Hairy Plots in the Wild

Why Hairy Charts Are Interesting

For starters, so many of these plots you see in the wild really drive home how badly we forecast metrics that matter a lot to us.

Take the federal funds rate. There are plenty of ways to forecast it. You can survey experts, including Fed officials and professional forecasters, or infer market expectations from interest rate futures, options, and other financial instruments. And there’s plenty of incentive to get it right. This one rate influences borrowing costs across the economy, investment decisions, asset prices, the cost of financing the US government’s debt and so much more.

Given how much goes into forecasting it, you might expect the predictions to be pretty good. Historically, though, they’ve been pretty poor.

And not just a little wrong. Often wrong in the same direction for years. For example, from 2009 until the Fed finally raised rates in December 2015, forecasts repeatedly anticipated an earlier increase. Have a look at the plot: more often than not, they’re wrong.

There are several possible explanations. Forecasters tend to expect rates to return to familiar levels. Market-implied rates aren’t pure expectations: the Treasury forward curve includes a term premium, and options-implied SOFR is risk-neutral, which builds in a risk premium (both covered below). Markets also take cues from the Fed’s own guidance, so the Fed and market participants can end up making similar mistakes (several plots from the wild above show both). And, of course, some of the biggest changes in interest rates are responses to shocks that nobody saw coming.

But Sometimes They Get It Right

The forecasts aren’t always wrong. For example, the Fed’s median projection from June 2023 turned out to be close, as did market expectations implied by SOFR options in September 2023. But accuracy tends to deteriorate with the forecast horizon.

And, quite apart from what they tell us about forecasting, I think hairy charts just look pretty cool.

Animate the Hairy Plot

And here’s an animation builder. It plays the fed funds rate forward in time, with each projection and forecast appearing as it was made. Pick the years, series and colors, press play, and screen-record it.

Two Dates for Every Number

A bitemporal chart is a method to plot data which has two dates for each value. One date the value is from, and one date the value is about. For example with the fed-funds hairy chart, each projection has the date the forecast was made, and the date the forecast is about. (I like Toph Tucker’s bitemporal chart article on Observable, it’s a good tour of the idea.)¹

Take one hair. On 16 March 2022, the FOMC raised its target range to 0.25% to 0.50%, its first increase since 2018, and published its participants’ projections for the federal funds rate at the end of 2022, 2023 and 2024.² The medians, all made that day, each about a different date:

This hair starts on the head at its made date, at the rate set that day (0.375%, the middle of the new range), and runs through the three projections. Every meeting leads to another set of projections, adding another hair.

This hair missed badly: the rate ended 2022 at 4.375%, not 1.9%, and 2023 at 5.375%, not 2.8%.

There are other types of these bitemporal charts. For a policy rate, the outcome is known the day it happens, so the head never moves. Plenty of numbers aren’t like that. GDP, employment and population keep being revised long after the day for the estimate has passed, so their heads grow hairs of their own. Imagine the release of an economic number, say one quarter’s GDP estimate: it sets a point on the plot. Each time the number is revised, a line grows forward in time, connecting the new estimates for the same quarter, to the date of the revised estimate. The x-axis shows the date each value was released. I’ve seen this called a “fishhook” chart; I think I’d borrow from nautical nomenclature and call them telltale plots.

Forecasts of the Federal Funds Rate

For the federal funds rate, the head is the FOMC’s target, and the hairs need forecasts made on many days, each about many days ahead. Many of the best-looking hairy plots I’ve seen use fed funds futures and overnight index swap (OIS) curves, which price every upcoming FOMC meeting every trading day. Those come from providers like Bloomberg, and I couldn’t access (afford) them. Fortunately, four free sources have the same two-date shape, each on its own schedule:

• Treasury forward curves: a hair at every FOMC meeting since 1994, cut at three years.
• Options on SOFR futures: a hair every trading day since March 2023, about three years long.
• The FOMC’s median projection: a hair four times a year since September 2015, up to about three years ahead.
• The Survey of Professional Forecasters: a hair every quarter since 1982, about a year long.

I created reproducible notebooks that document how I got and parsed these datasets. The R notebook and the Python notebook walk through each one, from loading the data to the final plot.³ And here’s a repo with cleaned data in data/, and scripts in scripts/ that download and build those datasets.⁴

Here’s a bit about each series.

Federal Funds Target Rate

First, let’s set up the “head” every “hair” grows from.

Treasury Forward Curve

The rate the Treasury bond market implies for each future date, from the yield curve that Federal Reserve Board staff fit every day, taken at each FOMC meeting since 1994.

Options-Implied (SOFR)

What options on SOFR futures imply the overnight rate will average over each coming three-month window, estimated daily by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta since March 2023.

FOMC Median Projection

The median FOMC participant’s projection of the federal funds rate at the end of each of the next few years, from the Summary of Economic Projections, published since September 2015.

Professional Forecasters

The Philadelphia Fed’s quarterly survey: the median forecast of the three-month Treasury bill rate for the current quarter and the next four, back to 1982.

An Interactive Version

Check out the US Mortality explorer - an interactive Lexis diagram of death rates in the US.

The obvious next thing to do was to let me ask my own questions of it, so I built an interactive version.

The original covers 1981 to 2019 and ages 30-80, all causes, both sexes. Mine runs 1934 to 2024, splits by sex, and adds two things the static figure could not.

The raw numbers, not just the smoothed ones. The published plot is smoothed, which is the right choice for print: it makes the pattern a little more legible. But a smoother has to guess at the edges and it struggles where the data is thin, so it can invent a little structure and hide a little noise. The raw view is the plain year-on-year change, no model. It is harder to read, and honest about how much of the pattern is really there.

You can also switch from change to the underlying death rate, which is the level rather than the direction. The rainbow gradient means old age at the top in red, childhood at the bottom in blue, and the long blue drift rightward along the bottom is a century of children increasingly not dying.

A few other things worth clicking. You can highlight a generation to see its diagonal. You can select by year, by age, or by birth year, and whichever you pick draws a time series underneath the plot with the numbers behind it. There are age and date filters, and on a desktop you can drag a box on the plot to zoom into it.

View mortalities by cause of death

This was a fun part. Every death registered in the United States produces a certificate, and the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics publishes one record per death going back to 1959, carrying age, sex, year and a cause code. That is sixty-six years and about 150 million records, free to anyone who wants them.

They are also distributed as fixed-width text with no column names and a layout that changes every few years, which would have been most of the work. As you might imagine, dealing with all this gets quite complex, nuanced and prone to errors. But research associated with the National Bureau of Economic Research have already done that job for every year and published the result as plain CSVs with named columns. It is a quietly enormous public service and it turned a month of parsing into an afternoon. Thank you, NBER.

So the interactive version lets you pick a cause: cancer and its major sites, heart disease, stroke, drug poisoning, firearms, suicide, dementia, and a few dozen more.

See the methods, data and code

Check out the interactive Lexis plot explorer of US mortality here. Start with all causes, hit “Full 1934 to 2024” and look at all ages, highlight the boomers, switch to death rates. Click into specific mortality causes.

I also wrote all of this up as notebooks:

• US mortality change on a Lexis plot: all causes. Replication of The Economist (2026-07-17) / Abrams et al. (2026) figures.

• US mortality by cause of death, on the Lexis plot. Death rates and annual change, by age and year, for fifty causes.

And if you want to bring me a little joy, please leave a comment about how baffled and befuddled you are by the data visualization. 0/10 bad plot.

For You a Rose in Portland Grows

Circa early 1940s · Linen paper · 3.5 × 5.5 in

For you a rose in Portland Grows! This one is iconic, and this reprint is as close to the original as I’ve been able to manage. I’ve mostly seen historic examples of this postcard from the 1940s and 1950s (earliest postmark I’ve seen is 1944), but it may have originally been printed as early as the 1930s. Wiki Commons link

Front Reverse Original Photo

A photo of the actual reprint for sale, this is what you’d receive.

