The Pacific Crest Trail in Northern California: Walking Under Shasta

1A thin line through a very large forest

The Pacific Crest Trail is about 45 centimeters wide. Everything else about it is enormous.

It runs 2,650 miles from the Mexican border to Canada, and the section through Northern California is the one that people who walk the whole thing remember as the hardest to stay motivated on. The Sierra Nevada is behind you. Oregon is not close yet. What you have instead is week after week of forested ridge, long traverses around the sides of valleys, and heat.

I want to argue for it anyway. This is where the trail stops being a series of famous views and becomes an actual way of living. You walk, you filter water, you eat, you look for a place to sleep. The scenery is not competing for your attention every minute, and after a few days that turns out to be a relief rather than a disappointment.

The trail is marked, but lightly. You are looking for small PCT emblems on posts and occasionally a blaze cut into a tree. Mostly you are just following the tread itself, which is remarkably easy to follow because it has been walked into the hillside by fifty years of boots.

The grade is the other thing worth understanding. The PCT was built for horses as well as walkers, which means it almost never climbs straight at anything. It contours patiently around hillsides at a gentle angle, and a climb that would take twenty brutal minutes on a European mountain path takes an hour here at a pace you can hold all day. Thru-hikers cover 25 or 30 miles in a day not because they are running, but because the trail lets them keep walking.

2Burney Falls comes out of the rock

Burney Falls sits just off the trail and it is the one thing on this stretch that stops everybody. It is about 129 feet high, which is impressive but not extraordinary. What is extraordinary is where the water comes from.

Only part of it flows over the top. The rest comes out of the cliff face itself, through porous volcanic rock, in dozens of separate springs spread across the whole wall. The effect is a waterfall that appears to be leaking out of the mountain, which is more or less exactly what is happening.

Because the source is underground rather than surface runoff, the flow barely changes. Roughly 100 million gallons a day, in August as much as in April. Rivers in this part of California drop to almost nothing by late summer; Burney does not notice. Standing in front of it after a hot week on the trail, in air that is suddenly ten degrees cooler, is one of the genuinely great small moments in Northern California.

3Somebody cut this by hand

Trees fall across the trail constantly, especially in country that has burned. A tree down across a steep slope is not a small inconvenience: you either climb over a two-meter trunk with a heavy pack, or you scramble around it on loose ground above a drop.

So somebody removes them. The pale cut ends in the photograph are the work of a trail crew, and a large proportion of that work is done by volunteers coordinated by the Pacific Crest Trail Association together with the Forest Service.

Here is the detail I like best: in designated wilderness areas, motorized equipment is generally not permitted. That means chainsaws are out, and crews clear trees like the one above using long two-person crosscut saws — nineteenth-century tools, still in service because the rules that protect the wilderness apply to the people maintaining it too. Every clear mile you walk was made walkable by someone, usually for free, often with a hand saw.

4Watch where you put your hands

Look at that photograph for a few seconds before reading on. The snake is in the middle, running from top to bottom, and it is almost perfectly camouflaged against gray rock and dry leaves.

Rattlesnakes are venomous — the correct word, because they inject venom through fangs. Something is only poisonous if it harms you when you eat or touch it. It is a distinction worth learning, and one that even native English speakers get wrong constantly.

The practical guidance is simple and worth taking seriously. They are not aggressive and they do not chase people; nearly every bite happens when someone steps on one or reaches into a place they cannot see. So on rocky ground you look before you place a foot, and you never put a hand onto a ledge above your own eye level. Give a snake on the trail plenty of room and it will almost always leave. The rattle is a warning, and the animal would much rather warn you than use its venom on something far too big to eat.

5Water is the entire plan

On a day hike, water is something you carry. On a long trail in late summer it becomes the thing your whole day is organized around.

Hikers work from a water report — a shared, constantly updated list of which sources are still running. You plan your day backward from it: this spring is flowing, the next reliable one is 22 miles further, so you carry four liters out of the first and you camp before the second. Four liters is four kilograms, which you feel with every step, and carrying less than you need is how people get into real trouble out here.

Everything gets filtered. The water is beautiful and it is still full of things you do not want. A lake like the one above is a genuine event on a hot section — not for the view, but because it means you can drink as much as you like and stop calculating for an hour.

Resupply works the same way. Every four to seven days the trail passes near a road, and hikers walk or hitch into a small town to collect a box they mailed to themselves weeks earlier. The rhythm of a long trail is really the rhythm of those boxes.

6One mountain, for weeks

Mount Shasta is 14,179 feet (4,322 m), a snow-covered volcano standing more or less alone at the southern end of the Cascade Range. On a clear day it is visible from over a hundred miles away.

What that means on foot is unusual. Shasta becomes a landmark you live with. It appears ahead of you, sits there for days, moves slowly to your right, and is still visible behind you a week later. In country where one forested ridge looks much like the next, having a single fixed object on the horizon completely changes your sense of progress. You are not measuring distance in miles. You are measuring it against a mountain.

It works the other way too. Shasta is a stratovolcano, and it is not extinct — simply quiet, with its last eruption a few hundred years ago. Standing on a ridge looking at something that large and that symmetrical, you are looking at a mountain that built itself out of its own eruptions. It is a useful thing to think about on a long afternoon when the trail is not giving you much else to do.

That is my honest argument for this stretch of trail. It has no single famous view to put on a postcard, and the guidebooks give it less space than the Sierra. But it is the part where walking stops being an activity and turns into something closer to a routine — and where a volcano you will never climb quietly keeps you company from one terminus toward the other.