Two Mules, 2,653 Miles

Sixty-one days and 817 miles into their hike of the 2,653-mile Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), Ali Calamoneri ’18 and Noah Fulcomer ’19 were ascending a nearly vertical mountain pass covered in snow. “The craziest incline,” Fulcomer says. “Like, our faces were on the snow when we were taking steps up.”

They used ice axes and microspikes for grip as they heaved themselves (and their 45-pound packs) up Mather Pass, the 12,000-foot-elevation low point between two peaks in the Sierra Nevadas. They’d been hiking on and off through snow since entering the Sierras 12 days earlier, waking up at 3 a.m. to start while it was still frozen solid and stopping to set up camp when they began “postholing,” suddenly sinking into sun-warmed snow.

About 20 feet from the top of Mather Pass, Fulcomer’s left foot postholed. He sank up to his knee. The weight of his pack caused him to swing around onto his back, and suddenly, he was staring down the 600 feet of nearly vertical trail they’d just climbed. With a rock field to his right, there was nowhere for his right foot to go. He began to panic.

Hiking the PCT, which stretches along the West Coast from Mexico to Canada, had been Calamoneri’s dream since she saw the movie “Wild,” the true story of a woman who hiked sections of the PCT alone, with her family in 2015: “I walked out of the theater, and I remember my dad looked at me, and he was like, ‘Oh, no. You want to do it, don’t you?’” she says.

She did, and because she grew up camping in national parks with her family every summer, it didn’t feel like an impossible dream. She got into hiking with the Outdoors Club at Muhlenberg, where she was a dance major and English minor, and, during the pandemic, she watched a PCT hiker’s docu-series on YouTube. That was also around the time she and Fulcomer, who had met at Muhlenberg, started seriously dating.

“In college, some of my favorite courses were creative writing courses,” she says. “My boss said she really liked [my short story] and it made her want to go to Mount Rainier — and she actually visited and hiked the Wonderland Trail over the summer.”

Fulcomer, a mathematics major and soccer player at Muhlenberg, knew Calamoneri wanted to hike the PCT. But it wasn’t until January 2024 — when Calamoneri got laid off from her corporate job on her birthday — that the pair committed to doing it in 2025 and began planning in earnest. During that time, Calamoneri saw that The Trek, a social media platform for long-distance hikers, was hiring bloggers. Calamoneri applied, submitting a short story about a cloud inversion she’d seen while hiking Mount Rainier.

In March, Calamoneri and Fulcomer began their journey (shortly after getting engaged). On the trail, Calamoneri wrote a little bit at the end of each day, uploading blogs when she and Fulcomer went into town to resupply. There were long stretches where even those towns lacked service — by the time they finished the hike, she had 15 weeks of blogging to catch up on. The pair also documented their journey on Instagram, naming themselves the “Two Silly Goosers.” They were well known on the trail as “the Goosers.”

Both Calamoneri and Fulcomer look back on finishing the trail in August, on day 157, as a surreal highlight. Realizing they didn’t have to get up and hike the next day was both amazing — Calamoneri had been ready to quit in Washington — and confusing. 

“My body felt like I needed to keep walking north, because that’s all I’d done for five months,” Calamoneri says. “Having to stop, it feels like when a wave crashes, but instead of the continuous motion of the wave, it’s like the wave hit the wall, and there’s no more water.”