While doing a routine check of passing vehicles in Muqdadiyah, Iraq, in 2006, Sergeant Trey Cate and his fellow soldiers were ambushed. Standing in the street, the initial blast—triggered by a suicide bomber—shattered his legs. Moments later, gunmen hidden on nearby rooftops opened fire, shooting him in the back, arm, and helmet. A stray bullet hit a barrel of gasoline, and fire enveloped the wounded soldiers, including Cate.
Remarkably, every soldier made it out alive. But when Cate got to the hospital, a doctor told him he’d never walk again.Cate didn’t accept it. “Watch me prove you wrong,”he told the doctor.
“They told me I didn’t understand how injured I was,” says Cate. “I told them they don’t understand my mentality.”
Thirteen years later, not only does Cate, 35,walk, but he hiked the entire Appalachian Trail in 2017 and the Pacific Crest Trail in 2018.
Catewas introduced to former Marine Jeremy “Mac” McDonald, 34, as part of the thru-hiking community. Together,the two veterans are organizing one of the most ambitious thru-hiking expeditions in recent years: a that will takeon the 6,875-mile Great Western Loop.
McDonaldspent eight years in the Marine Corps, did three tours in Iraq, and was the head of Marine security at the U.S. embassy in Dakar, Senegal. “I’ve backpacked in some of the craziest places, just because I’ve gotten to travel so much,” he says. In 2014, after heleft the Marines, McDonald hiked the Appalachian Trail.
But Cate has the more unusual thru-hiking conversion story. Stuck in the hospitalas he recovered from his war injuries, Cate would spend hours daydreaming. “I’m in a hospital bed, and people are telling me I’ll never walk again, and so all I could think about was walking again,” he says. Not accepting he’d spend his life in a wheelchair, Cate forced himself to get out of bed and practiced putting one foot in front of the other.
“While walking around, the hospital aides would follow me with a couch on wheels for when I’d fall,” Cate says. “I’d lost a lot of weight at this point—I’m six foot three,and I weighed 140 pounds.”
It was Cate’s younger brother who first told him about the Appalachian Trail. When Cate saw photos of how happy his brother looked while trekkinga 30-mile section, he immediately knew he wanted to thru-hike the entire thing. “I had already been daydreaming about doing something with my legs,” says Cate. “Why learn to walk again if I don’t do something incredible?”
But it wasn’t onlythe injuries to his legs that Cate was trying to overcome. The blast left him with a traumatic brain injury, and when he initially came to in the hospital, he had amnesia. “When I woke up, a woman was hugging me, and I thought, Wow, my girlfriend is old,” says Cate. “I shoved her away. But turns outit was my mom.” He recognized her after a few days, but his memories never fully returned.
After Cate retired from the Army and graduated from the University of South Florida in 2015, he decided to fulfill the promise he’d made to himself on the hospital bed years ago. He began preparing to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail, but Catesays a side effect of his brain injury was that it left him overly trusting of others. On White Blaze, a forum for Appalachian Trail hikers, an anonymous user played a joke on him, feeding him false information about what thru-hiking entailed. He told Cate that if he started hiking the Appalachian Trail in January, he wouldn’t need anything warmer than a 30-degree sleeping bag. (That is very incorrect; temperatures frequently dropto single digits.) Cate also believed it when the stranger told him that the backcountry shelters had electric outlets, and that he could charge his phone there at night. (Also not true.)
Cate completed half of the hike, starting in Georgia and getting off trail at Harpers Ferry in West Virginiabecause he wasn’t appropriately prepared. He then went home, studied what he did wrong, and tried again the next year. That timehe successfully hiked the entire trail, and he loved it.

The two got the idea to tackle the Great Western Loop because they wanted to do more with their passion for the outdoors, “something really interesting that gets the attention of the entire thru-hiking community,” saysCate. Taking a dozen people on the longest thru-hike in the United Statescertainly qualifies.
The looplinks together five existing long-distance trails: the Pacific Crest Trail, the Continental Divide Trail, the , the Arizona Trail, and the Pacific Northwest Trail. Itsfootpath follows the Sierra, the Cascades, and the Rocky Mountainsand passes through 12 national parks and 75 wilderness areas. To date, only two people have ever hiked the Great Western Loop to completion in a calendar year, one of whom isϳԹ columnistAndrew Skurka.
To accomplish their goal, Cate and McDonaldset up the expedition as an LLC called and partnered with a marketing company for publicity and to acquire sponsors to provide supplies and funds to the hikers, which includeMcDonald.They spent much of the last year gettingsponsorsand now have a budget of around $250,000. With the plan in place, they are ready to start hiking in March, beginning and ending in Cuba, New Mexico.
Because of the logistics required, Cate volunteered to follow the hikers in a support van rather than hike himself. “This level of organization is what we used for military missions,” Cate says. “You have to consider everything down to the final detail:the weather, the supplies, the travel.” Two vehicles will follow the hikers, ferry them to town, and resupply them with food. Support staff will also assess pick-up points, respond to emergencies,andeven do their laundry.
“There definitely will be a rate of injury,” says Phaneendra Kollipara, one of the thru-hikers selected for the expedition. Kollipara, a 27-year-old engineer from India living in Michigan, has hiked all three major trails in the U.S. “There are things we can do to help prevent injury, but bad luck can happen to anybody,” hesays.
between the ages of 22 and 36 andhailing from four countries were selected. All are experienced thru-hikers. Each selected a charity to raise moneyfor, including the , the , and the , and they’ll be seekingdonations while they hike as well as asking sponsors to support their chosen organizations.
Cate and McDonald initially spread word of their plans in person and by posting in thru-hiking Facebook groups, and soon enough, applications began flooding in. Experience in long-distance hiking was requisite,but not enough: Cate searched for individualswho were patient andeasy to get along with and whofollowed directions well. “I tried to stay away from people who wanted to ‘race’ the whole timeor would get angry the moment something didn’t go their way,” Cate says. They wanted people from different backgrounds, they recruited internationally, and they tried to balance the number of men and women. Because 12people is an unwieldy number on a trail where campsites rarely fit more than four tents, the teamwill be divided into four groups of three people, withstaggeredstart times.
Skurka was the first person to ever hike the Great Western Loop, completing it in 206 days in 2007. “It was complicated enough when I did it by my lonesome,” he says. “I can’t imagine what it would take to organize for 12people.”
Hepoints out that the biggest challenge the group will face will be hiking through the Sierra Nevadaonce the snow starts to melt around mid-May, and then booking it all the way to the Rockies, where it’llhave to exit the San Juans of southern Colorado before the snow falls in October. “You’re basically racing against winter the whole time,” says Skurka. “You need to throw down 30 or 40 miles a day. That’s the inherent difficulty.”
Even if you can handle the physical challenge, says Skurka, it can be just as tough psychologically.
“I would struggle to do that trip nowadays, because it’s got so many mind-bogglingly boring miles, hour after hour after hour,” he says. “You can’t do these things for fame and fortune, you have to love it at the end of the day. There are too many hours at some level of discomfort to make it worthwhile otherwise.” That said, Skurka looks back on the Great Western Loop as one of the best things he’s ever done. “I hope they can experience that, too.”
Cate and McDonald are hopeful that the success of thisexpedition willallow them to host new outdoor challenges in the future.But for now, they’re counting the days until theadventure begins.
“I am very excited,” says McDonald. “I wish we were starting yesterday.”