There’s a book I’m supposed to be writing… Instead, I stealth camp outside of town after riding the dog into Flagstaff. The deal was that I’d take time off-trail to finish writing the second book in my hiker trash romance series. Sit still. Write. Pay for the future. But to my body, writing felt like […]
The transition between trails is the hardest part of life, where dips into society are the fading norm, and life outside is becoming the foundation. Forty days. Forty nights. Done. The Catalina Highway unspooling below me, down into Tucson, and with it the slow return of everything I’d left behind… the noise of traffic, the […]
I didn’t expect the hardest part of this section to be what was missing. I walked out of town on the Legends of Superior Trail, chasing an alternative route I hadn’t taken before. Lost miles on the way to the rain collector, the only reliable water out here if you’re trying to avoid drinking from […]
Sometimes the stop matters more than progress. I took the Cemetery Trail out of the Roosevelt Lake marina, climbing 2,500 feet into the Superstitions, stepping over my first rattlesnake. The wind out there carries something with it, ghost whispers, barely audible. Agave and prickly pear, bull thistle catching my arms as I hike past. Rock […]
You make the plan. The plan doesn’t care. Cowboy camped off trail on the run to Tonto Basin, a hike I’d already lived once in my head. Moonlit miles. A mountain view of the town lights below. Chorizo and egg burritos in the morning. Only, the moon never showed. Clouds hid it. Google said the […]
How far can you go before the world comes back? I left the East Verde River just before sunset, climbing into the Mazatals with wet clothes cooling on my skin. Three thousand feet of elevation ahead, stretched together in fading light. A disco remix in my bone conduction headphones gave my legs a rhythm that […]
Why does stopping feel wrong before it feels right? I planned to keep moving. That was the default. Miles meant progress. Progress meant I was doing it correctly. But I reached the East Verde River at sunset and didn’t feel like earning anything else that day. I cowboy camped between two fallen logs, more as […]
The town came alive below me as the sun sank behind the ridge. I’d followed the Pine–Strawberry Trail out of town without much thought, just climbing until the noise softened and the air cooled. Halfway up Strawberry Mountain, I found an alligator juniper and leaned back into its bark, patterned and solid, like it had […]
I wasn’t thinking about the trail anymore. Somewhere around mile ten, walking into the Mogollon Rim Ranger Station for a dollar ice cream and three sodas, my body kept moving forward, but my mind had already left. It was fixed on something warmer. Tastier. Alive in a different way. Empanadas. PIEbar. Thirty miles off trail […]
I filtered water and brushed my teeth along the river below Double Springs, the current moving steady over rocks like it had somewhere else to be. The days stretched out in that easy range, seventeen to twenty-two miles, the kind of terrain that lets your body fall into a rhythm without asking too many questions. […]