Scheduling

The first major hurdle in preparing for the Pacific Crest Trail for me has been scheduling the entire six month hike from mid April to early October, at an average of 16 miles per day.  For any who have read about the trail, or who have hiked it themselves, they know that an April start is necessary, as it provides hikers with just enough spring to avoid the heat of the desert, but a late enough arrival in Kennedy Meadows to allow me to miss the heavy snow that blankets the High Sierras in May and early June.

The October finish was likewise pretty set in stone, as the winter weather that hits the North Cascades in late October creates wildly unsafe conditions for anyone attempting a through hike.  That left me a target window between October 1st and October 15, which I determined to be the absolute latest I could feasibly complete the trail.

I set April 15th as my primary hiking date for a few reasons, but the main one, the real one, is that it is the anniversary of one of the turning points in my life, the death of my best friend, an impetus for seeking solitude in the outdoors.  Aside from that fact, April has always been an important month for me, I moved to New Zealand in April, I got my knee repaired in April, I finished my Graduate Thesis in April.  It only makes sense to tackle the biggest challenge of my life in April.

The first few times I attempted to schedule my hike, I went far too long and ended up with an arrival date well into November, a sure fire recipe for failure.  I know my limits as a hiker, and know that 16 miles is attainable (I've averaged as much my last three big training hikes, so set that number as a baseline for my daily average.  I cut down on rest days and scheduled heavier mileage in Oregon, where the relatively flat conditions will allow me to extend my days.

I'm confident in the schedule, and hope that I haven't overlooked anything as I move forward preparing resupply packages and food/gear partitioning for the different legs of the trail.

Here are som highlighted dates thatbI am targeting, and places I'm excited to travel through as I make my way north:

April 15: I step foot onto the PCT

April 26: Summit Mt. San Jacinto

May 2nd: Rest day in Big Bear, CA

May 11th: Summit Mt. Baden Powell

May 16th: Vasquez Rocks

June 1st: Rest Day in Kennedy Meadows

June 6th: Summit Mt. Whitney

June 7th: Cross Forester Pass

June 14th: Evolution Basin

June 21st: My Birthday as I arrive in Yosemite

July 4th: Fourth of July in Lake Tahoe

July 23rd: Rest Day in Lassen National Park

July 28th: Burney Falls State Park

August 2nd: Castle Crags State Park

August 13th: Oregon Border

August 16th: Rest Day in Ashland, Or

August 22nd:  Rest Day at Crater Lake National Park 

September 9th: Washington border/Rest Day in Portland, Or

September 17th: Goat Rocks Wilderness

September 26th:  Rest Day in Seattle, Wa

October 9th: Finish the PCT!

Obviously even the best laid plans mean nothing when the bullets start to fly, but I feel this is as solid and attainable of a schedule as I can make ahead of time.  I will post the full schedule as weeks go on, and I add all the information I'll be researching to make each day as painless as possible.

Until, then, back to work, April 15th is getting closer every day.

John

Call for Hikers

The mission statement we've set up for Project 2663 is simple, to tell the story of the through-hiker experience on the Pacific Crest Trail through the eyes of the people who hike it.  While this is a documentary about the trail, it is the people who hike the trail, and their reasons for doing so, that interest us most.

As such, we want to hear your story.  If you're planning a through hike of the PCT in 2015, we want to share in your story.  Through your own videos, photos, and words, as well as our own interviews, we want to make this Project as comprehensive a depiction of this experience as possible.

If you are interested, please email us at project2663@gmail.com.  We'd love to hear from you.  Thank you.

Who I am

As I prepare for the challenge of a lifetime, both physical and mental, I find myself looking at where I've been, where I am, and where I'm going, and why I've chosen to hike nearly 3,000 miles for my 35th birthday.

As for many people who choose to hike the Pacific Crest Trail, I've held a long fascination with the outdoors, a love for being in nature developed in a childhood spent wandering the woods of Oregon and New York.  I moved around a great deal during my childhood, and often found myself drawn to the isolation of the forests around my house, climbing trees and building hidden fortresses in the undergrowth, playing make believe and making swords out of sticks to hit my friends with.

When I moved to Iowa in my teens, my passions shifted toward more creative pursuits, namely filmmaking, writing, and photography, but the two loves often found common ground, and I found myself shooting outdoors as often as possible, trying to capture the natural beauty of my environment.  When I got my first professional video camera, the first thing I did was spend three weeks shooting streams and leaves and every sunrise and sunset I could catch.

When I moved to New Zealand in April of 2005, it was my attraction to the raw beauty of its landscapes that drew me there, and I spent much of my time exploring the hills and forests surrounding Wellington, the old growth temperate rain forests and the rocky, wind-swept shorelines of the Cook Strait.  I fell in love with walking, not owning a car, or knowing how to drive on the opposite side of the road, and trekked everywhere, eating up miles as I crossed town for work or to play Ultimate Frisbee or to explore the city.  Walking became second nature to me, and I began to trust my own legs and feet more than anything else to get me from place to place.

