Seventeen dollars and a train ride out of New York City left me in Pawling, New York. My backpack felt light, and I floated out of town, feet barely skimming the asphalt. After too many months sedentary in Mexico, staring at a laptop and trying to build a future, it felt good to be moving […]
Category: Hiking Journal
Feet in the Fire
I woke up in an empty Airbnb ready to do something else, booking the cheapest flight I could find. 24 hours later I landed in Newark, with the vague plan of hiking the Appalachian Trail north into Massachusetts. With no definite plan, there’s nowhere to go, nothing to do. I drifted, taking the AirTrain in […]
I Quit Drinking on the Appalachian Trail
In 2010, I stood at the edge of a truth I couldn’t ignore. Alcohol was taking away pieces of my life, leaving behind a landscape I barely recognized. The morning light filtered through my apartment window, illuminating empty bottles and broken dreams that had become unwelcome companions. I knew then that without change, I wouldn’t […]
Florida to Cancun
Hiking across Florida was everything I’d hoped, good people, endless sky, and a life spent outside. But beneath the ease of it all, a nagging thought filled me with subtle dread. A goal left unfinished. Something that felt beyond my capabilities, beyond what I could take on while living out of a backpack. And yet, […]
The Winter Pilgrimage
The winter pilgrimage begins on New Year’s Day at the Southernmost Point of the United States in Key West, but I was already a day behind, and had only made it as far south as Marathon when I saw the first familiar faces hiking north. Longshot, hiking with Peg Leg on her audacious border-to-border calendar […]
Finishing the Pinhoti
I finished the Pinhoti Trail before the end of 2024, spending my last night in the shelter on Weogufka Creek, listening to the water slip over rocks, the sound as familiar as my own breath. At the base of Flagg Mountain, I contemplated my need for significant alone time in order to process emotions and […]
Heflin, Alabama
I woke to a cool morning fog at Laurel Shelter on the Pinhoti Trail, the kind that clings to everything and slows the world down. The plan for the day was an easy ten miles to Lower Shoals Shelter. But when a friend canceled our meet-up in Heflin the next day, I thought, “Why not […]
Dugger Mountain Wilderness
By the time I reached the Georgia-Alabama state line, all doubts about a life spent hiking had dissolved. The societal detox was complete, and the trail had me in awe once more. After leaving Cave Spring, I stopped at Spring Creek Shelter for the night, realizing there were far more shelters along the Pinhoti than […]
Poetry, Georgia
From Mack White Gap, the Pinhoti Trail stretches southward, a ten-mile ridge walk through the crisp fall leaves of the Chattahoochee National Forest, before spilling down to Georgia State Route 100. Not quite a road walk, though close enough, the trail clings to the roadside, occasionally meandering out of sight. I’d been told that this […]
Keown Falls, LaFayette, Georgia
I was still coughing up thick green mucus, but compared to the wreck I’d been when I left the trail, it felt like a new lease on life. The road walk out of Chatsworth stretched for miles ahead, but I didn’t make it far before a car pulled over, unbidden. No thumb needed. The driver […]