Trail angels help keep hikers going on PCT
By Chris Erskine, Los Angeles Times
By any measure, the Pacific Crest Trail is a beastly thing, an angry anaconda that slithers up the entire length of California and all the way to Canada, some 2,650 rugged miles. That’s approximately 6 million steps — some of them glorious, many of them merciless.
But along the way, mercy is at hand.
Near the southern trail head, Sandy and Barney Mann open up their five-bedroom San Diego home to up to 60 hikers a night. They even pick them up from the airport and ferry them and their gear to the starting point an hour east.
Up the trail, in Agua Dulce, Donna and Jeff Saufley not only provide a night’s rest to more than 1,000 hikers a season, they offer food and shelter to their dogs, horses and the occasional llama.
East of the Bay Area, Hank Magnuski functions as a sort of outdoors concierge, erecting a pop-up cafe to provide hot coffee and fresh fruit topped by whipped cream to hikers coming off a particularly grueling 300-mile stretch.
They are all part of a small network of outdoor Samaritans called “trail angels.”
Rather misleading in some ways. There are thousands, just a 100 Trail Angels, the vast majority of us (yes, wife Penny and I are Trail Angels) never, or only occasionally, take in one or two hikers, & not a large crowd of them, into our homes. Much more common is our providing transportation. You get acquainted with your passengers, and they are a hugely varying lot of very interesting people. At So. Lake Tahoe, this transportation usually means to or from the lower lake at Echo Summit to any of our local motels. Yes, these ‘through hikers’ help our economy here. Sometimes we take them to the Postoffice, where they have arranged ahead of time to get mail, perhaps clothing or food packages they had sent to themselves. Just a wide variety of things.
Our efforts are coordinated. There is a list of we Trail Angels with our phone numbers maintained by a local store at the Y, Lake Of The Sky Outfitters.
At the end of each season, many of us gather there one evening to chat about the PCT hikers we’ve helped, ways to improve what we do, and have a social evening together. Some Trail Angels do provide caches of food, etc., at some trail points, and many other things, but these folks are, more or less exceptions, rather than the norm. There is a Pacific Crest Trail Association, headquartered in Sacramento. I ‘did the PCT’, but due to having to maintain my business, as best I could here at Tahoe, it took me three years, doing a portion of the trail each year….that was 1977, 1978, and I hiked the final portion in 1979. My Trail Name was Flash.
You usually learn a lot about yourself, and what you can do, on a backpacking trip that is well over 2,000 miles. Many of us are Registered at the PCT Association.
We picked up a 60 year old guy from Japan this summer, it was his first trip to the USA, and he was doing the whole 2,600 miles of the PCT. When he told his wife what he was going to do, she didn’t talk to him for 2 days. His English was terrible, but we had a great time transporting him to Echo Summit. Trail angels have a chance to experience humanity in all its forms, it’s a great learning experience.