Bird’s Eye View of Portland, Including Mt. Hood

Circa 1909 · Uncoated paper · 3.5 × 5.5 in

Based on a black-and-white photograph from around 1905, this image was recolored and reproduced as a lithographic print numerous times leading up to the First World War. The reprint is on basic uncoated paper but looks remarkably close to the original.

Front Reverse Original Photo

A photo of the actual reprint for sale, this is what you’d receive.

St. Johns Bridge with “Battleship” Portland

Circa 1930s · Linen paper · 3.5 × 5.5 in

Based on a well-known 1933 black-and-white photo (which you can see in the lobby of the Oregon Historical Society), the “Battleship” is the USS Portland, named for some random small town in Maine nobody’s ever heard of, not my lovely PNW home. Also, it’s not a battleship, it’s a cruiser.

Most (if not all) linen postcards of the 1930s and ’40s were black-and-white photos with hand-drawn instructions for coloring. In this case, the they miscolored the bridge grey. St. Johns Bridge is actually green. As far as I can tell the bridge has always been green. Interestingly, the color on the postcard was never corrected across its many reprints into the 1940s.

I’m nearly certain the image is technically still under copyright by the Angelus Commercial Studio, but I don’t think anyone is enforcing it.

The earliest postmark I can find is from summer 1938. You can read more about the original photo here, here, on Reddit, and here.

Front Reverse Original Photo

A photo of the actual reprint for sale, this is what you’d receive.

Multnomah Falls Lodge, with Bridge & Train

Circa 1930s · Linen paper · 3.5 × 5.5 in

This is one of Oregon’s most popular and iconic tourist destinations.

Front Reverse Original Photo

A photo of the actual reprint for sale, this is what you’d receive.

Mt. Hood & Reflection from Lost Lake

Circa 1912 · Uncoated paper · 3.5 × 5.5 in

Based on a black-and-white photo, this image was originally printed in Germany via the lithographic method.

Lost Lake itself is pretty amazing, located just north of Mt. Hood along the Pacific Crest Trail. The explorers who named it couldn’t seem to find it and swore the lake was the one who was lost, not them. It takes real nerve to name a place after your own error. Cartographers call this projection.

Front Reverse Original Photo

A photo of the actual reprint for sale, this is what you’d receive.

Timberline Lodge, Late Winter at Sunset

Circa late 1930s · Linen paper · 3.5 × 5.5 in

All work and no play makes one a very dull boi, which is why Portlanders & Oregonians know it’s important to get out into nature, like the majestic vistas and skiing at Mt. Hood’s Timberline Lodge.

I’m a big fan of the Timberline. Built between 1936 and 1938 as a WPA Great Depression project, the lodge features an interior decorated by a bunch of local artists. You’re a stone’s throw from supposedly the longest ski season in the Lower 48, Mt. Hood’s peak, Paradise Park, the Timberline Trail, and a large swath of wilderness. The lobby is a great place to write postcards.

I’m planning a series for Timberline Lodge with cards for every season, hence all the various versions under “original”.

Front Reverse Original Photo

A photo of the actual reprint for sale, this is what you’d receive.

Greetings from Portland

Circa 1940s · Linen paper · 3.5 × 5.5 in

Pretty sure this is a mid-to-late 1940s postcard. Bright and colorful, tho honestly not quite as iconic as the “For You a Rose” or the Portland “Battleship” cards. My reprint carries over a strange mirror postmark print that I think makes it look particularly cool.

Front Reverse Photo

A photo of the actual reprint for sale, this is what you’d receive.

The Trail Provides (Cherry Chapstick, Pt. 1)

Their orientation went on to say that despite all that pain and discomfort, part of the fun is coping with it and finding the strength to keep going -- and that overcoming it all & completing the trail feels great. (Plus no shade to folks who don’t finish, for whatever reason.)

For all the bad times, fairly consistently and for everyone, “the trail provides”, in little and big ways. Randomness comes together to help keep you going, and when it does it feels miraculous.

They told one story to bring this to a point: there was a hiker who had really bad chapped lips. They were visibly crusty, white scabs, bleeding, he was having a bad day. No one could help him. Eventually, as he was hiking along, he found some cherry flavored chapstick just lying on the ground. Right there in the middle of the trail. He was amazed, applied it to his crusty chapped lips’ immediate relief, and showed everyone. “The trail provides”. He got a “trail name” (a nickname most folks on the trail are known by) Cherry Chapstick” from that moment on.

And there are a million stories like this that confirm the sentiment.

This was certainly my experience.

Figure 4: PCT Elevation Profile

Have a look at Figure 4. It’s an elevation profile of the full trail, with a few annotations. Basically all of the high Sierra range is above 8000 ft, the effective O2 is only 75% that of sea level. (At 13,000 ft it’s 60%). And you can feel it! It took me a couple of days to acclimate up there. A few folks got quite sick, or had chronic headaches. I had trouble sleeping my first few days. I had read about a man who’d reached Forester Pass, the highest point of the PCT (if you don’t count Mt Whitney spur trail), and he died there of a heart attack.

The trail gets brutal in ways not clear in the elevation profile. The north part of Yosemite (past Tuolumne) has thousands of these handmade granite steps. And it’s not like those clean, regular steps you have in a building, with uniform 7 inch rise and 10 inch tread, and landing every half story. Each one of these sierra steps was hand-chiseled, each a different size and shape, I imagine by Boy Scouts and WPA folks in the 1930s. Often over a foot rise. Every day a brutal leg day. I think they thought they were being nice, building these steps, but my gosh, those steps, along with all the mosquitoes in that section, were rough for me. There’s a moment when you leave Yosemite and get back into the National Forest, Emigrant wilderness at Dorothy Lake, and the trail is just softer and loamier again. This softer soil means the trail is just a straight graded trail, far fewer granite-steps…

Forester Pass was probably my favorite day of the whole trip. I was hiking with a nice group. We had a light dusting of snow the night before and a wide clear sky during the day. You could look down south over 50 miles of this massive U-shaped canyon holding a fork of the Kern River. Those high alpine areas -- there’s something about the mountain ridges, those Dr. Seuss-looking conifer trees, dwarf & twisted, pleasantly distributed, clean mountain streams trickling, so few people and not a road in sight. It was really pretty, and felt amazing.

By day 76, up at South Lake Tahoe, I’d say I reached a real new plateau of physical fitness. If I pushed myself I could keep up with most of the kids and fit hikers who’d politely passed me in Southern California.

Days 75-125 - Mental Challenges - If Southern California is phase one, with the deserts, subalpine wonderland sky islands, learning the trail and slowly getting into shape. If the high Sierra is phase two, really pushing your body in the high alpine trails, snow, stream crossings, grueling but beautiful terrain. After that, into Northern California, Oregon and Washington the trail gets a lot softer, (the trail mostly loam a few exceptions around rocky volcanos, near Lassen and in Oregon…), everything from resupplies to the weather is more manageable …. then PCT Phase Three is about finding the mental strength to keep going. More on that in the books & boredom sections later.

Oregon Expressway - All through Oregon, I was still hiking in mostly wilderness areas, but the Cascades are crisscrossed with roads driven by friendly Pacific Northwest outdoorsy folks. There seemed to be a small seasonal resort every 100-odd miles, just off the trail. Each resort might have a restaurant and small store with near-everything you’d need to resupply. Often a shower and laundry too. And, again, hard to see it in the elevation profile, but the trail just feels softer and easier. So much easier to get in the miles. I started finding blueberries in season (maybe huckleberries too?) just on trail. This meant that the whole state felt like it was all downhill, with a buffet along the way. I managed to make a lot of miles. And it felt really fun.

