Hello and welcome! We’re Caiti and Blake and we’re thru-hiking the PCT this 2019 season. We’ll have a rotating cast of friends and family joining us on and off-trail as we make our way north. We hope you will follow along with our journey when we set out from Campo on April 15th! In the meantime we’ll be giving you a peek into our preparation and planning for the trip including conditioning, meal planning, gear choices and more! Take a look around, show some support, and be sure to register and subscribe to receive notifications when new content is published and to join the conversation!
Caiti and Blake have been close friends for more than a decade. While they’re no strangers to living together, working together, traveling & camping together and more – curiously, they had never shared a trail before committing to this undertaking. You might get your fill of drama and intrigue following this journey from that fact alone! Both cut their teeth in an early age of internet journalling and public embarrassment (now known as blogging) and while Caiti seems to have mostly gotten it out of her system, Blake still enjoys screaming into the void. Both are eager to explore many subjects that will shape their unique PCT experiences. For Caiti this includes thru-hiking as a lifelong vegan – oh yes reader, there will be recipes! And for Blake there will be some exploration of how depression and anxiety fit into taking care of your mind and body through the extremes of a thru-hike – oh yes reader, there will be panic attacks!
Who are we?!
Caiti “Grown”
Caiti Holle is a multi disciplinary thinker who works in a variety of fields. By questioning the concept of movement, Holle absorbs the tradition of remembrance into daily practice. This personal follow-up and revival of a past tradition is important as an act of meditation.
Her work and contributions to community demonstrate how life extends beyond its own subjective limits and often tells a story about the effects of global cultural interaction over the latter half of the twentieth century. It challenges the binaries we continually reconstruct between Self and Other, between our own ‘cannibal’ and ‘civilized’ selves. By applying a wide variety of contemporary strategies, her work references post-colonial theory as well as the avant-garde or the post-modern and community movement as a form of resistance against the logic of the capitalist market system. By acknowledging the omnipresent lingering of a ‘corporate world’, she finds that movement reveals an inherent awkwardness, a humour that echoes our own vulnerabilities.
Her work is guided by strict rules which can be perceived as liberating constraints. Romantic values such as ‘inspiration’, ‘genius’ and ‘authenticity’ are thereby neutralised and put into perspective. By contesting the division between the realm of memory and the realm of experience, she plays with the idea of mortality confronted with the power of a transitory appearance, which is, by being restricted in time, much more intense.
Caiti Holle currently lives and is prepping for this 2600+ mile undertaking in Olympia.
Blake “Boomhauer”
Blake’s contributions to the world are on the one hand touchingly beautiful, on the other hand painfully attractive. Again and again, she leaves everyone orphaned with a mix of conflicting feelings and thoughts. By manipulating the viewer to create confusion, her journey references post-colonial theory as well as the avant-garde or the post-modern and the sublimation of self as a form of long term resistance against the logic of the capitalist market system.
Her strategies of endurance are paradoxical. For her, initially unambiguous meaning is shattered and disseminates endlessly. By taking daily life as subject matter while commenting on the everyday aesthetic of class values, she tries to create a narrative in life in which the actual event still has to take place or just has ended: moments evocative of atmosphere and suspense that are and are not part of a narrative thread. The drama unfolds elsewhere while the build-up of tension is frozen to become the memory of an event that will never take place.
Her works demonstrate how life extends beyond its own subjective limits and by putting the viewer on the wrong track, she uses references and ideas that are so integrated into the process of exploration and action that they may escape those who do not take the time to explore how and why her stories haunt you, like a good film, long after you’ve seen them.
Her self representation is a drawn reflection upon the art of art itself: thoroughly self-referential, yet no less aesthetically pleasing, and therefore deeply inscribed in the history of modernism. By demonstrating the omnipresent lingering of a ‘corporate world’, she often works forward using creative game tactics, but these are never permissive. Play is a serious matter: during the game, different rules apply than in everyday life and even everyday objects undergo transubstantiation.
Blake Croysdale currently lives and is prepping for this newest journey in Olympia.
