Date: 7/8/18 Miles: 17.2 Total Miles: 89.8 “This is the part I hate.” I can still hear him saying it. The smile on his face minutes later, waving goodbye from the front door, is the truly indelible part. The sweeter half of an otherwise bittersweet memory, as Emily and I pulled down the street heading…
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Persistence of Memory
Date: 7/6/18 Miles: 21.3 Total Miles: 55.7 Up the stairs to the fifth floor, a collection of Impressionism, surrealism, and cubism masterpieces adorns the starkly white walls of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Nestled among Monet’s famous Water Lilies triptych and Pollock’s massive drip painting canvases hangs a work of a very different kind,…
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Date: 9/4/17 Sleep has never come easily to me. Years after the Appalachian Trail I’d still occasionally turn over in the middle of the night and reach bleary-eyed for the headphones on my nightstand to plug them in and listen to one of the few sounds that would bring an end to my rising anxiety…
Roots
Date: 9/2/17 archaeology: noun | är-kē-‘ä-lə-jē 1 the scientific study of material remains (such as fossil relics, artifacts, and monuments) of past human life and activities Nearly one year ago, I arrived at an unassuming stripe of cleared forest that would never have been identifiable as an international border had it not been for the…
O Canada
Date: 9/25/16 Miles: 19.8 Total Miles: 2650.1 It began like any other day: morning coffee from the warmth of my sleeping bag followed by deflating and rolling up my sleeping pad, and stuffing my few belongings one by one into my pack before emerging from my tent to take it down once more. The only…
Confessions of a Chacoholic
Date: 9/24/16 Miles: 19.3 Total Miles: 2638.8 I love Chacos. True story: I own 8 pairs of them. Two pairs hiked the Appalachian Trail, two have hiked the John Muir Trail and the Wonderland Trail twice, and three have now hiked the Pacific Crest Trail. Combined they’ve been my companions for well north of 5,000…
The American Alps
Date: 9/22/16 Miles: 21.2 Total Miles: 2598.4 The clear skies that we’d fallen asleep to were the same ones we woke to, but somewhere in between we had yet another dose of overnight rain. Fortunately, it was the last we would see of the wet stuff for the rest of the day. Under the newfound…
Stone and Sky
Date: 6/13/16 Miles: 15.0 Total Miles: 784.2 “There are two kinds of climbers: those who climb because their heart sings when they’re in the mountains, and all the rest.” –Alex Lowe Now this is the Sierra I remember. Gone were the storm clouds and back was the sapphire blue sky that sets the backdrop for…
A Raisin in the Sun
Date: 6/7/16 Miles: 23.2 Total Miles: 680.1 “All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make…
Katahdin
Date: 8/19/04 Starting Location: The Birches Campsite Destination: Mt. Katahdin Miles: 5.2 Total Miles: 2182.9 After a night of restless anticipation, morning came early. I strolled away from The Birches for an early reunion with my Mom and Dad who’d driven all the way from home to meet me, but even before I made it…