My biggest day, 33+ miles, was on the trail between Mt Jefferson, headed downhill towards Mt Hood. Many hikers do a “24-hour challenge” here, where they time their hike to end at Timberline Lodge after 24-hours of hiking, 50-odd miles away, - trying to finish when the Timberline Lodge’s all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet opens. The waiters there are very nice, but I guess they are mildly annoyed at all the hikers eating them out of house and home. But, at the same time, the hikers are a bit of a tourist attraction for the hotel guests. ³

Days 120-140 in Northern Washington. The northern Washington Cascades are amazingly beautiful and remote. The trail takes you over high mountain passes and into really lush, green fungus-filled valleys. The trail isn’t nearly as rugged as the high sierra, but there are big elevation changes, and the weather in late summer gets cooler and cooler, and things get wetter.

Northern Terminus - I hit the northern terminus with big feelings — and a little guilt. Endless rain is one thing -- you’ll be miserable but won’t die -- hiking into feet of snow and freezing temperatures is another. By the time I reached northern Washington, the season was already turning. I’d skipped chunks of trail earlier to dodge smoke and fires, and to make sure I’d reach the end before the first serious snowfall. I kept thinking how devastated I’d feel to hike thousands of miles and miss the official finish line — but avoiding that meant missing hundreds of miles of trail.

And then: the monument was amazing. A marathon from the nearest forest service road — or an easy day hike southbound from Manning Park, B.C. — it’s an odd, beautiful place to end months of walking. The USA/Canada border is unmistakable: a perfectly straight, thirty-foot-wide clear-cut line slashed through forest in a U-shaped valley. Thick pine trees deep in the valley thin out up high into jagged rocks on the ridges above. Standing there felt incredible. I even did the classic thing and stepped a little into Canada, curious whether the rumor was true about a nice toilet just down the trail.

There was, unfortunately, no magical Canadian outhouse — just Mounties blocking the path north. All decked out: tactical gear, wraparound sunnies, assault rifles. They asked for IDs and if anyone had a felony. It was a bit surreal: all that quiet wilderness, and then suddenly some militarized bureaucracy. Until February 2025, a visa program had allowed hikers to cross into Canada right there at the monument — that’s now gone, for some reasons.

I didn’t linger. I took my photos and headed back. A marathon to the nearest trailhead south. It felt strange to walk southbound for the first time — walking north, the sun is always at your side or back; now it was low and straight in my face. My favorite line from Lord of the Rings is Treebeard saying “I always like going South; somehow it feels like going downhill.” So true.

Those last sixty-mile loop felt like a reunion tour. I kept running into people I’d met earlier on the trail, including a few I hadn’t seen since day one. They call this stretch the “victory lap,” and it earns the name.

Figure 1, Panel E: Enthusiasm

That enthusiasm plot really does tell the basic story of my hike. High early variance, with highs-&-lows that gradually smoothed out over time.

Early on, everything spiked wildly: day one heading toward Mt Laguna’s subalpine forest, I was almost breathless, thinking “oh my god, am I really doing this!?”, everything felt new and amazing. The lows came just as fast. Blisters aren’t excruciating pain, but that first bad blister in years is an infuriating little misery, as it heals I started walking funny leading to mild sprains; I had to slow down, take time off, and separate from a nice group I’d fallen in with early on. The High Sierra brought another stretch of literal and emotional breathless highs—some of the most beautiful days I’ve ever had—mixed with real effort in the desert and transverse range.

By Northern California, and for most of the rest of the trail, my enthusiasm flattened into something much steadier. Not ecstatic, not miserable. Enthusiasm “Doldrums” feels a little too negative— the novelty had worn off, this was a job I was comfortable with, one I knew how to do well, even with over a thousand miles still ahead. I can understand why so many folks who were certainly physically able to finish the trail, decided to quit here. You’d hear a lot of “it’s boring” and “what more do I have to prove?”

Toward the end, cold and wet weather dragged things down, and then, right at the finish, the line jumped up one last time: getting to walk through the North Cascades wilderness and sit on the northern terminus, the victory lap, my buddy picking me up from the trail to drink Dom Pérignon — a satisfying way to end it all.

Physical Experience

If you were to see me at the start of the trip and at the end, what would stand out is my dramatic physical change. I was maybe 240ish at the start, and maybe 190 at the northern terminus (I wasn’t really weighing myself, today I’m around 210). When I got back home folks assumed I was on Zepbound. No!, I cheated!, and skipped the nausea side effects by just walking all day every day for 150-odd days. Side effects may include blisters, sore ankles, a vague sense of awe at the sublime, and sunburns.

You might not be able to outrun your demons but at least you can look good while you’re doing it.

Slowly getting fit over the trail was a highlight. I took selfies every day and put them together into a timelapse (which I probably shared with you already).

{…insert timelapse video…}

Trail Speed & Fitness - One of the my personal joys of the PCT is getting incrementally better at it, every single day, and pounding out more and more miles. That progress is easy to see in the data.

Figure 5: Trail Speed

Figure 5 shows my average daily trail speed—not just moving speed, but all-in: breaks, selfie stops, food prep, staring open-mouthed at things. (Dot size is a bespoke metric, roughly how hard the day was—bigger dots mean more climbing, tiny dots might have been mostly downhill.) Early on (days 0–40), I was hovering between 1.5 and 2.0 mph. The Sierra (roughly days 40–75) knocked me down—brutal terrain, ice, high altitude, and a camera I couldn’t put down. After Lake Tahoe on day 75, things gradually got easier & faster. By days 100–125 I was consistently at or above 2 mph even on hard days -- partly because I was fitter, partly because I’d lost the urge to photograph every majestic vista and pretty wildflower. The thousandth one is less compelling.

By Washington, my resting heart rate was sitting around 45 bpm. My body was mid-20s fit. I was hiking 10–14 hours a day, and my pace in the Cascades -- despite the difficult terrain and ugly weather -- stayed in the 2.0–2.5 mph range. Fewer zeros & nero days in the back half meant the efficiency compounded fast.

That half-mph gain might sound modest. It isn’t. Early days topped out at 15–24 miles. By Washington, I was stringing together marathon days (26.2+ miles) in a row—bad weather, full pack, a week of food & accumulated trash -- and going to sleep with only minor aches. Roughly 20 days total cleared the marathon mark.

I’m not setting records. The serious young athletes were hitting my end-of-trail numbers before the Sierra. But that’s not my point, it’s that in a few weeks of conditioning, this increasingly creaky body got fit enough that a mountain marathon became… just another fun day on the trail. Mountain passes, rough terrain, stream crossings, tree falls … yeah, no worries. Months later, the thought of running a road marathon feels daunting. But for a few weeks in Washington, it was just another Tuesday.

TLDR: I got faster, the Sierra slowed me down, by Washington I was doing 20–34 miles a day. That improvement was a major highlight.

Food - “Hiker hunger” is a real thing on the trail. Your body just can’t keep up with the physical demands, and every cell screams “FEED ME!” Luckily, thanks to my middle-aged soft body and decades of neglect, I always had a decent amount of fat reserves to fall back on. But some of those skinny folks really had a hard time. And so we talked a lot about the foods we were most looking forward to eating in town.

{…get into calorie deficits, and how that translates into weight loss. Adjust for overeating town days…}

If you remember back at Mission Creek, those cheese-dreaming French-speaking hikers who I made a fondue pact with -- our Solemn Emmental Oath -- it wasn’t until mile 1,100, day 76 that we found a fondue place that met the standards of our group (the Frenchman was picky). On Lake Tahoe’s shoreline, watching a glorious sunset over the lake, we ended up having 4 bowls. That’s a lot of cheese.

Just to put a pin in the food situation on the trail. After fondue, I walked back to my hotel. Still hungry, I managed a Five Guys grilled cheese, fries & a large chocolate shake for dessert.

As I was working through the cheese sweats the next day, I realized something. Truly, you can fondue anything you put your mind to. The trail provides.

Lack of showering - In city life, I’m a daily showerer who definitely notices when I get too smelly, or when I’m around smelly folks. On the trail, those standards disappear. Maybe it’s the constant fresh air, but you eventually stop noticing your own musk -- or anyone else’s. It just smells… natural. Earthy.

