Category: Backpacking

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New Zealand part 6 – 4 Days on the Kepler Track

Day 1

A gravelly shore against a dark forest. In the distance a small boat carrying a collection of early-morning hikers grumbles its way across a massive, still lake. As the boat bumps its nose onto the shore a variety of hikers disassemble, me at the front. Then, one after another, packs are hoisted, straps tightened and folks begin wandering up the trail, me at the back. Slipping noiselessly into the beech forest it is cool, quiet and damp. Trees drooping under hanging clumps of Spanish moss like wispy strands of an old man’s hair. Leaden skies threaten but never quite deliver on the promised rain.

Today is our first day on the Kepler Track, a four-day trek and one of New Zealand’s famed Great Walks. The Kepler promises an epic ridge traverse, camping on the shores of an enormous glacially-carved lake, and the chance to swim in crystal clear mountain rivers. But, first we have to get there. So we climb, all we will do today is climb along a manicured trail of undulating switchbacks. Immediately my legs begin to protest. Tired with achilles tendons like straining piano wires, like any moment they might snap and rupture through the skin of my lower leg. Equally fragile is my ego. Hence, the back of the pack start. As my fellow hikers steadily pull away ahead of me I stop frequently to stretch, or even just to pause and let the strain in my legs ease the smallest amount. But soon, too soon to feel good about it another wave of hikers pass me, the bird chatter and silence cut by the sounds of hard breathing and trekking poles against stone. It seems like everybody and their mom passes me on this ascent. As I step to the side of the trail for the hundredth time I try and rather fail to not let this discourage me. “This is just going to be hard until it’s not,” I tell myself like I have so often on this trip. And then I just keep walking, because what else is there to do?

Suddenly, the beech trees give up their dominance over the mountain and we are popped out above tree line into a snow globe of dense cloud and golden grass. And at the edge of this snow globe I see the most beautiful thing I have seen all day: it’s a sign. Not a metaphorical or spiritual sign but literal sign in the cheery yellow and green of the Department of Conservation. It reads: 45 mins. to Luxmore Hut. I could weep with joy, I almost do. But it is very difficult to hike uphill when you are crying so I restrain myself to bodily hugging said sign and walking on into the clouds.

Luxmore hut reveals itself around a bend in a shallow bowl. Though well designed and utilitarian in aesthetic the hut still manages to blend into the hillside and I realize upon our arrival that I have made it here within the time estimate that the DOC gives for all hikes. So then, perhaps I am getting faster, even if it’s only just a little.

Day 2

Keith and I are only 50 meters above the hut when the first helicopter thump-thump-thumps its way into view. With clearly practiced precision it touches down on the pad, disgorges its few passengers and plummets down off the ridge before another helicopter rumbles its way over the ridge. We watch as the same routine repeats itself again and again until all the day hiker tourists are huddled on the porch of the hut, rotor was whipping their hair. Then, as soon as it all started the hills fall silent to the sound of the fierce mental birds and Keith and I are left to begin our first climb of the day.

The climbing is hard today, of course it is. But the route is exceptional, the views even more so, and that makes the whole thing easier. From any given high point one can see the trail snaking into the distance along ridge top and through scooping bowl. A little slice of brown dirt dancing across the sky. The scene is almost too grand to comprehend the scale of what we are seeing. That is, until a little human backpacker on the ridge brings bearing on perspective and we realize how far there still is to go. So go we must. And in the later half of the day I actually manage to pass someone! It’s such a minor and ultimately meaningless accomplishment but I am more than happy to revel in those moments like the finisher of some epic race.

And then it’s all down hill. Literally. Keith and I pass a couple more people before the descent begins and then we are racing down the switchbacks as fast as we can if for no other reason than to feel our bodies work without the required dependency on our lungs. The beech trees return, treeline dropping like a final curtain call beneath which we’ll spend the rest of the day and the rest of the trek.

Day 3

Keith and I are wading through hip deep water in one of our classic shortcuts that will invariably take much longer than if we had just stayed on the trail. Still, after hours spent walking the rolling hills and deep forests of the Kepler Track the flat sands of Shallow Cove were too enticing to ignore. From the short beach we can see our third and final hut, Moturau. It looks so close, we’ll just follow the beach along. Well, that is until we find a massive fallen tree blocking our path and a forest too deep and dense to cut through. So it’s into the mercifully warm waters of lake Manapouri as we cut around the large tree. I can hear Keith behind me laughing as I half-sing my anxieties about the deepening water and mushy lake bottom. And once we’re around the tree we keep walking through the water because why not. Sometimes hiking is boring and sometimes it’s full of strange moments and laughing at nothing much at all.

The first thing I want to do when we arrive at the hut is get back in the water. It’s a rare thing to find a mountain lake that’s actually warm enough to enjoy swimming in. And, as an alternative to sitting on the humid shore with the biting sandflies, there’s really no contest. We stow our bags and strip down to our boxers, leaving damp shorts and sun shirts to dry. Then it’s in to the water where I stand for a long, long time. Letting the sun nuzzle against the bare skin of my chest while inside I do backflips of joy around the simple fact that I will never have to wear a damp bra ever again, never ever ever again. I keep my back to the shore because I don’t want to think about the people standing there and what they are or aren’t thinking about me. I just want to stay in this one for a while longer, until I can feel my skin start to redden and I am forced to once again don clothes and return to the land and the realm of my fellow hikers.

Day 4

I wake in the middle of the night and reflexively slap my foot against the bite of a sandfly. Or, at least I think it’s a sandfly, hard to tell in the dark, maybe it’s just one of my existing bites itching me. Everything is itching me so I do what I can, pull my tights on and my sleeping bag around me and fall back into a fitful sleep.

When I awake again it’s morning and half the bunks around us have already cleared out. Today is the last day on the Kepler Track for most of us and it would seem that folks are ready to be up and done. I can hardly blame them. Four days of hiking and three nights sleeping in communal bunk rooms will have most hikers ready for a town day. Keith and I forgo breakfast, holding on to our hunger for a few more hours and a proper meal in town. Today we only have a handful of miles to the bridge at Rainbow Reach and our waiting car. The track is mostly flat except when it climbs in and out of river drainages—which are more frequent than my tired legs would prefer. But when I stop the biting sandflies find me and so I push on and on. Keith drops back to read a sign with Simon and a pointless flare of competitiveness strikes up inside me; I want to be the first one back to the parking lot. Or, said another way, I’m bored of hiking through the trees and I want the reward of real food. So I press on and my knees protest. Every small climb becomes an obstacle, every steep downhill a mincing dance on sore knees. I’m checking my maps almost as often as I check over my shoulder for Keith.
At last, finally at last I see the Rainbow Reach bridge over the Waiau River and the parking lot beyond, just as I’m sure I hear Keith’s voice behind me on the trail. I hit the bridge at a pace that would make an Olympic speed walker proud and quickly discover that the bridge feels far sketchier under foot than I would really prefer. But at this point it’s irrelevant, the car is on the far side of this bridge and soon so am I. I fling my bag onto the ground and strike a relaxed pose on a bench just as Keith hits the far side of the bridge. My feigned nonchalance is betrayed by my racing heart but in this moment it doesn’t matter at all. Because I, dear reader, I am the fucking winner of a race against no one.

