He was a former professional cyclist and triathlete who had raced for the US national team and won Ironmans.

Most of us had little to no thru-hiking experience. Loopy had finished the PCT four times, and this was his fifth. The Continental Divide Trail, the Appalachian Trail, and a bunch of other long trails were on his résumé too.

Loopy’s favourite line came from Cool Runnings: “a bad ass mofo who don’t uh take uh no crap off of nobody.” It was his highest praise for anybody who impressed him. He never needed to say it about himself.

But we did.

So when Loopy told stories about the trail, we listened.

And as we approached Mission Creek, he had one for this section too.

He told us about a woman who had gotten into serious trouble there on a previous PCT attempt. She needed to be rescued, and, according to Loopy, the whole thing was captured on live television.

The rescuer apparently called her a “Code W” – short for Code Wimp.

She left the trail.

Then, somehow, she came back.

And when she returned, she had a new trail name.

Cliff Hanger.

We laughed.

Then we looked at the section ahead.

There was no trail.

We were standing at the beginning of what looked like an entire section of the PCT that had simply been erased.

Years of floods had carved through the landscape. What remained was a mess of loose rock, steep bluffs, dead ends, and the occasional suggestion that a trail might once have existed there.

Sometimes we thought we had found it.

We would scramble up a slope, squeeze between rocks, and convince ourselves we were back on the PCT.

Then, twenty minutes later, we would hit a dead end.

Back we went.

Sometimes two or three miles.

Then we would try another route.

It was carnage.

People fell. Trekking poles broke. Shoes tore. Ankles twisted.

Every step required concentration. You had to look at the rock in front of you, figure out where your foot was going, then immediately start thinking about the next one.

It felt like a video game.

Except in this game, you couldn’t just respawn.

We had heard that Mission Creek had a lot of rescues, and that a lot of people quit here. It wasn’t difficult to understand why.

We stayed together. I was already Code. I didn’t need a W.

When someone got stuck, someone else helped. When someone got frustrated, the rest of us waited. When the route disappeared again, we figured it out together.

We made it, everyone in one piece, some of us less enthusiastic than others.

Nobody went ahead alone. Nobody was left behind. That felt more important than the miles.

Most people seemed to either love this section or absolutely hate it. I was firmly in the first camp. But only because this section lasted two days. Any longer and I would have hated it too.

Conquering Mission Creek gave us the confidence boost we needed. Miles had lost their meaning, and so had the days of the week.

We were thru-hikers now.

Even setting up a tent every night felt like an unnecessary project. If we found a reasonably flat patch of ground, we put down our ground sheets, pulled out our sleeping bags, and went to sleep under the stars.

Despite the heat, rattlesnakes, long days, dry stretches, and ridiculous misfortunes, we were still very good at finding ways to have fun. Something about the trail had made us kids again.

In the town of Big Bear, Poppins, Count Andy and I shared a room in a hostel.

We chased each other around the halls, screaming and laughing like a bunch of juveniles.

Count Andy had a little USB device that plugged into his iPhone and used heat to stop the itching from mosquito bites.

Naturally, this meant we had to chase Poppins down and use it on his arm.

It was one of those moments that would have been completely ridiculous anywhere else.

But out here, it was the funniest thing in the world.

Perhaps we were just too good at finding ways to have fun.

It was becoming a problem.

We were forgetting about the goal.

Our mileage had fallen below what we needed.

So we kicked it up a notch. Well, more than a notch.

We doubled our daily mileage.

Most of us managed to keep up.

Unfortunately, it proved to be too much for Zapper.

He developed a few overuse injuries and had to leave the trail to recover.

That was the price of catching up.

We said goodbye the way hikers do: promises to meet up down the trail, and the quiet understanding that those promises were easier to make than to keep.

We had already seen what happened when someone left. RP was only a few days behind us, but it had been more than a month since we had seen him.

We knew how quickly the trail could create distance between people. There was a real possibility this was the last time we’d see Zapper.

And then we kept walking.

Nobody said much for the next few miles.

Back around Mission Creek, we had begun leapfrogging two hikers from Switzerland: Ladina and Angelina.

They had known each other since university and started the trail together. Both were teachers and mountain bikers.

I knew immediately that they would make excellent additions to the group.

