Saturday, March 18, 2023
Start: Coronado Peak TH
Miles: 27.7
Elevation gain/loss: 6903′ gain, 7722′ loss (corrected)
After a very early wakeup time at my Airbnb, I requested an Uber and got a driver fairly quickly. My driver, Dean, was friendly and professional, and excited for an adventure. We made it to the dirt road trailhead less than half an hour after sunrise, and I started off at 6:45am to tag the border and then head north.
I passed by Harry Potter (PCT 2020) in the morning, and met Anna and Liesel from London at the first water source. This was their first long hike, and I gave them tips for filtering and treating water – they had initially thought they needed to filter and chemically treat all of their water. I finally stopped for the night at 7pm, camping nearby Scully, a 2021-2022 AT hiker from Iowa.
Today was a tough day, with rougher terrain than I had expected. The trailbed was uneven and rocky; climbing was steep; and the altitude hit me hard. It was colder than I’d expected, too; close to Miller Peak, it was in the high 20s with frost on the ground even in the afternoon. There were a few miles of snow travel; it was packed down but not too melted and slippery thanks to the cold temperatures. I’d also seen endless empty bottles and cans, all with Spanish writing, wool blankets, and a few abandoned backpacks. It was very sad and disheartening to see the detritus of other people hiking across the same terrain as me, but for very different reasons and in very different circumstances.
Part of the challenge of this hike was that the elevation gain and loss noted in FarOut was blatently wrong – it noted 1500-2500′ less than even GaiaGPS estimates (and GaiaGPS is notoriously low in elevation gain by 1000-2000′ for most 20-mile routes in the northeast). It took me at least 5 days to be conscious of this issue, but my body and legs knew very early on – I just doubted myself. I initially thought the problem was me and my fitness, not the GPS track; it was psychologically very challenging. I felt so very tired and exhausted, and I was going slower than I should have been if the elevation gain was correct. This made for some truly miserable times the first few days.
Transcending Mountains 