Walks Far Man: In Step with History on the Pacific Crest Trail

WALKS FAR MAN: IN STEP WITH HISTORY ON THE PACIFIC CREST TRAIL

BIG BLEND RADIO SERIES: Listen to the interview series with Jim Ostdick, author of “Walks Far Man: In Step with History on the Pacific Crest Trail,” where every few months we discuss a different part of the Pacific Crest Trail and its regional cultural history. Listen here in the YouTube player or on SoundCloud.

Posing for a picture at the southern terminus of the Pacific Crest Trail, a long-eared jackrabbit hop from Mexico and 2,650-some miles from Canada, your stomach churns and your mind reels. The air is dusty. A morning desert wind feels oddly cold. No amount of preparation is sufficient for the starkness of your decision. In this beginning, something has ended. Something practiced and old and broken-in has faded. In its place enters immediacy and relevance and sharp possibility. Plans and spreadsheets become paper prayer flags fluttering in a past mind, useless tributes to linear pretense. You catch yourself thinking that it feels like the first day of school. But there are no teachers, no classmates, no classrooms, no halls, and no walls. There is only one choice that yields results: to turn and to walk, to follow the well-worn trail North. With each step, you lose a little more of the other-world, the un-PCT. All you have is what you need. All you need is what you have. Here-now is all there is and this here-now is insanely fun.

“Walks Far Man” is available on Amazon. 

A long-distance hiker and cyclist, Jim is also the author of “Palomino and the Dream Machine: A Retired Dude’s Bicycle Tour Around the Lower Forty-Eight United States,”  and “Palomino Nation: My 2016 Crazyass Walk Across America.” Keep up with him at http://palominodream.blogspot.com/

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