At last, finally at last I see the Rainbow Reach bridge over the Waiau River and the parking lot beyond, just as I’m sure I hear Keith’s voice behind me on the trail. I hit the bridge at a pace that would make an Olympic speed walker proud and quickly discover that the bridge feels far sketchier under foot than I would really prefer. But at this point it’s irrelevant, the car is on the far side of this bridge and soon so am I. I fling my bag onto the ground and strike a relaxed pose on a bench just as Keith hits the far side of the bridge. My feigned nonchalance is betrayed by my racing heart but in this moment it doesn’t matter at all. Because I, dear reader, I am the fucking winner of a race against no one.

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New Zealand part 4 – 3 Days on Stewart Island

Day 1 –

“This is going to be hard until it’s not” I remind myself as I plod up the steep hill leading us out of town and towards the trailhead. “What you are doing right now,” I remind myself, “is what is going to make this better.” But my legs, being that they are legs, cannot hear me and so they rudely continue to protest, aching with a soreness earned almost a week ago on the climb to Muller hut.

Today is a recovery hike, allegedly. Seven miles and 800 feet of gain into the North Arm hut, a large shed of a building sitting along an inland bay on the Rakiura Track on Stewart Island. “This should be easier than it is” I think to myself, “I should be in better shape than I am,” I think to myself as I reminisce about last summer, about the PCT four summers ago when this distance and gain would have been the work of a couple of hours, not half a day. Or more.

I feel sad and lonely in this body of mine which has lost so much of the fitness it once had. I want to chide myself for not trying harder, for not training more in the weeks and months before we left for New Zealand. But could I have done more? Or did I do exactly what I was capable of in the moments I had to do it? I suppose neither matter much now and thoughts like these make it no easier to walk uphill under the weight of a heavy pack. And besides, I am not alone, Keith is here with me, up ahead just a little. Walking stoically under his own pack and waiting for me when I stop.

The paved road becomes a dirt road becomes a wide gentle path leading through the rainforested trees. Above and around us chime a cacauphony of the most rediculous bird calls I have ever heard: some like squealing dog toys, others whistling near-human, while others still sound like they are programming the deck of the USS Enterprise in an early episode of Star Trek. All around us is a wall of verdant green, limbs positively dripping under the weight of their summer foliage. The ground below a speckled garden with ferns exploding upwards like a thousand thousand fountains of green. It’s magical here, in its own way, far from the stark high alpine which I am usually drawn to. Down here there are no sweeping vistas, no miles-long panorama. But instead, the beauty of the small things bursting into life, a curl of a new fern or the brightest green of moss upon a tree. My lungs feel brighter and more full just for being here.

Eventually it begins to rain, because rainforest. Then it stops, because summer. And finally the hike culminates in a series of what Appalachian Trail hikers call PUDs (pointless up and downs) before at last the hut is revealed, a green window shining and reflecting between the ferns. As I strip away my rain-sodden clothes and exchange them for the dry ones in my bag I resist the urge to calculate miles and times and distances. After all, the numbers won’t help and this is just going to be hard until it isn’t.

Day 2 –

The debate with myself lasts a solid 20 minutes as I watch the gentle lap of the water push the tide in and my fellow hikers come and go along the beach. Finally, after so long, finally I pull my shirt over my head and lay back along the rocks. The mid-day sun, cooled by the ocean breeze rests its warm head against the skin of my chest and I feel at home and alive and exposed all at once—I could almost cry at the sheer volume of emotions cascading through me. In my ears Spotify’s Transcend playlist brings the music of my community close and I feel held by their songs, by the rocks against my own body.

Amid the glare of the southern sun I have been wanting, no aching to strip away my shirt like all the other boys and bare my chest to the sky. To let the sun bake down upon my scars and bronze my pallid chest. My new chest, as I have been thinking of it for more than a year. A chest free of the binds of my sex, free of the constraints of a gender that never felt truly like my own. And in this moment I feel a kind of wholeness I have never known. Not freedom, per say, for in the back of my mind I am still keeping track of everyone on this little spit of land: the old Aussies bobbing in the water, the woman with her book in the shade of the trees. Do they notice me, can they see my scars, are they thinking of me in any way at all? Because when you are trans, safety can never be assumed, and when you are like me, trans without an easily pegged gender, you are always a threat and therefore threatened by the fragile egos of the cisgender. But right now the caress of the sky upon my body, the music of my people in my ears, I let my guard down just a little and let myself be held in this one, perfect moment.

Day 3 –

“It looks like that rain is going to blow in within the next hour,” I say, before realizing that I actually have no idea what I’m talking about, never having been to Stewart Island before much less New Zealand as a whole. My knowledge of mountainous weather patterns is based exclusively in the northern hemisphere and within that an even smaller collection of mountain ranges and ecosystems. Even the simple fact that the sun arcs through the northern sky instead of the southern is throwing me so far off that I often don’t know which direction I’m facing. I donate a moment of mental energy to marvel at my limitations and smallness atop this great blue rock before pointing my muddy shoes down the trail and beginning to walk.

Today the forest feels different. Somehow more open under the gentle light of an overcast sky. More full of bark and branches than the riotous green that comes with bright sun. My hamstrings and calves still burn on the uphills, still demand that I stop and stretch more often than my ego would like. But the PUDs feel more mellow going this way, shallower climbs with short, steep descents and much of the morning is spent leapfrogging other hikers who spent the night with us at North Arm hut. Pleasantries; greetings; encouragement; round and round we go until Keith and I find ourselves alone in a long stretch between hikers. The threat of rain looms as we inch towards town. I fantasize about the small warm room that Keith and I have reserved at the hostel there. The trail pitches down and I push my legs to churn faster, to ride them forward like I used to but can no longer do. In a turn of almost but not quite perfect timing the sky opens as we hit the outskirts of town and Keith and I rush forward into the arms of a simple hostel lobby, then into our small warm room where I no longer need to push my body forward. Tomorrow is a rest day, a driving day, heading north once again and into the mountains. It would seem, that’s the only thing I know how to do.

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SDTCT – Day 8

Mile 140 to mile 153.7 (the end)

By the time the others start stirring I have already spent an hour watching the sky lighten through the window of Sasha’s parents house. At this point in the trip it’s not even remarkable that I’m barely sleeping, it has become the norm. As I start to pack away my things I take solace in knowing that today is the last day of the hike. Tomorrow I will be home and I will sit in the stillness and quiet of my own company, allowing the tension and exhaustion and pressure to slide from my shoulders. It doesn’t have to be fun, I remind myself. You can still do hard things, I remind myself. Only another 13.7 miles to the ocean. 13.7 miles and I will be free.

Since we are staying at Sasha’s parents house tonight we will slack pack the last section of the SDTCT, leaving the majority of our gear behind and only carrying what is needed. Despite this, the packing process drags on as people debate what to bring and what to leave and Sasha wrangles day packs for people to use. Finally at 8am we take the urban equivalent of a hitch, hopping into two Lyfts which take us back to where we left off last night.

