Almost every hiker box I have ever seen after 11,000 miles on American trails has the same litter problem: the thin plastic water bags that accompany the popular Sawyer Squeeze, the most efficient and reliable water filter I have ever used. In theory, these ubiquitous black-and-blue mylar bags are a hiker’s dream, able to hold nearly a liter of water in exchange for less than an ounce of weight.

But water filters get clogged, and gear gets dropped on jagged rocks, these thin bags rip in the middle during the second scenario and burst at the seams with the first. Weight savings and water filters are useless if you don’t actually have a way to hold your water.

Seven years ago, a product designer named Gilad Nachman began solving the problem caused by the flimsy bags when his fledgling company, Cnoc Outdoors, . A soft-sided and completely collapsible water bladder, the Vecto offered a simple but welcome upgrade: thicker walls and rugged seams that could withstand the pressure needed to force water through a dirty filter or the abrasive chaos of a long-distance hiker’s cluttered backpack. The Vecto’s real genius, though, is that one end screws neatly into a Sawyer Squeeze; the other end opens completely and easily, making it simple to scoop water from paltry sources, or dip the thing into a lake.

And so, as long-distance hikers have replaced their Sawyer water bags on trails with Cnoc bladders and bottles, they have gotten into the sensible habit of tossing the ones that come free with the Squeeze into our repositories of collective junk and gear, hiker boxes. The discarded bags wait for whatever unlucky walker next needs some emergency water-storage fix. I have donated at least a dozen during my adventures. Those bags are still sitting somewhere, I presume, awaiting oblivion or apocalypse.

Hopefully, this wasteful practice is over: In January, the two companies finally partnered, making the unofficial hydration fix of thru-hikers official by and selling them as complete units. Not only did they make this sensible pair a legitimate couple, but the combination costs less than buying the two products separately.

These units are sold through Sawyer’s distribution channels and on its website, and the Vectro bladders feature both brand logos on them. But make no mistake, the bladder is definitely made by Cnoc Outdoors. Sawyer’s own water bags should gradually become a little less common in trailside piles, making it easier to spot the free Knorr sides and Pop Tarts always lurking in hiker boxes.

The companies have considered this collaboration for years, since it made so much sense. If people were already doing it, after all, why not make it easier, cheaper, and less wasteful by slimming the packaging and shipping needed for two products into one? But Sawyer—which also makes splints and sunscreen, bug repellants and sting kits—was in the process of trimming its individual products, or of simplifying the assorted SKUs it sold. “We had hundreds, and it was so hard to manage,” Amy Stead, an account manager at Sawyer, recently told me during a call alongside Cnoc’s Nachman. “When Gilad approached us, we were fighting against that.”

Previous partnership talks proved preemptive for Nachman and Cnoc, too. From my own experience, I know he’s right when he says that the quality of the Vecto has improved in recent years. Today, the bladder’s seams are able to take much more pressure before they, too, succumb. (If you’ve ever superglued a Cnoc together in a hotel room while on trail, you know true Sisyphean frustration.) And in recent years, Cnoc has introduced and then upgraded a water bottle called the ; it’s one of a few items that is with me on day hikes and thru-hikes alike, and Sawyer is now selling one of those with .

What’s more, Cnoc’s production capacity needed to expand to keep up with the potential demand of a company as large as Sawyer. Still a relatively fledgling business, Cnoc has now tapped into the more robust distribution network of Sawyer, a brand that has been making life outside easier for 41 years.

“Our early bladders were just not as good, and there was a natural maturity curve for Cnoc,” Nachman said. “And then we had to grow to a point where we could teach our factory to produce at this scale. And now is finally the time.”

This is, admittedly, not some revolutionary shift. Sawyer and Cnoc have simply opted to sell a combination of their own products that lots of us have been pairing ourselves for years. But I appreciate the idea that their move makes this bit of semi-hidden thru-hiker wisdom accessible to anyone that doesn’t necessarily have long-distance dreams. Sure, you could have learned about this pair through Reddit, YouTube, or any number of hiking blogs, really. But now you can just walk into REI or so many of the outfitters that sell Sawyer products and ask for it. A Sawyer atop a Cnoc is the fastest route to reliably clean water on trail; now, it’s faster and easier to get in the first place.

