I usually put these PCT posts up on Supertopo a few days after I put them up here.
One person on Supertopo, "apogee," has been very supportive of the thread there. He did the PCT in the '80s and his description of how it was and how it was done then are funny, informative and interesting.
I posted the following on the thread there, for him. I thought that, at least, the photos would get a laugh here too. Here's what I posted there:
This post is for apogee.
I've never forgotten your comments early on this thread about your hike of the PCT. Your experience of the trail back in the 1980s was very different than ours has been; the trail itself wasn't what it is now, and methods and equipment were quite different from those we've used on this trip.
All of this came back to my memory about two months ago. My wife found a book then at a garage sale. She bought it for me for $1.00. It was published by National Geographic in 1975:
It's a cool book. I read it cover to cover over our recent three-day trip. As one might expect from National Geo, it's well written and contains great photos.
Some of these photos show how different methods and equipment really were:
Now that guy in the photo above isn't you apogee, but can you honestly say that your pack and your clothes were a lot different when you did the trail?
Here's another very revealing shot. This was taken in the southern Sierra. The young lady shown is well into multi-day backpack. She's wearing old Adidas shoes and jeans!? Jeans in the back country?
But apogee's description of the southern part of the trail is what's really stuck in my mind for all this time. When this book was written (and I think when apogee did the trail), parts of the PCT weren't even established yet. Here's the "San Filipe Hills" section of the "trail," in San Diego County (it's Highway 2 itself - when we passed through there we hiked a real trail in the hills about three miles east of the highway):
And perhaps the part of the book that hit me the most was a map. A map of the northern Mojave and Southern Sierra parts of the trail. Apogee described hiking up Jawbone Canyon north of Tehachapi, whereas we drove up that canyon in order to reach a PCT that traversed the mountains above it. Well look at the "temporary" PCT route on the National Geo map from 1975 - right up Jawbone Canyon:
The map also shows the temporary trail going out into the Mojave, way down and hotter then where the permanent trail now goes! Hot, hot, hot!
Anyway, I thought these photos would maybe bring back a few memories. They certainly brought your early posts straight back to my mind.
And, by the way, I'm laughing with you apogee, not at you. I suspect that I am five or so years younger than you; but in my early days I backpacked like that. I used a metal frame pack. And I wore cut off jeans as (normal length) shorts too.