Arriving at the trail freshly laundered and showered feels incongruous with my aching body. But then again, thru hiking is a deeply absurd endeavor so why should this trail feel any different. We set off down a gently winding path that runs alongside a small creek. Almost immediately some folks announce their boredom, put in their headphones and hammer off down the trail. But this morning I don’t want to be alone, I feel no need to push my body through these last few miles. The remaining miles to the beach will take us about five hours and for the first time on this hike I am content to let them slowly melt away.

I walk off and on with Liza, Pilar, Kelly, and Riley. We tell stories of childhood and awkward first dates. We decide that Riley is indeed the coolest of all of us and that Liza is the official cult leader of our hiking group. Everything is uproariously funny, drenched in the glow of the last day of a hike. The trail continues to wind through a shallow canyon past parks and below housing complexes, beside industrial areas and below bridges roaring with morning commuter traffic. But almost always on dirt, a fact for which my throbbing feet are grateful. Mile after mile slips away unnoticed and I am content to let them go. Unlike other hikes where I have used the last day for reflection, today I keep myself occupied with conversation. I have neither want nor need to spend another day ricocheting around the walls of my own skull. I want to be here, in this moment, and then I want to be done.

The trail dumps us out at the side of a busy road as though we are too-tan aliens deposited from another planet. This new world we have found ourselves on is inhabited only by rumbling glinting speeding beasts who wish us nothing but harm. Amid the noise and bustle we make our way to the taqueria directly on track at mile 150 where we eat thoroughly average Mexican food.

And then, as though by magic and kindness and luck and wonder I am hiking through a muddy wetland just a mile from the beach. The sky has grown grey, the air damp from ocean spray.

And then I am there.

The scene is not a jubilant sun-soaked dash to the finish but instead something more subdued and powerful in it’s finality. One last sprint across a busy road. A short flight of stairs. I am standing on a shallow beach which gives way to startling blue water that fades into fog like the end of the world. I am standing on the finish line. For all the tourists and hiking partners on the beach I might as well be alone. I made it. It didn’t break me. But something inside me has shattered. I spent eight days hiking and laughing with these people while crying hidden away in private moments. I saw the best of the hiking community while being reminded yet again that thru hikers are not kind to weakness and uncertainly. There is no fault or blame, only a wild, undulating ride through heat and brush and strife. I made it. I can do hard things. I am free.

Later, after we have snapped photos and played in the icy waters of the pacific, I am laying in a tattoo parlor. A tattoo of a jack rabbit jumping over a barrel cactus is being inked onto my skin. The needle piercing flesh reminds me of the pain from the innumerable scratches covering my legs. Only less. The heat from my rising skin reminds me of the brutal sun at the Salton Sea. Only less. I nearly doze off while the artist works, as though I have grown so accustomed to discomfort that this tattoo cannot phase me. I have forced myself to walk through pain and tears, through the loneliness of an endlessly screaming brain and now I will brand that experience into my very skin. I will carry this with me forever, pierced into my body, into my very core. Proof that amid more than a year of raging metal illness I still had the resilience to do something hard. I am trapped and I am free. Tomorrow I go home.

** Thank you for reading this far, you’re my special favorite. Wild Country is going back to it’s regular schedule of posting every other Friday; watch this space for a new post in two weeks. **

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SDTCT – Day 7

Mile 117 to mile 140

Tomorrow will be the last installment of the SDTCT blog. As always, I would love if you consider donating to the Border Angels fundraiser.

For three hours I am deeply, perfectly asleep. When the others start to make moves at 5:30am I am rudely dropped from a floating cloud back into my body with it’s scratched legs and aching feet. As with each previous day I feel older and more tried upon waking. But today is the penultimate day of our hike, today we reach San Diego, today I remind myself , that this hike is not about having fun. So I get up.

We leave the campground in a dense fog and wind our way through deconstructed suburbs, turning this way and that until we are unceremoniously dumped on the side of a busy road. I need time in the morning to warm up and Riley is kind enough to walk with me at the back of the pack. Within a couple of miles my legs are churning and we work our way up through the pack and out into the lead. The track takes us around a gravel pit, across a highway and up a hillside via a steep bushwhack that has my scratched legs screaming. From the top of the climb we hike on jeep roads and fire breaks over rolling dusty-green hills. The group expands and contracts like a many-legged inch worm searching for shade.

After so many years in southern California I find this sort of hiking to be easy if not unremarkable. I let my mind wander, past my throbbing feet, past the sweat running down my face and back, past the field trip of people behind and in front of me. I think about why I hike long distances. For the beauty and exercise, yes. But more so for the erasure that comes from grinding down my body so deeply into the earth that I am set free from a body and brain that increasingly feel like a ride on which I am trapped. It pains me to think that even out here I can no longer escape myself, my mental illness and my transness. I don’t know what to do about that. The problem feels bigger than I can handle and so I shuffle it away for future examination.

I am lost in thought when I come upon Riley and Kelly sitting in a patch of shade. They tell me that there is an alternate we can take that would get us off this dull ridge walking and would put us within a half mile of an In-N-Out Burger. The downside, they confess, is that the alternate might force us to walk along a very busy road, possibly a highway, kinda hard to tell from the maps. Fine. Fine, I say. Being this close to the end of the trail has me in both a better mood and ready to give zero fucks about anything. But sure, something other than miles of hard-packed dirt and grey-green bushes that culminates in burgers? I’m down.

We follow our original track until it hits the road and where we discover it’s a capital B Big Road. It’s a highway. Cars are moving fast, blowing by in big gusts, their speed and size feel scary and I wonder if this is a bad idea. Riley and I are again out in front of the pack and they think it’s a go so I do too. I wonder if anyone from the group will follow us, but then I realize I don’t really care. They’re all functional adults and group think has mostly gotten us lost on this hike, so I set off after Riley. Time to learn to fly baby birds.

At first there is a narrow single track trail that contours across the hills in parallel with the highway and we optimistically think we’re all set. Then we walk along the shoulder on the far side of the guard rail which gives us a little extra safety. But then, then comes a blind curve with a narrow shoulder and a big, steep hill overhead. Neither up nor through look like good options. This is what they call the lesser of two evils. Time to bushwhack. Riley and I push our way into the shrubs and my scratched legs scream in protest. My brain knows that being up on the hill is the safe thing to do but I am forced to fight my body’s natural urge to avoid pain. We pick our way up to the top of the hill while my brain sends messages of searing pain so intense that they warp back into some kind of sick pleasure. From the top of our scramble I watch the group below us hike down the shoulder, not on the safe side of the guard rail, three abreast without a care in the world. They don’t even blink when they come to the blind curve. I watch them make the same stupid, unsafe choices again and again as if they exist beyond consequences. As if this route were the PCT or AT where trail angels hold your hand and the trail is nicely marked and easy to follow. As Riley and I make our way back to the road I wonder at what it must be like to live in a world in which you think you are immune to harm simply because you are a hiker.