The funny shock comes when you get close to a popular trailhead. You can actually smell the day-hikers before you see them. They smell quite nice! That floral laundry detergent scent, those spotless clothes.

After Timberline Lodge, I hitched and took a train back to my place in Portland. One guy on the train asked “you homeless?… what’s your deal?” -- I looked pretty dirty & smelled, and was carrying a bag covered in dirt, but I also had a clean haircut and hiking poles. I explained I’d walked there from the Mexican border, and he offered me a swig from his bottle of vodka on the MAX. The same train had a guy open-carrying a machete. Oh, Portland.

How National Geographic showed the PCT.

A Poo Story

Here’s a section I’ve been dreading writing. Bear with me.

Popular trailheads are fun, the wilderness softens into civilization. Clean sweet-smelling day hikers appear: folks on dates, happy families and dogs troddle along, looking at me, hardcore-PCT-hiker (very dirty, smelly, racing to the trailhead), a little oddly.

Now, catching the hitch to Bishop, over Bishop Pass into South Lake, requires good timing — get to the trailhead too early and no one is headed down into town; too late and you might be stranded in an empty parking lot. Late in the afternoon, I was moving with haste. And also, in a second sense, I was dealing with a hasty movement. When I first get into the wilderness, it can take me a day or two before I’m comfortable to finally “go”, if you know what I mean. And also at the end of a stretch of trail, my bowels act up with the prospect of a proper toilet, and I knew South Lake had a nice bathroom just down the trail.

I was enjoying it right up until my bowels decided it couldn’t hold out any longer. I ducked behind a bush. It was urgent, and given the circumstances, substantial. I had just finished and was reclaiming my dignity when I heard a jingle, and a golden retriever came bounding around a bush right up to my masterpiece, with the pure indiscriminate joy that goldens personify. His family just round the trail, I quickly got myself presentable and hiked past them. Not my proudest moment.

I hear behind me, “Teddy! Where are you? — oh, there he is — OH MY GOD! Teddy! look at this! —what have you been eating?!” And because they were good dog owners, I saw them bagging it up. I know I shouldn’t have left it like that. Leave no trace they said back at Day 0. But like with Cherry Chapstick, maybe this is just another example of how the trail provides…?

Gear, Zeroed In -- Backpacking Theory - By the High Sierra, I was quite “zeroed in” on my gear and my daily schedule. There are a couple of books (e.g., The Complete Walker by Colin Fletcher) that go into backpack “theory” -- how you carry the kitchen, pantry, bed & linens, closet, bathroom, living room, medicine cabinet, media & entertainment center, roof & walls -- a whole home in miniature -- on your back. Pretty amazing how much thought and technological development has gone into the gear most thru-hikers bring with them. There’s been quite the evolution over the last 100+ years, with a ton of new ultralight and “cottage gear” options just in the past ten years. Nobody wears hiking boots anymore -- just trail runners with a gaiter. ≥ 90% of packs worn are made with dyneema. Even if people use totally different brand names, most have coalesced around the same basic design for water filtration systems, tenting, sleeping bags, clothes etc. There’s lots of content out there that make it easy to take advantage of all this accumulated tech & experience.

The basic idea of “ultralight” is that shaving a few ounces per item adds up to pounds off your back, which over hundreds of miles means a more comfortable pack and more miles per day. I found a PCT gear guide from 1975, and many of those hikers were carrying three to four times what people carry now. Cottage gear fits the same philosophy: small independent makers, often thru-hikers themselves, obsess over every design detail in a way big outdoor brands don’t, so you get lighter, more durable, better-thought-out gear, even if it costs more, takes weeks to arrive, and has no brand name you’d recognize.

By Tahoe, I’d figured out the absolute minimum I needed to carry day-to-day -- and then still always packed a little too much anyway. No iPads, tho.

Food prep is an issue. I learned how to prep for and carry 4-6 days’ worth of food. You want to carry as many calories as you can, as lightly as possible. But then tastes are an issue. My culinary taste has really evolved and got challenging hiking every day. Food I thought I’d love, and find efficient, started to taste like vomit (certain energy bars come to mind). I ended up doing a lot of “cold soaking”: oatmeal + cocoa for mornings, noodles or beans & rice dishes for dinner, which meant I didn’t need to carry a stove & gas. Those high-sugar protein bars were a tasty way to shove 200 calories into my face when I needed the boost.

There is a strange numbing of my taste buds at high altitudes too. Flavors just don’t “land” the way they do at sea level. To compensate, I and plenty of other hikers found ourselves chasing more aggressive hits of spice; Flamin’ Hot Cheetos became a trail staple, less for the cal-to-weight ratio and more for that necessary kick and crunch, and ultralightness. It’s hard to say if it’s the altitude alone or a perfect storm of factors -- cold air, dry-mouth, utter exhaustion, the sheer caloric desperation of hiker hunger -- but up high it was certainly peak blandness.

Water is a constant issue, but eventually it becomes quite easy to manage. I had a ceramic filter with 0.1-micron holes, filtering out basically everything but clean water, with a gravity system: I’d fill a dirty-water bag and let it drain into my clean bottles while dealing with other camp chores. For whatever reason, practically everyone used Smart Water brand plastic bottles -- good quality plastic, and the screw-cap thread matches most filters. After a few weeks they look totally beat up, which I kind of took pride in.

We all use a trail map app (FarOut, or GutHook), and folks report on the conditions of springs & streams in the comments. So you can check what’s ahead and have a pretty good idea of exactly how much water to carry until the next reliable source.

Some of the trail’s personality came out in those reports too. I remember hiking through the Mojave wind farms on a particularly windy day -- getting tossed around in high heat, with smoke from local fires -- when I read a comment: “These wind farms are outrageous. Someone needs to tell these dang wind farmers their fans are blowing too hard. And can we do something about the solar farms too…?” Chuckle chuckle. Reading it back now, that’s a little cringe -- but I was genuinely laughing in the moment, when getting shoved around by the wind and hiding from the sun, I found it the funnest thing that week.

MedEvac - I saw my second helievac in the High Sierra -- and actually called it in. Just before reaching Mammoth Lakes, about day 63, near Duck Lake, I ran into a Dutch hiker who had stopped. He was surrounded by about ten other PCT & John Muir Trail hikers. He said he couldn’t take another step. He’d been hiking on a bad knee/shin/leg for at least 50 miles. Looking at his foot, it was noticeably swollen and “wrong” looking -- discolored, visibly not right. Though honestly, I don’t want to exaggerate , it don’t look like it’s fall off any time soon. More like a bad but recoverable soccer bruise.

We calculated that the nearest trailhead was a solid 15 miles away, over a mountain pass -- too far to carry him that day. Some folks tried reaching help via satellite tracker, while I was tasked with the job of getting to the pass, where I’d hopefully find cell service to call 911. (Our map apps show almost exactly where different carriers have mobile coverage, amazing, and it looked like I’d pick up Mammoth Lakes towers from the pass.) Along the way, I ran into two nurses with search & rescue experience who said they’d run to help.

When I called 911 from the pass, it felt like the rescuer needed a bit of rescuing himself. I was connected to the Mono County Sheriff’s Office -- but once they understood the hiker was on the other side of the ridge, in a different county, it became a Fresno County issue and they tried to transfer my call. The transfer sent me to a dead number. It took a few more calls until I finally found an emergency operator who said they would help & took the lat/long and details, before I finally got confirmation that a helicopter was on its way. They also told me the satellite tracker had already made the report -- my call was redundant. Thanks anyway.

Maybe 15 minutes later, hiking down toward Mammoth Lakes, I saw the helicopter -- Mono County Sheriff logo on the side -- heading toward their location. His trail name became “Flying Dutchman.” ⁴

I later learned they carried him down the trail to a clearing, where a stretcher was lowered and he was flown to the nearest hospital. Flying Dutchman was somewhere around 65. It turned out to be an overuse injury -- minor, in the end -- and he was back on the trail not long after.