Joining the tramily wasn’t as simple as hiking with us.

There was an initiation process.

There were sacred vows.

And there was one requirement.

They had to learn the opening high-pitched scream of Immigrant Song by Led Zeppelin.

It was the sacred song of the tramily.

Wrightwood was another reminder that the trail could change completely in minutes.

On the climb toward town, it was sunny and bright.

Twenty minutes later, we were in a snowstorm.

We hiked through it for hours.

We found ourselves standing beside a desolate highway, wet, freezing, and scared, trying to hitch into town.

Ladina and Angelina were ahead of us.

They were picked up by a couple who took them into Wrightwood.

And then, when they heard from Ladina and Angelina that there were more of us stuck in the storm, they took the rest of us in too.

They let us make their home ours for the night.

We showered.

We ate.

Then we sat around their wood-burning stove and talked.

A whole bunch of hikers ended up sleeping in their living room.

They weren’t established trail angels. They weren’t running a hostel or waiting for hikers.

They were simply a kind couple who saw a bunch of cold and wet hikers and decided to help.

People say the trail provides.

Sometimes it doesn’t provide water or food or a campsite.

Sometimes it provides a warm house when you’re cold, and a stranger who treats you like family for the night.

We stayed in Wrightwood another night waiting for the storm on the trail to pass.

As we walked around the town, gathering our resupply and doing the typical town chores, Poppins casually announced that Wrightwood looked like the kind of place where E.T. might have been filmed.

It sounded like one of those completely random Poppins observations that you nod at and forget five seconds later.

Then someone checked.

He was right.

Wrightwood really had been a filming location.

Poppins had somehow done it again.

Ladina and Angelina invited us to their Airbnb for dinner and a night of games.

They prepared Swiss dishes for us. The way to a hiking tramily’s heart is through its stomach. And the Älplermagronen did the trick.

So that was that. Ladina and Angelina had completed their initiation.

Our ranks had grown by two.

They also earned a name of their own: the Swiss Missus, like the chocolate drink.

Soon, echoes of the Immigrant Song could be heard bouncing through the valleys of Southern California.

We were becoming a problem.

Some people called us the Cult.

Others called us the Bubble.

It stuck.

We had our own vocabulary, our own music, our own rituals.

Some of that vocabulary was German.

Ladina also became my German teacher – Frau Fischer. She maintains that I was a good student. If you are reading Ladina, can you leave a comment and let me know if you still think so?

Having always heard from my other teachers that I was disruptive to the good students in the class, I am skeptical.

Ladina, on the other hand, was a good teacher.

Increasingly, the tramily had its own gravitational pull.

We’d arrive at a café and occupy half the tables.

We’d walk into a restaurant and suddenly there were a dozen dirty hikers ordering food.

We’d enter a grocery store and start filling baskets like we were preparing for a siege.

Towns would see us coming.

Grocery stores would feel us leaving.

And once you were in, you were in.

As in Hotel California, leaving was more complicated than joining.

We kept growing.

At some point we added two more: Cryptic and Scratching Post.

Cryptic earned her name by giving very little away when she spoke.

Scratching Post fell so often that her legs started to look like a cat’s scratching post.

There were also occasional guests who drifted in and out.

By Tehachapi, we even had our own uniform.

We stayed at the home of Barbara and her late husband, who had hosted PCT hikers for years.

When I first reached the house, Barbara was out riding the lawn mower, immaculately dressed.

She was old, but she did every chore herself. Sharp as a tack, and funny.

While we were there, the Swiss Missus decided to paint all of our fingernails pink. It was the only colour they had.

Now the entire group was recognizable from a mile away.

Grizzly Gramps, a trail angel who followed the trail by car to support hikers, gave us a new name.

The Nail Polish Gang.

Zapper was still recovering, but he wasn’t quite finished with us yet.

At Walker Pass, he drove all the way from home to give us trail magic. He even picked up RP, who was taking a couple of days off in the last town.

There was something comforting about seeing Zapper and RP again.

We weren’t hiking together anymore, but for a little while at least, they were still part of us.

We were looking for a place to stay at Ridgecrest, and we managed to score a secret trail angel.

The couple used to host a lot of hikers, but over the years life got busy for them and they stopped.

Every once in a while, however, they decided to take hikers in.