Still, lucky as we are to be hiking into a city, the shoulder gives way to a sidewalk and In-N-Out appears. We scurry inside, garnering looks from fellow patrons, one of whom I overhear talking about the book or movie Wild. They must think we are PCT hikers. Or, more likely, Wild is the only context this person has for understanding people like us. After all, they’re not that far off.

While we must look out of place to the other diners, to me In-N-Out feels like stepping into a spaceship. Everything is too bright and too close. The tiny bubble of cleanliness is too loud, like all the voices and dings and soda machine gurgles are pressing into me, demanding my attention. I want to stay and eat. I want to linger in this clean, air-conditioned space. I want to clap my hands over my ears and run screaming into the parking lot. But the desire for food wins out and shortly after we are done eating we leave. Following our ever-winding track which leads us down a busy road to a suburban neighborhood to a cut through a questionably public open space, then a park, then finally a winding pathway along a small, algae-choked creek. We follow this path until it hits a road and someone pulls out their phone and calls a Lyft. We are thoroughly in San Diego now and there will be no camping. Tonight we are heading back to where it all started, sleeping on the floor of Sasha’s parents house.

Tomorrow we will finish our walk to the ocean.

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SDTCT – Day 6

Mile 98 to mile 117

Hi, me again. Can we talk about the fundraiser? You know the deal by now, human rights disaster at the US-Mexico border, Border Angels uses the money you give them to help people from dying in the desert and educates folks about immigration and employee rights. That they’re helping people on both sides of the border. I know that not everybody has the means, that’s okay, care for yourself first, but if you can afford to give, I’d really encourage you too. I threw into the fundraiser myself because I really believe this is an organization that deserves our help.


The infamous bushwhack starts at mile 109. One and a half miles and 1,500 feet of gain to the summit of El Cajon Mountain, through chest high Manzanita and chamise bush. I moved slowly this morning and by the time I reach the base of the climb I can’t see anyone from the group, only their voices above me indicate where they are. I rush to stow everything on the inside of my pack and start climbing. I feel a little left behind, and then a little stupid for feeling that. Since all my efforts were towards self preservation I’ve set myself on the outside of the group. I’d been so focused on trying to stay in a place where I didn’t feel like I was going to crawl out of my skin, that I didn’t notice I’d been drifting away. Now I felt like a little life raft tied to the back of the party yacht.

At first the climb is simple enough. I can follow gaps in the brush, making my way diagonally up the mountain bit by bit. Half way up and I’m starting to wonder what the hype is all about. Sure I’m getting scratched but it’s nothing to write home about.

Except, I soon learn, I’m not half way up. I’m not even a third of the way up but rather half way up one of the three false summits. Fantastic. Really great. Once I gain the saddle I can see the rolling ridge extending away from me. Our group of 12, which feels so large when we are all collected, is scattered across the sweep of terrain and I can finally see how very far behind I am.

The peak rises in three hulking mounds below a round summit. Only large granite boulders break the sea of dense, haphazard green brush, like a giant, warty Chia Pet. It will be my special pleasure to work my way through 1.5 miles of it. As I climb higher the easements in the brush fade away until there is nothing but persistence and heaving lunges to move forward. The Manzanita has smooth bark and hard, unforgiving branches covered in small leaves. They whip my legs and leave them stinging. No matter how I try and navigate through the brush I end up scratched. My only reprieve is when I can clamber up on a boulder and attempt to get a better sense of a path. But there is no path there is only brush. Above me I can hear the others, see them standing on the summit a rise above me. I start pushing myself faster and faster, becoming careless and all the more scratched because of it. But I don’t want to be left alone, not up here, not adrift in a sea of green leaves and dark red bark.

I nearly break down in tears I am so frustrated. But this hike isn’t about having fun, it’s not about doing something easy. And somehow this knowledge calms me and allows me to keep moving as uncomfortable as I am. Eventually the skin on my legs becomes a singular, burning sting. The pain is both part of me and beyond me, allowing me passage through the dense vegetation with a supreme lack of concern for any further pain. It can’t hurt any more and so I stop fighting it, I stop fighting anything and simply make my way to the top of the mountain where I find Audrey, Beau, Hadley, Ashley our adopted daughter, Muffy, Liza, and Pilar.

The infamous bushwhack is over and with it the only summit on the entire SDTCT. From the top we can see ridges marching away to the east, each one unique and yet similar in their building blocks: dense brush and round barrel rocks. To the west a thick haze blankets San Diego and it’s surrounding neighborhoods, blocking them from view. We’re pushing up against the edge of civilization and walking our way out of the desert.

The descent is knee-jarring in its steepness but provides one excellent diversion. Less than a mile from the summit rests an old rusted-out jeep from the days when our trail was a road and well dressed city folk came this way in their fancy automobiles for a bit of adventure. We however, put the car to a different use. Beau suggests a thru hiker themed Truck Sluts photo shoot and soon people are stripping off their clothes and climbing onto the truck. As the person with the camera I am both photographer and art director, posing, arranging, and encouraging this collection of half-dressed hiking companions. It is truly amazing how doing difficult things in the outdoors can bond people.

Dressed and back on trail the sun grows long as the miles slip slowly by. The sounds of the racing highway herald our arrival at the bottom. It is here where we see Pea with trail magic. And this truly is remarkable. There is no such thing as trail magic on a route so obscure as the SDTCT. But Pea loves this route and loves supporting the hikers on it. The group sits on a grassy berm and eats Taco Bell bean and cheese burritos in the fading sunlight as cars wiz by below us. Incredible, I think, that people would go so far out of their way just to help those of us who like to hike long ways and sleep in the dirt. I try and tuck this wonderment away in my head for future use when things grow dark and the world feels a hostile place.

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SDTCT – Day 4

Mile 58 to mile 77

The SDTCT runs close to the US-Mexico border. As such, it seemed only right to raise money for an organization doing humane social justice work in this area. Border Angels, a non-profit organization that works to reduce the number of deaths on the US-Mexico border. If you have the means to donate I strongly encourage you to do so. If you appreciate my writing on this blog, consider it a favor to me to donate to this fundraiser.

This morning I feel like I am moving backwards. Every time I pack something away it’s on top of something I need and then I have to reverse course and start over. It’s perhaps unsurprising that I am the last one out of camp, walking up the cool canyon that lays beneath the morning shade. The tendon pain in my left foot has receded to the point where I am no longer worried about it. But in its place the bottoms of my feet throb. Such is part of thru hiking and so I walk on.

Unlike my foot, my mood has not improved much over night and as I make my way up the first gradual climb of the day I find myself thinking of ways I could leave this hike that wouldn’t be my fault. Maybe a rock fall would break my arm. Or maybe just a small bite from a rattle snake. Or maybe a severely rolled ankle in one of the gopher holes that litter the fields we so often walk across on this route. I wish I could say that my brain felt like it was on my side today, that I felt well and truly better, but I can’t. Rather, it feels like one side of my brain is arguing with the other and I can’t stand it anymore. I am growing tired of being awake with this runway brain. I feel like a building that has burned from the inside, leaving nothing but sparking wires and blackened timber.

