My good friend Charlie Simpson and I planned to hike a 48 mile section of the PCT last weekend. The forest ranger said that there was “some snow in the shady parts and mosquitos everywhere.” As you can see from the picture, there was snow everywhere and mosquitos nowhere…

Saturday’s hike over the pass was tough. Our normal pace is two miles per hour. On this trip, it took us 12 hours to climb 12 steep miles. Forward progress was hard because a lot of the trail was “gone” – buried under several feet of snow – and we had to use GPS to navigate our way back to the trail every couple of hundred paces.  As we crossed the 7,000 foot high ridge we hoped conditions on the other side would be better. They were worse: high winds, snow fields everywhere, and more snow falling.

We hunkered down for the night, cramming down some warm food and snuggling into our sleeping bags wearing most every bit of clothing that we had brought. We woke to frozen socks, ice in our water bottles, and trails with even more snow on them.

Two hours into Sunday’s hike we had made it below the snow line, but all our gear was soaked, and it was continuing to snow. We stopped, ate some warm oatmeal, and decided to push on for another hour to see if conditions got any better. Maybe the sun would come out, dry our gear, and warm us up… It didn’t, it just snowed harder.

So we pulled out our Garmin inReach satellite communicator and called for help, asking our families to pick us up at the Olallie Lake Resort. 24 miles from our starting point and 24 miles from our goal.

The Olallie Lake Resort store had everything a hiker could want. For me, that was a warm wood stove and even warmer staff. They were surprised we had come over from Pamelia Lake: “Only hardcore people do that now, most everyone else waits until mid-July. You’re the first of the season to make it through. They had to rescue someone off that ridge with a helicopter just two weeks ago.”

We are proud to be labelled “hardcore” and to have been the first to make it through this year. But even more, we are grateful to be home with nothing more than wet gear and some soreness!

So, since LinkedIn is a “business platform” let me draw a few professional lessons from our experience…

First: Hope for the Best, Plan for the Worst – we hoped to pull into camp early, read books, have deep conversation, and watch the sun set over the mountains. Instead, the worst happened: our days were all about grinding through abhorrent conditions and finding warm, dry shelter. But, we are not in the hospital with hypothermia or frostbite because we planned for the worst. We carried the extra weight of micro-spikes, cold weather gear, the Garmin, and multiple spare batteries.

As a business example, in my last job we were forming a complimentary business relationship with a new partner. But, despite our high hopes for the deal, we also were negotiating a thorough contract that provided contingencies for everything we could see going wrong. We hoped for a great deal, but prepared for the worst with a strong contract, even if it meant extra effort and a slight delay in starting the relationship.

Second: Don’t Fall for the Sunk Cost Fallacy – there are more proper economic definitions of the Sunk Cost Fallacy out there, but simply put, it’s: “don’t put good money in after bad” or “know when to cut your losses and pull the plug.”

Charlie and I invested considerable time training and planning as well as choosing and packing gear. We were driven to complete the hike, but as hard as it was to stop, we pulled the plug and called for help. Our losses would have been greater if we had continued.

In a business context, at a previous job I launched a big Account Based Marketing (ABM) program. We generated several thousand leads and hundreds of MQLs. The number of SQLs that came from that work was exactly zero. We had invested so much and the top of the funnel was so good that the team wanted to continue the program, but fundamentally we were throwing time and money away. Instead, I cancelled the program and we pivoted to live events which had demonstrably higher yields. We did not fall for the Sunk Cost Fallacy.

So… we are going to complete the last 24 miles of that hike later this summer. Anyone want to join us? 😊

[This post originally published on LinkedIn June 21, 2023]