What Does the PCT Sound Like? Meet the Thru-Hiker Who Recorded His Journey.

On any hike, it’s natural to pause, close your eyes, and listen to the breeze through the trees, the lap of water against a lakeshore, the call of a bird. During his 2023 thru-hike of the Pacific Crest Trail, Tom Kelly stopped to listen, too—perhaps more often than most.

While some hikers document their journeys in journals, blogs, or photographs, Kelly, a 41-year-old Angeleno, captured the sounds around him using a couple of microphones and handheld recorders. Two years of editing later, those recordings now comprise a free, publicly accessible sound map representing 200 points along the PCT, offering listeners a chance to experience the trail through its soundscapes.

In the very first audio file titled “la posta creek cliff swallows,” you can hear the birds chitter as cars drive by. In another titled “insects at dusk,” chirping bugs pierce the night. Frogs, crickets, bees, quails, rushing water, and rustling grass make up some other sound moments in the files.

Each entry comes with Kelly’s field notes, including the recording gear he used, his observations, and even what he experienced in that place. For a nearly six-minute clip of intense wind, blowing sand, and fellow hikers walking by on the edge of the San Gorgonio Pass Wind Farm in California’s Coachella Valley, which he reached in May 2023, he wrote:

“finally got to the windfarm and recording a pct landmark. sitting in the colorado desert having just descended from the snowy san jacintos. it is hot, windy, exposed, and i’m getting absolutely sandblasted. hikers passing by as i record the ominous drones of the palm springs windfarm.”

And another titled “great-horned owl” captures the call of the elusive bird. Recorded in October 2023 in Northern California’s Plumas National Forest, Kelly wrote:

“maybe my favorite recording of the trek. i ended the recording just before the male showed up due to core temp concerns. an incredibly tender dialog ensued between the two of them. i’ll never forget just how excited the female was when the male showed up. heartbreakingly beautiful. a nat geo moment.”

A lifelong listener

Kelly’s attentiveness to sound began in childhood in Wisconsin; he recalls sitting in a sandbox in his parents’ backyard, listening to mourning doves one late afternoon. Music was an early fascination, too. Around the same age, he experimented with the weird sounds of a toy keytar. He went on to study music composition at Columbia College Chicago and continued making music. On a trip to Istanbul, he brought an audio recorder along for the first time, using it to document his travels.

“I was like, this could be cool because I can immerse myself in these spaces in a way that you can’t with photography or taking videos on your phone,” he says. “You can close your eyes, put on a soundscape, and kind of be transported back there.”

After graduating the music composition program in 2018, Kelly was ready for some extended time outside, away from a studio and desk. He completed his first three- to four-day backpacking trip on Minnesota’s Superior Hiking Trail. Then a 2019 visit to Yosemite unlocked a dream to hike the PCT, and he obtained a permit for 2020. The pandemic derailed his plans.

Instead, he explored Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains and thru-hiked the Superior Hiking Trail over three weeks, carrying an audio recorder on both trips. After a year spent working mostly indoors in 2022, he reached a breaking point, quit his job, and set out to hike the PCT in 2023.

Packing along a recorder was inevitable.

Conserving nature’s sounds

Kelly didn’t know what shape his recordings would take in the end. His only intentions were to document the PCT’s most natural soundscapes, free of human noise—a priority for soundscape conservationists who see natural silence as an increasingly scarce resource. But even in remote areas, planes, cars, and other people were often audible, making pristine recordings difficult to capture.

“I quickly realized that even though you’re on the Pacific Crest Trail in these very remote places, there’s a lot of human presence within earshot everywhere,” Kelly says. “There are so many airports along the West Coast that it becomes a logistical nightmare to try and really significantly alter how you’re traveling in order to record natural soundscapes.”

Finding quiet was only part of the challenge. Stopping to record and then getting started again would disrupt the rhythm of the long-distance hike. Any longer than 30 minutes and Kelly’s body would go into recovery mode. Some days, he’d hike through interesting sound moments if he wanted to make up miles. Other times he’d stop to record only to come away with nothing.

The equipment he carried also evolved along the way. Two breaks from the trail allowed him to reevaluate his setup. He started out with a Sony a10 handheld recorder and small LOM mikroUsi microphones. His final load out was a high-quality microphone with a makeshift windshield and Zoom F3 field recorder, which he carried in a Cotopaxi 1.5L hip pack.

In the end, the 200 recordings included in Kelly’s map—pared down from 350 recordings, totaling about 50 hours—is a combination of pristine nature soundscapes and clips with obvious human presence, such as the wind farm outside Tehachapi, California.

The resulting body of work balances soundscape conservation with a broader portrait of the trail, offering every kind of listener something beyond an idealized version of wilderness.

“I just want to create a nice experience, and there’s something for everybody in there,” he says.

For Kelly, the project was a way to take himself out of the picture—literally, but also as a break from a culture that often makes experiences about documenting the self. The months spent recording nature became both “political resistance” and “personal therapy.”

The deeper he got into the hike, he says, the more he synced up with nature’s glacial pace rather than the pace of society. Things got quieter, more spacious, and a bit more minimal as he progressed. Without the usual demands on his attention, he began to notice subtle sounds that might otherwise have faded into the background, like the staccato of a creek or the flutter of leaves.

Through this curated sound map, he hopes to share the feeling of being on the trail with people who want to experience it, are living it now, or long to connect back to it.

“You don’t even have to put your email address in as a cost,” Kelly says. “There are no cookies. There’s no tracking. It’s just a space for you to show up and explore and create your own playlist of nature sounds if you want.”