Dear walker,Nature Steps: The PCT is out. It is the second app we have made, and the first that is not a pilgrimage. Your daily steps now carry you north along the Pacific Crest Trail, from the border monument at Campo to the one at Manning Park, 2,650 miles later.
The mechanics will be familiar if you have walked with us before. Apple Health hands the app your step count. The app converts it to distance and moves you up the trail. There is nothing to log, no workout to start, no GPS following you around. You walk your neighbourhood; the trail advances underneath you.
What is different is what the trail gives back. On Shikoku, arriving somewhere meant a temple, with a history and a stamp. Here, arriving somewhere means a place in the natural world, and the app's job is to tell you what lives there and why.
We want to spend this letter on the why, because it is the part we found most interesting to build.
A long trail is a cross-section
Most trails wander. The Pacific Crest Trail does something more particular: it runs the length of the western mountains, north to south, staying high. It follows a crest, which is to say it follows the line where the continent's weather divides.
That single fact produces almost everything else. Because the trail runs 1,500 miles of latitude, it crosses climate zones that would otherwise take a plane ticket to see. Because it stays on the crest, it also crosses elevation bands, repeatedly, so that a walker can leave a desert floor in the morning and be among conifers by evening. And because a crest catches the weather coming off the Pacific and wrings it out, the country to the west of the line is wet and the country to the east is dry, the whole way up.
Walk it end to end and you have taken a transect across the American West: its rock, its rainfall, and everything living on both.
What the trail actually crosses
The app divides the route into 34 stages, each running between real resupply towns, and each carrying the natural history of the ground it covers. Those stages group into a handful of larger regions, and the regions are where the changes are legible.
Sonoran desert and chaparral
The trail begins in scrub, at a fence, in country that gets most of its rain in a few winter weeks and then does without. The plants here are built for that: deep roots, small waxy leaves, the strategy of waiting. Chaparral burns and regrows on a cycle measured in decades, which is why so much of it is the same age at once.
Joshua tree · chuckwalla · red diamond rattlesnake · greater roadrunner
Oak woodland and montane conifer
A few thousand feet of elevation buys the same effect as several hundred miles of latitude. Oaks appear, then pines, and the walking changes from exposed to shaded within a single afternoon. This is the first place on the trail where the pattern becomes obvious: go up, and you go north.
canyon live oak · Jeffrey pine · acorn woodpecker · mule deer
Granite, and the range of light
The Sierra Nevada is one enormous block of granite, formed underground as magma, then lifted and tilted, then scraped bare by ice. The polished slabs and U-shaped valleys are glacial signatures, and they are everywhere once you know to look for them. Forester Pass, at 13,153 feet, is the highest point the trail reaches.
The living things here are specialists in short summers. Whitebark pine and Clark's nutcracker are the pairing worth knowing: the bird caches the pine's seeds by the thousand, forgets enough of them to plant the next generation, and the tree has evolved cones that do not open on their own. Neither one works without the other.
whitebark pine · Clark's nutcracker · yellow-bellied marmot · Sierra Nevada bighorn
A line of volcanoes
North of the Sierra the rock changes completely. The Cascades are a volcanic arc, built by an oceanic plate sliding under the continent and melting, and the trail spends hundreds of miles walking past the results. Crater Lake fills the collapsed caldera of Mount Mazama, which removed most of a mountain roughly 7,700 years ago. Ash from that eruption is still in the soil for a long way in every direction.
mountain hemlock · beargrass · Clark's nutcracker · black bear
The North Cascades
The last stretch is the wettest and the steepest. The Columbia River, crossed at the Bridge of the Gods, is the only sea-level gap in the entire range, cut by a river older than the mountains around it. North of it the trail climbs into country that holds more glaciers than anywhere else in the lower forty-eight, and the walking gets slower right when the season is running out.
subalpine fir · American pika · mountain goat · pine marten
The Field Journal
The collection at the centre of this app is a Field Journal of 102 species. Each one has an illustrated plate, a range, and a piece of natural history. And each is tied to the stretch of trail where it actually occurs.
That last part is the whole design. It would have been far easier to hand you a list of 102 species and let you tick them off in any order. Instead the app knows which stage you are standing in and offers only what belongs there. A Joshua tree does not appear in Washington. A pika does not appear in the desert. If you want the alpine species, you have to walk to the alpine.
The effect, after a few weeks, is that you stop reading the journal as a checklist and start reading it as a map. You notice that the same nutcracker turns up in the Sierra and again in Oregon, and that the pines it depends on turn up in both places too. You notice that the desert entries stop, all at once, at a particular elevation. You are learning the shape of an ecoregion without anyone announcing that a lesson is underway.
Knowing that a species exists is trivia. Knowing where it lives, and why it lives there and not elsewhere, is ecology.
Muir, and a year of mornings
Every one of our apps has a guide. On the Ohenro it is Kōbō Daishi. Here it is John Muir, whose name is on the parallel trail through the Sierra and whose writing did more than anyone's to make this particular range legible to people who had never seen it.
Alongside him, the app carries a year of daily field notes drawn from the naturalists: Muir, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Thoreau, and dozens of others. One thought each morning, to take out with you. There is also a Naturalist's Notebook of nine illustrated chapters on the trail's great places and ideas, for the days when you want more than a paragraph.
What we left out, and what we did not
Fifty patches mark the milestones, from your first thousand steps to the 2,600-Miler waiting at the Canadian border. There is a full Apple Watch app, widgets, and Live Activities, so the day's progress sits where you can see it. Streaks, step goals, and hydration tracking are all there. The app is available in eight languages, with distances in miles or kilometres.
What is not there: no account, no ads, no subscription, no in-app purchases. Your health data is read on your device and stays there, or goes into your own private iCloud, and never comes to us. We say this in every app we make and we mean it every time.
Why we made this one
Sacred Steps came from a conviction that a long walk with meaning attached to it does something a treadmill cannot. Nature Steps comes from a related one: that the reason a long walk changes you is partly that it takes you through somewhere, and that knowing what the somewhere is made of makes the walking richer.
Most of us will not thru-hike the Pacific Crest Trail. It takes five months and a leave of absence. But the trail is not only a feat of endurance; it is also the best cross-section of the American West that anyone ever laid out on the ground. That part can be walked a few thousand steps at a time, from wherever you are, over as many months as you like.
Start at Campo. The desert is first.
With thanks to the naturalists whose work we borrowed from, and to the thru-hikers whose notes taught us what the stages actually feel like — — The Lost Theory team
Walk the Pacific Crest Trail
Nature Steps: The PCT is available now on the App Store for iPhone & Apple Watch.
Download on the App Store →