by Already this year, 26 wildfires have burned along the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail, which travels along the spine of California, Oregon and Washington and has long been considered one of America’s great thru-hikes.
The blazes have forced the closure of 16 sections of the trail, causing hikers to hastily arrange trips around them.
Father-son duo Thijs Koekkoek, 52, and Taime Teesseling, 17, spent four months hiking the trail this year, from Southern California to the Canadian border. In July, they were forced to pause their walk and pass around the Shelly Fire near Etna, California. After additional fire closures further north, the two eventually skipped about 400 miles of track.
“There was no other way,” said Teesseling, who lives in Amsterdam. “Otherwise, we would have to walk around it in the smoke and we didn’t want to put ourselves at risk.”
As of 2018, a total of nearly 1,700 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail has been temporarily closed due to fires, according to Chris Rylee, a spokesman for the Pacific Crest Trail Association. Almost 250 miles of trail have been burned.
Wildfires and their burn scars have made sections of the trail more dangerous and forced the interns to contend with closing at quick notice. For some divers, the blazes are changing their goals and witnessing a dramatic environmental change. Meanwhile, when fast-moving wildfires strike, many rural communities are on the road responsible for helping vulnerable people.
“The wildfire season is getting longer, becoming more predictable, affecting more trails, more trail users and more trail communities,” Rylee said.
The PCT, a longer and more strenuous answer to the Appalachian Trail on the West Coast, passes through the Mojave desert, the Sierra Nevada and the Cascade Range. Between 6,000 and 8,000 people seek long-distance walking permits from the trail association each year. Hundreds of thousands come to visit for shorter periods.
But the landscape has been transformed by intense wildfire seasons, fueled by extreme temperatures due to global warming, combined with more than a century of aggressive fire suppression that has created unhealthy forests.
The PCT is showing signs of climate change now, said John O’Brien, a climate scientist from California who grew up near the trail and hikes it frequently.
“It’s a long-term journey through climate history,” O’Brien said.
Beyond the risk of fire, water is becoming increasingly scarce due to climate change in some areas along the trail. Glaciers are retreating in the high country, often exposing slick bedrock. Streams often reach peak flow earlier in the season, which can make crossings dangerous at those times.
Koekkoek and Teesseling said fire was not the only extreme weather they faced. In Julian, California, heavy late-season snow forced them to forage. Then, the pair endured three weeks of about 100-degree heat near Burney, California, even at a high elevation.
They said the locals they met were still saying the same refrain: “We’ve never experienced this weather before.”
The hike gave the father and son a crash course in how wildfires are changing daily life for remote, fire-prone communities, especially in California: “Everybody had an escape bag at the front door, and everyone had to be ready to abandon their home. ,” Teesseling said.
PCT visitors also need to be vigilant – when fires do occur, they are among the most vulnerable. Many of them prepare for their trip with the assumption that they will skip some parts of the trail due to fires, or “flip-flop” — they will return later. Others try to connect complex paths around work.
Karen Altergott, a 2022 thru-walker, was forced off the trail near Stehekin, Washington, after developing a hacking cough, headache and sore throat after three days of walking through smoke.
“My lungs felt full of fluid,” she said. This year, Altergott returned to make up the missing miles and ended up walking 17 miles in an N95 respirator. Then, a new fire left her 30 miles short of completion and eager to close.
“Part of me stayed out there,” Altergott said. “I strongly believe that it is now impossible to walk the Pacific Crest Trail without being affected by wildfires.”
The Pacific Crest Trail Association this summer launched a smartphone app to help hikers track and navigate confusing wildfire closures.
“Trail angels” – locals who provide free food, support and places to stay for distant visitors – are increasingly playing essential safety roles for hikers stranded around fire forts.
“They’re literally away with their lives,” said Becky Wade, who works as a trail angel with her partner, Jeff McCabe, in Hamburg, California. “There is no escape for them if you don’t stop to help them.”
McCabe and Wade moved to the area, near the Klamath National Forest, four years ago. Wildfires forced them to evacuate twice. Both times, they were hosting long-distance hikers and drove them to safety.
In July, McCabe carried about 75 hikers around the Shelly Fire, including Koekkoek and Teesseling.
“It would be … a lot harder without people like the trail angels who are willing to drive you around the fires,” Teesseling said.
Even when hikers don’t encounter active fires, walking through burned zones is a stark reminder of the effects of climate change.
Will Georis, 25, hiked the PCT in 2022, the year after the Dixie Fire. The fire left thousands of burned stumps, unstable ground and the risk that gusts of wind could transform burned trees into widow reapers – the term hikers give to dead trees and branches in danger of being cut.
“There’s no way around it – those huge areas where every tree has been burnt to a crisp or it felt like a bomb had gone off. It’s not fun to walk,” said Georis, who worked as a firefighter in college and is now a forester.
“The biodiversity will be different,” he said. “There will be different species coming in.”
Fire itself is not unnatural or evil. Before European settlers, an average of about 4.5 million acres burned each year in California, according to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley — a mark that would surpass modern fire seasons.
But today’s forests are not as well adapted to fire, and often burn hotter.
“The fires of the old people were of low intensity,” said Ó Briain. “That created these really resilient forests where the lower branches of the big trees burned, but their canopies remained intact, and they lived and continued to grow.”
Georis managed to make a continuous path from Mexico to Canada, an increasingly difficult experience. He advised future visitors not to worry about the potential for logistical confusion, smoke and the need to be flexible about plans – a sentiment shared by many remote tourists who say it’s worth it the scenery and community of the trail.
Despite many visitors focusing on walking a continuous path, Georis said, “when you get to the end, you realize that’s the least important thing – it’s really the people and the experiences.” .”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
