Long considered one of America’s most spectacular hiking trails, the 2,650-mile Pacific Ridge Trail, which runs the spine of California, Oregon and Washington states, has been hit by 26 wildfires this year.
With 16 sections of the trail closed due to the fires, hikers were forced to hurriedly circumnavigate the trail.
Father-son duo Thijs Koekkoek, 52, and Taime Teesseling, 17, hiked the trail from Southern California to the Canadian border for four months this year. In July, they were forced to stop their hike and take a detour around the Shelly Fire near Mount Etna, California. After additional fire closures further north, the duo eventually hiked about 400 miles of trail.
“There was no other way,” said Teesseling, who lives in Amsterdam. “Otherwise we would have had to go around it in the smoke and we didn’t want to put ourselves in danger.”
Since 2018, about 1,700 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail have been temporarily closed due to fires, according to Chris Rylee, a spokesman for the Pacific Crest Trail Association. About 250 miles of trail have burned.
Wildfires and burn scars have made parts of the trail more dangerous, forcing hikers to deal with sudden-notice closures. For some long-distance hikers, the fires are changing their destination and making them witnesses to dramatic environmental change. Meanwhile, when fast-moving wildfires break out, many rural communities along the trail find themselves responsible for helping vulnerable hikers.
“The wildfire season is lasting longer, becoming less predictable, impacting more trails, more trail users and more trail communities,” Rylee said.
The West Coast’s longer, more challenging answer to the Appalachian Trail, the PCT traverses the Mojave Desert, Sierra Nevada and Cascade Mountains. Each year, 6,000 to 8,000 people apply for trail permits from the trail association. Hundreds of thousands more come for shorter visits.
But extreme temperatures caused by global warming and more than a century of aggressive firefighting have combined to create intense wildfire seasons that have transformed the landscape.
Signs of climate change are now evident on the PCT, said California climate scientist John O’Brien, who grew up near the trail and hikes it frequently.
“This is a long-term tour of climate history,” O’Brien said.
Beyond the fire risk, climate change is making water increasingly scarce in some areas along the trail. Glaciers are retreating in the higher elevations, often exposing slippery bedrock. Streams are often at their highest flow early in the season, making crossings dangerous at that time.
Koekkoek and Teesseling said the fire wasn’t the only extreme weather they’ve faced. In Julian, California, a heavy late-season snow forced them to hunker down. Then the duo spent a week near Burney, California, where temperatures hovered around 100 degrees even at high altitude.
They said the locals they encountered kept repeating the same refrain: “We’ve never encountered weather like this before.”
The walk gave the father and son a quick education in how wildfires change daily life in remote and fire-prone communities, especially in California: “Everyone had an escape bag at their front door, and everyone had to be ready to leave their house,” Teesseling said.
PCT hikers should also be on guard — when fires break out, they are among the most vulnerable. Many prepare for their trips with the assumption that they will skip or “hesitate” several sections of the trail because of the fires — then turn back. Others try to create complex makeshift routes.
Karen Altergott, who was planning to run a long-distance hike in 2022, was forced to leave the trail near Stehekin, Washington, after three days of hiking in smoke, complaining of a severe cough, headache and sore throat.
“My lungs felt full of fluid,” she said. This year, Altergott returned to make up her missing miles, walking 17 miles with an N95 respirator. Then, a new fire left her with 30 miles left to complete and she missed closing.
“Part of me remains there,” Altergott said. “I now believe it is impossible to walk the Pacific Coast Highway without being affected by the wildfires.”
The Pacific Crest Trail Association launched a smartphone app this summer to help hikers navigate and navigate frequent and confusing wildfire closures.
“Trail angels” — local people who offer free food, support and lodging to long-distance hikers — are taking on increasingly important safety roles by ferrying stranded hikers during fire closures.
“They literally walk their entire lives,” says Becky Wade, who works as a trail angel with her partner Jeff McCabe in Hamburg, Calif. “They have no escape unless you stop to help them.”
McCabe and Wade moved to the area near the Klamath National Forest four years ago. Wildfires forced them to evacuate twice. Both times, they hosted long-distance hikers and guided them to safety.
McCabe led about 75 hikers, including Koekkoek and Teesseling, around the Shelly Fire in July.
“This would be a lot harder without the angelic people who volunteer to walk you around the fire,” Teesseling said.
Even if hikers don’t encounter active fires, walking through burn zones is a harsh reminder of the effects of climate change.
Will Georis, 25, hiked the PCT in 2022, the year after the Dixie Fire. The fire left dozens of miles of charred logs, unstable ground and the risk of wind gusts turning charred trees into widowmakers — the name hikers give to dead trees and branches that are at risk of falling over.
“There’s no way around it — those huge areas where every tree has been reduced to ash or it feels like a bomb has gone off. It’s not fun to hike,” said Georis, who was a wildfire firefighter at university and is now a forester.
“The biodiversity will be different,” he added. “Different species will come.”
Fire itself is not unnatural or evil. Before European settlers, California burned an average of 4.5 million acres each year, a figure that would outstrip modern fire seasons, according to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley.
But today’s forests are not as well adapted to fire and often burn hotter.
“The fires that occurred in the past were low intensity,” O’Brien said. “That created really resilient forests where the lower branches of the big trees burned, but their canopies stayed intact and they survived and continued to grow.”
Georis has managed to hike an uninterrupted trail from Mexico to Canada, an experience that is increasingly difficult. He urged future hikers not to be deterred by the possibility of confusing logistics, smoke, and the need to be flexible with plans, a sentiment shared by many long-distance hikers who say the trail’s scenery and community still make it worthwhile.
While many hikers focus on walking a continuous path, “Once you get to the end, you realize that’s not the most important thing; it’s the people and the experiences that really matter,” Georis says.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com