Built different—and also a little unhinged
Review: Ella “Red Riding Hood” Raff’s Washington PCT FKT trail journal
“I didn’t know what I was capable of, but I knew I was fit and ready to make hell for myself.”
I can’t remember how I first came across Ella “Red Riding Hood” Raff’s Instagram but I think I was on a bus back from a hike (this one, maybe?) when I began reading her blog posts about her Fastest Known Time (FKT) attempt on the Washington section of the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), and I was engrossed. I couldn’t stop reading, couldn’t look away.
Her stream-of-consciousness writing is visceral and immediate, with the occasional typo and uneven punctuation/capitalization to underscore how unfiltered it is. It was Raff’s blog that actually gave me the idea to review trail journals in the first place.
If you’re not already fluent in thru-hiking lore and lingo, a FKT is basically what it sounds like: a course speed record for a particular trail, or trail segment, or notable route. There are different categories of FKT (supported/unsupported) but it basically boils down to hiking really, really fast, or rather, running for very long distances (ultrarunning).
In 2022, Raff began her FKT attempt of the Washington PCT after throwing in the towel on an attempted FKT of the entire Pacific Crest Trail earlier that same year. She had already attempted the Washington PCT FKT in 2020, but had to quit because of a stress fracture and diagnosis of relative energy deficiency syndrome, which is what happens when athletes don’t eat enough to fuel their activities.
Clearly, this woman is built different—and perhaps also a little unhinged?
“I’m devastated not to poop before I start the clock but I just don’t need to go.”
Raff sets off from the Canadian border in the dead of night, at 2 am, wearing a “suitably inappropriate” frilly pale peach romper with a flower print that she thrifted in Seattle. It’s an incongruous outfit for any thru-hiker, especially one attempting an FKT, but perhaps on brand for someone whose trail name comes from a fairy tale?
The way the garment deteriorates over the days is a testament—a stark visual record—to the trials and tribulations endured. You’d think she’d gone to hell and back, and that’s not too far off.
It’s a kind of out of body experience to read the trail journal of someone whose abilities and habits are so extraordinarily different from one’s own. We learn Raff intentionally chafed various body parts before starting her FKT attempt to create callouses; that she sets timers to allot a specific amount of time to crying, but then doesn’t even use the full two minutes; that she starts hiking before 5:30 am even when she’s not attempting an FKT. I think: Couldn’t be me! Could never be me.
In some ways, it’s like reading about a train wreck, but a really, really impressive one. She knocked out 56.1 miles on day one and woke at 1:45 am (after a sleepless night, or rather, nap) to do it all again.
By day two, Raff’s frenzied hike has taken on the feeling of a fever dream, or a bad acid trip. She makes this pretty explicit in her summary at the end of the day: “Low: feeling like I was trapped in a mythical game where dice could destroy me.” This is a reference to the Dungeons & Dragons podcast she briefly listened to before getting too scared.
When it starts raining she takes off her romper so it wouldn’t get wet:
I eat some ramen soaked in balsamic oil and olive vinegar and it is delicious! The kind of delicious I can’t think about too closely because it’s actually disgusting but the strong flavour and fat with the simple carbs hit the spot right now. The nobo [northbound] hikers look at me like I’m crazy as I eat ramen on the go wearing my knickers, wide eyed and pale.
My nose is bleeding approximately 80% of the time and I enjoy the different consistency of the blood throughout the day. Most often it is like the ketchup water when you don’t shake the bottle properly, but sometimes I get these great bloody congealed lumps of coal.
I mean!! Have you ever?! I am in awe: wide-eyed, somewhat horrified, mind-boggled awe.
The second-hand horror escalates the next day when she falls in the dark hours of the morning while navigating a series of blowdowns and knocks herself out:
I woke up just a few seconds later and promptly vomited. My head was sore and I felt dizzy. I lay in the dirt for a few minutes hoping I would feel better but the sad reality of not feeling very well in the wilderness is: you are not going to feel better.
Raff continues vomiting on and off throughout the day but still manages an incredibly scary and dangerous river crossing.
I continued on but unfortunately some quite vivid hallucinations had started. The donner party potentially was not the best reading material as I started seeing cannibals around every turn, holding severed human heads by their hair, munching on their brains or eyeballs. The tears continued to flow, cannibalism makes me feel sick (weird), I was a wreck. I got to red pass for sunset and it was so gorgeous but I couldn’t get my head in the game. In a snap moment I had fallen into full meltdown mode.
The last part, at least, is immensely relatable—the sudden spiral from fine to very-much-not-fine.
Some unspeakable things happen in Raff’s bivy that night, arousing profound feelings of disgust and pity in me. I feel guilty about this. I wonder if I would have the nerve to put something like that in my own trail journals.
The fever dream continues on day four:
The cannibals are still here today although I now understand they are not real and I can make them disappear with a hard slap to my face. However I have become convinced that meat sticks are human fingers, they taste of gristle and bone and I can’t eat them, despite them being a pretty crucial calorie source. Oh well. Other hikers look concerned as I pass them mumbling about bones and decking myself repeatedly in the face, but I do not reply when people ask me ‘are you ok’.
Jesus.
Not even Raff is immune from soul-crushing anxiety around her pace and perceived slowness.
She writes:
It feels like everything has fallen apart, I truly cannot believe I am behind my 2020 pace…I am violently shaking, so cold, and sobbing so hard it almost turns into vomit. ‘I think I’m having fun still’ I tell myself, and in a way I am. I am suffering and would do anything to end it, but I only truly feel annihilated at my core when I worry about my miles. I decide to let myself enjoy the suffering, and it helps immensely. I will deal with the shame of being slow later.
She shares a video of herself on trail crying and saying, in her British accent (she’s from Oxford), “And I’m stupid. And slow,” and captions it, “This is so so so funny.”
In my last trail journal review, I came down a bit hard on a hiker for her obsession with speed and pace and strength, which I thought misplaced, misguided, and inaccurate, but the circumstances are entirely different. That writer/hiker was a relatively new and unexperienced backpacker, and was backpacking for the sake of backpacking. The whole point of Raff’s hike is speed. The goal is speed. The quest is speed. In that case it is really, truly understandable to worry about speed, even when you are by all normal, average-human metrics very, very speedy.
“I saw the most beautiful lightning storm while most were in their tents: don’t tell me you lose out when going fast.”
Raff’s trail journal is not for someone who wants to learn about the Washington PCT. Some of those details will flow by, in Raff’s rear-view mirror before you even can process them, but they are not the point. It is raw, feral, foul, and inspiring. It is a front row window into a journey to the edge of human limits.
After first reading that she pats her thighs and tells them good job, I have sometimes done the same myself, after particularly challenging runs or hikes.
Although Raff missed her goal for a sub-10 day FKT, she set the female self-supported record, hiking the Washington section of the PCT in 10 days, 3 hours, 47 minutes, and 18 seconds. You can start reading about her adventure in full here.
Reading list:
This is not the usual Pinch of Dirt fare, but here is (some) of what I’ve been reading this week:
David Klion, n+1: “Have We Learned Nothing”
Arielle Angel, Jewish Currents: “We Cannot Cross Until We Carry Each Other”
Emily Tamkin, Slate: “What Does It Mean to Stand With Israel?”
Bashir Abu-Manneh, Jacobin: “Israel’s Assault on Gaza Is Part of Its Permanent War on Palestinians” (Abu-Manneh was one of my professors when I was a student at Barnard.)
I’ve also ordered a copy of the memoir Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape, by Raja Shehadeh.
Wow.