As the track rolls out of the narrow canyon and onto a broad valley dotted with cholla cactus and manzanita bushes I realize that I have service. I pull out my phone and start to text Starman. I want to tell him how hard this hike is, how my meds aren’t keeping me stable, how my brain feels less and less like a safe place to be. I want to tell him I wish I could come home. But I settle on “this is hard, I miss you,” then put my phone away. However, my phone soon buzzes, the message from Starman reads “I miss you too, I can’t wait for you to come home.” In those three small words, I miss you, something in my chest cracks open and sobs rip from my throat with only the vast silent desert as witness. I am trapped I think, as I cry-hike my way across the valley.

The sun so far above presses me into the valley bottom like I am an ant walking across a giant open palm. The others are ahead of me and I find I don’t care where, I am content to be relieved of the niceties required of socialization. I simply walk and attempt to tune out from my brain. “Isn’t this what you wanted?” I ask myself. “Isn’t this what you’re out here to get?” To be worn down, to grind my body into the earth until it disappears, to be forced to listen to my thoughts without the distraction of music or podcasts or people or work. The pain becomes me and I surrender to it. I wanted this, brought it upon myself and now I will see it through. As much as I want to quit I know I will regret it if I do. So I walk. On tender feet through campgrounds of clean-smelling tourists in their gleaming RVs. I walk. Tear-stained and salty through narrow sandy canyons below the hiss and rumble of cars on the highway overhead. I walk. Across flat fields full of short grass and hard-packed soil.

I walk until I am past the last highway I could hitch a ride from. I walk past my last out and find myself seated in the sand amongst the group in the shade of a large bush. Lunch time. Today we get to town and because my food bag is still somewhat full I treat myself to soup and a sandwich for lunch. This basic meal is a luxury and I savor it as such. I listen to the others with their funny stories, letting their words wash over me and away. I don’t want to be in my brain anymore but instead let the words of these people cover me until I find I am laughing along side them. I could sit here forever, I think. In the good, calm shade. Laughing and sharing. I could stay in this moment forevermore and be happy and held and safe. But that’s not how time works and soon the others are packing up around me.

We string out along the hard-packed jeep road and begin the climb that will take us up and over a ridge to the Sunrise Highway where we will hitch into Julian. We couldn’t have picked a worse time to start an exposed climb as the hottest part of the day is quickly approaching. The heat is relentless. A thousand fevered hands pressing onto every inch of my body. Any breeze, a kindness. This is the kind of heat that feels dangerous, intolerable. The road climbs steeper and steeper, undulating along the side of a mountain and occasionally, but not nearly often enough, proving a small sliver of shade into which we can squeeze ourselves. Squatting in the red dirt we complain about the heat, the climb, the pain in our feet. The saving grace of the day is that it is still early and even at this slow pace we will be able to make it to the road with enough time to hitch before sunset. The group hops from shade patch to shade patch, the only person who doesn’t seem to be suffering is Audrey who matter of factly tells us they were made for the sun.

The good, the bad, and everything in the middle. All things end, and at long last we crest the top of the climb and the world opens up around us. From here, round-topped mountains march away in ridge lines toward the inland sea where this whole thing began only a few days ago.

The last miles to the highway slip by in an easy downhill, the afternoon cooling as the sun arcs to meet the horizon. When I hit the road it is to find the others gathered on the shoulder waiting for a hitch into town. Relief covers me like a soothing blanket allowing me to breathe fully again. I am still less than half way done, still held firm by the talons of this hike. But I made it to Julian, and perhaps with enough food and time I will be strong enough to make it all the way to the ocean.

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SDTCT – Day 3

Mile 38 to mile 58

The SDTCT runs close to the US-Mexico border. As such it seemed only right to raise money for an organization doing humane social justice work in this area. Border Angels, a non-profit organization that works to reduce the number of deaths on the US-Mexico. If you have the means to donate I strongly encourage you to do so. If you appreciate my writing on this blog, consider it a favor to me to donate to this fundraiser.

I start the climb out of Borrego Springs before the sun has cracked the eastern horizon, priding myself on my early start. However, as soon as the sun makes its way over the ridge I know I didn’t start early enough. The temperature rockets skyward even at this early hour. This morning we are climbing on a real bona fide trail as we gain more than 3,600 feet in a little over four miles. The sun paints the rocks a warm, glowing pink and I think, not for the first time, that I do not find the desert beautiful. The trail winds through a Seussian landscape of house-sized boulders and scratching plants with their curled fingers clawing at the sky. Just past the summit of the climb is our second water cache and we press ourselves into the bushes in search of shade. My cohorts gush about the beauty of the desert while all I can see are rolling scrubby mountains shot through with sandy washes and covered in reaching, splayed vegetation. They say there are three types of people, mountain people, desert dwellers, and river rats. In that case I am a mountain person surrounded by 11 desert dwellers. We hike on.

The afternoon is one long descent towards another highway and I allow the group to pull ahead. My brain feels too full, chattering with itself, making up stories and playing out imagined scenarios. There is already too much going on between my ears and I feel panicked at the presence of other people. My mood feels like it is perpetually falling down a flight of stairs and I am struggling to right myself amid the tumbling. Toward the bottom of the climb I find most of the group posted up for a snack and smoke break in the shade of a large bush. I stop long enough to shovel down some snacks before I head off alone.

I imagine they think I’m weird. Or that I don’t like them. That I’m a loner, antisocial, a freak. My brain is too full and today none of the voices are on my side. I can’t manage the niceties of being social and yet not doing so makes me feel like I am somehow failing at this hike. Why would I come all this way to hike through terrain I don’t even like if I’m not even going to hang out with the people I came to see? It makes me want to cry, just as so much does these days. But I don’t, I can’t. I’ve never been much of a crier, something which at this moment I’m frustrated by and grateful for. After all, it’s not easy to hike when you’re crying.

A few miles after I pass my group I see Ashley, a woman who started this hike on the same day as us and who has been flitting around us like a serene humming bird. She is sitting on the side of the trail in some deep shade all by herself. I am so envious that my knees almost buckle from the wanting. To be alone, I think, I would give anything to be that alone. But I know the group is just behind me and so after a quick chat with Ashley I press on, pushing myself harder and harder down the shallow descent.

My legs churn and my feet ache and my brain starts looking for a way out. When I get home, I tell myself, I’ll have one single afternoon before Starman gets home from work where I can be totally alone. Somehow, I’ve reasoned, being alone will stop the roiling current in my head. Somehow if I can just be alone, if I can just make everything stop then maybe I won’t be so very tired and so very wound up at the same time. And then, I do something I have never done before on a thru hike, I pull out my phone and look for flights back to Seattle. Or, I would have, but there is no service out here. And so I hike on with my head too full of thoughts and my body weighed down from the inside with this exhaustion that has followed me for the better part of a year. On throbbing feet that ache with every step I march into camp and set up my tarp with the others.

