On the Merits of
Walking Really, Really Far

“Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord. Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them.”

Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

The Triple Crown

It was a warm and sunny September day in Rhododendron, Oregon when Adam and Kylie pulled their rented Subaru into a dusty gravel parking lot. They woke in the dark of the early morning to catch a plane from Denver to Portland, and the interim 45 miles of highway from Portland International Airport were driven in a state of quiet anticipation. Just over a month ago, Kylie was standing atop Mt. Katahdin deep in the wilderness of central Maine. She had just finished the last of the three long trails she needed to complete one of the most prestigious achievements in the world of thru-hiking: The Triple Crown. Alongside her stood her partner Adam. He had completed his Triple Crown less than a year before and came to join Kylie for the last few hundred miles of her effort. It was a moment neither of them would ever forget, and now, a few weeks later, they were sitting in a dusty parking lot in Rhododendron outside the venue of the Triple Crown Ceremony, the magnificent Mt. Hood standing proudly in the distance.

The Triple Crown is composed of three long trails situated across the breadth of the United States. In the West lies the beautiful Pacific Crest Trail, which is 2,600 miles long starting in California and ending in Washington. The Continental Divide Trail, right down the center of the Rocky Mountains, is 3,100 miles stretching from New Mexico to Montana. Finally, in the East sits the Appalachian Trail. It’s the shortest of the three at 2,200 miles long from Georgia to Maine, but widely considered the most challenging in terms of weather and trail quality. Together, these three behemoths add up to nearly 8,000 miles in length and constitute the Holy Grail of thru-hiking. Each one takes an average of over a 100 days to complete, meaning that if one chooses to commit to doing all three they are committing to nearly a year out of doors carrying equipment up and down mountainsides. It’s no wonder that only the most dedicated and masochistic of thru-hikers go for this achievement.

The World of Thru-hiking

You may have guessed by now that thru-hiking might require a certain type of personality. Indeed, it does have a reputation of being a world for misfits, and if you boil the activity down to its component parts, it’s a wonder that anybody chooses to do it at all. Who would want to carry a bunch of heavy and expensive equipment on their back and then trek into the wilderness for weeks on end without pay? Such a person would spend all day sweating up steep inclines and pulverizing their knees into powder on long, meandering descents. They’d sweat in the sun, get drenched in the rain, and shiver in the snow. They’d have to ration food and filter all of their water – that is, whenever they could find water. And at the end of the day, they wouldn’t get to shower and sleep in a soft bed. No, they’d crawl into a dirty sleeping bag and sleep in their accrued daily filth and sweat on the hard ground. Oh, and did I mention that there are no bathrooms out in the wilderness? Even something as simple as relieving oneself turns into work, something to be planned and executed.

Indeed, many people who attempt thru-hiking promptly give up! Nearly a third of those who start the Appalachian Trail with full intent to stand on top of Mt. Katahdin quit within the first 100 miles, and another third quit within the first 500. And yet, there remains the few that do make it all the way to Maine. These are members of a subculture that live to live outside. When they’re on the trail, they feel alive, and when they’re not, they’re thinking about when they will be back on the trail. Kylie and Adam are squarely in this latter group, as are the others in attendance at the Triple Crown Ceremony.

Amongst fellow thru-hikers, Kylie and Adam go by their trail names: Tang and Chipotle. A trail name is a funny, sacred thing. One’s given name is for the real world, but on trail, the real world is so distant that it may as well be ancient Mesopotamia. Out on trail one needs a different name for different circumstances. Trail names can be chosen or given, and they can be anything! Commonly, they are bestowed by a companion who notices some personality quirk or witnesses some funny or strange happening. The aptly monikered Chipotle earned his title from his love of the chain restaurant of the same name. Chipotle estimates that he’s eaten Chipotle no less than 2000 times, and every time a new store opens up he is one of the first to try it out. Other trail names aren’t so obvious. The origin of Tang’s trail name remains a mystery to most of those who know her, and she likes it that way. Shades, Sticks, Boomerang, All-You-Can-Eat, Double-Stuff, Longfish, Church, Thoroughbred, Scab, and Dirty-Girl are all names that invite speculation of epics and comedies. Kylie and Adam were happy to be in this room, among these people, and with them felt a deep sense of camaraderie. These people all got each other. They’ve seen what’s out there in the wilderness, and they understand why it’s worth pursuing.

