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hoof-like feet, they’ll stay with you until you’ve been thoroughly broken in.

    On the morning of May 8, we traveled east toward the small California border town of Campo. For weeks I’d been preoccupied with trail worries, but on this morning fear took a backseat to grogginess. It was 4:45 in the morning and we were whipping along the dark curves of Highway 94 in Bob’s Dodgevan, feeling slightly ill from breakfast sandwiches and frequent stomach-revolving shifts in direction. We’d had a short, fitful night of sleep; excitement, nerves, and strange surroundings made us fidgety, so much so in Angela’s case that she sat bolt upright in bed at about 12:30 in the morning and chirped at me to get moving. She chirped and chirped, despite my pleas for her to consult her watch. At last, after a dozen or so chirpies, she checked the time and reluctantly lay back down.
    Angela and I weren’t the only ones on the groggy side. Bob was making the pre-dawn trip to Campo for the twenty-second time that spring (we were his thirtieth and thirty-first hikers), and the cumulative effects had made him a little sleepy—sleepy enough to disregard a sharp curve in the road and take the Dodge screeching into the oncoming lane. Luckily, Campo to San Diego isn’t a big commuter route, and there wasn’t any westbound traffic to collide with. Our only fatality was Bob’s mug of coffee.
    Fifteen minutes later, Bob pulled the van up next to the wooden PCT monument, which stands twenty feet from a corrugated steel fence marking the Mexican border. Running alongside the fence is a well-maintained dirt road used nightly by Border Patrol officers to scout for footprints. The monument itself was a cluster of five rectangular pillars of varying height with a series of inscriptions that read, “Southern Terminus Pacific Crest National Scenic Trail,” “Established by Act of Congress on Oct. 2, 1968,” “Mexico to Canada 2627 Miles 1988 A.D .,” and “Elevation 2915 ft.”
    It was cold and windy and we were anxious to get started, so we snapped a couple of photos, said our good-byes to Bob, and then were off toward Canada—a mere 2,655 miles away (the trail has grown by twenty-eight miles since 1988). As we set out from the border, I wore a pack containing our tent and ThermaRests, five days’ worth of food, a gallon of water, and an assortment of personal items. It had weighed in at fifty-three pounds that morning on Bob’s scale. Fifty-three pounds of pressure on my shoulders and hips wasn’t so comfortable—about as comfortable as sitting next to an eight-hundred-pound dairy cow for a twelve-hour Greyhound ride. But for the time being, the discomfort of a heavy pack was superseded by the excitement of starting our great adventure.
    We moved at a steady pace over undulating trail in the face of blustery winds, which stirred up clouds of caramel-colored dust. My nose caught an occasional whiff of sweet sagebrush. Every so often, I glimpsed suspicious pieces of litter—juice cans and candy bar wrappers with Spanish lettering, ragged blue jeans, an Oakland Raiders baseball hat. There were no signs of those who had discarded these treasures, but I assumed they weren’t fellow hikers. I’d done enough research to know that very few long-distance hikers wear blue jeans or Raiders paraphernalia.
    A week before our departure from Philadelphia, I’d read an account of a hiker who, while walking at night, was chased by a gang of men. He avoided capture by locking himself in a small shed. The assailants didn’t give up, however, and spent an hour attempting to break in while the frightened hiker (who happened to be an ex-marine) braced himself against the door. As morning broke, he burst from the shed, brandishing a knife whittled from wood and raced away from his tormentors. Despite the fact that this assault occurred in Chariot Canyon, some sixty miles