In 2009, back in film school after a year abroad, I injured my knee playing the sport I loved, and my legs became a source of pain and an excuse not to do the things I enjoyed doing.  As my life became focused on my career and I withdrew further from my former passions, I found myself lacking something significant in my life, a reason to be excited about the coming weekend or the change of seasons.

2012 began with heartbreak for me, as two relationships I invested all of myself in fell apart in rapid succession, and my best friend in the world, the man I called brother, passed away on April 15, before I could get back to his side.  

I retreated inward, fleeing from all but my dearest friendships, and ran to the places I felt safe, the places I felt inspired by again.  Despite the protestations of my still injured knee, and the financial strain my travels would cause, I spent every free moment on one trail or another.  I called it my Summer of George, and it set in motion the wheels that would drive me to the Pacific Crest Trail in the summer of 2015.

Over the subsequent years, I geared my life around shooting the outdoors, hiking each of the National Parks in the Western US, exploring wild places, and taking up distance backpacking.  I got my knee fixed and found happiness and comfort in my life through my newly recaptured love affair with the outdoors.

So here I am, a few months out from stepping onto the trail, three years to the day removed from one of the low points of my life, ready for the challenges that this undoubtedly life changing experience will hold for me.

So there it is, the brief encapsulation of the story of my life, and how it relates to the PCT and Project 2663.  Now it's your turn.

If you're hiking the PCT in 2015 and want to share your story as part of Project 2663, please email us at the address below:

Project2663@gmail.com

We'd love to have you on board, and I look forward to seeing all of you out here in April.

Kickstarting

The 

On January 1st we started up the Project 2663 Kickstarter campaign, looking to raise roughly $3000 to fund the production costs of our documentary.  After six days we are up to $440 in generous donations and confident we can easily raise the necessary funds to accommodate our rather spartan needs for a production as large in scope as this.

Donors will receive a number of gifts for their support, including copies of the completed project and high quality prints of still photos taken from the trail.  Our hope is to utilize the funds gathered through the kickstarter to purchase essential gear, in the form of audio equipment, camera necessities, hiking equipment, and power solutions that will enable near continual shooting along the entirety of the six-month hike.

If anyone is interested in contributing toward the funding of Project 2663, please visit our kickstarter page at:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1357160531/project-2663

Thank you all.

- John

Welcome to Project 2663

Hello Everyone,

My name is John Robinson, and I am the Co-Director of Project 2663, a documentary aiming to explore and attempt to understand the reasoning behind several hikers’ pursuit of the lofty goal of hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, including my own.  

We enter this project with a few key questions that we are fascinated by and hope to answer:

• What would make a person leave their lives and the rest of society behind for 6 months in order to disappear into the wilderness.
• Why is there an increase in people attempting the trail?
• What parts of their personal histories have led them to this decision?
• What are they hoping to achieve in completing the trail?
• How will these people cope with the prolonged removal from society, both on the trail itself, and after, once the experience is over.
• Why the PCT?  What makes this trail special to them?
• What special challenges does the trail present, be they physical, mental, or emotional

As a part of this documentary, I will hike the trail, meeting other hikers along the way and interviewing them, as well as keeping an ongoing record of my own trek, his struggles, his victories, and his defeats.  The project's second director, Zac Petrillo, will remain in Los Angeles, traveling to meet hikers as they pass through pockets of civilization and compiling the hours of footage sent from the trail as the hikers progress along its length.

In addition to my story, which will form the spine of the film’s project’s structure, we seek to involve several other hikers, still to be determined, to get a varied and multi-representational perspective on the trail and their reasons for hiking it.  It is our hope that through collaboration with the Pacific Trail Association and other resources, including social media, to connect with these fellow hikers and develop a strong relationship from which we will collect footage, journals, photography, and anecdotal interviews before, during, and following their attempts to complete this six month odyssey along the mountains of the western United States.

The film will be shot on a variety of formats, DSLR cameras, Go Pro action cameras, iPhones, etc. and will be sourced directly from the hikers themselves, providing an accurate and personalized account of their experiences.  We will see the trail as the people who experience it see it.  The people we follow in this documentary will each have their own story.

Other hikers will hopefully include, but not be limited to several sub-sections of the population who hike this trail.  We hope to enlist the aid of a wide variety of hikers, whose stories we hope to highlight in the making of this project.  Without knowing specifically who they are, we hope to develop relationships with the following types of people:

• Women hiking the trail alone or as a group
• Parents hiking with their children
• Divorcee’s or widowed individuals
• people who have walked away from careers, from family, or other responsibilities
• couples, either trying to build on a relationship or attempting to save it
• retirees or older hikers
• people running away from their lives
• people trying to rebuild their lives

Regardless of the story, we want to hear it, whether it’s positive or negative.  It is our belief that everyone who attempts this hike does so for a reason beyond the desire to do it for the sake of doing it.  This is more than climbing a mountain or running a marathon, this is a six month commitment and one of the greatest challenges the American outdoors has to offer, and we want to tell these peoples’ stories.