A matter of length

Having been hiking for several years, I’m used to kilometres and walking five miles made no sense to me. Walking 8 km, which is about two hours, yes, I understand. Hence, there are some misunderstandings that one quickly learns to overcome. 1 mile: 1.6 km. 3 Miles: a little less than 5 kilometres, 6 mi/10 km, 10 mi/16 km, 20 mi/32 km, 25 mi/40 km, 30 mi/50 km. Throughout the hike, I had to interpret my friends' directions, sometimes admittedly with a bit of stubbornness. “Let's meet in 5 miles for lunch”,” Tonight there's a nice camp 25 miles away”.

It should be noted that the people in my group were either non-Americans or engineers, and thus familiar with the metric system. I did not give in and continued to regularly misjudge the meeting point, to my friend’s annoyance. I think all Europeans were also shocked to learn how much longer it feels to have only one mile left, compared to one kilometre.

The metric system remains a blessing. To quote “Metric,” whom I had met at the end of the Sierra and who concluded his hike with these words:

"In metric, one millilitre of water occupies one cubic centimetre, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat it up by one degree centigrade, which incidentally is one percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. It's also interesting to note that an amount of hydrogen weighing the same has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American imperial system, the answer to 'How much energy does it take to boil a room temperature gallon of water?' is 'Go fuck yourself,' because none of those quantities are directly relatable. It's been a blast, Metric Out."

But on the PCT, the important markers were measured in miles, and I celebrated the 500 miles, the 1000 km, the 1000 miles, and the 2000 kilometres (etc.) because whatever measurement was used, it was still a bunch of steps.