Walking Around: Science, History, & Culture

Thru-hikers aren’t the only ones who have found something profound walking through the wilderness. Indeed, there is a long history of folks who found purpose along their walks in nature. Jean-Jaques Rousseau, Henry David Thoreau, William Wordsworth, Virginia Woolf, Charles Darwin, John Muir, and countless others discovered that walking through the woods could be a source of great inspiration and clarity – a way to not only know the world better, but to know oneself better, too. Reflect on your own life, dear reader. You yourself have probably at least once “gone on a walk to clear your head.” In recent years there has been growing scientific interest in the important relationship between the mind and the feet. Researchers have found that walking for as little as 90 minutes a week can decrease cognitive decline in elderly women, that walking for an hour on a treadmill prior to a divergent thinking test improved creativity scores by 60%, and that regular periods of walking can even increase the volume of the hippocampus, the brain’s memory center. The fact that walking, a simple, non-cognitive task, has such a wealth of benefits for our brain health is on its surface quite surprising. However, the story begins to make much more sense when we consider our ancient ancestors.

Evolutionary biologists have much to say on walking and the brain, and many have gone so far as to credit our bipedalism as a necessary precursor to our high intelligence. The use of two legs rather than four, the thinking goes, resulted in two important changes in our evolutionary history: the development of our hands and more efficient ambulation. The development of hands entailed the development of complex manipulation – the exact kind of skill that required the use of cortical tissue, the brain matter associated with complex thought and reasoning. Additionally, more efficient ambulation meant that excess energy could be devoted to the brain rather than musculature. Together, these changes formed a virtuous cycle. As our brains grew, we developed new skills and tools, like hunting and language. As our skills and tools developed, our species developed more efficient methods of collecting and storing resources. An excess amount of resources meant more energy could be devoted to the brain and its development. And so on. Summed up by the evolutionary biologist Mary Leaky,

“One cannot overemphasize the role of bipedalism in hominid development. It stands as perhaps the salient point that differentiates the forebears of man from other primates. This unique ability freed the hands for myriad possibilities - carrying, tool-making, intricate manipulation. From this single development, in fact, stems all modern technology. Somewhat oversimplified, the formula holds that this new freedom of forelimbs posed a challenge. The brain expanded to meet it. And mankind was formed.”

Hiking as a Whole Human

Of course, none of this was on the minds of Kylie or Adam as they traded trail stories with the other Triple Crowners in that stuffy room in Rhododendron. Their brains may have benefited from the thousands of miles they spent walking trails, but brain health wasn’t ever on the list of reasons why they chose to hike thousands and thousands of miles. To them, being on trail was a way of life, something that was deeply challenging and fulfilling, something that simply wasn’t available in their day-to-day lives back home.

Thru-hiking engenders a clarity of purpose that has become all-too-rare in the modern world. When you wake in the morning nestled in your sleeping bag, early morning sun illuminating your colorful nylon cocoon, there is a very clear idea of what needs to be done, and that simplifies life to a delightful degree. What will you eat today? Whatever you have in your bag. How far will you walk? However far you need to go. Who will you walk with? Whoever is walking in the same direction you are. Beyond these questions remain a few points of uncertainty, such as the afternoon weather or the quality of trail in the upcoming national forest, but life on trail takes on a quality of streamlined unity – something notably lacking in much of modernity. As observed by the author Rebecca Solnit over twenty years ago:

“Many people nowadays live in a series of interiors - home, car, gym, office, shops - disconnected from each other. On foot everything stays connected, for while walking one occupies the spaces between those interiors in the same way one occupies those interiors. One lives in the whole world rather than in interiors built up against it.”

