You can now walk the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail without leaving your desk chair — or at least listen to it. Field recordist Tom Kelly, a 41-year-old Angeleno, spent his 2023 thru-hike capturing audio along the route, and after two years of editing has published a free online sound map covering 200 points from Mexico to Canada.
Each entry pairs a recording with Kelly's field notes: his gear, his observations, what the day felt like. The clips run the full emotional range of a long trail. There's "la posta creek cliff swallows," where birdsong mixes with passing traffic. There's "insects at dusk," all chirping bugs and night air. A six-minute file from the San Gorgonio Pass Wind Farm near Palm Springs captures hot wind, sand, and the drones of turbines while hikers trudge past — Kelly reached it in May 2023 after descending from snowy San Jacinto, getting "sandblasted" in the process.
His favorite came in October 2023 in Plumas National Forest, Northern California: a great-horned owl duet, cut short only because his core temperature was dropping. He describes the female's excitement when the male finally appeared as "heartbreakingly beautiful."
Kelly came to this oddly. He studied music composition at Columbia College Chicago, started recording on a trip to Istanbul, and found that audio immersed him in a place in a way photos and phone videos never did. After a first taste of backpacking on Minnesota's Superior Hiking Trail and a 2019 visit to Yosemite, he scored a 2020 PCT permit — then the pandemic intervened. He hiked Idaho's Sawtooths and the Superior Trail instead, recorder in tow, quit his desk job in 2022, and finally set off on the PCT in 2023.
The recordings tell an honest story about modern wilderness. Kelly initially wanted pure nature soundscapes free of human noise — a priority for soundscape conservationists who see natural quiet as a dwindling resource. Reality bit fast: with so many airports along the West Coast, planes and traffic intruded almost everywhere. Of 350 recordings totalling roughly 50 hours, he kept the 200 best, mixing pristine wild sound with clips that include obvious human presence. That blend, he says, offers a portrait of the trail beyond the idealised version.
Practicalities shaped the project too. Stopping longer than 30 minutes sent his body into recovery mode and wrecked his hiking rhythm, so some good sound moments got hiked past. His kit evolved from a Sony a10 handheld recorder with LOM mikroUsi mics to a Zoom F3 field recorder with a high-quality mic in a makeshift windshield, carried in a Cotopaxi 1.5L hip pack.
The map itself is refreshingly generous: no email sign-up, no cookies, no tracking. You just arrive, browse, and build your own playlist of trail sounds. For daydreaming future thru-hikers, current PCT hikers missing home, or anyone who wants creek staccato and owl calls as a work soundtrack, it's a rare thing — a travel document with zero selfie energy. Kelly calls the whole endeavour a break from a culture that turns every experience into content about the self. His versions is the opposite: he took himself out of the picture entirely and left the trail talking for itself.