The wife had a hobby farm in the middle of the desert. I won’t disclose her name here. We have to protect their secret trail angel status.

Sheep.

Highland cows.

Maine Coons.

Emus.

Peacocks.

Desert tortoises.

Dogs, cats, chickens, rabbits, geese, alpacas.

It was heaven in the desert.

The husband was an incredible storyteller. We sat around listening to his stories until two or three in the morning.

Their grandchildren came over too. We sat and watched the younger ones play, and then fight.

The little boy flipped off Cryptic for fun, and his mom caught him in the act.

He got a whooping on the spot.

The oldest kid was remarkably mature. We talked about her passion for starting a business selling jewellery online.

For two nights, we weren’t hikers.

We weren’t counting protein bars or calculating water or thinking about resupply.

We were just people in a home in the desert, listening to stories.

The trail had a funny way of doing that. It would make you work hard for something as simple as a place to sleep. And then, every once in a while, it would give you something far more than you expected.

The landscape changed a little each day, and the desert began to feel like it was behind us.

We were getting closer to Kennedy Meadows.

Closer to the Sierra.

Closer to the point that I had imagined for years.

And then we arrived.

Kennedy Meadows.

There were seven of us.

We walked in together, hands interlocked.

People were cheering.

There were claps and bells.

It felt like a celebration we had somehow earned without realizing we were earning it.

I had seen this moment before, in Wild and in videos of hikers arriving at Kennedy Meadows.

For years, it had existed somewhere between a dream and a scene from someone else’s life.

Now I was standing in it.

Except this time, it wasn’t a movie.

It wasn’t YouTube.

It was us.

We had started as a handful of strangers.

People had joined, and people had left. The Bubble had grown, shrunk, split, and grown again.

But through all of it, we had made it here together.

A bunch of people from different countries, different careers, different lives, who had met on a trail and decided to keep walking together.

I had come out here to see what difficulty would do to me. I hadn’t expected it to give me this.

With a great bunch of people.

And painted nails.

It was March.

Back in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada, where I lived, there was still snow on the ground and the temperature was below freezing. A few hours later, I was in San Diego, walking out of an airport into heat that felt completely wrong for the time of year.

I took a shuttle east to Campo, toward the southern terminus.

By the time I reached the monument, late in the afternoon, I felt dehydrated before I had even taken my first real step. My body had no idea what to make of it yet. I was nowhere near acclimatized.

My permit was for that day, so I walked the 0.8 miles to CLEEF campground and spent the night there. The next morning I waited until 9 a.m. for the officials to arrive, validate my permit and give me the coveted PCT hangtag.

Then I started walking.

The first five miles were easy enough.

Mostly fuelled by the excitement of finally being out here.

And then it became midday.

The excitement wasn’t enough.

There was no shade.

None.

The trail ran through a landscape that seemed specifically designed to punish you for being outside in the middle of the day. It felt like an oven. Heat radiated off the ground, hot air surrounded me from every direction, and the sun beat directly down on my dome. It was relentless.

A few of us eventually resorted to pressing our faces into rattlesnake-infested bushes just to get out of the sun. Winchester, Honey Badger and Wonder Woman were with me.

It was Winchester who gave me my trail name: Code Talker. It quickly became Code.

We waited until five in the afternoon. And then we started walking again.

By mile 11.5, we were in rough shape. Almost out of water, with the next source still miles away.

Another hiker, Michael, gave us a litre of his water, which Wonder Woman and I shared.

It was enough to get me through the night.

Michael and I hiked together from there.

I learned my first lesson of the desert quickly.

You don’t hike through the middle of the day.

You wake up early. You get as many miles as you can while it is cool. Then you find shade, stop moving, and wait for the worst of the heat to pass.

The trail had been going for two days and had already taught me that I was not in charge.

I was going to have to listen.

I had come out here for two reasons.

The first was simple. I wanted to get my body moving again.

The second was less tangible. I wanted to meet people. As many as I could. I wanted to spend the next few months surrounded by genuinely interesting people from all over the world.

But first, I had to learn the trail.

The heat wave made an already difficult beginning even harder. Long stretches without reliable water meant carrying enormous amounts of it, which meant carrying more weight, which meant walking slower, which boiled down to spending more time exposed to the heat.

For some people, it was simply too much.

