Pacific Crest Trail (CA, OR, WA)

[Matthias]

Hi Peter!
Thanks for getting back to me, so you think they did not cache water on their journeys right?
Maybe they come up here with a statement about it. If not I ask them per mail should I ever attempt the record
Thank you!

[Matthias]

Okeeeey I read some pages back about what the Krudmeister has written. So to my understanding they did not even use installed caches nor trail magic? I mean really no one can varifiy that but I believe them. So If I hike the pct in under 60 days lets say but use the caches, like scissors crossing, third gate, hat creek that would mean I did not break the record? It is a bit weird. I understand to not use these amities for their personal ethics but how should this be handled for future attempts? No trail magic on all unsupported fkt attempts?
Tuna Helper, did you take trail magic on your attempts?
Thank you all!

[john]

*self-supported

it's been my impression that setting your own caches is not okay but unplanned trail magic is generally fine. and in that i think the water caches others set are basically fine. you can't necessarily rely on them, such as the scissors crossing one not really happening anymore. but i also think the no hitching rule is silly, so who am i to say. if you're going to follow krud's rules you'll have to stabilize and evacuate a horse packer to truly better bink's time

[Matthias]

Feb 2, 2017 19:19:24 GMT -5 john said:

*self-supported

it's been my impression that setting your own caches is not okay but unplanned trail magic is generally fine. and in that i think the water caches others set are basically fine. you can't necessarily rely on them, such as the scissors crossing one not really happening anymore. but i also think the no hitching rule is silly, so who am i to say. if you're going to follow krud's rules you'll have to stabilize and evacuate a horse packer to truly better bink's time

I see.. well I personally think the no hitching "rule" and walk in/out is cool. But I can not wrap around my head to walk past a soda cache in the dessert

Haha maybe I should stop thinking about that.

[Wyoming (yes this is me again)]

Feb 2, 2017 11:17:14 GMT -5 Peter Bakwin said:

You'd want to talk to PCT experts on that (Anish, Bink), but it seems to me that caching violates the spirit of the ethic they established.

Peter

I do not believe you are correct on this matter.

For instance in the very first category on this blog "Read This First" page 1 is the following quote about what the different guidelines are about the FKT hikes.

"Supported, self-supported, unsupported? What does it mean?





[*]Supported means you have a dedicated support team that meets you along the way to supply whatever you need. This generally allows for the fastest, lightest trips, and for an element of camaraderie and safety, since someone knows about where you are at all times.


[*]Self-supported means that you don't carry everything you need from the start, but you don't have dedicated, pre-arranged people helping you. This is commonly done a couple different ways: You might put out stashes of supplies for yourself prior to the trip, or you might just use what's out there, such as stores, begging from other trail users, etc. Long distance backpackers are typically self-supported, since they resupply by mail drop or in stores.


[*]Unsupported means you have no external support of any kind. Typically, this means that you must carry all your supplies right from the start, except any water that can be obtained along the way from natural sources. This approach has also been termed "alpine style". The longest trip I'm aware of using this style is Coup's 20-day thru-hike of the Colorado Trail. For most people, carrying enough food for more than a few days to one week will be prohibitive. Unsupported also means unaccompanied! (i.e., no pacers) Further note: Some people get really crazy about what does or does not fit into "unsupported". I've had long conversations about this especially with Jeff List, who very thoroughly documented the opinions I expressed here."

This matches what I have always understood to the guidelines.  You can mail yourself stuff, buy on the way or make caches.  As long as you do all of that yourself.  I have made this point before when commenting on FKT discussions and no one has ever disagreed with me. I have pointed out that eventually the records will be broken by someone who goes out ahead of time and caches in a number of places where walking in to get a resupply requires a lot of time.  

Personally I have no issue with caching for oneself but I do disagree with begging food from other hikers or trail angels as that is receiving support to me.  But the general rule on that seems to allow it.  Not using the water caches is another issue which there is some disagreement on I guess but I would defer on that to others.

A more important point is whether the FKT has to cover the PCT thru all of the fire closures.  This seems to be the claim being made by Williamsons hiking partner in the first post in this thread.  Making this a requirement is a very bad idea.  It forces hikers to break the law for one.  Also when a section of the trail is legally closed then that section should no longer be considered part of the trail and the alternate is the real trail - in legal terms - until the closure is reopened.  For a hiker to claim that their record is the only one which counts because they hiked through closed sections is problematic.  Should any record for a FKT count if the hiker broke the law?  Many would say no it is not a real record.  Making such a claim also allows the illegal hiker to make it impossible for another hiker to break their supposed record and remain legal - pretty convenient.  So the only legitimate way to approach this is for any given point in time the route which counts is the legal route of the trail and closed sections do not count as part of the route.  Sometimes this will make the trail a little harder and sometimes a little easier.  This means that the exact distance covered will vary but this is of no consequence since most trails change in length every year.  Distances fluctuate, the amount of road travel changes and so on, but the trail is the trail and whatever it is at a given point in time is all that matters for a given FKT attempt.  An example for last year.  The Big Bear fire closure route around would have required about 40 extra miles of hiking over the regular PCT route thus making the trail longer and with a huge desert road walk added in.  If someone had done that and set an FKT how would we not count it as legitimate?

