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Hiking Strategy & Itinerary

The Challenge

Hiking the Sea-to-Sea Route literally from sea to sea is one of the most challenging thru-hikes ever completed. This is due to three unique characteristics of the C2C:

  1. It is long. How "long" is 7,800 miles? If you hiked a marathon a day, it would take you 10 months to finish. This presents an incredible physical challenge. And it poses a logistical problem: even if you hike really fast, you still can't avoid the winter.

  2. It is far north. It stays in the northern tier of US states and two southeastern Canadian provinces. Winter comes early and leaves late everywhere along the C2C, particularly at the termini, where enormous mountains create additional difficulties.

  3. It runs east-west. Most long-distance hikes commence in the South in the spring; they finish in the North in the fall. This is not a feasible strategy for the C2C -- the seasons are mostly the same at both termini.

These three factors essentially force the hiker to spend winter out on the trail (assuming that the hiker wishes to hike literally from sea to sea, as opposed to flip-flopping). The pivotal question then becomes: What is the best section along which to hike during winter? The hiker should then time their start date in accordance with the answer.

My Strategy & Results

  • I started late in the summer at the Atlantic Ocean, which gave me enough time to get over the high peaks in Canada and the Northeast (the last one being NY's Mt Marcy) before winter arrived. I could have started a month later than I did, but I wanted to give myself some cushion in the case of some unforeseen event.

  • I reached Battle Creek, Michigan, just before the winter holidays. This was sub-optimal: I was at the end of the "warmest" stretch of trail before winter arrived in earnest. This happened because I hiked faster than I anticipated and because there were no unforeseen events.

  • The 1,600 miles between Battle Creek and Ely, MN, were the most challenging and humbling miles of the entire hike. The frigid temperatures and deep snow was exactly what I had hoped to avoid when I started at the Atlantic.

  • Spring on the northern prairies was mostly pleasant. There were a few cold stretches (the morning of May 3rd it was 15 degrees) but overall the conditions were probably better than if I went across a month or two later, when the heat and sun would be more intense.

  • I reached the Rockies early in the season and had to deal with snow again -- snowfields, of course, but also snow above 6,000 feet for 3 weeks. It was smooth sailing once I reached Washington.

Schedule