Over dinner that night I laugh and joke and listen to the others tell hiking stories as we eat our dinners out of our tiny pots. In the darkness it is easier to be social, almost effortless. Like it used to be. It only occurs to me now, after a day of being disappointed in myself, that my meds still aren’t right and that my brain is still running away with me. But there is less than nothing I can do about it now and so I return to my little home under my tarp and prepare for bed.

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Sissy

A thick mist presses tight against the tent walls and I am cocooned from the world by white and nylon and down. It’s too early to hike so I’m reading, my phone screen glowing cheery and bright as I scroll through page after page of Jacob Tobia’s Sissy. The book, which details Tobia’s gender-bending childhood and discovery of their trans and non-binary identity strikes so close to home it feels like someone is jamming their finger through my heart.

As I read, big, sloppy alligator tears roll from my eyes and puddle against my ultralight backpacking pillow. Tobia’s coming of gender story elicits the particular kind of pain that comes from struggling to find one’s self. I can do nothing but cry. Cry and wish I was born just a few years later when more people knew the word non-binary. Cry and wish I was a little more knowledgeable about the queer world. Cry and wish that anyone in my sphere knew what being trans and non-binary was when I was a child so I wouldn’t be stuck working this all out in my 30’s. 

But you can’t rework your past to better suit your present.

I grew up a child of the largely homophobic early 90’s where gay culture was just beginning to crack into the mainstream discussion and trans was still a foreign concept to most Americans. Genderqueer was even further afield and non-binary was a word that didn’t even exist yet. And I was a child who liked to dress in boys clothes.

As a child I was a hyperactive, sprinting, adventurous mess who was largely allowed to ditch the femininity ascribed to those of my sex. I credit my parents for introducing me to the idea that gender norms are bullshit. My mother never wore makeup and dressed in jeans and a t-shirt to her job as an engineer. My father worked from home, taught me to cook, encouraged his my sister and I to play sports and that it was okay for girls to want to win. I continue to reap the benefits of having parents who focused on ability over appearance. Brains over beauty.

Still, life is change and childhood is temporary. To me, puberty was a betrayal. Seemingly overnight my genderless adolescent body with it’s straight lines became a mockery of itself. I was repulsed by my widening hips, growing breasts. Suddenly I needed to shop in the girls section. Clothes that were cut to accommodate this new body seemed clownish and bizarre; worse was that my female friends seemed to want to wear these clothes. Short , capped sleeves, tight pants, pink and purple glitter scrawling out sassy phrases across their chests or worse, asses. They sailed off to the land of femininity while I remained trapped on the gender confused island of misfit toys. Clever as I had been raised to be, I could understand how one would assemble the pieces of an appropriately girly wardrobe. What was lost on me was why; why did they want to dress like that? Why did I not?

The years between high school and my first foray into the professional, office-bound world hammered home the idea of why. Because there is social capital, security, and affluence in dressing like the gender everyone assumes you are. And though I was still uncomfortable, still took every opportunity I could to conceal my chest with scarves, I began to develop a look that was feminine enough. Though I hated shopping for clothes I didn’t like. Though getting dressed every single day was a frustrating ordeal. Though I still didn’t understand the rules of this game I was playing, I tried my best to figure it out. To use my brain if not my desire to play the part of woman. And in doing so I even began to believe the specific kind of bodily oppression that women are held to. I dieted: carb counting, paleo, vegan, vegetarian, intermittent fasting, and good ol’ calorie counting. Maybe if I was thin enough I would feel at home in this obviously feminine body. When that failed I tried makeup, styling my hair, plucking my eyebrows, artificially contouring my face. But these efforts were nothing more than secondary acts in the farce that was my life. And all the while I never thought there was another option.

As I progressed through my 20’s I held on to my masculinity through sports and, most importantly, the outdoors. I would rarely think about my chest while bombing down a ski run. Rock climbing, with it’s intense focus and unforgiving standard of safety, meant my gender was shoved to the deepest recesses of my mind. But my true love became solo backpacking; the more remote the better. Away, truly away from other people I was free of expectation, gaze, performance.

Being in the backcountry felt like a return to childhood. In the sort of travel turned adventure, yes. But far more importantly in the way that I could simply be. In Tobia’s book they talk about feigning late-night study sessions so that they could choreograph secret dance routines in their high heels—hiding their feminity away from the world, knowing it wouldn’t be accepted. The outdoors became my midnight dance party, I craved the moments when no one was looking at me. I still do. In a body that has never quite felt like mine, backpacking afforded me the means to move at my own pace, go where I wanted to go. I could simply exist.

Until recently I never thought to tie those feelings of bodily and gender discomfort to anything larger. Certainly not things as substantial as being non-binary or transgender. Plus, I rationed, if I were non-binary, or trans, I would know. Right? Certainly by this age. Right?

And here we come to the lie that cisgender people tell themselves about the transgender experience: that it looks one way. That being trans means you know at a young age that you were born in the wrong body, that you’re meant to be a different gender, and that you’ll go through specific physical transitions to achieve your desired body. 

Bullshit. 

Bullshit bullshit bullshit. 

That narrative, while valid and real, it is also held up as the one and only trans coming out narrative. Because if that’s the only way to be trans then all cis people are safe from questioning their gender. If that is the only way to be trans, then people who fall in the middle, people like me, aren’t real. It’s a narrative that ties physical transition to being trans. It’s a narrative that fails to recognize that being trans is at its very core a simple criteria: being trans means you don’t identify with the gender assigned to you at birth. Non-binary is no more complex than not being a man or a woman.

I hope that paragraph helped someone realize they’re trans. Just as the incredible work of Molly Woodstock did for me. Because sometimes it takes someone holding up a mirror to themselves or their community to help you see yourself. And when you do, it can change everything and nothing. But at least for me the realization that I’m non-binary shook my understanding of myself while simultaneously putting a lifetime of experience into clarity. Everything changed and nothing changed.

Which brings us back to the mountains. To the places where I can bound along like a cut marionette, beholden to no strings but my own. Invisible and protected because of it. Free from constant misgendering, the curious looks or blank stares that are commonplace when you inhabit the hinterland between man and woman, free from the forced self-advocacy that is required by every trans and non-binary person. The mountains don’t ask that from me. Out here I can still be invisible. From others, yes. But also from myself, from mirrors. From that now familiar twinge of disappointment when an unfamiliar face and body look back at me from the mirror. Something that happens less these days but in the mountains it never happens at all.

Out in the wild I never have to explain or ask or justify. I don’t have to listen to people get my pronouns wrong. In the way that these wild spaces belong to all of us and none of us I can be both all of me and none of me.

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Something Has to Change

In 2014, the Elwah River in Olympic National Park was finally freed of it’s two damns. Allowing the river to return to it’s natural state. In the following years the Elwah began reestablishing it’s flood planes. And as a result destroyed a section of the road that visitors used to access the trail to the Olympic Hot Springs. With swift force the Elwah sliced through the road, destroying it. Suddenly, a 2.4 mile approach to the springs became an 11 mile approach.

