Walking Home

By the time I reached familiar country, I had already been walking for a very long time. The Sheltowee Trace had once seemed impossible to me. Then in 2025 I did it. 340.77 miles. My post-hike account recorded 779,817 steps across Kentucky and Tennessee. There were blisters, wet boots, lost toenails, cold rain, deep water crossings, lodge stays, convenience-store resupplies, hitchhiking around a tornado and more than a few moments when I questioned why anybody would voluntarily do this.

But the physical difficulty wasn't what ultimately got to me. My family did. I had spent years treating the woods as a place to go farther. Find another arch.

Look at another drainage. Document another waterfall. Take another trip. There was always another objective. The Sheltowee took that mentality about as far as it could go.

After enough days, life becomes remarkably simple. Where am I sleeping? Where am I getting food? What hurts? How many miles until the next place? Eventually I joked that I had become effectively homeless, existing for little more than the next mile.

And somewhere in all of that, the things I normally valued in the backcountry began losing their importance. I didn't cry because my feet hurt. I didn't cry because it was raining. I didn't cry because I was cold. I cried because I missed my family. In the account I wrote afterward, I said that was the only thing that brought tears to my eyes.

And I wrote something else: I was finished running to find the next arch. Finished looking for the next competition. From now on, Lili would be hiking with me. At the end of the trail, a man who could hardly walk saw his family waiting at Burnt Mill Bridge in Tennessee.

And I ran. That's what the Sheltowee gave me. Not proof that I could walk 340 miles. I already knew I was stubborn. It showed me what I wanted to walk toward.