Even Winchester and Honey Badger, both PCT veterans, quit during that first week.

But somehow, in the middle of all that difficulty, our little group started to take shape.

There was Michael, Poppins, Count Andy, Zapper and Loopy, who would join us for stretches but often hike ahead on his own.

We didn’t always hike together. People would get up at different times, spread out, pair up with others for a few hours, or head off on their own for a while.

One day, it was just Michael, Poppins and me walking along the crest of a mountain.

Michael was in front.

I was behind him, with Poppins bringing up the rear.

The trail disappeared behind a bush. Michael put his hiking pole down, expecting to feel the ground on the other side.

Instead, he felt something different.

A large rattlesnake.

He leapt forward.

I leapt backward, straight toward Poppins.

The snake started rattling.

It didn’t stop.

For the next twenty minutes, it sounded like a jet engine coming from somewhere inside the bushes.

We couldn’t see it anymore, but we couldn’t cross the trail either. There was no alternative route around that section.

So we waited.

Eventually, the snake moved just far enough for us to make our way past.

And somewhere between the leap, the rattling and the twenty-minute standoff, Michael became Rattlesnake Poker. RP for short.

By the time we reached Julian, my little group was starting to feel like a family. A trail family. A tramily.

We had our first zero day here. We washed ourselves. We washed our clothes. We washed the desert off everything we owned.

And then we ate the famous free pie.

We had been thinking about it, talking about it and, at some point, even singing about it for the last few days.

There was something about being in a real town again that made us realize how strange the previous few days had been.

We had spent days covered in dirt and sweat, talking while walking, eating whatever was convenient and falling asleep almost immediately after putting our shelters up.

Now we were sitting around town in clothes that smelled like detergent, looking almost like normal people.

We were also starting to discover the little things that made each of us who we were.

Poppins, for example, carried a pack of cards everywhere.

Every time we had even a few minutes to spare, the cards would come out.

He would try to rope us into playing some Midwestern card game none of us had ever heard of. Euchre was his favourite. None of us really knew what we were doing at first, but Poppins was persistent.

And then, somehow, Euchre became the default game of the tramily.

It came out whenever we had time to kill. At town stops. While waiting for someone. Sometimes when we should probably have been doing something else.

It wasn’t one big moment where we suddenly became friends.

It was the cards coming out.

The same jokes getting repeated.

Waiting for someone who was slower.

Sharing food.

And eventually knowing who would say what before they said it — “Cactus!!!”

While we were settling into the trail mentally, our bodies were adapting to it physically.

The blisters dried up. The skin hardened. Feet that had been soft and unaccustomed to the trail began to change. Shoulders developed their own armour where the pack straps rubbed against them.

Eventually, those changes became something we were almost proud of.

They were our battle scars.

We compared them. We joked about them. We pointed out new ones as if they were badges of honour.

They were physical proof that we were becoming thru-hikers.

I was settling into the rhythm of trail life and didn’t want to break it. So when my tramily decided to stay in Julian for an additional day, I left.

On the way to Warner Springs, I crossed the 100-mile marker.

It should have felt like a milestone.

Instead, it felt strangely empty.

My tramily wasn’t with me.

Somewhere along those miles, I had a quiet realization: the PCT wasn’t really about the miles. It was about the people you shared them with.

So when I reached Warner Springs, I decided to wait. I spent three nights in Warner Springs, and it became one of those unexpected places that stays with you.

There was a church nearby that was hosting an Easter breakfast for PCT hikers.

Word spread quickly.

Then it spread a little too quickly.

What was probably meant to be a small gathering for a handful of tired hikers turned into something much bigger. PCT hikers started timing their arrival into town around the brunch.

By the night before, there were tents everywhere.

Forty hikers became fifty. Fifty became sixty. And then, my tramily arrived too.

People we’d never met were arriving from the trail, setting up their shelters and settling in for the night, all for the promise of a big breakfast in the morning.

And the next morning, there was.

A church full of people who had nothing to do with the trail had opened its doors to a bunch of dirty, sunburnt strangers walking from Mexico to Canada.

There was food everywhere.

People kept bringing more.

They wanted to feed us. They wanted to hear our stories. They wanted to know where we had come from and where we were going.

There was no transaction.

They were simply happy to have us there.

