After completing the AT in 2005, I was hired to my first office job and I made it 10 months before needing to break free from the cubical. I also needed to lose the 20 pounds I had put on sitting in said cubical.

In some respects I was lucky, because at least my desk was positioned near a window where I could look out at nature, but instead of providing inspiration it made me feel trapped. Fortunately my job had a four-month slow season that coincided with the optimal PCT thru hiking months, and when I asked my boss for time off, she gave it to me.

Since finishing the Appalachian Trail in 2005, not a day passed that I didn’t miss the trail. I missed the friends I made, the animals I saw, the time to think, the way my body felt at the end of a long day. But to go straight from my experience on the AT to hiking out west was still a bit of a stretch. The thought of walking through the mojave desert with 30-miles between water stops terrified me; and I had to Google the definitions of an ‘ice axe’ and ‘crampons.’ [Read More]