Walking a new world into being? Healing and regenerative imagining on the Pacific crest trail

Abstract

Each year, hundreds of people spend 4-6 months hiking the entire 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), which runs up and down the mountain ranges of so-called California, Oregon, and Washington. This research draws on three months of “hiking ethnography” and autoethnography, as I walked 1,500 miles on the PCT in 2024. In the Anthropocene, new ethics and ontologies of land are required, and the PCT is a space where many people envision themselves creating new worlds through the embodied practice of walking. Hikers describe their experiences as healing and transformative and as departures from modernity and capitalism. Hikers create embodied and emotional intimacy with the more-than-human environment, yet also import harmful normative and colonial understandings onto their experiences. I contextualize hikers’ experiences within the millennia-long histories of the places the PCT crosses. The places where hikers experience transformation are on stolen Native land which has been recharacterized by the U.S. government as places for recreation. Indigenous movements along the PCT work for Land Back, remembering erased Indigenous histories, and healing for Native communities. This ethnography considers land as an agentive actor and resists the depoliticization of place, showing that hikers’ interactions with land perpetuate both colonial and decolonial understandings. In considering healing and regenerative imagination on the PCT, this research considers walking new worlds which embrace Land Back, multispecies flourishing, collective healing, and the dismantling of oppressive capitalist and cisheteropatriarchal normativity.