[Peter Bakwin]

While I agree that the general guideline is that caching is allowed under self-supported style, it is important to follow the ethic that has been established for a particular route or area. For the PCT, I believe that Scott Williamson et al., Heather Anderson and others have established a style that is somewhat more pure or rigorous than would normally be used by thru-hikers, for example by walking all resupplies. Therefore, if you want to contest their records you should seriously consider following the same stylistic nuances. I don't know if they cached - you would have to ask them.

The fire and wildlife reroutes have been a source of controversy. I understand the argument that a PCT record should not be established on the basis of a big fire year in which reroutes make things easier/faster (for example). I think a person should detail any reroutes that were taken, along with consideration of how this might make the trip longer or shorter, in terms of distance and time. Ultimately, the community decides what "counts" as a record. I'm personally not familiar enough with the PCT to make a judgment, though I do try to summarize what I believe the community consensus is.

As always, detailed discussions with previous & current record holders are highly encouraged.

[wyoming]

Peter

Thanks for the reply.

I am not sure that there are different ethics for different trails. I was under the impression that across the board folks are settling on a set of ethics which will be universal for this type of activity. To not do that means that people will come along and do something others consider out of bounds that will lead to lots of controversy - the discussion below fits that perfectly. On the flip side of that however is the likely future ethic that taking any food from other hikers or trail angels will be considered out of bounds. Using water caches placed by trail angels would be another candidate for being out of bounds. Support is support. But those issues are another discussion.

Re fire reroutes.

There are a number of issues here.

1. I am not sure when the last year was when the PCT did not have a fire closure, but it was a long time ago (10 years?). Given the situation today and the likely issues going forward in time (especially climate change and the likely return of drought to CA) there is probably not going to again be a year where it is possible to legally hike the actual original PCT. Thus we need a different metric than that.

2. I maintain that one cannot create a criteria for a record which requires the competitors to break the law. It is just not appropriate. In fact anyone could argue if they chose to that no attempt at a record which broke the law should be counted - I am not doing that but the point is a reasonable one to make.

3. If reroutes around a fire closure are to legitimately count towards trying to make a record hike there are certainly going to be some which result in an easier path than the original trail. But the opposite is also true that sometimes the reroute will result in a hard trail. An example of the later point was the closure in 2016 due to the Lake Fire as walking around that closure would have been hugely harder than the formal route and would have more than made up for several other reroutes which were likely easier.

4. Some of the closures in place today are going to last for some years still. And maybe longer as there is a good chance the money will not come to fix them. When new closures inevitably happen this situation will get worse. It begs a solution which does not require breaking the law.

5. Forcing people to take the original route through closed areas does not just have a legal issue behind it. There are plenty of people out there who are opposed to this activity on principal and someone will certainly come along who will inform the Forest Service that they know of a hiker who is going to violate the ban and enter the closed area and approximately when. One can easily think of other motivations for turning in a speed hiker to authorities.

6. Trails change constantly. It is not truly possible for people at different times of a year, let alone in different years, to hike the same trail. It is not just conditions which change but trail routes change too. The AT for instance is a different 'official' length almost every year. The amount of road walking changes all the time. Blowdowns change the trail, snow, flooding, fire closes part of the trail, etc. But none of these items actually changes the trail in a meaningful way. The trail is the trail. On the AT in recent years the accepted fast times of Ward Leonard were counted as the times to beat when in fact the trail and methods he used were very different from what the they were for Matt Kirk and Anish and it would have been reasonable to just count Leonard's times as historical. But they didn't.

So I would suggest the following adaptation or clarification going forward in time. What is past is past.

That the "official" trail at any given point in time does not include any fire closures sections and that the 'official' route is the accepted reroute around the fire closure until such time as the Forest Service says the trail is once again open for travel. One still has to walk the entire way no matter what. If there is a closure and there is no reroute listed by the PCT (the Lake fire closure for example had no reroute suggested due to the difficulty of all options) that does not mean that the requirement to walk the whole way has an exception - you do not get to get in a car and ride around it. The hiker in that case just has to figure out their own reroute and document it.