Hiking the PCT, you mostly feel alone. But during peak season, there are actually quite a few people nearby -- you just don’t notice, since everyone’s moving in the same direction at roughly the same pace.

{…insert visualization…}

Flying Dutchman lying there on the trail connected with over a dozen people very quickly. As alone as you are in the remote wilderness, the trail is a real community, especially in the Sierra along the JMT. Even outside those popular stretches, I suspect that if you ran into trouble, you’d be surprised how quickly people would appear & help.

Town Days - Zeros & “Neros” - All hail glorious Nero. The average number of zero days PCT hikers take is about 18, I took 26 (and considering I skipped many miles (getting back to most of them in Oct & Nov), that’s a lot relative to the norm). I also took a bunch of “Neros”, ie “near zeros” days. Where I’d leave the trail early, run into town, and get back to the trail the next day, often starting later in the day.

Those town days became huge luxuries. An exercise of excess. If you can manage store opening hours and a hitch well, resupplying often only took a few hours, and in the rest of that time I’d just relax and overeat greasy comfort foods. You can see in my stats, all those empty bars in steps and miles are my zeros. By Mt Shasta, I could eat a full extra-large pizza all by myself, in one sitting (and still be hungry for dessert). One of my proudest moments on the trail. And I met a bunch of people who could eat me under the table. Everyone else seemed to have their own town routines, but it usually involved getting washed & well fed.

Trail Angels - Hitches — Many of those trail towns were a lot of fun, and each area had its own distinct relationship with PCT hikers.

Up in Idyllwild, near Mt. San Jacinto, I needed to get down to Paradise Valley Cafe — about 20 miles away, down a highway that drivers were unlikely to be headed. I assumed I’d need multiple connecting rides and half a day to piece it all together. I set out at 7am on a Sunday (a seemingly terrible time to be thumbing for a hitch) and yet within an hour I’d found two connecting rides and was at the trailhead by 8am, no payment required.

In Big Bear, a very nice woman, an older retiree, introduced herself while I was shopping for leukotape at a drugstore. She offered to drive me around town, even volunteering her daughter to pick me up the next morning to drop me back at the trail. Other spots — Stehekin, Etna, and Leavenworth come to mind — most hikers had to call ahead and pay a decent sum for a ride. At Scissors Crossing near Anza-Borrego, there were one or two trail angels making a modest living off paid rides -- and more than a little annoyed at the friendly folks up in Julian giving rides away for free. I heard them complain about how little German hikers tipped. I had one driver near Etna offer to give me a ride for a fee, and then angrily proselytize Christianity to me. Some hikers I saw were offended when it was suggested they should pay for a ride, while many drivers would only pick you up knowing they could make a little cash in the doing. And just as often, you’d find a hitch who was mildly offended to even be offered money…

I hope you get the idea, lots of varying opinions about how trail angels & hikers should interact, often contradictory, and strong feelings about how commercial the trail should be.

The pattern, roughly: towns with larger populations, lots of outdoorsy locals, tourists, and retirees, and well-trafficked roads near the trailhead — Wrightwood, Big Bear, Bishop, basically all of Oregon — made hitching easy and usually free, with folks happy to help and chat. These folks were most likely to get offended to be offered money.

But in spots with long, out-of-the-way drives, you might wait a long time or have to pay for a shuttle. The handful of people doing those runs had probably talked to so many hikers by then that they weren’t especially curious about your story -- and a few of them mentioned that some hikers had acted entitled, genuinely offended to be asked to pay.

It was just fascinating to see how many distinct equilibria emerged around helping hikers hitch, trail services, place to place. Despite all the variation, none of it struck me as unreasonable. Many hikers are young and broke, hiking their dream, steeped in norms of mutual aid, expecting a gift economy, and can feel genuinely wronged to be asked to bring money into the mix (It reminds me of Al Roth’s research on “repugnant markets”⁵).

Many hitches are happy to operate there. A lot of this operates as tipping, & many Europeans don’t understand American tipping norms. Those Julian drivers come to mind, they’d been offering rides for well over a decade. By the thousandth hiker, individual stories lose their significance, the chat is no longer much of a compensation, at which point getting paid a bit is both welcome & fair. Meanwhile, a driver making dedicated out-of-the-way runs was never really in the gift economy to begin with; their time and gas have real costs, and there’s nothing wrong with that (I mean, they often just called themselves a shuttle at that point). Most hikers accept paying cash for a service, or at least help cover costs, the “gas, grass or a**!” norm. With the gift economy vs market tension, folks might not know which norm the other is operating under at first – a norm collision that can tip into genuine grievance when a hiker or hitch runs with the wrong expectations, or when driver resents the free riders.

Adam Smith did not hike the PCT, but he would have had thoughts!

InsideOutside - I’m not exactly sure how to describe this, but I slowly discovered the joys of a long-term “outside life.” I obviously normally live in a house, drive a car, work in an office. I’m an indoor creature. That being my normality makes it hard to appreciate how different things can be. Modern life offers excellent temperature management; it keeps out the bugs and the moistness, and the sun rarely hits my face directly. But if you sleep outside for 150 days, that comfort bubble vanishes. It took a while to adjust. Even with sunscreen and a hat, the environment claimed its pound of flesh: my hair & eyebrows developed blonde highlights, and after just one week of hiking without gloves, I had scary looking “lobster hands.”

Managing cold, heat, and moisture becomes an everyday obsession, especially when trying to keep gear weight & volume to a minimum. Wind, rain, snow, and sun all play a role in your internal thermodynamics. If you’re moving, you’re warm, but the second you stop, you keep sweating and that wetness becomes a liability. If it’s cold out, that sweat gets cold very fast. Then there are the bugs—mosquitoes, ants, and wasps—who were all massive fans of my face. I managed to never use DEET or other chemicals but completely understood folks who did. It’s interesting how annoying this all sounds (& can really be in practice, in the moment), but with a bit of planning and the kind of gear strategies people debate endlessly in online forums, you learn to stay reasonably comfortable. Practice makes perfect. And honestly, a bit of discomfort eventually just feels like part of the fun.

I finished at the Northern Terminus Sept 18th, but then hiked another few months picking up stretches I had skipped. By my final day in late November, I found myself in a freezing sleet and snow storm near Jawbone Canyon. I was being pelted by freezing rain and buffeted by the wind, but dealing with the elements had become routine. I had the right shell, the right layers, I knew the drill, and I was genuinely enjoying my last few miles as the desert turned into a winter wonderland. Being that in touch with the raw outside world didn’t just change my perspective on spending time in the wilderness; it gave me a bone-deep appreciation for the little comforts of home.

Weather and optimal hiking times - Going back over skipped parts of the PCT in Oct and Nov taught me why basically everyone (or at least most people) thru-hike northbound in the standard window: April to September. Even in October in California, the weather lotto drew poorly for me and I had freezing nights. Cold and wet weather incentivizes you to carry more clothes. Snow and ice means even more gear. Cold also means I suddenly really want to carry a stove for warm meals and hot coco. All that gets heavy, and weight makes me slow.

And even when the gear is “right,” just managing it takes time. Layers on, layers off. Trying to stay warm without soaking myself in sweat. Moisture management becomes more of a task. Plus, there are far fewer people on trail, so hitches take longer. Everything is just… harder and slower.

But across the PCT during those optimal date ranges, again April → Sept for NoBo hikers, the weather is usually very nice. The desert is certainly hot, but totally manageable, with plenty of water sources and prepared water caches. The high mountain ranges can get wet and cold, but again, totally reasonable with fairly light gear. Nothing like what happens in fall and winter. If you hike fast enough, the weather more often than not is just perfect. I never had a freezing night in the High Sierra, for example. And despite my thunderstorms and hail storms, we actually had a pretty dry summer season in 2025.

But by October, much of the trail’s mood had turned. I already mentioned the Mojave, famously hot and dry, giving me a sleet storm in late November. I had sleet and snow in the Oregon Cascades and Northern California. And the Canadian section, from Manning Park, BC to the border terminus, had a couple feet of snow.

