A little more than 400 miles; 69,000 feet vertical gain. Rain, snow, ticks, and poison oak. Addison Jerlow conquered all these things in 21 days this spring on the Condor Trail.
“I was going to do a thru-hike of the Pacific Crest Trail and was doing a train hike with my uncle. This was in like, 2018,” Jerlow said. “And he was just like, ‘The PCT is whatever, but the Condor Trail—that’ll kick your ass, you have no chance at that.’ And I was like, ‘Well, it’s the Condor Trail.'”
The Condor Trail runs through Los Padres National Forest, but it isn’t a continuous trail from Ventura to Monterey, per se.
“It’s more of a route than a trail. It connects a lot of trails, like existing trails and roads, but it also has a lot of historic trails which haven’t been maintained and/or have been decommissioned,” Jerlow said. “So, they aren’t maintained as well. There are some sections with no trail, compared to a more traditional thru-hike, where you have signage the entire time.”
Only a few have really tried to complete the trail in its entirety. According to National Geographic, there’s no official record of every person that’s conquered the trail, but Brittany Neilson is known to be the first person to complete it in 2015.
In 2022, Matthew “Masochist” Hengst made a record time of finishing the trail in 29 days, but Jerlow recently beat that by eight days.
Jerlow is a project manager for the Los Padres Forest Association, a nonprofit that works alongside the U.S. Forest Service to help maintain recreation areas in the national forest, so he already knew the trail well. Based on the weather patterns last winter, he thought that March 2025 was his time to complete it.
“Because we had two wet winters in a row followed by a dry winter … I was like, all right, it’s going to be a good year,” he said, laughing. “And then, of course, it rained almost the whole time I was doing it. It didn’t rain at all in February, and then just the whole month though, March we got a bunch of rain.”
He also knew much of the route wouldn’t be maintained and that the brush would likely be feet tall. This meant that he would spend a lot of time crawling and even digging his way through bushes just to remain on course.
“I think just being prepared for that mentally and knowing that you’re not just going for a hike, that you’re going to be … falling down some hills and going through just an egregious amount of poison oak,” he said. “Hiking is not the hard part.”
On his biggest day, Jerlow hiked 33 miles, and he only spent one night in town (downtown San Luis Obispo) during his entire 21 days—needing a chance to let his gear dry amid night after night of rain.
“I had my third day in a row where the humidity was too high and/or it was raining, so I couldn’t ever dry my gear out. And so you’re inside of your tent getting really wet from condensation, even if it’s not actively raining. If you can’t dry that out each day you continue to get wet,” he said. “And your sleeping bag starts to get wetter and wetter, and at some point, it stops insulating.”
After a night of receiving 2.2 inches of rain, he booked it into the city for some shelter.
“I actually called an Uber to pick me up at like 9 p.m. in the dark on Cuesta Grade, going through the mud and rain all day,” he said. “The Uber was there in five minutes, and he looked a little concerned, but he popped open the trunk and let me put my stuff in there covered in mud. He’s like, ‘Can’t say I’ve ever done this before.’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t expect you to have done this before, but thank you for stopping.'”
On average, Jerlow hiked 20 miles per day and said his body held up surprisingly well, except for his feet, which blistered thanks to endless moisture from river crossings and rainy nights.
“My feet just never dried out. So I did get terrible blisters the entire time. Like, I’ve never gotten blisters, I don’t get blisters,” he said. “I had my feet just taped up with KT tape, so nothing rubs. Like, my whole foot was just a piece of tape on both feet, which is also really tough to keep on when they’re wet. … But I think when your feet are that wet, your callouses you’ve been building up for however long, they’re just soup now.”
What Jerlow said he could always rely on each day of the trail was a red-tailed hawk, which he called his spirit animal.
“Every day. It was a different one, but every day, at some point, a red-tailed hawk would circle above me and caw,” he said, “Which was kind of cool, because I didn’t see a lot of animals in the early season.”
His biggest realization while being solitary among nature he said was the need for trail restoration.
“This is a great hike. It would be the best hike in the whole world if you weren’t crawling for a lot of it,” he said. “I was less excited to go hiking again afterward, and more excited to go do trail work and find ways to get more trail work done because it’s just so needed in this forest. There’s just so many trails that are so overgrown because of deferred maintenance for years and years, and we have got to get them open.”
For anyone interested in completing the Condor Trail, or even hiking portions of it, Jerlow recommended reading The Condor Trail Guidebook by Brian Sarvis, a mile-by-mile guide that offers tips on good places along the trail to store food and provides recent maps and trail conditions.
“I think that you should do some shorter two-to-three-night trips in the Los Padres to kind of get used to the terrain you’re going to be in and the amount of brush that you’re going to be dealing with every day,” Jerlow said. “You can go to all these different camps and stuff, and so kind of figure out the speed you want to do it, and then really focus on your logistics for caching your food, how much food you’re going to need, which towns you’re going to go into. Hopefully you have some friends nearby. If not, how you are going to deal with getting into town or getting yourself food.”
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Get Outside – Summer/Fall 2025
This article appears in Get Outside – Summer/Fall 2025.