I had expected the trail to be hard.

I hadn’t expected so many people along the way to make it easier.

The days had begun to blur into a sequence of small, predictable things. Wake up. Pack everything back into my backpack. Walk. Eat. Filter water. Walk some more. Find somewhere to sleep.

There was something comforting about how little I had to think about. I didn’t have to plan much beyond the next few hours. The trail decided what mattered, and most of the time, it came down to three simple questions:

How far can I walk today?

Where is the next water?

Where will I sleep tonight?

The life I had left behind was becoming strangely distant.

I wasn’t thinking about work.

I wasn’t thinking about what I should be doing.

I wasn’t thinking about the next milestone.

For the first time in years, my life had been reduced to a few simple but consequential questions.

Eventually, we reached Paradise Valley Cafe, one of those legendary PCT stops that hikers seem to talk about long before they reach it.

By then, RP’s feet were taking a beating.

He had switched to zero-drop shoes without giving his feet any time to adjust. The trail was not particularly interested in giving him that adjustment period either.

He couldn’t keep going.

So he hitched to Idyllwild to take a few days off and let his feet recover.

The rest of us continued on, expecting to catch up with him in Idyllwild and have him rejoin us.

We arrived in Idyllwild just before a snowstorm, and Zapper graciously invited all of us to stay with him.

Now, here is something you have to know about Zapper. He had been doing trail magic for years, and almost every PCT story he told seemed to begin with, “When I was doing trail magic at Walker Pass…”

This year, he was doing double duty.

He was a hiker himself, but he was also a trail angel for our tramily.

His wife drove all the way into town to pick us up and take us home. RP, who was recovering at a motel in town, joined us too.

We showed up as a small, filthy group of hikers and took over their house like we’d known them for years.

Zapper and his wife fed us.

And then there was the lemon pie.

Zapper had made it himself, and it was incredible.

One of the first things we did was put our packs on a scale.

Zapper gave each of us a large tote for the things we were willing to leave behind, and slowly, our carefully chosen gear started making its way into it.

Everything we had carried from Campo suddenly had to justify its existence.

Did I really need this?

Was it worth carrying every single day for the next five months?

An ounce wasn’t precise enough anymore. On Loopy’s expert recommendation, we switched to grams.

So things went into the tote.

And then more things went into the tote.

By the end of it, all of us had left something behind.

Count Andy was having none of it.

While the rest of us were cutting weight, mostly at the cost of comfort, Andy was carrying a huge two-person tent that was practically palatial.

He had three inflatable pillows.

One for his head.

One for between his knees.

And one for between his ankles.

His backpack was the size of a tower.

This was how Andy hiked.

It was also how he got his trail name: Count Andy.

So when Zapper drove us to REI, nobody was particularly surprised when Andy somehow found more things he needed.

He almost emptied the store.

His already enormous backpack somehow got even bigger.

We went back to Zapper’s, repacked everything, put our packs back on the scale, and tried to convince ourselves we’d somehow made them lighter.

The funny thing was that the longer we walked, the less attached we became to the things we carried.

At Campo, every item had seemed important.

A few hundred miles later, we were happy to throw half of it into a tote.

Out on trail, every extra ounce had a price.

And you paid that price with every step.

Then we heard the storm had passed. It was time to put our bodies to work again.

For RP, the break had come as a blessing in disguise.

His feet were recovering.

He was ready to get back on the trail.

There was just one problem.

We’d all spoken highly of the section between Paradise Valley Cafe and Idyllwild, and he didn’t want to miss it either.

So while the rest of us resumed from Idyllwild, RP went back to Paradise Valley Cafe to hike the section he’d missed.

It was only a few days.

But on the PCT, a few days is a long time.

Once a gap opens up between hikers, it becomes surprisingly difficult to close it. Your hiking partners keep moving. You keep moving. Everyone develops a new rhythm.

We left assuming we’d see him again within a week. We had no idea that months would pass before we were all together again.

For the rest of us, the landscape had changed.

There was still snow on the ground.

That night was extremely cold.

Andy, who has Raynaud’s syndrome, was having a particularly rough time. His fingers and toes were turning blue from the cold. He was clearly struggling, but he pushed through it.

The next morning we had a decision to make.

Do we summit San Jacinto?