Talk more about pain & suffering - Memories - Don’t get me wrong: everything hurts every day, but it was a dull, manageable pain. Pain is an interesting thing. My trail diary has a “pains” section where I logged that day’s pains (I’d start every entry with “Dear Diarrhea,” lol). I listed tooth pains, blisters, sunburns, chafing, heatstroke. Chronically sore feet, ankles, knees, toes, shoulders, neck & back. My knees were popping for a few weeks. Eventually I learned that if I stopped slouching, the knees would stop popping (?!). Calluses formed into corns that would needle my toes if I walked certain wrong ways. I had a sprained ankle that took weeks to heal. The bottoms of my feet were losing feeling, they’d get tingly in town days. Coughing and elevation headaches. Mosquito bites. A few wasps spent hours trying to break into my tent. Soaked gear, gear covered in forest fire soot. Sometimes it would take days to dry out my tent, sleeping bag, and clothes. Chafed nipples. Occasional poo problems. Hard to breathe with smoke from nearby fires. Sometimes too hot, sometimes too cold and freezing. I’d sweat too much and overheat; I’d sweat too much, then stop, and my wet sweat would make me freeze.

By the end, near the northern terminus, I stopped having specific pains. My pain notes are just roughly: “mild pain, just sore” each day.

But it’s interesting: I wouldn’t remember those pains & discomforts if I hadn’t kept such detailed notes. It’s certainly not what comes to mind when I think about the trail.

I was talking with a few hikers and we jokingly said, “The pct is like giving birth”. Yes, lots of pain, discomfort at least, but that’s not what you remember. In the moment, the pain is quite salient and annoying, daunting sometimes. But then it’s over, and your mind has moved on. You just remember the good stuff. What’s the baby in that metaphor? The trail is the birth canal? No that doesn’t sound right. Maybe you give birth to your new self…?

The cool stuff seems to stick in the mind more. That Washington thunderstorm was a loud, scary and uncomfortable near-death experience, sure, but the thing I remember most was the story about the insane ultra-marathon runner (I’ll get to that in a bit), my ability to sleep through most of it, and the sights of the forest afterwards. For the high Sierra, as much as the granite steps, streams crossings, and mosquitoes sucked, I mainly remember the amazing views and interesting things to see every day. The sleet storm in the Mojave was a little uncomfortable, but I remember just how beautiful a snow covered desert is, and seeing my grandpa pick me up in his red Ford F150, waiting with a dozen glazed donuts.

Mental Experience

Type-II Fun — In thru-hiker culture (and maybe extreme sport culture more broadly) there’s this term: “Type II Fun.” Where Type I Fun is fun that’s fun while you’re doing it, Type II Fun is the stuff that’s kind of un-fun in the moment you’re doing it, or at least looks grueling from the outside, but later, in memory, you and everyone else agree it was, in fact,… fun. (And Type III Fun is the stuff that’s just not fun at all. And Type IV Fun is.. death? I think that’s the taxonomy, anyway.) My experience of the trail is probably the perfect example of Type II Fun.

Painful Cognitive Dissonance — The other funny thing, I’ve been thinking about this trail for a decade. I used to fantasize about hiking all day, every day, imagining myself in the wilderness, having a blast. Now I’m actually doing it… writing in a journal… Now I’m writing about my memories of having done it…. Imagine if I didn’t enjoy myself? What a waste. No way. No chance. I suspect even if I hadn’t liked it, I’d still put in at least 1,000–1,500 miles and tell other people (and myself) that it was a great experience. I’d shove down the memories of pain and discomfort and keep the highlight reel.

But no, really: this actually was fun for me. Trust me.

Mentally Challenged - the boredom - it’s funny to even think or foresee this as a challenge. But back in civilization, with a job, friends and families, you’re busy. Phone & computer screens occupy a lot of time. Now imagine removing opportunities to engage in those activities, removing the distractions of a screen connected to the internet. Yeah, you have the world around you, which is mostly quiet, and the thoughts in your head, which are often weird and occasionally terrifying. I certainly carried my phone with me, but I only looked at it to check the map or take photos occasionally.

How I spent my time: books - I read 39 books (audiobooks anyway), about 100 sci-fi short stories, and then I got into podcasts and listened to… way too many of those. I hiked about 1,200 hours total, and something like 50% to two-thirds of that time I was listening to something.

In hiking online forums, there’s a little movement to not listen to any music or audio while you hike. I get it, and I did some pure-silence hiking most days. But having a great story, or something interesting to learn, was also a fantastic way to pass the time. And with that kind of schedule (ie, all day every day), you can get through an absurd amount of audio content.

One strong audiobook memory I have is from the “Dixie Burn” area of Northern California (California’s largest and most expensive wildfire), roughly Bucks Lake/Belden up to Lassen NP (days 88 to 95 for me). Through that stretch, something like 80% of the trees are burned up. Several days I never walked past a live one. Most are still standing, just dead, branchless trunks. The soil is loose and sandy, this ashy black that stains your clothes & pack. With the trees dead and little vegetation left to hold the sandy soil in place, the trail is unstable, and falling trees are more likely in high winds, or if you just get unlucky. A lot of people skip this section, but I figure it’ll be a good character-building experience.

If you think that would be a slog, try reading the entirety of War & Peace.

I’ve always wanted to read what is supposedly one of the best books ever written. My copy of the War & Peace audiobook was 65 hours long. When else would I have the chance to read it all in roughly “one sitting”? We had Napoleon invade and retreat from Russia, but half the story focused on a tiny class of shallow, vacuous rich socialites with little self-awareness (which, admittedly, was part of the point). You never really get to know a single serf or lower-class character. Perhaps I’m just too used to modern storytelling styles, but I kept thinking it could have told the same narrative, with stronger emotional catharsis, in 1/10th the time. Maybe I had a bad time in the burn area and took it out emotionally on War & Peace, but it really did feel like a boring slog.

One audiobook hiking pro-tip: it’s fun to listen to scary horror stories while night hiking. Steven King’s The Long Walk is a good one (It’s about a game show where children have to keep walking or they get a shot in the head, the winner gets a prize.)

I also ended up listening to about 15 Agatha Christie murder mysteries. I got into the habit of stopping them right before the end-of-book reveal, just to give myself the rest of the day to think about who the real killer(s) was. I figured it out correctly only once.

How I spent my time: daydreaming - I certainly daydreamed constantly, but the strangest repeat obsession was the development of my sprawling wilderness fantasy cabin empire. Walking through long stretches of National Forest and Wilderness, I kept imagining what it would be like to stay and live here. As I hiked, I’d deeply consider the best spot, and design an off-grid cabin ideally suited for that specific view, drainage, and foundation. Which way the door would face, where the little wood stove would go, a root cellar?, the outhouse, the solar panels. By Canada, I’d probably built and lived full, satisfying lives in at least fifteen imaginary cabins.

It reminds me of that Dick Proenneke quote (the 1960s Alaska cabin guy), (paraphrasing here) “City folks come up here, see how amazing it is. All unspoilt. Gee it’s nice here. No hustle and bustle. You can really take it easy. And it’s not 30 days until they’re working to make it just like it was where they came from, bringing all that noise.”

How I spent my time: Trail faces - I’m not a hugely religious or spiritual person, but in many ways, the PCT does feel like a pilgrimage of sorts. A secular pilgrimage. I started to appreciate why folks might want to do trips like the hajj, camino de santiago, the chota char dham, and I increasingly felt some weird connection. I read that even some CCP kids do “red tourism” thru-hikes over parts of the Long March as a way to symbolically connect with how that journey forged the CCP’s identity. I asked a couple religious folks on the trail, and they were a little offended (I think they were more of the protestant, evangelical American tradition that looks at pilgrimages as a Catholic, idolatry, corrupt commercial thing, like the idea that a journey itself could be sacred was not the right way to think about it). Hiker lingo does have terms for “trail angels”, “trail magic”, and “the trail provides”. Even if the bones of some old dead saint don’t particularly call to me to visit them, there’s this whole sacred-geography element to these things, plus the purification/test aspect, and the forging/discipline-through-difficulty part I was starting to understand.

