Peter Michaud planned to bookend his retirement by hiking the entirety of the Appalachian Trail in 2020. He wrapped up his career at the Maine Medical Association at the end of 2019 and started his 2,190-mile journey at Springer Mountain, the southern terminus in Georgia, on March 11. After 10 days on trail, however, the 70-year-old retiree started experiencing pandemic-related obstacles: He remembers cooking in a designated shelter on March 23 and feeling nervous as crowds of hikers rolled in at the end of the day, cramping the small shelter space. The next day brought the final straw, when Michaud arrived at Winding Stair Gap in Franklin, North Carolina, to catch a shuttle. When the van arrived, Michaud recalls six to eight people climbing in, “no masks, no distance.” 

Michaud left the trail on March 24 and, like many among the estimated hundreds of fellow hikers who left the Appalachian Trail in 2020 because of pandemic-related complications, started planning a redemption hike for 2021. Whether a 2021 thru-hike will even be possible (read: legal) on America’s two most popular thru-hikes, the Appalachian Trail (AT) and the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), is yet undetermined. The only certainty is that the 2021 thru-hiking season will feel the impacts of 2020—whether through the large number of people gunning for permits or trail space, changes to trail navigation patterns, and/or heightened division and controversy among the thru-hiking community. 

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In 2019, more than 5,000 people received permits to thru-hike the PCT, and roughly 4,000 started the AT. Both trails have seen a steady increase in thru-hikers each successive year, but in 2020, fewer hikers are bound to finish when they typically would have, in late September and October. On March 17, the Appalachian Trail Conservancy released an announcement asking all thru-hikers to leave the trail, and on March 20, the PCT announced new and pending long-distance permits would not be accepted. 

Gabrielle Saulsbery, a 28-year-old reporter in New Jersey, has been planning her 2021 AT thru-hike for more than a year. Back in March, though, she started to suspect that the effects of COVID-19 on the 2020 hiking season would roll over into the 2021 season. 

“When the pandemic hit and so many people got off trail, I just thought, “Oh my god, the trails are gonna be packed’,” Saulsbery told Sierra.  

ATC president Sandra Marra has stated that the organization would not officially recognize 2020 AT thru-hikers, as they chose to continue hiking against ATC recommendations. The move, a blow to the 2020 class still on trail, is another reason that hikers may stay at home this year and start again in 2021. Saulsbery doesn’t see the potential crowd as a deal-breaker, however. 

“Maybe it would just be like a spring break throwback,” she says.  

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While congested trails could certainly impact the 2021 season, Sean Sullivan says that this year he hiked on some of the emptiest trails the AT and PCT have seen in a while. After embarking on a calendar-year Triple Crown attempt (that’s hiking the AT, PCT, and Continental Divide Trail, or CDT, in their entirety) in January, Sullivan managed to cover 4,650 miles, between the AT and PCT.

Sullivan’s experience hiking at the peak of state COVID-19 closures in March and April, he says, granted him insight into what adjustments are necessary for navigating a thru-hike in pandemic times. “You need to find little workarounds,” he says. “I stopped trying to hitchhike, and I would plan my resupplies and stuff around the places where I could walk to.”

Jackie McDonnell, who operates the resupply shop Triple Crown Outfitters in Inyokern, California, roughly 700 miles from the southern terminus of the PCT, felt the impact of such workarounds. In a normal year, her shop sees an average of 50 to 150 people per day in the peak season spanning April and July. This year, however, she could only allow two customers in the store at a time. She’s enjoyed getting to know her customers more intimately but predicts that a long-term lack of thru-hiker traffic could impact hiker resources. 

“If this lasts for too long, I’m worried about how many businesses will fold, which would drastically impact a hiker’s experience,” McDonnell told Sierra. “Where hikers typically would have, say, a short 40-mile resupply and then another 70-mile resupply, it’s now 130 miles.”

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McDonnell adds that she’s personally felt the tensions COVID-19 has wreaked on the hiker community. At one point, Triple Crown Outfitters was the only one of the three resupply shops in the area requiring masks, in accordance with current mandates in California. Customers, she says, were surprised to find they were asked to wear a mask in one shop and not another. 

Saulsbery, who still has her eye on a potential 2021 AT thru-hike, wonders whether mask-wearing could become a hiker hot button, dividing the typically convivial community of thru-hikers into sanitizer-using mask-wearers—who will understandably seek only to interact with fellow hikers taking CDC-recommended precautions—from the rest. The divide between the COVID-wary and those committed to hiking regardless of what happened this year indeed has become fierce, according to Scott Wilkinson, director of communications and marketing for the PCT Association. He says the initial PCT Class of 2020 Facebook group became a cache of conflict between thru-hikers still on the trail versus those who left as requested. Eventually those who stayed started their own Facebook group: Still Hiking PCT Class of 2020. 

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As of the publication of this story, hikers and trail leadership alike are still waiting to see what 2021 brings. The latest update from the PCTA is that more information as to whether or not thru-hiking permits will be issued is forthcoming on January 15, 2021. Peter Michaud, the retiree who left the trail in March, says he’ll keep an eye out for health officials’ recommendations. 

“I’ve worked with public health officials and physicians and nurses, and I know their thought process,” Michaud says. “If people are still saying [in March] ‘maintain your distance; use a mask,’ I probably will not go.”

But he wants to go, to realize the goal that he started in 2020. 

“I thought that the trail would be a great opportunity to reflect on my life to date and to think about my future,” Michaud says. “Right now those plans, like so many, are postponed to 2021.”