Most of the group decided against it. We could come back another time, perhaps another year when the conditions were better.

But I wanted to go.

There was still snow on the ground, but I felt comfortable enough in those conditions to give it a shot.

I brought it up with the tramily.

Poppins had clearly been having the same internal debate.

The moment I said I wanted to go, he said he would go too.

And that was that.

We would do it as an out and back, then catch up with the rest of the group in a day or two.

It was a lot of elevation gain over a relatively short distance, so we took our time.

As we got higher, the snow stayed with us.

Since camping at the summit isn’t allowed, we eventually decided to leave behind everything we didn’t need and take only the essentials. We put the rest in a bear hang and continued with lighter packs.

The weather started to clear as the day went on.

Clouds gave way to blue sky.

And then, almost suddenly, the landscape opened up.

From the top, we could see for miles.

The desert stretched out below us. Mountains continued in every direction. The weather that had made the morning feel uncertain had given way to one of the clearest views we’d had since Campo.

I stood there for a while, taking it in.

10,834 feet was a personal best for me. But there was still a very long way to go.

For that moment, though, there was nowhere else I wanted to be.

I don’t remember the video clearly anymore. I remember the feeling: that something in me recognized it.

Long stretches of desert in the south, then mountains and snow, then forested volcanic regions, and finally back to grand mountains in the north. A single continuous line drawn across the western edge of a country I had never set foot in.

I was still in India at this time, studying, already beginning the long climb into software and ambition. The trail felt impossibly far away. I put it into the quiet category of things I might do before I turned thirty.

I was always outdoorsy. Weekend trips into nature. Hills, mountains, lakes and trails close to wherever I happened to be living.

I was busy becoming competent at another kind of hard.

Deadlines. Code. Startups. Enterprise software. Building business relationships. Learning to lead teams and build products from the ground up.

Intellectual work suited me. I was good at it. It rewarded the part of me that likes systems, complexity, and long stretches of effort. The body was mostly the vehicle that carried the mind to the next meeting.

The bill arrived later.

When I turned thirty, I took stock and found three herniated discs, along with a body that had begun keeping its own record of the years I'd spent ignoring it. Years of sitting for too long, sleeping too little, carrying stress from one deadline to the next. The work kept getting done. I kept getting better at it. But physically, I was moving in the other direction.

The three years before the trail had been especially intense: building a product from scratch while leading engineers across four time zones. I was always available. Always solving something. Always telling myself that the next milestone would be a good time to slow down.

There was always another milestone.

And just as I was beginning to question how long I wanted to live that way, the profession itself began to change. AI was rewriting the software landscape. As an experienced engineer, I could see the fork clearly.

One direction led deeper into the new world: learn it properly, become native to it, and spend the next decade getting very good at something that was changing the shape of the profession itself.

The other was to stay where I was, in the systems that already existed, and ride them for as long as they lasted.

I wanted the first path.

But I also knew what it would cost.

If I committed to that depth, I could easily spend another decade before doing anything as large, and physically demanding as the Pacific Crest Trail.

The goal I had set as a teenager was still sitting on the other side of thirty.

But now there was a difference.

At nineteen, thirty had felt like an arbitrary deadline. At thirty, time had acquired a body, and mine had already started keeping its own record.

It was no longer - When will I have time to do this?

It was - How much longer can I keep telling myself I will?

That was when the soft goal of completing the Pacific Crest Trail solidified.

I wanted to know what it felt like to do something difficult without turning it into a direct career advantage.

Most of the hard things I had done in my adult life had led somewhere. A difficult project became a promotion. Learning something new made me more valuable. Long hours produced something I could point to.

The trail offered none of that.

No promotion at the end. No product to ship. No one waiting for me to be available.

Just the work itself, and the body doing it.

I wanted to see what that kind of sustained difficulty would do to me. Whether I could become more comfortable with discomfort. Whether there was a version of myself on the other side of something this demanding that I hadn’t yet met.

But underneath all of that was something simpler.

It was the thing I had been telling myself I would do someday.

And someday had finally arrived.

So I found myself at the southern terminus in the middle of a heat wave, 40°C outside, with a 35-pound pack on my back and four litres of water.

After years of putting it off, there was nowhere left to defer it to.

The desert was right in front of me.

I started walking.