we are from the Pacific Northwest.
Because we are not guessing.
Those tools will be necessary at some point. The real question is not whether spikes and axe will be needed somewhere along the trail. The real question is whether the axe will be in your hand when you need it, or strapped neatly to your pack while you attempt to save a pound and gravity offers its own critique of the idea.
Sure, there are hikers who go through the PCT every year without carrying either.
There are also old climbers and bold climbers.
But there are no old bold climbers.
I keep thinking about my old Scoutmaster, Carl Henderson. Boeing engineer. Seattle Mountaineer. One of those men whose authority came not from volume but from accumulated miles.
We were climbing Inter Glacier on Rainier when he looked at his heavy pack and said something I have never forgotten. He told me he had carried that sleeping bag to the summit a hundred times and never used it once. But here he was carrying it for the hundred-and-first time, and he was glad to have it.
Carl said similar things about rain gear. About balaclavas in the middle of summer. About avalanche beacons.
The heavy things.
The unnecessary things.
The things that feel excessive right up until the moment they are not.
I grew up carrying an ice axe on hikes where no one expected snow. We carried them on the Olympic beaches along Washington’s wild coast. On slick driftwood logs. On steep heather slopes. On frosted ground where a slip could become a slide. An ice axe, properly used, is a walking tool as much as a climbing one.
But only if it is in your hand.
Which means it has to be long enough to function like a cane. A short decorative axe strapped to a pack may look tidy, but it will still be on the pack when you needed it in your hand.
That old woman from the PNW understands this.
And so do I.
Another discovery from the gear shakedown: the BV500 bear canister doubles as a perfectly serviceable stool. This may sound like a minor insight, but anyone who has spent long evenings in the backcountry knows that sometimes comfort begins with simply having a place to sit.
So the systems continue to evolve.
The miles increase.
The pack grows heavier.
The plan becomes more real.
Meanwhile the headlines continue to convulse in the background, as headlines always do. The news this week is filled with sudden war talk – the sort of geopolitical drama that arrives abruptly and then demands everyone’s attention. Having spent a lifetime around military intelligence thinking, one develops a certain skepticism toward grand strategic adventures, especially the kind that involve the Middle East and confident predictions of quick outcomes. Iraq and Afghanistan provided their own graduate seminars on that subject.
But those questions belong to the large and complicated world.
The business at hand is simpler.
Walk.
Test the systems.
Check the weight.
Carry the tools.
And in seventeen days and a wake-up, shoulder the pack and start north.
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