Walking the Walk Along the Pacific Crest Trail

The author hiked the Pacific Crest Trail in California’s High Sierras while on a journalism fellowship, living out of his tent, above, while reporting on the environment and the people he encountered along the way. Photo: Courtesy Bing Lin.

EJ Academy: Walking the Walk Along the Pacific Crest Trail

By Bing Lin

In 2024, I received a mass media fellowship through the American Association for the Advancement of Science designed for scientists looking to expand their journalism skills through a summer immersed in a newsroom. Little did they know, I had ulterior motives. 

Several years earlier, I hiked the Pacific Crest Trail, a dirt path a foot wide and 2,650 miles long from Mexico to Canada. Unfortunately, I had to skip a section due to record-breaking snow through the High Sierras that year. Ever since, I’d been desperately scheming a way to finish the remaining 500 miles I'd missed. Life just kept getting in the way.

I was able to convince the editors of Inside Climate News, the newsroom where I’d been placed, to not laugh (to my face) at my idea of writing and photographing a field-based narrative journalism series from the trail for half my fellowship. 

 

My series documented the

impacts of environmental change

on the wildlife, both human and

nonhuman, along the trail.

 

Over four installments, my series documented the impacts of environmental change on the wildlife, both human and nonhuman, along the trail. It grounded the abstraction of scary global headlines in peer-reviewed science and the lived experiences of those who called the trail home. 

The pieces were published weekly online in near real-time during my hike, loosely structured around four intersecting themes: the fate of our fading wilderness, the fury of escalating wildfires, the increasing fickleness of water and a call to wonder — and wander — in a changing world. 

I interviewed dozens of scientists, stakeholders and hikers along the way, and learned a ton about field reporting, narrative writing, photography and myself. 

On reporting

Reporting on the trail, you are never fully in the driver’s seat. As much as I pre-reported and planned for contingencies, something unexpected always got in the way. 

I got good at doing a lot, often with very little. Usually, that meant no callback interviews, no second takes and no full sense of what exactly was ever going on. 

I would generally have an outline of what I wanted each of my articles to cover and how I might get there. However, I also baked into my overhead all the baggage — quite literally — and contingencies, from weather to fatigue to logistics, that inevitably got in the way. 

 

Amid that uncertainty,

I mastered the subtle art

of making my own luck.

 

Amid that uncertainty, I mastered the subtle art of making my own luck. That came down to saying “yes” whenever possible, never over personal safety but always over personal comfort, and putting myself in a position to capitalize on the unexpected. I always agreed to adventures and side quests, even if I didn’t fully know what I was agreeing to.

For instance, saying “yes” on a Zoom cold call allowed me to hike 50 miles with a world-renowned fire ecologist, Hugh Safford. He walked me through the science of wildfires as we scrambled over burnt logs and sheltered beside blackened snags.

These few days ultimately formed the narrative backbone of the series’ second installment. 

Expecting the unexpected also meant that I always had my camera strapped to my chest and my Voice Memos app pinned to my lock screen. 

On writing

When the trail crossed town, the author would get down to organizing his notes into a coherent narrative. Photo: Courtesy Bing Lin.

During trail days, I would jot down thoughts in my Notes app based on my planned and impromptu interviews, and any live experiences that pertained to the topic at hand. 

Of course, a lot of this also came down to meticulous planning, such as hiking the most water-laden parts of the trail through the High Sierras during the “water” week installment, or through the burnt forests by Quincy, California, during my “wildfire” week. 

Then, when the trail next crossed town — about once every four to six days — I would get down to business. In order of importance, I’d stuff my face with food, resupply, find internet and get to work. I'd unfurl my new, discombobulated notes onto a blank Word document, and begin to make sense of the mess. 

Eventually, magically, the writing process would always resolve into exactly what I wanted. This process could take a few hours, sometimes a few days, but that's exactly what carrying a tent is for. 

Another lesson I learned is that narrative journalism is never a neutral endeavor. Experiencing the world from one perspective, and reporting on it, means that there will be implicit bias in the voices you sanction and in all the others you inherently silence. 

The only thing to do is to acknowledge that fact going in, and to use it to sharpen the questions we ask about what story to tell, and why.

On photography

As I’ve heard the photographer James Popsys say, “don’t take pictures of something; make pictures about something.”

On the trail, it was easy to feel inundated by the beauty around me and quickly lose track of what I should be photographing from moment to moment, peak to peak. 

 

Every time I raised the camera,

I tried to intentionally ask myself:

Why am I taking this picture?

 

To correct for this, every time I raised the camera, I tried to intentionally ask myself: Why am I taking this picture? How is this making me feel, and how can I reflect that in the final image? 

That meant trying to see everything through the lens of the topic I was covering that week, and to use my pictures to see what I planned to say, stir emotion and show surprise. 

Often, I would know the general gestalt of what I hoped to capture and convey to the reader, but not how the individual pixels would resolve to get me there. 

When it comes to gear, make your equipment earn its keep on your back. I can tell you from memory that my Sony a7RV camera body weighs a smidgen over 700 grams, but not how much my carbon fiber tripod weighs because I shipped it home halfway through. 

Be ruthless: Streamline and shake down your gear as is precisely appropriate to your workflow, no less, and certainly no more. Mine ended up being a camera, drone, laptop, two lenses and the means to keep them all going, just about the limits of what my remaining knee ligaments could handle up and down those Sierra switchbacks. 

Finally, through all the blisters, burns and wrong turns, remind yourself why you’re out there. Because you want to be, and because you have a story worth telling. 

That means remembering that the occasional cry is mission-critical to any endeavor worth pursuing, but also not to wallow in self-pity when the miles get particularly hard or steep. 

[Editor’s Note: “Miles to Go" won first place in the Society of Environmental Journalists’ outstanding student reporting award. It also won the National Academies' Eric and Wendy Schmidt award for excellence in science communication, the Society of Professional Journalists' (Northern California Chapter) Excellence in Reporting award and the Lowell Thomas award for excellence in travel writing.]

Bing Lin is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Sydney and a photojournalist with the International League of Conservation Photographers. His research focuses on social-ecological resilience in coastal communities around the world, and his upcoming book, “A Sea of Fading Color” (University of Chicago Press), describes the ebbing life of coral reefs and their intertwined fate with humanity. Follow more of his work at www.thebinglin.com.

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* From the weekly news magazine SEJournal Online, Vol. 11, No. 33. Content from each new issue of SEJournal Online is available to the public via the SEJournal Online main page. Subscribe to the e-newsletter here. And see past issues of the SEJournal archived here.