San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Pacific Crest Trail: from scenic to bleak
1 million hikers to set out this year on famed route — climate change to bring more wildfires, drought, danger
The Pacific Crest Trail is supposed to provide an escape from society, a place where a person can unplug and explore the wild and scenic landscapes that inspired America’s early naturalists. But increasingly it is morphing into an exhibition of ecological deterioration wrought by the warming climate.
Higher temperatures, less snow and ice, dry springs, wildfires, smoky skies and denuded forests have come to define the experience of hiking the 2,600-mile trail, which extends from Mexico to Canada through the mountains of California, Oregon and Washington. The current generation of hikers is already having to adapt.
“I’ve started carrying N95 masks with me while hiking,” said Brad Marston, a climate physics professor at Brown University who has hiked sections of the trail for the past nine years. While traversing a High Sierra segment in 2013, he said, “I had to get off the trail for a while because the smoke was too bad.”
Being driven off the trail by fire or smoke, or enduring miles of parched scenery, has become part of the standard Pacific Crest experience. The growing threats have prompted the Pacific Crest Trail Association, which operates in partnership with the U.S. Forest Service, to begin shifting its mission from preserving the trail and managing hiking permits toward addressing environmental degradation head-on.
“It can no longer be ignored: Climate change is serious and pressing, and these are some of our last chances to prevent some of the worst consequences,” said Jack Haskel, the association’s trail information officer.
Wildfires are the primary source of disruption, but a drier, warmer future will likely yield all sorts of pitfalls for
trail users — and particularly for the thousands of hardcore thru-hikers who attempt to trek the whole thing in a single, six-month odyssey each year.
“I knew there was a big potential for a dry year to produce a lot of fires, but I didn’t imagine so much destruction, or seeing plumes of smoke every other day, or having to turn back on trail, or having road closures almost separate our group,” Rebecca Harnish, who hiked the trail last summer, wrote in an Instagram post chronicling her journey. “It was haunting.”
A recent article drawing on climate research co-authored by Marston paints a despairing portrait of the trail’s longterm outlook. Published in the latest edition of the Pacific Crest Trail Association’s quarterly magazine, it conjures scenes of charred forests, bare glacier beds, brittle vegetation, hazy skies and hotter days.
According to the article, hikers will face heightened risk of heat stroke by the end of the century, as triple-digit summer temperatures on the trail “will become exceedingly common.” Early-season snow may be minimal, and the streams hikers rely on for drinking water may dry up, leaving no place to get water for stretches as long as 40 miles.
Lightning ignitions — the top cause of wildfires in Northern California — will rise, along with the potential for recurring destructive blazes in drier landscapes. Meanwhile, atmospheric rivers will be more extreme, bringing rain events that will worsen erosion and damage the trail.
Such a holistic decline in hiking conditions could make “an unsupported trip all but impossible,” the article reads, and foreshadows “a future PCT experience unlike any we have known.”
John O’Brien, a climate scientist in Mendocino who co-authored the article with Marston, said it was important for hikers to know what is in store, because “these highelevation areas are going to see some of the biggest changes.”
Chief among the changes is the shrinking of what constitutes an average snow season and the resulting upward creep of the snow line in California’s mountains. Parts of the Sierra could get cooked bare of snow some years within a quarter-century, according to a new study from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Last summer’s thru-hikers can attest to the difficulties. The Dixie Fire in the northern Sierra, which raged from July to October, torched 112 miles of the trail — an “unprecedented” impact, according to the Pacific Crest Trail Association.
In the past two years, 532 miles of the trail in California and Oregon were closed due to wildfires and 194 miles of it burned. Wayward hikers, driven out of the woods by smoke and fire, wound up in towns under evacuation orders and had to be shuttled to safety. One thru-hiker, who last year broke the speed record on the trail, recounted a surreal afternoon near Mount Shasta when smoke blotted out the sun and ash rained down from the sky.
Marston’s article represents a first public-facing step in the association’s transition; it was published as hiking season ramps up, during another year in which record numbers of people are expected on the trail. The association estimates that 1 million people set foot on the trail each year, though it’s impossible to keep an exact tally.
Marston believes the association should have recognized the issue sooner.
“I’d been frustrated trying to get the PCTA to acknowledge the import of climate change in the past,” he said. “I’m pleased that they’ve now turned the corner and are thinking hard about its effects.” The scope of the association’s planning — which is part of a larger climate-change response among federal land agencies — is expansive.
It ranges from relocating campsites, thinning brush along the trail and warning about the dangers of backcountry campfires to advocating for government funding for trail maintenance. Last year, about $4.4 million in emergency funds via the Great American Outdoors Act were allocated to Pacific Crest Trail programs in California, Haskel said.
For hikers, drier conditions and more volatile weather necessitate greater attention to trip -planning, with consideration paid to fire danger and contingencies for evacuating the trail quickly. The association has added new trip planning tools to its website that keep up-to-date information on fires, smoke, air quality and park closures — aspects that hikers would rarely have planned around even 10 years ago.
A candid trail update from the association last August, when wildfires prompted the Forest Service to shut down California’s national forests, read, “Basically NorCal is closed.”
Forest Service staffers have become quicker to assess damage to the trail burn areas and more aggressive in early trail and forest rehabilitation work, Haskel said.
Complicating those efforts, however, is a dearth of critical volunteer labor the association relies on to maintain the enormous trail. In 2019, 2,038 volunteers chipped in about 107,000 hours of trail work, Haskel said. But the pandemic cratered participation. Last year just 1,221 volunteers performed about 55,000 hours of work.
The infusion of government funds will allow the association to revitalize its trail maintenance programs and recruit new volunteers this year, Haskel said.
“Probably the biggest impact that the (association) might have is building a strong volunteer core,” he said. “In the past few years, we’ve redoubled efforts to recruit people, especially in rural areas.”
A series of late-season storms have dusted California’s mountains with snow, but it is largely expected to melt away quickly rather than meaningfully improve drought conditions. This year could be “the absolute worst” fire season, Cal Fire officials said recently.
Trail experts anticipate another harsh summer for Pacific Crest hikers as well as the potential for more profound impacts to the highelevation environments it passes through.
“People who did the trail 10-15 years ago, their experience is going to be very different from someone who does it 20 years hence,” O’Brien said. “People take for granted how fast our ecosystems are changing.”