The closest spiritual experience I had was seeing a bunch of faces in the objects on the trail. I’d be hiking along, feeling good, and then I’d see smiling face after smiling face in the rocks, landscape, trees, shrubberies, assorted piles of pebbles & sticks and other things all around me. I think they call that animism.

I call 6.a “Jabba the Rock”, 6.b is “the Granite White Shark”, 6.d is a chipper log. In the desert, cacti too close to the trail sometimes had scars from the occasional hiking pole that poked it, 6.e’s is a prickly pear with scars and lobes made it look like it was smiling & waving hi. I like to think it was hoping people would hi-five it. I took photos of these objects and have an album with 170 photos now… It felt at times that I had these little spirit buddies keeping a friendly eye on me.

Now, just because I tended to anthropomorphize the inanimate objects around me when I was dehydrated in desert sections, late in the day, hungry, that might lead someone cynical to believe these were just nutrient-deprivation-induced-pareidolia-hallucinations. But I’d prefer to imagine there’s a spirit world that I, as a magical trail thru-hiker master, can occasionally tap into.

On Fear: Washington Thunderstorm — I remember one night in Washington, at Waptus Lake, I went to sleep dry. I woke up around 11pm to rain and thunder. By midnight the rain was intense in our tents. I’d see five bright flashes followed instantly by five crackles of the loudest, ground-shaking thunder I’ve ever experienced, directly overhead & all around me. This went on for some time. I heard tree falls. The heavy rain slowly snuck into my tent, not because there was a leak or I picked a spot with bad drainage, but because the rain was so much, droplets would hit the ground and bounce up under my fly and inside the tent.

Not sure how bad that sounds to you. That’s the kind of situation where I think I’d be afraid. But even then, I don’t think I ever really was too afraid on the trail. Sure, I’d get anxious in anticipation of what might happen. But in the middle of those thunderstorms… I mean, either I’d get hit by lightning or I wouldn’t. A tree would fall on me or it wouldn’t. Anxiety wouldn’t help, I wasn’t about to jump out of the way of any danger. I specifically remember sitting in my tent, calm, almost surprised that there kinda wasn’t anything to fear in the moment. I just tried to minimize how much rain got in. I wasn’t cold, or even that wet.

Those summer Washington alpine thunderstorms famously start around sunset and only run a few hours. It should be clear by the morning and I’d love to get another early start. Eventually I fell asleep to the heavy rain and thunder.

Even the disappearing scary (homeless?) guy in southern California didn’t make me particularly scared in the moment. There wasn’t anything I could do. So I just kept hiking, or I was exhausted and went to sleep.

Just “sleep away the part of the day I cannot hike away.”

Wildlife - Ultramarathon Runner in a Thunderstorm — During the thunderstorm, a friend was tented nearby, and she had an ultramarathon runner guy set up next to her (in case you don’t know: these are folks who “run” 60+ miles in a day). She had a typical tent with a rainfly like most hikers. Ultramarathon runners in the backcountry typically only carry a small day pack. This guy was just cowboi camping. (Which sounded a bit crazy to me. Didn’t he see there was a chance of thunderstorms in the forecast?)

Once the thunderstorm started, he only had a light shell. He moved under a small conifer, back to the tree, feet outstretched, arms akimbo. My friend said he just sat there & lit up a fancy cigar. She didn’t have room in her one-person tent, and he told her he didn’t need shelter anyway, because he was planning to start running again at midnight. And then, in the middle of the storm, he eventually just took off, finishing his run in the middle of the raging thunderstorm.

Ultramarathon runners are funny to watch on the trail. I remember seeing folks in the backcountry, dozens of miles from the nearest trailhead, a sizable mountain pass away, with just a small pack and the intention of running (well, usually fast-walking, because ultramarathon “running” is its own thing) those miles back to their car without stopping.

Hiking the next day after that intense thunderstorm, as I got up to a mountain pass, I could see a bunch of fires had started overnight in the forests all around me.

Wildlife - Bears

The only bear sighting I had the entire PCT was just after Kennedy Meadows (South) on about Day 47. A bear woke me up in my tent, I made loud noises and it took off fast, like I was a sketchy bad-vibes guy he was warned about in his map-app.

I heard a trail rumor said when the Sierra national parks get a particularly misbehaving or human-loving bear, they capture & release them down to this National Forest, in the wildernesses around Kennedy Meadows. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was one of those Yogis. .

Wildlife - Pikas

Let me tell you about probably my favorite animal of the trail.

I might have some of the details wrong here, but I think these are mouse-like guys, they only live at high altitudes, above the treeline, among scraggly piles of rock scree. At that elevation, that means they’re under several feet of snow all winter. They don’t hibernate. In the warm season, while we’re walking past them, they collect flowering plants, dry them out, and put them in storage in their burrows. They have an “alert” sound, where they peep, letting others in their group know someone random, possibly a predator, is nearby. They’ll often have one pika quite visible on a rock outcropping, at a safe distance, usually above, watching you and peeping on behalf of the rest of the colony.

That means, as you’re hiking up at those high altitudes, along the alpine meadows, passing those lichen covered zen rock piles, you hear the cutest peeps and see these guys running around with bouquets of flowers in their mouths, watching you.

Cutest thing ever.

The “peep” warning noises sound a little like sneezes. I heard that this is what Pikachu is based on. They look quite similar, except for their color and ear shape. If you google it, the creators of pikachu say it’s just a coincidence, but that didn’t stop me from telling every child I passed to be on the listen & look out for real pikachus.

Wildlife - Nighthawks

Why didn’t anyone tell me about nighthawks?! I used to hear that word and picture the Hopper painting (the diner one, about solitude or boredom, anomie and the alienation of city life), or the old diner in North Portland.

Now I think of that one night camping at the edge of Lassen NP, Day 95, these strange looking birds swooping all above my tent in the dark, making these deep, otherworldly booming sounds. The sound is wild. Males make a resonant boom mid-dive — not their voice, but their wings — as part of their courtship display. Google the sound they make, it’s very strange to listen to, just above your tent, as you’re trying to go to sleep. It’s loud.

They gorge themselves on bugs all night long with these tiny beaks that open to massive wide mouths. And then you learn they migrate all the way between the Amazon & Oregon, every year. Insane range for a bird that small, & something I’d never known was happening overhead all the time.

Wildlife - Sasquatch

The North Cascades are a whole other world.

Most mornings, climb high enough and you look out onto a vast white blanket stretching to the horizon, mountain peaks poking up like islands on a white fluffy ocean. The fog often clears by afternoon. This stretch gave me several days of heavy smoke, then a series of thunderstorms rolled through clearing the skies — which, honestly, despite the thunder and wet, was a fair trade. Clouds quietly pouring over ridges in what looks like slow motion, but it’s all live, just really big and far away. They call those atmospheric landscape layers “landskein.” It stops me cold every time.

The trail then dips down into those fog filled valleys, the mist gradually blocks out the sun and obscures the forest growing more and more thick the further you descend down into these lush, green, moist valleys. Strange dreams in those valleys. Old growth forest miles from the nearest old unmaintained road or trailhead. There were some with the biggest mushrooms I’ve ever seen. Imagine looking out, and a foot-deep ground layer of that “fairy forest” moss covering everything. One valley had a bunch of small wooden bridges installed ages ago, to help you quickly pass over the many streams coming down from Glacier peak. Nearly every single bridge had deteriorated so much, with rot eating the wood, they were lying in pieces for me to climb over, and slip & slide down.

