As a NOBO hiker, this is where it all began for me. 23^rd April marked my start date and I spent 54 days hiking through this section. I arrived in Kennedy Meadows South on 15^th of June and having made it this far I was swept away by the welcome from the balcony of the Kennedy Meadows General Store.

The desert was full of excitement and nerves, myself and everyone around me were pumped with enthusiasm, ready to tackle the trail. For many on trail, hiking the PCT had been a lifelong dream, for me it was a new discovery, and the collective atmosphere was contagious. Near the start of the trail, everyone I’d met was eager to chat and get to know people around them. I remember my first night on trail, there were almost a dozen hikers spread around the small campsite at around 11 miles, we sat in a group and cooked together, recounting our first day on trail and sharing our plans for the weeks and months ahead.

I started the trail with a group of hikers I’d met on the bus, plus some others I’d met in the first few days. One hiker, MJ from Utah, was thrilled with us down-under folk using the word faff to describe how we mucked around at camp each morning and evening. A pair of Aussies, Lucy and Tiger, proposed we call ourselves the Faffy Family and I suggested a Kiwi touch, how about the Faffy Whanau? The name stuck and we all remained in contact under this name, even after we began to find our own pace and spread out through the trail.

About a month into the desert, a chance encounter with 3 other hikers led to an unexpected grouping, but I didn’t know it until about 2 weeks later. I met Ninja, Fortune Cookie and Star at the windfarm near Cabazon. We shared a campsite one night and regrouped unexpectedly at Wrightwood. We called ourselves the LA Aquadoofers, since we’d made a true party out of crossing the LA Aqueduct at night, Doof is a word I’d been using to describe the experience and atmosphere at the outdoor festivals we have here in NZ and it also resonated with our experience night-hiking in the desert.

Early in this section, I had to make sure not to get too wrapped up in the excitement. My body was untrained for this kind of exertion day after day, and I needed to grow into my new lifestyle. I held myself back and listened to what my body was telling me, they say the first part of a thru-hike is all physical. Not only my muscles, but my joints, ligaments, tendons and even my bones were sending me quiet messages, telling me to take it easy while they adapted. A smorgasbord of different kinds of pain kept me in check and helped me avoid injury, despite carrying what some might consider a stupid load.

Muscle strength came first, after just a couple of weeks my legs became noticeably stronger. With this new strength came new risk, I didn’t believe my ligaments and tendons would have grown as fast as my muscles had, so I kept myself in check for a few weeks longer. A couple of months into the trail, I became confident in my body and trusted myself to carry the unusually heavy load (by thru-hiker standards at least). Some had encouraged me to drop weight, but I was living a life of luxury and eating like a king; not only that, but the food I was eating was exactly the kind my body could use to grow. I arrived in Kennedy Meadows South, uninjured and confident, having tasted altitude on San Jacinto, unbelievable heat near Tehachapi, and pounding through hundreds of miles in the dust. At the end of this section, I knew deep down that I would be seeing the northern terminus some day.