I encourage others to step in here and provide some input on these ultimately inconsequential issues which still mean so much to many of us.

[Peter Bakwin]

Bink reports doing the "official" route with no detours or alternates in 2011. I don't know if he broke rules to do that. I appreciate that these discussions raise passionate views from those who love the PCT. Believe me I had some very heated discussions on this topic, which contributed to one person requesting to have his name removed from this site. I don't know the answer. Ultimately each person does what makes sense and feels right to themselves, and the chips fall where they may.

I don't agree that style has to mean the same thing everywhere & that there can't be local idiosyncrasies. For example, there are several generally accepted "rules" for the Colorado 14ers FKT that are not used for any other mountain record (CA 14ers, for example). Some of these rules I personally don't agree with, but I accept that the community expects them to be followed. For the PCT, walking the resupplies seems to make sense as it appears to add very little overall distance to the hike. This probably would not make sense on the CDT (I imagine). Caching seems to me something that is not done much by standard PCT thru-hikers, so I could see that a pure ethic such as Williamson established would preclude caching. I think they want the hike to be done only using resources that are available to all thru-hikers, which makes sense. It's a narrower interpretation of "self supported".

[JeffU]

I'd also like to add that solo hitchhiking on the PCT ranges from difficult to impossible for many POC. Maintaining a no-hitching rule for FKTs is necessary to equalize the field.

[karelsabbe]

Hi!



I'm Karel Sabbe from Belgium, and I consider myself record holder of the P.C.T.

I didn't involve myself in the "fire detour discussion" so far, but would like, just for once, to explain my point of view, hoping to provide an answer to some of the questions posed (mainly by one article in TrailrunnerMag).



Firstly about my proof: as you can see on my website (live.karelsabbe.com) you can see my GPS tracking files. They were uploaded live every 4 minutes and apart from that I was also running with Strava, offering more GPS proof. Here you can also see I was 100% open about the detours I have done. I never tried to hide them or ignore them. I was open adding comments to the livetracking website linking to the PCTA website on why I was running a detour. Offcourse, running with a GPS device like mine makes everything visible, also the detours. What is strange is that, when Joe McConaughy arrived at the Canadian border two years before me, nobody questioned his record, nobody asked for his GPS files. It was just: Joe McConaughy reaches Canadian border in record time, setting the new P.C.T. F.K.T. When Joren and I were preparing for the P.C.T. we contacted Joe for some advice, and also asked for his GPS files as we were going to set up a virtual race on the tracking website which would have been awesome. But the GPS files were worthless, with not much data at all let alone to be able to use it for a virtual race. Nobody ever made a problem out of this. Did he run fire detours? Nobody knows, and nobody can ever know as he doesn't have the GPS files to prove it.

Did he run the entire PCT? I have no doubt about it ! But this does kind of show the two standards that are used for the F.K.T., as I , as a foreigner, did everything I could to prove I was genuine and that I was running the PCT in the right manner, yet people find something else to try to put an asterisk at my record attempt (being the fire detours).



There were two conclusions with my fire detours:

1. If somebody purposely choses a high fire year they could run less miles and claim the F.K.T. like that.

My reply to this is that firstly, it was a low-fire year. Averagely there were less closures than a regular year of P.C.T. (confirmed by the P.C.T.A.). This year there were 93.3 miles closed, that is from a 2650 mile long trail. Is that even worth mentioning? The detour length for these 93.3 closed miles was 97.8, so I ran a few miles more than if the PCT would have no closures (see picture).




Secondly: the fires in general mean a detour, there is no way you could go for a high fire year and hope for a “shorter” or easier PCT. It mostly means leaving the PCT on a rougher trail, descending to the valley, running in the valley and then climbing all the way to the ridge again, certainly not providing a benifit.


Thirdly: almost surely, there will never be a P.C.T. without an ongoing fire. If my fire detours are a problem, then I congratulate Joe McConaughy on his P.C.T. F.K.T. that will stand for the rest of his life, as no one will ever be able to run every inch of the P.C.T. again (offcourse never say never, but chances are really low considering the California droughts and global warming).

I really never understood how some people would even consider to see fires as a problem for an F.K.T. of a trail like the P.C.T. that crosses over a thousand miles of desert.


The second conclusion was that if the “community” decided that I was right taking the detours, it would be the new F.K.T. The person posing that in his article made it offcourse extremely difficult for me to conclude: OK now the “community” has decided it was OK that I have done the detours and I can get the new F.K.T. In almost all articles or comments on articles the conclusion was that I was right taking the detours, but when is that the “community conclusion” ?