Lacking any better sense Starman and I decided to snowshoe into the springs and have a relaxing weekend sitting in the murky, sulphur-smelling water. Actually, we tried to ski into these same springs last weekend and I was too tired, and we’re moving too slow to make it so we bailed four miles in. Then we spent the rest of the weekend in the sound-side town of Port Angeles sitting in a hotel hot tub, eating pizza, and watching garbage television. It was incredible. And I am so glad we took a weekend to mellow out. That being said, we both still wanted to check out the Olympic Hot Springs.

The approach to the springs is long and low. When gaining 3,200 feet over 11 miles you’re always sort of climbing, but it’s never steep aside from the one very short scramble that is the reroute trail directing hikers above the washout. Additionally, the views are nearly non-existent, you’re basically following a road through the woods for all but the original, last 2.4 miles of the hike.

These are the perfect hikes to spend zonked out in thought, watching the sun trickle through the trees all day. I’m working hard enough hiking in the snow to draw some of my attention on the monotonous task of not falling on my ass. But this means the rest of my mind can just wander off, following odd doors and strange left turns through the Escher painting of my brain. You should try it some time.

This hike kicked off our spring training as we work our way back from a fall and winter spent healing from thru hiking, relocating, finding work, and not moving very much. Big trips are not simply built out of grit. They are cultivated through training hikes and weekly gym sessions, as much as passion for the outdoors. Starman and I are absolutely head over heels in love with living in the Northwest, and with each other, too (Hi mom, Hi Carol, I know you’re reading this). And part of this adoration of our new home comes in the form of a galloping desire to explore this land. We have some big objectives this year both near home, and abroad that I’m really stoked on.

Right now Starman and I have trips to the Virgin Island and Puerto Rico, ski touring in the northern Sierras, and a hike around Mont Blanc in the works. In addition I have a week planned off-trail scrambling in British Columbia with a hiker I met on the PCT last summer. Plus we’re looking to climb a couple volcanoes, backpack a ton, and explore this great glorious gorgeous gem of a place.

In addition to hitting the gym, the plan is to go on progressively longer backpacking trips over the weekends. These weekends away are something that I love as well as something that takes a huge amount of time and planning. I know that going out every weekend is far from how the average American spends their 48 weekly leisure hours. But these trips help define the weeks of my life, they remind me that time is passing and to see the planet while I have the chance. To revel my self against her multitudinous skin. Which brings us back to this weekend.

Between the forest walk and the time spent sitting in the algae filled hot egg-fart water like the preposterous great ape that I am, I had a nice opportunity to think about some intentions for how I spend my time. I have recently started a new job as a Copywriter and Video Director at TomboyX (though my actual title is the somewhat meaningless Content Manager). Additionally I’m going to be making an exciting announcement over on my Instagram this evening about an upcoming photography project that I’m excited about, but can’t say more about right now. Which means that the blog is going to be changing, again. Ten points to Ravenclaw if you saw that coming. I know I just said this. But first let me explain why and then I’ll tell you how as well as what you can expect to see here in the future. Because Wild Country Found isn’t going away completely.

I have fallen into the busyness trap. I have a full time job, plus freelance writing, volunteering, working out, planning and going on training trips, creating content for this blog and Instagram, in addition to doing all the other shit like changing my car’s oil and feeding myself! I have bought the line told to us by capitalism which is that we are only as valuable as we are productive. And in doing so, created more work for myself than I can handle. And it’s stressing me out. I want to read books again. I want to have down time to go for a walk or make a cup of tea and look at the spring sunshine. I am no longer interested in trading hours of my life for internet popularity. I will write when and what I want. Boundaries. I’m learning to set boundaries.

So many of you have been kind and supportive over the life of this blog. And for that I am so, so grateful. Your comments have made me smile with pride while others have been beautifully candid about your experiences. Thank you for that. Truthfully, I have agonized over this choice simply because of the kind comments I have gotten here, I read and appreciated them all. But I need time for me. Time to reform my life into an experience instead of a to-do list. So here’s what you can expect.

I repeat: Wild Country Found is not going away. On all my longer hikes I will be writing daily blog posts for each day of the trip. These will publish shortly after I get back from the hike since all my trips this year are shorter than two weeks. In addition to that I’m working on a new photo series profiling women, trans and nonbinary, POC, and disabled folks who get outside and what draws them there. You can expect these to be released like seasons, each with six profiles and portraits, probably only a couple a year. I’m creating the first series now so if you or someone you know (who lives within four hours of Seattle) want to be a part of this series, or future series, please let me know.

What will be going away are the semi-weekly posts. So if you want to follow along I encourage you to subscribe. That way you’ll know when I post. Plus, I never give your information out to advertisers and I’ll never spam you. If you want more regular access to my writing I can be found on a few websites around town. Or you can pop over to my Instagram which I post to more often.

Again, thank you for being here. Look for some more trail writing and cool profiles in the future. Sport Bastard out!

Give em the ol’ razzle dazzle.
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Unbalancing Act: Reflections on PCT Thru Hiking

“…this, dear reader, is what I want to tell you about the Pacific Crest Trail. That it is not the romance you expect it to be. Nor is it the suffering which one can imagine it to be, nor the constant elation that many wish it to be. But as with every dream turned accomplishment it lies somewhere in the middle.”

A hiker stands with their arms wide looking at an impressive peak in the distance.

Outside the window the North Cascades roll past as the bus travels south towards Seattle. A verdant green valley stretches away towards craggy cliffs which jut skyward to be capped with low grey clouds. As viewed from the enclosed glass bubble of a Greyhound bus this otherwise expansive view feels distinctly minimized, small, removed—as though I am being sealed off from the natural world. With every traffic-laden mile I roll back hours of walking and this, more than anything, makes me realize that my PCT thru hike is well and truly over.  

A group of hikers gather next to the Mexican border wall.

On March 27, 2018 I stood at the southern terminus of the Pacific Crest Trail outside the minuscule town of Campo, California. Hemmed in on all sides by rolling desert hills and nervously laughing strangers I took my start day pictures. I remember thinking that if it were not for the PCT no one would visit this particular stretch of border wall, this particular stretch of chaparral and sand and sky. But there we stood, 35 pale, squinting strangers assembled under a flat blue sky looking north and pretending we could see all the way to Canada. All the way along this wild stretching journey laid out in front of us. The plan: to walk the land between Mexico and Canada, the height of a country. An act which on that day in late March felt more feasible than it does now, some 168 days later. Bizarrely it is only upon completion of the PCT that I have come to realize how absurdly improbable the task of thru hiking is.

At its most basic level a Pacific Crest Trail thru hike is an exceedingly long logistical and physical challenge set against the backdrop of some of America’s greatest natural spaces. Which, when compared to the romantic notion of what people believe a thru hike to be, may sound overly reductive. But the most basic elements of thru hiking are precisely what drew me towards it. Like a thread tied deep within my chest tugging me forward through the months of preparation, it was the thrill of the challenge that sustained me. I have long been drawn to being physically challenged beyond what is expected, or assumed that I am capable of. Furthermore, this hike was an opportunity to spend an extended period of time backpacking in remote places—something which is central to who I am as a person and seek to do as often as possible. I didn’t want to hike the PCT as a means of suffering my way towards a life realization, but because I believed I would genuinely enjoy it—the sleeping in the dirt, the hours spent walking through wild places far away from the next human animal, the self reliance and accompanying logistical planning.


