Madison Sites

I hope this letter finds you and yours off to a beautiful start in 2024. Sitting down to write most of this annual letter is one of my favorite holiday season activities, usually done in the weeks leading up to Christmas. We had a flurry of unexpected activity at the end of the year, drawing us away from home for over a month. So, here we are, halfway through January, and I’ve finally found the time to get to it. 

It feels like last January was a lifetime ago. The year started off with a bang, or, really, a dump. We blew all the historical snow records off the map for the winter of 2022-2023, deluging us with so much snow that we could no longer see out of our first-floor windows. As the groaning of our roof increased, we realized we would require emergency shoveling before a rainstorm came in and buckled it. We watched as reports came in that others throughout the Sierras were losing their roofs to the weight. We were grateful to have found a team to help us get the pile of snow (taller than either of us!) off the roof. 

Between the record snow year and all the layoffs in tech, I wavered between believing whether this was the worst year to take a sabbatical and spend most of it hiking or, well, the best time to do it. The jury’s still out on that one. With a permit to hike the Pacific Crest Trail in hand and having already announced it to the rest of the family (who were gracious enough to delay family trips), it felt best to move forward anyway. In the months leading up to my start date (March 27), I spent most of my time in the kitchen piecing dehydrated ingredients into meals that would compromise the bulk of the resupply boxes that Shawn would be mailing to the trail for me. 

My extreme meal prepping took up nearly every waking moment in those months, stepping away from the house just twice: once for a weekend training in backcountry emergency first aid and another to travel to Costa Rica for an ayahuasca retreat with Conrad. 

If you had told me of all my friends that Conrad would be the one who would approach me with interest in attending a plant medicine retreat of any kind, I would have called you a liar. I didn’t believe he was serious until I put my eyes on him in Costa Rica. It was an enriching experience that, frankly, can’t be well-summarized. I hope to get the chance to return for another retreat. We were advised to seriously consider continuing to stay off of pork if we wanted to engage with this medicine more regularly. I had already been stewing on giving it up from a more ethical perspective for years, and that was the final nudge I guess I needed. It has been over a year and, surprisingly, I don’t miss it!

Before he dropped me off at the US-Mexico border (the southern terminus of the Pacific Crest Trail), Shawn and I escaped south of the border for a few days in the Baja peninsula wine region. I was so grateful to get a few days together, knowing we’d be apart for the next few months. The trip (read: wine) was a fantastic way to distract my pre-hike nerves. 

I documented my hike along the way, taking time out at the library computers of every trail town I could. With that, I won’t repeat many of the details here, but you can find all the projects that came out of it here. The record-high snow here in the Sierras made this an insane year to attempt to thru-hike the Pacific Crest Trail. There were many ways in which it wasn’t the hike I was expecting, but so many more in which it was the hike I needed. 

This snow also affected how much time I spent off the trail. After returning from Star Wars Celebration in London, Shawn came down with his mom to visit me in the desert section. Figuring I had time to kill in hopes that the snow in the Sierras would melt more, we took off for a few days to enjoy Disneyland together.

By the time I arrived at the Sierras, many of the hikers before me had decided to skip them entirely this year as most of us were reasonably inexperienced at snow camping. There was also hope that this could give back some extra time to get further north before fire season hit later in the summer. Figuring I would have easily been able to hike home to Tahoe in time, we bought tickets to see Blink-182 in Sacramento and, the next day, the Tahoe is For Lovers festival back in South Lake Tahoe. I had spent so much time in the desert waiting for snow to melt that this was another reason on the pile to jump ahead.

Before those concerts, we hosted the trail family I was hiking with at the time (we all decided to jump ahead together). I stayed home for the few days remaining until those shows, giving me the chance to host another of my hiking buddies, Big Green. He graciously watched the cats while we were in Sacramento and joined us for the Tahoe is for Lovers festival. Between all the other hiking friends we hosted and planned visitors through the rest of the year, this was the year of a packed house for us.

It would be another month of hiking and a whole other state before I saw Shawn again in the absolutely adorable town of Ashland, Oregon. He helped me jump ahead a few hundred miles again to ensure I could hike into the Pacific Crest Trail’s Trail Days festival held in Cascade Locks, OR (right on the border with Washington in the Columbia River Gorge). During this jump, we checked another national park off our list: Crater Lake. 

