Quote:
"I suppose I am primarily concerned with water issues. I have made some longer trips but am curious about the PCT and thru hiking it."

If you have little experience at either the PCT or CDT, I suggest that you tackle the PCT first.

For either trail, if you get to the point of being pretty serious about it, definitely invest in Yogi's Guide. Ideal is to buy the latest version for the year you're hiking, however.

postholer.com has quite a lot of PCT-specific info, including a FAQ that will cover a lot of what you want to know.

The pct-l discussion group is typically pretty active, a good place to post questions and get answers, though in the past at least, I found at times a lot of volume of email relative to the useful information. You can also search through their archives, however.

Less volume perhaps, but often resulting in good answers/good discussion is the PCT subforum on whiteblaze.net, http://www.whiteblaze.net/forum/forumdisplay.php?416-Pacific-Crest-Trail.

For water issues in particular, hopefully AsABat still puts out his water report for the southernmost 700 miles. For that stretch, his water report is the most important "guide/map" stuff you'll carry. If you go there during typical NOBO thru-hiker season, there's significant support, but a person can also do it all on their own, i.e., not using water caches except for emergencies. On my trip I ended up using cached water just once, and that just as an alternative to some of the nastiest slime-green water I've ever seen; I could have skipped the water cache there too, but ... :-)

If you have more specific questions, post here or one of the above places; you'll get more answers from folks that have hiked the trail on pct-l or the whiteblaze PCT subforum. I think the latter is easier to use, FWIW.
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Brian Lewis
http://postholer.com/brianle