This article’s publication date is June 2017 BTW. What I quoted in the nearly two-year-old article may or may not apply to this year.

I’d ask this question on the appropriate social media group such as found on Reddit or Facebook. You’ll get much information from experienced Sierra hikers.

Good point, esp #3. More of a social experience vs. years past. Meaning? More time in towns. Which is why thru-hike times are going up on the more popular trails IMO.

1) No Rain, No Pain, No Maine – it works back east. You can hike the whole trail at any point of the year (northern New England excepted). Out west, forest fires don’t care how gritty you are – you ain’t going thru there. If you’re coming from an eastern hiking background, you probably don’t understand that certain conditions aren’t just unpleasant, they’re impossible.
2) After 5 or 6 low snow years in a row, I think PCT hikers have been lulled into a “new normal” – all their friends who hiked last year, two years ago, have been leaving KM in late May or early June for years now and it’s never been a problem – so they push it back a week or two this year to account for the heavy snow. Unfortunately, they don’t compensate enough, time-wise, for just how big the snow year is in comparison to all the other recent winters.
3) I’d venture that people feel more time pressure now on the PCT than they used to. With more people on trail and people with less experience on trail, I’d guess that the average PCTer takes longer to complete a thru-hike as opposed to, say, a decade ago. More time pressure means earlier starts in the Sierra.

Thanks, Nick. I’ll link to the post where you quoted me. 😀

http://popupbackpacker.com/the-death-of-renaissance-man/

It also happens to be an excellent post.

Free advice is usually worth what you pay for it… pmags excluded 🙂

The challenge of modern society is we can’t figure things out by ourselves, We need to ask our peers what to do and they usually don’t know, Or we ask Google, who directs us to some self-proclaimed expert. Paul wrote an excellent post on this a while back were he quoted someone who had a great list of things people should be able to do. Maybe he’ll post a link to it here.

Finally, I was shocked at the amount of crappy advice that was floating around the web about this epic year. This ranged from everyone can do it with Guthook app to everyone will die.

The truth is certainly somewhere in between!

As mentioned, my friend was dumbfounded people were backpacking so early in the Sierra. This “issue” is beyond thru-hiking. Just something most people do not do.