A thru-hike in charts and numbers: PCT mileage stats

Off-trail, I like numbers and charts. On-trail, I feel no differently. Quantifying aspects of my hikes made them feel more manageable to me, and thus more doable. It’s an illusion of control, to be sure, but one I find useful.

While I was hiking the Pacific Crest Trail last summer, I recorded where I slept each night in a paper journal. I filled up two Moleskines with mileage, campsites, stories, and stray feathers, and now I’ve pulled out that data and combed through it to give me a big-picture look at my PCT mileage over the entire course of the hike¹.

Looking at a list of hike days all together has given me insight about my hike that I didn’t have before:

• Turns out, of my 160 day (159 night) trip, I slept 50 nights in towns or with trail angels, not on the trail.
• I hiked 15% further on days when I was entirely on trail (neither leaving nor arriving in a town).
• Of the nights I spent camped alone on the trail, 81% were before seeing that first cougar while night hiking.
• … and on it goes.

I thought some of you might find these stats interesting too, so I’m sharing them with you today.

How Far Each Day

Let’s start with straight-up mileage. I recorded where I slept each night, so I was able to get a picture of how far I went each and every day.

Total hike days: 160 (April 13 – September 19th, 2014)

This first chart shows my hiking mileage across my entire PCT hike. Hover over a day to see mileage for that day. You can use the tabs in the upper left to zoom in to a closer view of 3 months, 1 month, or 5 days.

The overall picture is all well and good, but it doesn’t tell me much about my average day. How often did I go a particular distance? Did I hike mostly 20s? 25s? 15s? I charted the frequency of different daily mileages to answer this question.

I most commonly hiked 19 or 20 miles per day, and somehow managed to never hike a 29 mile day.

Notes on Zeros and Neros:

• Of the 22 zeros, all were in town, none on trail. 5 (and 1 nero) were due to getting off trail for a family illness.
• Of the 14 nero days up to 10 miles, all started or ended at a town or resupply location
• Of the 18 days between 10 and 15 miles, 4 were in the high Sierra, 2 were with non-thru-hikers, 1 was north of Tuolumne, and the rest started or ended at a town or resupply location

Longest day: 31.6 miles past Olallie Lake

Shortest day: 1 mile across Lake Edison bottom to VVR ferry

Overall average (mean): 16.7 miles/day

Non-zero average (mean): 19.3 miles/day

All-on-trail average (mean): 22.2 miles/day. All-on-trail means I didn’t leave, arrive at, or pass through a town.

Total miles hiked: 2666.3

Eagle eyes will notice that the mileage I hiked doesn’t match the official total. I trail and road-walked around the Mountain Fire, Powerhouse Fire, and Endangered Species closures in southern California, and took a few ~10 mile shortcuts (Oregon Skyline Trail in OR and Goldmyer Hot Springs Alternate in WA).

Town or No Town

Though I had 22 zero days entirely in town, I passed through towns² on far more days. In fact, I passed through towns on more days than not.

Let that sink in.

More of the 160 days I spent on the PCT saw me arriving in, departing from, staying in, or passing through towns, than days that were 100% on trail.

Not what I would have expected out of a long distance hiking trail. I will say, though, that I didn’t mind it terribly. While I preferred the wilderness sections of the PCT, I appreciated being able to carry less food in the areas with frequent roads, and I certainly could have chosen to stop in fewer towns.

Places to spend the night

I was able to tell from my journal where I had slept each night, and looking at the overall results surprised me a bit. Because I sometimes slept in town without staying a whole day there, the number of nights I slept in town is almost twice as high as the number of zero days I took (22).

Though I appreciate the hospitality and generosity of trail angels, I usually preferred the simple business transaction of paying money for a bed in a motel to the social obligations of staying with people, hence the low number of nights with trail angels.

Campground here means a camping area with some sort of toilet facility, usually for car camping. These were surprisingly frequent along the trail, particularly in SoCal, but also as far north as Rainy Pass and Hart’s Pass in Northern Washington.

Camping alone or with people

Because I started the hike solo, and didn’t join a hiking group until Oregon, I had this idea that I spent most nights alone, at least before my NorCal animal encounters. Turns out, that wasn’t actually the case.

For this chart, I’m only looking at the 109 nights I spent on the trail (including campgrounds), since I was never scared or lonely in a town — except for the dead-animal-smelling room in Chester, CA. That was a super sketch.

Here, 10 means 10 or more.

Notes on camping alone:

• Total nights alone: 26
• Alone before bear: 18
• Alone before cougar: 21

It’s interested to me to see that almost half of my nights on the trail were solo or with one other person. After the bear and the cougar, I was terrified to have another animal encounter on my own, and though I loved the control over my experience that hiking solo gave me, it didn’t feel worth the debilitating fear of the nights. I gave in to this fear for hundreds of miles, and it was only in mid-Washington that my need for solitude and to hike my own hike lead me to start overcoming this conditioning.

Though I loved the freedom of camping alone, some of my favorite nights on the trail were with one or two other hikers. It was lovely to get to make camp and unwind with other hikers, compare notes about the scenery we walked through, share aches and pains and tiny bottles of rum.

Some random numbers

Number of Snickers Bars Consumed: 138 (one for each non-zero day)

Longest number of days between zeros: 26 days (Bend to Stehekin)

Shortest number of days between zeros: 4 (Agua Dulce to Tehachapi, Tehachapi to Lake Isabella)

Unplanned zeros: all of them, I was terrible at planning where I was going to be when.

Number of times I hitchhiked (separate rides, not with people I knew): 17

Number of days I saw my husband: 22 (including 7 hiking days)

¹

To get these numbers, I logged all of my mileage data into a spreadsheet using Google Sheets, then exported it as a CSV. I uploaded that to Mode Analytics and used their free service to run SQL queries over my data. I make zero claims to statistical significance about any of these numbers. I rounded to whole numbers when I felt like it. All the charts are made with Google Sheets as well.

²I counted as a town any place I could get a resupply package or purchase supplies. This includes lake resorts like Vermillion Valley Resort (VVR), Shelter Cove, Olallie Lake, Elk Lake, and Stehekin.