“I remember thinking I wasn’t sure if the PCT would be a life altering experience, or simply another experience in a life.”

And this, dear reader, is what I want to tell you about the Pacific Crest Trail. That it is not the romance you expect it to be. Nor is it the suffering which one can imagine it to be, nor the constant elation that many wish it to be. But as with every dream turned accomplishment it lies somewhere in the middle. More indescribable, more nuanced in the ways it will affect you. More prone to leaving you staring at your keyboard in frustration as you attempt to express an entire world of roiling emotions into the cumbersome, imperfect things we call words. Early on in my hike, as I stood panting atop Mount Laguna and looking down onto the vast beige desert below me, I remember thinking I wasn’t sure if the PCT would be a life altering experience, or simply another experience in a life. Now that it has come and gone and I am left standing along the shores of the aftermath I can say it feels more like the later.

Kara standing on the PCT in Washington, she is smiling at the camera and there are mountains in the background

Looking out at the great forward expanse that will be the rest of my life, the PCT stands behind me as part of who I am, not the entirety of who I am. An experience that has left me changed, but was not life changing—a sentiment that I tend to feel a little guilty about. As though I should have produced a deeper moral to this story. That I should want to leave my life in the city, throw everything in my backpack, and wander into the wilderness where I would be my deepest and truest self. I know this is the story that many people want to read. But for me it is simply not true, and I have never been a person capable of dishonesty simply to placate others.

You see, there is a prescribed narrative splashed across the pages of books and the screens of social media, a story that says thru hiking will radically change your life or else thru hiking will become your life. For there are a small but highly vocal minority of hikers for whom long distance thru hiking has become the central pillar of their lives. They post YouTube videos about gear and food in the winter. While during hiking season they fill our Instagram feeds with stunning images of wild places and wax rhapsodical about the purity of life on the trail, how the simplicity of living from a backpack and wandering through the woods will lead you onto a higher plane of being. This narrative is so pervasive, that to the uninitiated it feels preordained. In the days after I finished the PCT I was subjected to the constant refrain: what’s next? Strangers who had followed my hike inquired about my next big hike. Would it be the AT? CDT? Something abroad? The online peanut gallery has read the script and in witnessing my success looks to cast me in the roll of thru hiker for life.

Three hikers and their gear sit in the bed of a pickup truck, they are all smiling.

Yet, thru hiking is not something I wish to build my life around. I believe the act is simply too unsustainable for that—you can’t thru hike forever, no matter what social media portrays. And beyond that, neither my body nor mind have the desire to do so. To thru hike repeatedly at the exclusion of all other activities would be to trim oneself into a mere shadow of the multitudes we contain. I am a thru hiker as much as I am a writer, a skier, an adventurer, a traveler. And substantially less than I am a daughter, a sister, a partner, and a individual with myriad desires and flaws.

Kara and Keith smile at the camera next to their tent in Northern California on the PCT.

Please don’t be disappointed dear reader. For while my months long walking vacation has not rent me into a new person for which unabated hiking is the only path to happiness, it has gifted me a great deal.

Thru hiking taught me that there is a great joy in unbalanced, unrelenting forward progress towards a singular goal. The very nature of thru hiking gives us that. Something with which we can focus all our energy towards, an unambiguous pursuit to which we can commit fully and in doing so strip away the banalities and distractions of a more complex life. To realize that balance is rarely at the center of great achievements, but conversely is required for us to be full and complete humans. That balance should be sought in the long game, not the cause for strife in the minute workings of a day.

A hiker with their arms spread wide silhouetted in tunnel while hiking the desert section of the PCT

In the unbalanced volume of time spent walking I was afforded a chance to think, to wander and wonder about my life, to leave space for realizations about what is important. In the broadest sense I came to realize that I do not want to spend my life working towards things to which I only feel the most obligatory passions. Namely, dedicating my life to a career. I have struggled most of my life against the highly American notion that our work lives should be placed at the center of our whole lives. I believe this is most obviously seen in the question we all deem most important to ask new acquaintances–“what do you do.”  To which it is implied “for work.” Not what do you do for joy, or to relax, or to challenge yourself. But what do you do to earn money, who are you in relation to the way you feed your ever hungry bank account. And in the drive for transparency I must admit that it scares me to write this.

You see, upon leaving the trail I am also unemployed and will need to seek work, and what if some future employer reads this and in doing so discovers that a my career has never found a home in my heart? It is subversive in the most basic way to not want to work. America believes itself a country of hard workers and capitalists. But thru hiking gave me the time to fully step outside that narrative and see how artificial that idea is. To re-frame my life’s long struggle to figure out what I want to do with my one wild and precious life, and begin to frame that question outside of a career. What do I want to do with the rest of my life if my job is not the most central part of it, but instead a facet of who I am?

Maybe in some ways thru hiking the PCT simply gave me the space to recognize the full measure of myself. It gave me time to see what I thought was important, and most invaluably, why those things were important to me. To have the time and space to fully observe why I choose to do things, even the somewhat silly things like thru hiking was a tremendous privilege.

In truth my beautiful reader, I didn’t hike the PCT for any real reason other than I wanted to. There was no burning desire to memorialize a loved one, nor did I expect the trail to somehow solve all of my life’s problems. In the most literal sense there was no point to it, no purpose other than that I thought I would like it. In so many ways the whole PCT is a pointless, deeply absurd endeavor. To walk the land between Mexico and Canada along a set line between two arbitrarily decided borders–and to what end? To live a life of social conformity–and to what end? If I don’t have my own own reasons for doing something, then why am I doing it? If I am not finding joy in the process or working towards a goal, then what am I doing and why? Why, I was given the time to ask, does one choose to anything in life?

A hiker stands on a the PCT overlooking a valley, there is a rainbow in the distance.

Ultimately, I chose to thru hike the PCT because the challenge appealed to me and gave me the time to shed the gaze of the world and play freely in the outdoors. And that, maybe more than anything, is what the PCT was to me. A chance to honor myself by doing something that was so purely selfish and joyful. Yes, maybe that is the real truth of it—to me, the PCT was an act of joy.

For joy is not something that is without pain, or suffering, or strife. Joy is electing to go through that pain because what is waiting on the other side is so much grander and more beautiful than comfort and conformity could ever be. To bleed, to ache, to hurt in pursuit of something that you want–that is joy. To peel back the layers of your skin like a wild, feral, inhuman beast, to dig deep within yourself for no other reason than the thrill of adventure–that is joy. To choose how you suffer, to look far into the distance and recognize that this ridiculous idea of walking to Canada is nothing but an expression of want–that is joy. It is a privilege to be given the body, time, and world in which that is a possibility.

So no, the PCT did not change my life so much as it was an opportunity to step away from how we are told to live and open up to the ways in which I would prefer to live.