Northern California marks a new section of the trail. However, it is not seen as the best part due to it being its longest section as well as being the same rolling green mountains for more than 600 miles. In this section, most people start doing bigger milage, averaging over 26 miles per day and sometimes even doing consistent 30 milers. The other aspect of Northern California that makes this section challenging is what is called the Norcal blues. After walking for nearly 3 months now, you are still in the same state, and it sometimes seems like you haven’t done any progress at all.
I am really enjoying the process of writing this blog almost a year later. It is allowing me to see and observe what the trail gave me. I mean don’t give me wrong, I do not believe you learn so much by doing easy things, but deepening that personal relationship with yourself, in my opinion, comes from jumping into the deep end and learning what you can do, or can’t, how far you can push yourself. Taking time to have introspection on this journey is showing me how far I have come. It is, for me, a nice way to reward myself with gratefulness for who I am becoming.
In this section, the biggest concept I had to learn was how to stay motivated. After over 1000 miles walked, many aches and pains, the redundancy of the routine, however beautiful life on trail might be, it becomes quite boring. It sometimes can be brutal to wake up and look at what’s left, what you still need to chew on, even after 1000 miles, I still wasn’t even halfway through, and that can be a heavy perspective. In those moment, I would lose the present, I would not enjoy the scenic views, the pristine nature that I was in, the amazing relationship that I was building. No, the only thing on my mind was that I had 60% of the trail to go. I figured out a way for me to stay motivated by learning how to change the angle of my perspective on the task or challenge at hand I was able to trick my mind in staying positive, having fun and keep putting one foot in front of the other.
Personally, in this section, I followed along my friends, Snack Pack and Fat Dog, yes, you read that right, that is their trail names, who wanted to start pushing the mileages. Personally, I didn’t think that walking a marathon a day was something that would be very healthy, wanting to make sure that my body would make it through the entirety of those 2650 miles. But somehow, someway, the desire that made me want to keep sharing this experience with them push me to start doing 26, 27, 28 miles every day. Wanting to see how far we could push it we even did our first 30 miler towards the end of this section. I was the first one amazed at what the body was capable of… in some way, this opened me up and what else could I do become my new question!
The stress that we were putting on ourselves also showed in our friendship. I personally think it is something truly unique and wonderful to meet people in these chapters of life where you share yourself in a very raw way. There is no place for the normal and regular fake relationships that we sometimes encounter in busy fast-paced life. If things aren’t working out because you either need space, or you need space, or they need support and you don’t have the energy for that, or vice versa, or that you want to experience the trail differently in a way that means that you wouldn’t walk with them anymore… I mean these are all examples of things that I saw happened on trail, and you get attach due to the bare bone nature of doing something so demanding. After almost 1000 miles, 2 months of living on trail with them, the strain of our own personality being pushed to the limit showed itself.
But here we were, we finally made it to the Oregon/California border. The biggest milestone so far. Yet, we still had 1000 miles to go, encounters with forest fires and are little group being broken up…
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