In the spring of 2019, I made my way to Campo, California, a small town near the Mexican border, with the intention of walking all the way to Manning Park, British Columbia by way of the mountainous 2,650-mile strip of dirt called the Pacific Crest Trail. It would be my furthest hike by a whole order of magnitude and the longest I had ever been away from home.
100 days later, I walked across the border into Canada, weary and dirty, with my heart and soul filled with a summer’s worth of freedom and adventure. I had slept under the stars and drank from the melting snow and embraced the dirt. My comfort zone had stretched and shifted as I pushed at its boundaries and “home” became less of a place and more of a feeling. In living a summer of transience through America’s wild and beautiful places, plenty had been stripped away and left behind, and I was pretty happy with what was left.
The Pacific Crest Trail wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows for me. I shivered through late-spring storms in the driving Southern-California wind. I risked drowning in bloated Sierran creeks. My toes went numb after walking on snow for thirty days straight. And I ran from buzzing Oregonian mosquitoes for days on end. But somewhere along the line, I learned that I was happy to persist through all of those things in pursuit of the goal. Relentlessly walking north towards home became the most natural thing for me, and everyday I felt free even as I stayed on the same path.
In addition to all the walking, documenting the hike with writing and photography ended up being a big part of my experience. After quickly realizing that my friends, family, and some complete strangers were getting something apparently valuable out of what I had previously thought was a completely selfish endeavor, I was inspired to journal and shoot every single day. What started as just a long walk became an art project that allowed me to walk every step with hundreds of readers. On this site, I’m sharing those daily journals and photos plus some blogging I did after coming home.
