A Westlock resident recently completed a 2,650 mile hike following an inland trail along the west coast that stretches from the Mexican border to the Canadian border.
Julie Bourque has called Westlock home for most of her life, attending St. Mary School from Grade 5 on until her graduation.
She currently works in food services at Westlock Healthcare Centre, saving up for her next hiking adventure, which will hopefully be this coming summer.
Bourque trekked for 149 days along the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), which runs through the states of California, Oregon and Washington. Her journey ran from April 18 to Sept. 14.
When you do the math, that works out to an average of 17.78 miles per day. Considering the ups and downs over the mountain ranges, crossing cold streams, sleeping under the stars many nights, that’s a pretty steady pace.
“(The trail) goes along two major mountain ranges, the Sierra-Nevada in central California and the Northern Cascades in Washington,” she told the Town & Country recently.
She says the PCT starts in the desert at the Mexican border for the first 500 miles. The highest point on the trail is 14,000 feet at Forester Pass in the Sierras.
“The trail goes by Mount Whitney, the highest altitude point in the continental U.S., so mostly everybody who does the Pacific Crest Trail diverts over and does the Mount Whitney Summit,” she said, noting the altitude of Mount Whitney is 14,505 feet, or 4,421 metres.
Julie says she started the trek alone, but on the way, she was joined by others who were also on the trail.
“On the way, you just kind of meet people doing this trail from all over the world. I met probably four or five different hiking groups on the trail,” she said.
“You just find people who have a similar pace as you and a similar hiking style, and it just works out. You kind of do your thing during the day, and then have dinner and camp together at night. I did some sections completely by myself, and sections with other people.
“I was with people from Germany, Australia, France, South America — literally from everywhere, they come to do this trail. It’s known world-wide.”
Of course, with meeting new people, there is always an exchange of names and e-mails.
“It’s great, and I continue to be in touch with a lot of people that I hiked with. I have group chats going on various social media outlets and I’m also in touch with a lot of people I met in trail towns.”
Julie also talked about meeting new friends in the form “ ‘Trail Angels” — people who help the hikers in any way they can.
“I met a family in South Lake Tahoe who took me and four other French hikers in for a Fourth of July weekend. She fed us meals and we all had beds and showers and she did our laundry.”
Julie adds, “Sometimes they will take donations, but this family refused any donations from us, so they were very generous. They just appreciate the opportunity to meet people from other areas, hear our stories and be a part of our adventure.”
Julie says her favourite Trail Angel experience was in Tehachapi, California. They had a campground for PCT hiker set up next to an airport.
“Me and my German hiking partner met a retired pilot. We got talking, and next morning, he took us up for about an hour and a half in one of his little planes. He happened to be an instructor, so he let me co-pilot and I got a little flying lesson.
“That was probably a highlight as far as a Trail Angel experience goes. Such a nice fellow.”
Of the entire trip, she says, “I really never felt uncomfortable out there. (I was) more comfortable there than in towns.”
Julie says what helped with that is just such a great sense of community among the hikers. “It doesn’t matter if you met each other before, as soon as you say you’re both hiking the PCT, you have this huge thing in common and you’re basically family right away, so you always have people there you can count on.”
As far as equipment, she carried a tent, which she only used about 60 per cent of the time. “I got really used to sleeping out under the stars, which I highly recommend.”
She also had a little stove, a pad and a sleeping bag, plus some water. As for clothes, she says she “pretty much wore the same outfit for the entire trip,” which were shorts and a T-shirt.
As far as food, she says they would cross a town about every five to seven days, so you just had to carry enough food for a week.
However, Julie basically arranged for most of her food before she left. She sorted it out into about 25 different boxes and picked the stops she was going to make; her mom was her “go to” mail girl back home who sent out boxes according to a schedule she left for her.
She then would pick the boxes up at post offices and stores in the various towns she stopped at.
In total, she says she went through about 300 packets of maple and brown sugar oatmeal and 20-plus jars of Nutella.
Julie says she also carried her cell phone, which was generally useless on the trail except for taking photos. However, she would send a quick message to friends and family and post a photo or two on Facebook when she got to a town. She also carried an emergency satellite beacon.
Her pack consistently weighed around 30 pounds. She said it was toughest in the desert, because there aren’t many water sources, so she had to carry extra water, and that adds considerable weight.
On the trail, she encountered several rattlesnakes, a bear, and too many marmots, squirrels and deer to count.
She went through three pairs of shoes and two packs, had seven to 10 days of rain, a snow storm and one thunder storm.
Julie said she met and travelled with four major hiking families. She had 35 showers (at most) during her hike, though she had countless swims in rivers, lakes and waterfalls, which she describes as “mostly all skull-numbingly cold.”
As for ailments and injuries, she had one bout of altitude sickness, three minor ankle sprains and one skin burn from sliding down an ice chute at the base of Mount Whitney.
“Otherness, I made the trail injury free,” she says.
Aside from the distance and days of her Pacific Crest Trail hike, Julie notes there was a 483,735 foot of elevation gain overall all, a plane ride, a motorcycle hitch, and “enough walking to last a lifetime.”
She said she would “absolutely recommend” this sort of hike. “It’s a great way to kind of reconnect with yourself. It was such a great balance of spending time alone and also meeting a ton of incredible people who are out there doing the same thing as you,” she said.
“For me, it was great to realize how little you actually need, carrying all my belongings on my back. It was a great reality check.”
She says it is a great way to meet people, adding doing the trail “helped me meet so many beautiful and inspiring people from all around the world who inspired me with their appetite for adventure to keep getting out there.”
She noted that some people just do sections of the trail, which she certainly encourages others to do if they can’t complete the entire journey.
As to the future, she is already thinking of other trails she would like to take in, such as the Appalachian Trail in the eastern U.S., the Camino in Northern Spain, and the Continental Divide Trail on the west coast that continues into Canada on the Great Divide Trail from Waterton Lakes to Jasper.
“(The Great Divide Trail) what I’m thinking of for this coming year,” she says.
