First-Ever Winter Thru-Hike of the PCT - Outside Magazine
On a sub-zero November morning, following a month spent slogging 600 miles along wet, snowy stretches of the Pacific Crest Trail in Washington and Oregon, Shawn Forry and Justin Lichter awoke to find their trail shoes coated with ice and frozen... But the weather had turned for the worse, and through gritted teeth that morning, the men jammed their feet into their frozen shoes and prepared for yet another long, cold day on the trail. “We told ourselves that if our feet aren’t warm in an hour, we’ll stop and re-warm them,” Forry said later. A few hours into their hike that morning, the hikers pulled their feet out of their shoes and saw that they were cold, white, and waxy. Forry and Lichter had set out to do something no one else had ever done before: hike the Pacific Crest Trail in winter. The Appalachian Trail’s badass older cousin, the PCT stretches 2,650 miles from British Columbia close to the border of Mexico, and wends through the Cascade Range in Washington and the Sierra Nevada in California. Since its formation in 1977, there has been only one known attempt to hike the PCT in winter, by couple Gerald Duran and Jodi Zatchick back in 1983. They were traveling south to north and were hiking. Source: www.outsideonline.com
