On a summer day in 2015, my sister and I sat across each other in a Seattle coffee shop, taking a break from the remote work of our respective jobs. Scrolling through Facebook, I came across a Jezebel article written by someone I went to school with who had hiked the Pacific Crest Trail. Louise’s good friend was hiking it that summer. We considered what an incredible thing it is, and what remarkable knowledge, determination, and gumption those people who do it possess. We discussed all the challenges–acquiring backpacking knowledge, buying gear, feeling physically equipped, planning the whole thing, having the time and money, but mostly, who to do it with if not alone… Its unlikely that we’d have a friend with that kind of flexibility and commitment who we would want to spend that much time with in the wild. And we agreed that doing it with a boyfriend would change the experience in an undesirable way. Slowly we whittled down the list of potential hiking partners until there was almost no one left. I know we were both thinking it but I can’t remember which one of us asked, “So, uhh, wanna hike the PCT together?”
And that is how it all began. That day, Louise and I looked at our next 3 years and thought about how we could do this with Louise being a student and me trying to be a functioning adult. We decided 2017 could work, gushed a bit about how cool it would be, and left it there. It rested in the back of my mind, an exciting notion that was so distant and outlandish that I could hardly imagine sticking to it. But about 8 months after our initial PCT talk, I called Weeze to check in on the matter. Both of us still down, I went ahead and purchased Yogi’s PCT guide and have not stopped planning since. 
Mountains of Pancakes 