Hiking Trip Reports

Hiking the ‘graduate school’ of trails

Caitlin_Elsaesser@TimesRecord.Com
09/26/2007
BRUNSWICK — When Dan Feldman was hiking the Appalachian Trail in 2002, he injured his knee early in the trek. His parents traveled from Maine to help, but after five days of rest, Feldman decided to continue. Mike, Dan’s father, recalls his son was in so much pain that he went downhill sideways.

“To see him walking slowly and painfully with more than 2,000 miles to go was hard,” said Mike. Dan was hurt so badly that he hiked the last eight miles backward. Still, four and a half months later, Dan Feldman finished the trail.

This year, Dan applied this same determination to conquer what many consider a level above the Appalachian: The Pacific Crest Trail. To complete that trip, Feldman faced a much more dangerous situation than an injured knee: an ailing heart.

A 1995 graduate of Mt. Ararat High School, Feldman today looks several layers thinner than smiling pictures of him at the PCT’s trail head. Only a few weeks out of finishing his 130-day trek, Feldman speaks with a relaxed and easygoing manner, sporting an Ultimate Frisbee T-shirt from his alma mater, Oberlin College.

Yet finishing the Pacific Crest Trail took intense dedication and grit, he said. A 2,650-mile trail that runs from Mexico to Canada through California, Oregon and Washington, it has none of the shelters or hot showers that stud the Appalachian Trail. Out of the average 300 hikers that begin the trail each year, about 60 percent finish. Reaching a high point of 4,009 meters at Forester Pass in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, most through-hikers walk about 25 miles a day.

Feldman completed all this with a heart condition that can cause sudden death.

Jackie McDonnell, who wrote a guide to the PCT and goes by the trail name “Yogi,” says that if the Appalachian Trail is undergraduate education, the Pacific Crest Trail is graduate school and the Continental Divide is a doctorate.

McDonnell hiked the PCT during the same time Feldman did. These three trails form the American triple crown of long-distance hiking. The Pacific Crest Trail not only demands that hikers remain more self-reliant, says McDonnell, but it contains more extreme temperatures and requires hikers to carry their own shelter.

Many challenges

Feldman liked the sound of these challenges. Last April, after saving $5,000 to cover supplies and taking leave from his job as a physical therapist in Washington, D.C., he set off for California.

Difficulty came earlier than he had expected. Only a few days into the trail, he contracted a fungal infection so bad — “you don’t want to know the details,” he said — he had to take two days off to recuperate. Another day he lost the trail and had to sleep on the edge of a mountain, cold and hungry.

One of his greatest tests was a 261-mile stretch of the PCT that has no access to food. Here, Feldman had to carry nine and a half days worth of supplies. He got so hungry near the end that he had “wild food fantasies,” even hoping to see Girl Scouts on the trail selling Thin Mints or Somoas. In the end, Feldman had to bum food off of other hikers to make it through.

Though trying, these difficulties are part of why Feldman does these hikes. He’s found that his wilderness skills have improved.

“The physically draining parts are where you learn the most,” Feldman says.

Another challenge for Feldman was more subtle: ennui. “The books and blogs don’t write about the boring parts,” says “Yogi” McDonnell. In the early mornings, Feldman said he often had creative thoughts, which caused him to get sick of his own head. To keep himself occupied, he allowed himself an hour in the afternoon of listening to music on his iPod Shuffle.

Focused on food

Whatever the difficulties, many more aspects of the hike were satisfying. Some were on a small scale. Food, in general, was a hot topic.

“You think about food a lot,” said Feldman, who said hikers span a “food spectrum.” Some brought bags of spices for their food, while on the other extreme one hiker ate a cup of mixed groats, barley and oats for every meal. “I think he got pretty sick of it,” said Feldman.

Feldman still gets dreamy-eyed when recounting his own trail food — which he says always tasted good. He ate a carnation instant breakfast with dried milk — most people don’t know they come in five flavors, he says — with granola. For lunch Feldman ate a candy bar and a cliff bar, and dinner would be some variety of freeze-dried food. Beef stew was a favorite. He consumed between 2500 and 3000 calories a day.

People were another constant source of entertainment. He met many characters. An eleven-year-old hiker — named “Oblivious” — hiking with his dad, who was on track to be the youngest to complete both the Appalachian Trail and the Pacific Crest Trail. And “No Car,” who refused to step in a car for the duration of the journey.

Two of the trail’s more interesting characters — the white-bearded pair who go by “Billy Goat” and “Captain America,” helped Feldman earn a reputation early in the hike. Billy Goat alone has hiked the Pacific Crest Trail six times, though Feldman bemused how the pair made progress: often he found them laying down on the side of the trail in some shade. And they were always dirty.

Feldman, whose trail name is “Achilles” for his chronically aching tendon, became renowned among hikers when he helped Billy Goat with an aching arch. Using his knowledge as a physical therapist, he made a replacement arch by cutting his own mattress pad. Feldman’s kindness so impressed the expert hiker that “at the end of the trail, Billy Goat was still talking about that,” says “Yogi” McDonnell. Billy Goat experienced no more foot pain after Feldman’s help.

A beautiful trek

More than anything, the trail attracted Feldman because of its renowned beauty. Less urban than the Appalachian Trail, the PCT passes through six out of seven of North America’s ecozones and through 24 national forests, seven national parks and 33 wildernesses. And because the trail runs the crests of mountains, it is far more scenic than the Appalachian Trail, which is mostly under trees.

The trail diversity especially impressed Feldman. At one point he walked through deserts, at another, through ancient lava flows. “Yogi” McDonnell adds that the weather tends to be exceptionally good. She hiked the trail at the same time as Feldman and said there were four days of rain out of the four months on the trail.

For its beauty, both Feldman and Yogi say that they prefer the Pacific Crest Trail over the Appalachian. “If you can only do one, do the Pacific Crest Trail,” says Feldman, who says a hiker does not need to hike the AT first to be prepared. Both hikers believe that PCT is so much less traveled than its Eastern counterpart simply because the AT is better known through works like Bill Bryson’s “A Walk in the Woods.”

The PCT is also younger than its Appalachian sister. First explored in the late 1930’s, the trail was authorized by Congress in 1968. The trail also faces more threats than the AT; the threat of urban encroachment is real, with many sections still under private ownership. The Pacific Crest Trail Association is lobbying Congress to earmark $5 million per year to put PCT private lands under the federal land trust, but no such action has been taken.

Whatever the future of the PCT, Feldman knows what’s next for him. He will return to Washington to start a pediatric physical therapy practice. There, he also will continue work with the “Accessible Wilderness Project”, a program he created with the Sierra Club that takes small groups of disabled children hiking in Shenendoah National Park.

But Feldman knows that sooner or later he will get the itch to go on another long walk, and he has his eye on the Continental Divide. He continually comes back to what he calls the lifestyle of the trail — where raw sights, smells and sounds are a priority. Every trail gives Feldman a new perspective. This time, he says, it is a “new appreciation of the benefits of walking.” Wanting a break from his work at his father’s downtown Brunswick office, Feldman goes on a walk to find some coffee.

You can read Dan Feldman’s blog at http://web.mac.com/podin04

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