Before she left Soquel last April, Savannah Fitz mapped her solo through-hike of the Pacific Crest Trail. A perfectly unbroken line followed the 2,650-mile path from Mexico to Canada, the only tangents marking a few side trips to pick up munitions and enjoy a warm shower.

If Fitz were to trace her path now, with just over 500 miles to go, it would look more like a toddler’s scrawl, full of random lines and loops.

A month after high river levels and snowpack in California’s Sierra Nevada first caused her to veer from the trail, Fitz and thousands of other PCT hikers like her are now having to circumnavigate numerous fires raging through Oregon and Washington. It’s been such a challenging year that Fitz said it’s led to a new slogan among the PCT Class of 2017:

“2017 — We tried.”

“I would probably say this is the most insane the PCT has ever been,” Fitz, 25, said, “the most the PCT has ever thrown at a group of hikers.”

Mark Larabee, the associate director of communications and marketing for the Pacific Crest Trail Association, wouldn’t put superlatives on the season. Still, he acknowledged hikers have had more than their share of challenges this year.

“This has been one of those years where there wasn’t a clean border-to-border hike for through-hikers,” Larabee said. “They’re having to make really tough decisions, and it’s almost impossible to find a place you can go and not get some smoke.”

Larabee had first-hand knowledge of that. He was speaking from his office in Portland, where he said ash would occasionally rain down and where he choked on smoke while out running an errand. He noted that currently it is physically impossible for a PCT hiker to travel from Oregon to Washington without getting off the trail because of the fires, which have burned about 640,000 acres in the state. Even many of the re-route options are closed, meaning hikers have to find another mode of transportation around the fire areas.

Fitz also took refuge in Portland for a few days after being forced off the trail at Lolo Pass in the Mount Hood National Forest, near the town of Zigzag. She said one day she and some fellow hikers were reveling in a beautifully clear sky and a scenic view of Mount Jefferson and Mount Hood. The next, everything went dark with smoke.

“We woke up and we were like, ‘What’s going on? We can’t see anything,’” she recalled. “We ran into a group of people walking in the other direction. They said, ‘There’s a fire up ahead, and we’ve been told we have to turn around.’”

Her group at the time was only about 25 miles from the Oregon/Washington border and crossing the Bridge of the Gods, she said.

Some hikers chose to walk on the paved and fire roads around the burn area, but she knew that would be too hard on her body. Plus, she had already been forced to hitchhike around a couple other sections of the trail, including when she was hiking in California’s John Muir Wilderness in late July.

At that time, mortally high river levels, caused by snowpack 200 percent above average in the Sierra Nevada, had forced her to skip ahead and pick up the trail in Ashland, Ore., until passage became safer. When she returned to the Kings River area in mid-August to connect her path, she knew she and her companions had made the right choice to jump ahead.

“It was green and lush and there was snow on top of the passes. It was the way it looks in a normal summer, but for us it was a completely different world,” Fitz said. “We didn’t feel isolated in the snowy nowhere-land.”

But when Fitz returned to Ashland at the beginning of the month to continue her trek toward Canada, she found a different town. Smoke had already begun to muddy the air. Still, she pressed on until she got turned around near Lolo Pass, about six miles northwest of Mount Hood, due to the Eagle Creek fire.

Fitz set out onto the trail again on Friday with a new hiking partner, Austin “Zoro” Higuera of Seattle, whom she’d met earlier on the trail.

“I would rather have a partner at this point,” said Fitz, who began hiking solo but soon connected with a couple from Phoenix who had to leave the trail to return to work. “There’s so much constant decision making, and I feel I would rather not do it by myself.”

Fitz hoped to be able to gain access to the two Oregon sections she had to skip over, one of 90 miles and one of 25. Failing that, though, she said she planned to soldier on toward Canada and not look back — at least not this year.

“I feel that when I get to Canada this year, I want it to feel like the end of this voyage,” she said.

And what a long, strange voyage it has been.

“Some of this is so truly out of our control, there’s nothing we can do,” she said. “You have to realize it’s part of the adventure.”

Contact Julie Jag at 831-706-3257.