Our final JMT Team is ready to go!

Alright, our final team of Hikers, Derek & Katy are about to depart for the 211 mile trek across The John Muir Trail. Katy has written a great story for us about final prep & training involved in undertaking a hike of this magnitude. This is a great read, enjoy.

Katy here. Derek and I begin our north bound John Muir Trail adventure on July 15 at the Cottonwood Pass trailhead, making our way to the Yosemite floor in ideally 21 days. It’s about an 8-hour drive from Phoenix to our starting point. Our preparation for this hike has felt endless at times. Our thoughts and feelings have meandered back and forth between unbridled enthusiasm and sheer dread. It is the typical feeling of days leading up to vacation when you’re finalizing all the small details, only with this hike, it’s also wondering if we trained hard enough, do we have the right gear, and are we mentally tough enough to hike 250+ miles?

All in all, it’s been a good prep.

Derek has planned in almost excessive detail how many miles we will hike each day and where we will aim to stay each night. He made an excel spreadsheet that included these miles, our elevation gains and loss, and even made a rating system of how difficult days will likely be.

Over the past 6 months, we’ve been replacing our backpacking gear little by little. When we first started backpacking we wanted to save every dollar to just get out and do it, but for a 21-day trek, we needed to be cutting every ounce of weight we could instead. We switched our gear from light to ultralight. We got a new tent (4 pounds lighter than our first), sleeping bags, pads, etc. In addition to lightening our packs, our wallets ended up a little lighter too.

Locking in our clothing has taken until this last weekend to finalize. It’s been a game of trial and error in comfort, practicality, and weight. Derek is firmly in the corner of practicality while I land squarely in the comfort category. We have about 2 of everything, plus a set of clothes for bed time. We needed to consider inclement weather, bugs, sun exposure, river crossings, varying temperatures, and bear attacks (according to Derek).

My favorite part of our preparation has been food. As a Holistic Health Coach, I was determined to consume healthy, nutritional, fueling foods for this trip. Though I hear a lot of people say you can eat whatever you want out there, it has been important to me to be nourishing our cells with all they need for such a brutal hike. Fresh foods unfortunately provide little option when backpacking, but we still found ways to get fruits and veggies. We prioritized proteins and fats, as carbs seem too easy to come by. We planned 3 meals plus snacks every day. We found many nutritional meals and added our favorite health store candies for morale boosts and even included organic red wine cans and smores in our resupply buckets. I’ll be turning a blind eye to the Little Debbies Derek put in his resupply.

We dubbed any physical activity performed in the build up to the JMT “Spring Training.” I was fortunate enough to be working in Los Angeles for 5 months of our training, where my neighborhood provided cardio filled hills, stairs, and nearby mountains for hiking. During training, I even stumbled upon the house where Kurt Cobain wrote a majority of “In Utero.” My everyday routine also consisted of 25-60-minute yoga sessions and targeted weight training. Derek has had to contend with the brutal Phoenix heat by waking up for 3am hikes in the

Phoenix Mountain Preserve, which we are now doing together. In addition to the early mornings, he’s done some additional backpacking around Arizona. We’ll be doing one final shakedown hike between 10,000-11,000ft this weekend to shore up our game and help acclimate to the high elevations we’ll be contending with.

With all of this said, we realize that no prep is enough prep. This has been a key mantra in preparing mentally. With Derek’s permission, I will share that one massive challenge for him is his crippling Emetophobia (fear of vomiting), so the first few days at altitude will be very difficult on Derek mentally, but he is admirably embracing the challenge. Part of this experience requires that we roll with the punches and rely on each other, God, and what we have in our packs. At this point, we feel as ready as we’re going to be. It’s an adventure in the purest sense of the word and we can’t wait to get started.

Happy Hiking and Go Suns!

From the desk of The Rugged Outdoorsmen, we want to thank Derek & Katy for being part of our JMT project, and sharing the process with all of us. We want to wish them a wild, incredible journey, and can’t wait to hear about their adventure when they summit Mount Whitney and return !