Nevada Offers Travelers $5,000 to Hike the Pacific Crest Trail

When Jeff Potter arrived in Carson City, Nevada near the end of the ’90s, he noted an absence: His new home was ringed by low-slung mountains at the eastern edge of the towering Sierra Nevada and its sweeping Lake Tahoe, but there was no real way to get to them without a car.

A California native drawn toward Tahoe for its labyrinth of mountain-bike trails, Potter and his pals grew tired of mounting their rides to roof and hitch racks just to go somewhere else. So Potter, who would eventually earn the name “The Trail Steward of Carson City,” started scheming with Muscle Powered, an organization that had long been promoting non-vehicular infrastructure there: How might he build trails that connected this place where he loved to live to the mighty mountains and endless routes he loved to ride?

A quarter-century and 9.8 miles of single-track later, Potter’s dream is now a navigable trail. Finished last fall just before snow swept into the region, the Capital to Tahoe Trail makes it possible to hike, pedal, or horseback ride nearly from Nevada’s sandstone capitol building to the Tahoe Rim Trail (TRT) and its country-spanning connector, the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT). In fact, Carson City is looking to pay two hikers $5,000 each to do exactly that come the Summer of 2025: walk from the capitol to Canada and tell the tale. (The application window closes May 31, 2024.) At just over 1,600 miles, that’s a little more than $3 per mile.

“Our downtown sits in the middle of all of our trails,” says Lydia Beck, the Visit Carson City marketing manager who hatched the plan to sponsor thru-hikes late in 2022. “And people have no idea that Carson City has a beautiful stretch of the east side of Lake Tahoe. We’re trying to bring awareness to our proximity.”

Carson City will likely never become a “trail town” for long-distance hikes of the PCT or TRT, since the resources and revelry of South Lake Tahoe are much closer to those trails. (And the PCT, for its part, trends westward from Lake Tahoe.) But the small city’s geography and position along the base of the beautiful Carson Range, with other peaks to every side, make it a prime hub for exploration in all directions. Peter Doenges—the 77-year-old retired computer graphics pathfinder who stepped into Potter’s former role at Muscle Powered as Trails Coordinator in 2019—sees “Cap to Tahoe,” as he calls it, as a crucial part of that plan.

“We’re constantly stirring the pot based on prior public processes that approved all these trail routes—and then going about building them,” says Doenges. “There are so many people in this town who believed in this trail, of getting us integrated into this larger system.”

Indeed, the Capital to Tahoe Trail is simply the latest phase of a larger plan that Potter helped to initiate when he first partnered with Muscle Powered. They built Ash to Kings Trail, linking two roads that cut through canyons, from 2012 until 2015, even earning an award from American Trails. Back then, Potter was already fantasizing about how the next trail would reach Lake Tahoe. “That’s another 10 miles of trail we hope to build,” he told Adventure Sports Journal in 2016. “This isn’t just about recreation. It’s about providing connectivity to our community.”

That community responded in kind. Construction began in 2020, and Muscle Powered recruited a professional, mechanized trail builder at one point, as the path rose nearly 2,000 feet and cut through thick brush. Doenges remains verklempt by dozens of volunteers who arrived to work on hand crews as well as the surgeon who gifted the trail a permanent easement so that nearly a mile of it would not be so dastardly steep. Potter, who no longer lives in Carson City, even did the “final flagging”—a last survey to make sure the trail is properly aligned. The very day after the final two remote miles were finished, Doenges saw tire tracks and boot prints cutting across the path.

But as far as anyone knows, no one has yet to take the Capital to Tahoe Trail west, hit the PCT, and head north to Canada. That is where the contest comes in. Rather than hold a lottery of submissions, Visit Carson City intends to vet each application and choose two people they think can go the distance—and, of course, share the story along the way. As of mid-March, they’ve only received a dozen applications.

If it goes well this time, however, they may even continue the program for hikers in years to come. “We’re not ruling that out,” says Beck. “We’re very excited.”