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Day 1 (Pete)
Day 1: First day. Night rather. I have my head lamp on in order to write this. We’re camped in a small, ten by ten, clearing twenty yards from the trail. The sand is accommodating. We are hidden by a thicket of virtually impenetrable brush called “Chemise.” A mere hour after farewells at the border,…
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Day 1 – The Mexican Border
It’s like we parachuted onto a different planet. We’ve spent a long time preparing for this, but we aren’t prepared. All we can do is walk. It doesn’t take long before we have the map & compass out. We’re crawling through chemise, getting scratched and gouged, learning navigation the hard way. Finally we find the…
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Pete’s Forward
Forward: My mom and I walked into the C&R Clothiers on Clairmont Mesa Boulevard in San Diego. I was a Sophomore in College and she was down visiting. In addition to the usual meaningful conversations, walks on the beach, and graciously accepted fancy meals, she was to intervene on my naive student life in a…
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Flipbook: The PCT at 100 miles/second
Following a plan of Pete’s, each day I took a picture of him with a disposable panoramic camera. We tried to pick a spot representative of the day’s terrain, and I carefully paced out the same distance from Pete for every shot. Pete, keeping mental track of the sequence, changed his pose slightly every day.…
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My Formative Journey Begins
This 1700-mile hike along the Pacific Crest Trail with my good friend Peter Bergman took us through the mountains and deserts of California from the Mexican border up to Oregon. Neither of us had ever done anything like this, and the journey gave shape to much of the rest of my life. I attempted narrate…