I knew that as a Belgian going for the P.C.T. record people would we watching my steps closely. If you then see an article about a closed section of the P.C.T. that fines are up to 2.500$ if you go through the closure, you know what to choose, because the arguments would be as active as taking the detour, or even more. All thru-hikers struggling with these closures to get around them, and then mister Belgian FKT runner doesn’t care and just does as he likes. I have worked for 3 months in some National Parks in the South-West, doing trailwork, and here I also learned: a closure is a closure, and it’s always for a reason.


Peter, you stated this in the TrailrunnerMag article about my PCT:

“My feeling is that if he took fire detours, it’s not really the PCT,” says Peter Bakwin, who tracks trail records on the Fastest Known Time website and is arguably the trail-running world’s de-facto authority on the subject.

“One thing that concerns me about taking the ‘alts’ is that a person could wait for a big fire year then do a bunch of ‘official,’ presumably shorter, road running,” Bakwin adds. “I’d rather they wait for a low fire year with insignificant reroutes. It’s part of the game.”

In my opinion you state the answer to my F.K.T. yourself: it was a low-fire year and the reroutes were insignificant. What more could I have hoped for? Your colleagues have the same view:

“In light of such considerations, Horton and Burrell, a longtime friend of Bakwin’s, take a softer stance, allowing that some rerouting will be inevitable and shouldn’t automatically disqualify a record.”

“Big trails like the PCT and AT may evolve,” says Burrell. “If he did the official reroutes, that means he did the official trail. [We] can’t blow the whole thing off until next year because the perfect trail may never come back.”

I followed all P.C.T.A. official detours, having to run a few miles more than the P.C.T. that has no closures, and all in all there was about 3.5% of the P.C.T. closed. You do say it’s “one” thing that concerns you of taking the alternatives. Are there other? I will happily explain why I did this or that ! Or if you see it would give me an advantage of any kind, I’d like to explain more about it, confirming or arguing your concerns.


I hope this can conclude the F.K.T. and that it is clear I did as I should have, and that I just gave it my all and succeeded. If this explanation above isn’t sufficient, then I will stop caring about the “online discussion”. To me it isn’t even a discussion as, of all articles that wrote that I have the new F.K.T. (GearJunkie, REI TrailrunProject, Appalachian Trials, outdoor magazines, television, ... ) there was only one asking questions about the fire detours, of which I hope I have closed the discussion now. Surely I believe F.K.T. claims shouldn’t be accepted or taken lightly, but concerns must be reasonable as well.


Karel

[Jake]

When Peter Bakwin runs through closed trails, he risks a $50 fine that he can pay online and forget about. It wouldn't even show up on a background check. Karel, on the other hand, could have been deported and barred from coming to the US for up to a decade at the discretion of immigration. Peter's statement is the textbook definition of privilege begging to be checked. I'd also add that the idea that prior FKT-holders should be the judges who validate subsequent FKTs is dumb, and would not fly in any other sport competition.

[Peter Bakwin]

Thank you Karel for your detailed comments and reasoning. This is an important discussion & each person who completes the trail has a valid perspective. I'm away from my desk at the moment, but will try to adjust the discussion at the top of the thread in a way that adequately reflects these views when I return. The PCT is definitely tricky because of these fluid route changes. In the end, each FKT aspirant must decide for him/herself what previous marks are most significant & compelling. My only hope is to fairly summarize what we know about these attempts. If I haven't done a good job of that to now I apologize. I will try to do better. I am not personally a PCT finisher & don't know much about the trail, but have tried to understand all perspectives.

[[e-mail]]

Hi. Can someone please clarify above. Heather Anderson has the overall FKT for unsupported unassisted thru on the PCT. True? It's a tad confusing since it says women's record and the words unsupported unassisted are not there. What is meant by 'thru-hiker style'? Is there a definition for that somewhere? Thanks.

[Peter Bakwin]

Read through the thread and fastestknowntime.proboards.com/thread/19/read-first and you will understand. Thru-hiker style is a version of self-supported. Unsupported is quite different, and impractical for something as long as the PCT.

[karelsabbe]

Thank you Peter for editing the way of describing the FKT's on the first page, this makes more sense now. Last week I got the news from Guinness World Records that my record attempt has been validated and I am now the official Guinness World Record holder of the Pacific Crest Trail. The investigation was thorough and I had to offer them a lot of proof before they accepted my record run as a world record. Perhaps a small detail but can my time now appear on the top on the first page? On other pages, like for the GR-20 that I will run soon, it seems like the most recent, fastest time is on top. Thanks.