[pct-l] The Herd is a FACT...

[Gary Wright]

On Mar 15, 2007, at 3:40 AM, Pea Hicks wrote:
> i'll state again some numbers from a previous post i made on this  
> topic.
> even without the kickoff, if in the coming years we have 400 hikers
> starting, and we spread them out evenly between april 15 and may 15
> start dates, that's roughly 12 hikers starting per day. to me, that
> means clump city at some point on the trail.

Here are my calculations for 400 hikers with an 8 day standard  
deviation:

95%  381 hikers  in 32 days  (11/day)
68%  273 hikers  in 16 days  (16/day)
38%  153 hikers  in  8 days  (19/day)
20%   78 hikers  in  4 days  (19/day)
10%   38 hikers  in  2 days  (19/day)

If you want to see some scary numbers consider if the PCT was as popular
as the AT (1700/year):

95%  1622 hikers in 32 days  (50/day)
68%  1160 hikers in 16 days  (72/day)
38%   650 hikers in  8 days  (81/day)
20%   335 hikers in  4 days  (83/day)
10%   162 hikers in  2 days  (84/day)

In case some of you were wondering--I simply tossed out fractional  
hikers
in preparing those numbers.

If you assume it takes six days to hike from the border to Warner  
Springs,
during the peak period there would be almost 500 hikers on that stretch
of trail. Various government officials will intervene long before the
PCT gets to these numbers.

The weather window isn't going to change (unless we factor in global
warming but we probably shouldn't go there :-).  So if the popularity
of the PCT continues the only way to fight against the Central Limit
Theorem, which predicts bell curve distributions, is some sort of
permit system (and enforcement) that breaks up the random nature of
start dates.

The popularity on the AT has its own set of problems but they are
somewhat mitigated by an almost three month starting window.  That
is radically different than the PCT situation.

Gary Wright (Radar)