During a rough thunderstorm near Glacier Peak, I dreamed about this guy — See Figure 3. He wandered around the forest making no noise, but I could sense him, poking around my tent, and checking out my soul. … Now I dream about him every night. In my dreams he wanders Portland, jumping rooftop to rooftop, with a murder of crows circling above him. A big black cloud follows, keeping him in the shadows. He watches. Whenever there’s crime or villainy, he experiences it like a gut punch and flies toward it to help.

I wake up tired and sore. Sometimes drenched in sweat. I’m reminded of a line in John Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra — where he writes about wanting to work his first summer as a shepparder in 1869 — working his way through the Sierra foothills, to Yosemite valley and Tuolumne meadow to Mono lake, he daydreamed about being able to continuously wander those pretty lands without having to earn a living. “I was longing for the mountains … but money was scarce and I couldn’t see how a bread supply was to be kept up. While I was anxiously brooding on the bread problem, so troublesome to wanderers, and trying to believe that I might learn to live like the wild animals, gleaning nourishment here and there from seeds, berries, etc., sauntering and climbing in joyful independence of money or baggage…”.

Honestly, maybe Sasquatch has it right. It might be kinda cool to be able to just live off the land, out there in that wilderness forever, foraging on hiker souls or whatever that dream meant.

Wildlife - The Positive Potato

In a particularly dry desert, Day 42, I had just refilled water with these blue five gallon bottles trail angels cache, late in the day pushing up a hill I found a small, smiling amigurumi potato on the trail. It was crocheted from brown yarn. It had German text printed, saying “I’m the Positive Potato. I may be a small potato, but I believe in you. You can do it!!” I thought that was an amazing find, a mascot I’ll need to carry to the northern terminus. But then, before going to sleep, I checked the map-app comments and saw someone reported losing their crochet potato. They’d “love to get it back”, and listed a number.

So, obviously, I sent them a video, where the potato bounces and my voiceover says, “Hello my friend… Or should I say, my old friend….When you abandoned me on the trail, it has been hard for me to stay positive. I had to fend for myself. Face down in the dirt….I was always there for you, trying to keep your spirits up on your journey. But where were you when I needed you? …I have found a new hiking family. They rescued me from the hole I was in, cleaned the dirt out from my mouth. …And my new partner seems to love me. And he is a generous lover (purely platonically, of course). … It will be a struggle to reunite with you. It’s hard to forget painful pasts. …But perhaps we can find a way to start again?… I may be able to forgive you, but I will always remember your betrayal — and for that… I am an absolutely positive potato.”

And then the Positive Potato listed ransom instructions. I demanded ice cream.

Reunited at Kennedy Meadows — where I unknowingly & ominously sent a “proof of life” photo with a pile of french fries in the background — I learned a German friend made (bought?) the amigurumi guy as a mascot for a nice hiker. I never got my ice cream, but I think I can still be positive about the experience. And honestly — handing the potato back, the CLEEF prophecy came true: I cried myself to sleep several nights, thinking about my lost mascot. And not even getting any ice cream! Sometimes the trail provides, but it’s just providing for other people, not you.

Cherry Chapstick, Part II

Back at CLEEF, the southern terminus on day 0, at the end of their 90-minute orientation chat, they continued their Cherry Chapstick story. There was another hiker suffering from an ailment… I think the medical term is “swampass” leading to “monkey butt”? Sweating and chafing causing his bum to be very painful. Many folks have chafing issues and carry ointment (I certainly always carried “body glide”). This guy was asking everyone he saw if they had anything to help his pain. He went hours in pain. Eventually he found a nice hiker who had some flavored chapstick. Cherry chapstick. He stuck it down his pants, smothered it all around his nether regions, a satisfied look on his face, and said he felt fantastic. He was so thankful.

He offered the chapstick back to the original owner, but the original owner said “No, you keep it, the trail provides.”

Sadly, later, “Monkey Butt” came back in pain, saying he had lost the chapstick! He must have dropped it back down the trail. He took off in pain. Then, another hiker came down the trail telling us his own story of how the trail provides… He had been complaining for days about how painful his lips were, bleeding, no lip balm or anything. And then, lo and behold, he found cherry-flavored chapstick just lying there on the trail. Obviously the universe had left it for him. Before anyone could stop him or tell him where his salvation had just been, he put more on his lips, smothered it all around, a satisfied look on his face. We all decided to keep quiet and suggest he take the trail name Cherry Chapstick.

It’s true, “the trail provides”, but sometimes it comes at a great cost. If you’re lucky, like Cherry Chapstick, you’ll never know that full cost.

Not me though. No costs for me. I just had a nice long walk.

Simple Solow Model

Solow Model with Population Growth

Adding in exogenous population growth doesn’t change the model much, but some steady states become balanced growth paths. I walk through the extended model below.
View Video Playlist (2 vids 36:55)

• Set-up of Model with Labor Growth Added
  A quick review of the solow model, and how population growth fits into the existing framework.
• Solve for New Law of Motion of Capital-per-Worker
  How to calculate the new per-capita capital accumulation equation with the addition of exogenous population growth.
• Show Growth Rate of , , Y, I, K and C
  As we calculate the new steady state values with population growth, we discover that the aggregate variables (Y, K, I, & C) are no longer steady states, and instead grow at the rate of population growth. We find the steady state level of capital-per-worker and output-per-worker.
• Solow Diagram with Population Growth
  The solow diagram changes slightly with the addition of population growth.
• Transition Dynamics, “Level Effects” and Growth Rate Changes
  Review of what shocks to exogenous variables (the parameters for savings, depreciation, technology, population growth rate, etc.) effect our dynamic variables. We find that some shocks have level effects and others have growth effects.

Solow Model with Technology Growth and Population Growth

• Adding in Technology to Solow Model
  We discuss neutral, capital augmenting and labor augmented technology. (The model we’ll be working with incorporates labor augmented technology).
• New Model Set-up, Notation and Assumptions
• A Focus on the “Effective Worker”
  We discuss why this model (with technology growth) focuses on the ‘per effective worker’ instead of ‘per-capital’ level. It turns out the steady state is only in per-effective-worker level of capital and output.
• New Law of Motion of Capital-per-Effective-Worker
  We derive the capital accumulation equation with technology growth.
• Show Growth Rate of , , , , Y, I, K and C
  We calculate the ‘steady state’ values with labor augmenting technology growth and discover that the aggregate values (Y, K, I & C) and per-capita levels (y, k, i & c) are not steady states. They instead go at a rate related to the growth rate of technology and population growth.
• Solow Diagram with Technology and Population Growth
• Calculating Growth Rates of Key Variables
  We derive the growth rates of the major model variables: Y, K, I, C, y, k, i, c, and . Nice little summary table there too.
• Transition Dynamics, Level Effects and Growth Rate Changes
• Summary of Solow Model - what does the model tell us about economics growth? How well does the model hold up to observable facts?

Additional Content

• Numerical Example of Solow Model
  Given a parameterized model, find the steady state.
• Golden Rule Level of capital
  We discuss consumption as the best proxy in the model for welfare and how there is a level of per-worker capital that maximizes consumption. We then find the golden rule level of per-worker capital, and calculate the savings rate the leads to the golden rule level of capital.
• Solow Residual — an estimate of Total Factor Productivity

* Migrated from my old google-sites & cazaar.com personal website in 2026.

First Approach: BIU Sidrauski (1967)

Real Beer Volumes enter directly in the utility function.

Given suitable restrictions on the utility function, such an approach can guarantee that, in equilibrium, agents choose to hold positive amounts of beer so that beer is positively valued.

Representative household takes beer-to-work/consumption exchange rates as given, and maximizes

subject to the budget constraint.

Budget Constraint, in nominal terms:

where are real, lump sum transfers to the household (which can be negative).

In real terms,

or,

Equilibrium

Collecting equilibrium conditions.

Given an exogenous process for the productivity shock and the nominal stock of beer, equilibrium consists of time paths for output, real beer volumes, consumption, capital, employment, wages, the nominal rate of brewing, the beer level, and rental rates that satisfy

Steady State

The Standard RBC relationships, plus

These imply the Fisher equation , or