Those close to me already know the answers to these questions (at least mostly). A 2020 PCT through hike has been on my radar since 2014/15. Not that the PCT is new to me, however. Way back in the last century, I had a co-worker and roommate that was planning to hike this damn thing. He never made the trip, despite burning a lot of paper and dot-matrix ink from printer to poster the entire elevation profile as ceiling trim in our rental’s living room. But we spent quite a few years backpacking and snow camping in the Sierras east of Sacramento. In the years since, I have been on small portions of the trail and crossed it in many places in California. It would take some outside influence to push me to actually plan to do this thing.
I’ve been with the same employer since March of 1999. In about 2006, a new manager was hired from outside of the organization, and he was to turn my world upside down; albeit very slowly. To make a long story short, my advancement and growth in this organization pretty much came to a halt, though I was too ignorant to realize it for the first several years. By the time I came to realize what I was really going through, I felt trapped, like I had no choice in my fate. Bread winner for my wife and two kids, very good money and benefits on top of that, and a potential for a future retirement….if I could just hang on. So I chose to hang on, like a stubborn tomato at the end of summer; past its prime, slowly drying up as the days grew shorter and the future looked more and more bleak. I was not doing well mentally/emotionally, and I even started to have physical ailments…still do. I am getting old, after-all. I was going in to very dark places, losing sleep, self-destructive behaviors, not being a loving and caring husband and father. I was letting someone else dictate how I lived my life. And then I rediscovered the PCT.
Those first years of rediscovery of the PCT, I spent a lot of nights reading the blogs of hikers, paying particular attention to the through hikers. These readings lifted me out of the depression I was falling in to. They gave me an escape, just like a good book but only real life, even if it was a dream. “What if….?” I felt I got to know some of these hikers; what motivated them, what their hiker life was like, how they changed. This led me to start dreaming of my own through hike, an escape, taking control of my life once again. Escaping the anchor that others called my boss; the one that I called many other things. These dreams then led to lots of what-if scenarios on spreadsheets, looking at finances, vacation time accrual, the age and status of my offspring. My supporting wife. I started to include close friends and extended family in my dreams; they all thought it was wild and crazy and that I was just the guy to do it. Could I?