Far from a series of interiors, longer trails are broken apart into segments between trailheads or county roads. However, when you ask a thru-hiker to remember their time on trail they’ll typically recall their experience on trail in terms of stories. After spending so much time walking through wilderness, something interesting is bound to happen.

That afternoon in Rhododendron, a series of guest speakers shared some of their trail stories. A well-known thru-hiker named Rascal shared a personal anecdote from his time spent on the CDT. He described how he had lost his toilet paper right out of town just before a very remote part of the trail, so he had to use rocks to wipe himself for three days before finally encountering another hiker who mercifully donated some of his supplies to him. Later, a woman named Fidget spoke about her seven year hike from the southernmost tip of South America to the northernmost tip of North America - a 22,000 mile epic filled with stories of terror, compassion, and triumph. The stories shared made the room laugh, gasp, and even brought some to tears, yet so many others went untold. Each and every one of the hikers in the room that day had their own stories, their own experiences, their own lessons learned, but most would never be shared outside the circles of a few close friends and hiking partners.

Conclusion: Really, Why Thru-hike?

At nearly 8,000 miles in length, it takes some people their whole lives to complete the Triple Crown, while others make the (insane) attempt to complete it in a single year. Regardless of pace, it is an unbelievably impressive achievement, and it is no wonder that fewer than 700 people to date have officially completed it – about as many people who have been to space. At the conclusion of the ceremony, small wooden plaques were awarded to 2023’s batch of Triple Crowners. Adam and Kylie collected their plaques, returned home to Colorado, and displayed their awards next to each other on a small shelf in their bedroom. They do not show them off to guests, and they do not brag about their Triple Crowner status. Indeed, there’s something important about how such a small token can represent such an enormous achievement. There is a temptation here to allude to the old expression: “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,” but this is obvious, and it doesn’t fully capture the point I want to make.

What does one get out of thru-hiking? It certainly cannot be the little piece of decorated wood awarded at the Triple Crown ceremony, because, if so, what a ripoff that would be! So, is it strong legs and a healthy respiratory system? Or, is it the epic stories of getting caught in thunderstorms or running out of water on a long, dry stretch of trail? Could it be the deep friendships that form in the collective overcoming of true adversity? I think these are all wonderful rewards from thru-hiking, but there’s something more. It’s also the experience of startling an angry bull moose from a nap and taking shelter in a grove of trees until it leaves you unharmed. It’s laying stock still in your tent trying not to make a sound as a large animal sniffs around your campsite in the darkness. It’s getting into town after being in the mountains for eight days and gleefully gorging yourself on a full stack of pancakes drenched in syrup. It’s standing on a mountaintop as the sun breaks over the horizon, bathing the world in the first light of a day that has not come before, that will not come again, and that you, by some miraculous stroke of pure luck, are alive to witness. These are not moments you can buy, they are not moments you can plan for, and they are not moments you can hold onto. In an era where we feel constant pressure to move faster, plan better, and to make absolutely sure that our lives unfold by our own design, thru-hiking stands in resolute opposition. It is a world in which life moves at its own pace, in its own way, and with its own surprises. In a certain sense, thru-hiking requires more living than our day-to-day lives do. And to experience it, all you have to do is walk.

References

Oppezzo, Marily, and Daniel L. Schwartz. “Give your ideas some legs: the positive effect of walking on creative thinking.” Journal of experimental psychology: learning, memory, and cognition 40.4 (2014): 1142.

Voss, Michelle W., et al. “Plasticity of brain networks in a randomized intervention trial of exercise training in older adults.” Frontiers in aging neuroscience 2 (2010): 32.

Weuve, Jennifer, et al. “Physical activity, including walking, and cognitive function in older women.” Jama 292.12 (2004): 1454-1461.

Erickson, Kirk I., et al. “Exercise training increases size of hippocampus and improves memory.” Proceedings of the national academy of sciences 108.7 (2011): 3017-3022.