By the time Trail Days started, much of the area that the trail passes through in Washington was closed to wildfires. I had spent the days hiking into Cascade Locks under a cloud of wildfire smoke and wasn’t looking forward to continuing it. The Sierras weren’t on fire for the first summer in a long time. I still had much of the PCT to hike in the now-melted-out Sierras, so I planned to return with Philosopher, whom I had met on the trail in Northern California.

I flew out of Portland, OR, and into San Francisco in time to celebrate the wedding of our good friends Jason and Anthony. This was the last major detour I made from the trail before I took my final steps on the trail this season in September.

A few weeks after finishing, Shawn’s mom arrived so he could take her to see Kenny Loggins for her birthday. The following weekend, she stayed back to watch the cats while Shawn and I headed to Las Vegas for the When We Were Young festival. Teenage me spent the whole day giddy as I saw some of my favorite bands from my younger years: Motion City Soundtrack, Michelle Branch (seemed like an odd addition for this festival, but you haven’t lived until you’ve danced and sung along with a crowd of punk/emo kids to “Breathe”), Relient K, 30 Seconds to Mars, Bowling For Soup, and Green Day.

Five days later, we landed in Tokyo for two weeks in Japan. We’ve always wanted to see what has long been claimed as the best Disney park for ourselves, and Shawn especially wanted to bring his mom along while we could still get her on an 11-hour flight. Realizing that we could see both the Halloween and Christmas events there if we timed it right, the trip was book-ended by two separate Tokyo Disney trips. If you can only see one, I highly recommend Halloween. The guests go all out on cosplay, to the point that it is difficult to tell the difference between guest and cast member (someone paid by Disney to be that character).

In between, we explored Japan further afield, starting with an excursion to a hot spring town (Hakone), where we stayed in a ryokan (a traditional Japanese Inn). From there, we headed further west to see our friends Brad and Yuko in their “town” (which would be a mega-city here in the US) of Nagoya. As lovely as it is to explore a country on your own, it is 10x better to not only see friends you haven’t seen in years, but experience life as they live it there. 

The last chapter outside the Disney bubble was spent in Tokyo proper, taking in more incredible food and many cultural sights. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but many of my best memories were within the walls of our hotel, the Park Hyatt Tokyo, which spans the top of three interconnected skyscrapers. The views spanning the vast sea of skyscrapers enhanced our time relaxing in the room, eating another incredible meal, and even my daily lap swims (seriously, Google pictures of the lap pool).

Returning to the Disney bubble again at the end of our trip was an odd sense of comfort. It felt like a perfect way to slowly transition back into US culture. Anything I could get to help certainly went a long way. I don’t know how to describe going from walking and sleeping in the woods every day to landing in the world’s most populated city in a matter of weeks, but, well, the sensory overload was insane. 

Still, there wasn’t time to lollygag around once we landed home. Shawn’s mom left a couple days after that, and my mom arrived in Tahoe three days later. A couple days later, my baby brother Joe came with his two dogs, Rose and Violet. I picked up my brother, Kreston, his girlfriend, Liz, and their son, Charlie, just a few hours later. We had a full house for Thanksgiving week!

A few days after our house emptied again, we got the call that my Uncle Trey’s health had taken a drastic turn. A week later, we were scrambling to get things together to go home for his funeral. After missing last year, we had already been committed to spending Christmas with Shawn’s family in Indiana this year. Not wanting to fly back and forth across coasts twice in one month, driving to Memphis and then to Indianapolis felt more straightforward. The extended time away made it impossible to get care for the cats, so we brought them along, too. They were thrilled. 

As terrible as the circumstances were, it was nice to enjoy extended time with family in Tennessee and, as a bonus, give them a chance to meet our little fur babies. I hadn’t been able to do that in years, making me incredibly grateful that we were still in our gap year. I don’t know how I would have been able to manage all this if I had been working. 

We enjoyed a quiet Christmas with Shawn’s family and rang in the New Year together before we finally headed home to face the pile of life admin stuff that has been growing since March. Piles of mail that accrued while I was gone, plus all the gear that needs cleaning and put away looms in our gear room.

I wondered it a year ago, and I still wonder about it now: it was either the best year to hike the PCT or the worst from the environment the trail gave and my own outside-of-hiking commitments. I don’t know that I would plan another epic trip in the same year as a thru-hike again (nor would I certainly plan on any funerals). Still, it was the year I was given, so I have to believe it was what I needed. What a lucky person I am to be able to complain about how much we squeezed into this year. Still, I would be okay if 2024 was far more boring.

Happy New Year!