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Hiking 40 Miles Alone on the Trans-Catalina Island Trail in California

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A filmmaker straps on a pack, cuts the dialogue, and lets 40 miles of Catalina Island do the talking.

Kraig Adams built his channel on a simple premise: no narration, no talking heads, just a solo hiker, his camera, and whatever terrain he’s decided to punish himself with that week. In “Hiking the Trans-Catalina Trail in California,” he points that minimalist style at Santa Catalina Island, off the Southern California coast, and walks the entire Trans-Catalina Trail (TCT) alone, camping wild along the way.

• The Trans-Catalina Trail is a 38.5- to 40-mile point-to-point route managed by the Catalina Island Conservancy, starting at the port town of Avalon and finishing near Two Harbors.
• The trek demands roughly 8,000 feet of cumulative elevation gain, with steep, switchback-free climbs and descents across exposed, sun-drenched ridgelines.
• The route passes Black Jack Campground and Parsons Landing, and features encounters with the island’s herd of American bison, an animal not native to Catalina but long established there.

The Route from Avalon to Parsons Landing

Adams begins in Avalon, Catalina’s main port town, where ferries from the mainland drop hikers off before the trail immediately turns inland and up. The TCT climbs into the island’s interior ridgelines almost right away, trading harbor views for arid, chaparral-covered slopes that offer little shade for most of the day. The footage lingers on that first punishing climb — no dialogue, no cutaways to a map graphic, just boots on dirt and heavy breathing carried by the ambient wind.

From there the trail threads past Black Jack Campground, one of the designated backcountry sites the Conservancy maintains along the route, before eventually dropping toward Two Harbors, the small settlement roughly at the island’s narrow waist. Hikers doing the full TCT typically loop out from Two Harbors to Parsons Landing, a remote beach outpost near the island’s western end, before returning — the out-and-back stretch that gives the trail its full 38.5-to-40-mile length depending on the exact route taken.

Elevation Without Mercy

What separates the TCT from a typical coastal walk is the terrain math: about 8,000 feet of total climbing and descending packed into a route that never lets a hiker settle into a rhythm. Catalina’s ridges were not built with switchbacks in mind, so Adams’s camera repeatedly finds him grinding straight up loose, rocky grades, then immediately dropping the same elevation into the next valley. There’s no flat middle section to recover on.

No switchbacks, no shade, no one else on the ridge — just the wind and the next climb.

That exposure is compounded by the island’s climate. Much of the interior is sun-baked scrubland with minimal tree cover, meaning the physical toll comes as much from heat and dehydration risk as from the vertical gain itself. Adams’s minimalist filming approach — long, quiet walking shots with no narration — ends up doing more to convey that grind than any voiceover could; the silence of the ridgeline becomes the point.

Wildlife and Wild Camping

Catalina’s most famous residents show up on camera: the island’s bison herd, descendants of animals brought over decades ago and now a fixture of the interior grasslands. Spotting them roaming freely against the ocean backdrop is one of the trail’s signature moments, and Adams’s footage captures the animals at a respectful distance without turning the encounter into a nature documentary aside — it’s simply part of the walk.

Nights on the trail are spent at primitive coastal campsites, including the beach setup at Parsons Landing, where backpackers sleep within earshot of the surf with almost no infrastructure beyond a permit and a water cache. That primitive, self-supported camping style puts the trip in the same category of solo endurance filmmaking as his cross-country trek covered in How I walked 2650 miles with a single backpack, and viewers drawn to that kind of unsupported multi-day trekking may also find something in FIRST TIME BACKPACKER // Appalachian Trail // MY EXPERIENCE.

Solo by Design

Nothing about this trip suggests Adams needed company to pull it off. The entire point of his channel’s style is watching one person manage the logistics — water, food, camp setup, navigation — without a support crew or a second set of hands, and Catalina’s isolation from the mainland only sharpens that. Once the ferry drops a hiker at Avalon, resupply options thin out fast, and the TCT’s stretch between Black Jack and Parsons Landing leaves little room for error on water planning.

The video closes the way most of his trips do: no wrap-up monologue, just the last miles back toward Two Harbors and the trail ending as quietly as it started.