Dobra hikes Pacific Crest Trail Shirley man’s 5-month trek covered 2,600 miles

The memories of Ron Dobra’s most recent hike are still fresh. It’s no wonder. Just this October he walked into Canada after through-hiking more than 2,600 miles along the Pacific Crest Trail.

Starting on the border of Mexico and California in May, Ron hiked for five months and five days across the most varied landscape in America. It was a trek that took him across the Mojave Desert, into the Alpine zone of the Sierra Nevada, then past the glaciers of the Cascade Mountains and into the northern forests of Oregon and Washington.

I talked to Ron recently to find out more about his trip. First, I asked about his pack weight.

“I only weighed it once. With six days of food, it weighed 40 pounds. Most nights I cowboy camped in the open, no tarp, just a sleeping bag and pad. I didn’t go super light. I used a three-pound backpack by Go Lite,” he said.

The desert is the first test of PCT through-hikers. There, they must travel along one roadless stretch of trail for more than 200 miles, and one stretch of 35 miles with no water. I wondered about how much water he carried.

“The max capacity I carried was 5.5 liters. I also carried a dipping cup, since I didn’t treat any water, I would drink up at every water source, but I did drink less on average than anyone I met.”

He added, “It was a dry year out West, and if it wasn’t for trail angels leaving caches of water, it would’ve been tough to cross the desert.”

Ron has hiked other long trails, having hiked the entire Appalachian Trail over two summers in 1988 and 1989. Then, in 2006, the retired music teacher from Shirley, whose trail name is “Zen Quake,” hiked the International AT from Maine to Canada.

I asked how he got his trail name.

“It was given to me by my music students at [the former] Oak Grove-Coburn School in Vassalboro before my through-hike of the AT,” he said.

He taught in the Greenville school system for five years before retiring. He told me what his trail name means.

“It’s a combination of opposites,” he said, “and reminds me to keep in the present and accept whatever the trail brings moment by moment without forcing outcomes. It sounds a bit pretentious, but I try to keep in that center as much as possible.”

Since he had hiked both the AT and the PCT, I wanted to know how they compared in difficulty. Several of the mountains on the PCT are huge with the trail crossing one pass at 13,000 feet. Many mountains in the Sierra are more than 9,000 feet. Still, he said, “The PCT is easier than the AT because the PCT is graded for horses. The AT is harder because you have to use your hands. But, the PCT is not blazed very often. You might go three or four days without seeing a blaze. Towns are often 100 miles apart.”

With towns so far apart, I asked Ron how he re-supplied.

“I bought food in towns along the way, enough to go the distance: Lipton’s noodles, lots of tortillas, beans, pita bread, peanut butter and I really got into Clif bars, a protein bar.”

Now that he has hiked the highest mountains in the East and the highest mountains in the West, Ron, at 60, is a veteran long-distance hiker. For him to complete the Triple Crown of hiking, there’s one other trail, the Continental Divide Trail.

I asked him if he had any plans to hike that trail.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I might take a look at the CDT. I’m pretty sure it’s something I don’t want to try solo.”

I then asked about the worst and best parts of the PCT hike.

“The most stressful part was straining my quadriceps muscle outside of Yosemite,” he said. “There were times when it took me an hour to go a quarter-mile. That was tough. The other part was when my hiking partners and I encountered winter weather – rain, snow and cold – as we neared the end of the hike. There was snow to our knees, into Canada, with waist-deep snow at 6,000 feet. We were forced off the trail by the snow about 14 miles north of the highway at Rainy Pass. We walked back to the highway, hiked 25 miles down the road to Ross Lake, then about 38 miles north alongside Ross Lake over the border into British Columbia.”

“The best part was a tie between the scenery of the High Sierras and the North Cascades in Washington,” he added.

The most surprising answer Ron gave was when I asked why he would want to put on a backpack, sleep outside, encounter wild weather, cross deserts, climb mountains and walk for 2,600 miles.

“I had hiked almost 600 miles of the northern end years before,” he said. “But I had never seen the Sierras before or camped in the desert. It was kind of like a retirement gift to myself.”

What a great present to give yourself, I thought. The gift of a five-month adventure outdoors. He’ll probably remember this one for a lifetime.

Brad Viles can be reached at sball1@prexar