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In early August, on the shoulderÌęof Colorado’s highest peak, 14,439-foot Mount Elbert, I suddenly found myself unable to do anything except apologize.

I had started up the mountain so early that morning you could still call it night, hiking the remote Black Cloud Trail that leads to Elbert’s southeast ridge. The trail was lit by so many stars I sometimes forewent my headlamp.

Delirious from a lack of sleep and the increasing altitude, I was barreling back down the mountain not long after dawn, visions of breakfast skillets back in Leadville dancing in my head. But my post-summit reverie was broken by a nightmare scenario: a trail-crew looking up from their work to judge me. They were silent, but their scowls might as well have been screams.

At a junction a few hundred vertical feet up from them, I’d instinctively taken what appeared to be the most direct route down, plunging across the slope. I thought the route seemed especially steep, not like the kind of steadily graded trail the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative typically builds and maintains. I hadn’t seen any obstacles blocking access to this part of the trail.

Alas, this wasn’t the trail at all, and I had inadvertently cut several switchbacks, realizing it only when I ran into the very crew that was managing them.

“I’m so, so sorry,” I repeatedly stammered to the Sunday morning gang, explaining that I was a strict switchback-cutting-is-for losers apostle and that I’d simply missed a turn.

“And it doesn’t look like I’m the only one who made that mistake,” I continued, pointing to the sizable rut I had followed. They sighed, less at me than their Sisyphean task: trying to maintain a mountainside in a world where most people simply want to get somewhere else as quickly as possible.

“It’s cheating,” Lloyd Athearn, the executive director of the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative, told me with a laugh two weeks later, the “it” in question being cutting switchbacks while coming down a mountain. “We just got done with the Olympics, and someone can’t just cut the turn on the track and still be in the race,” he added. “They’re disqualified. You’re not doing the trail any faster—because you’re not doing the trail.”

Indeed, switchbacks—and, namely, cutting them in an effort to save time—had a big year. A month after my conversation with Athearn, on Labor Day, Idaho pro runner Michelino Sunseri appeared to set a new for getting up and down one of the country’s most totemic peaks, Grand Teton. Trouble was, he cut a switchback to avoid what he called the “Congo line of hikers” who weren’t paid athletes, since his record was apparently more important than their joy or the trail itself. His FKT was revoked, and the National Park Service issued a hefty citation, prompted in part by his very public flouting of the rules on—where else?—Strava.

The outcry against Sunseri was swift and sustained; many in hiking and running communities rightfully resented someone who seemed to see himself as better or more important than the hoi polloi, “the Congo line.”

But Grand Teton National Park—like most every mountainous public land I’ve ever encountered in the United States—is often an endless spiderweb of unofficial trails created by cutting switchbacks, sometimes unintentionally built by individuals looking to save a little time. Collectively, though, these decisions lead to massive environmental degradation. It’s easy to scorn Sunseri, but we’ve all done it. I make every effort to never cut switchbacks, but, just as I did on Elbert, I still make mistakes. Making less in the future is a nearly effortless way to preserve the trails we all share.

“When trails switch back up a slope, it does two different things: It lessens the grade of the trail, as opposed to just going straight up that slope,” explains Athearn. “And then it allows water to flow down the backslope, across the tread, and then the bottom part of the slope. That’s much less impactful to the trail’s tread.”

That first reason is why people cut switchbacks at all. They see where the trail is eventually going and they trust they’re strong enough hikers or runners to get to the same place in a more direct albeit steep way. They shave off a few hundred feet and maybe a minute or so of movement; done enough times during a long day or even an FKT attempt, that adds up to getting to that breakfast skillet much faster. I understand the temptation entirely, and I’ve certainly done it in the past.

But switchbacks aren’t just for us; they’re for the benefit of the landscapes we’re there to see and the trails we use to visit them. Water wants to get from a high point to a lower one as quickly and efficiently as possible, so when we help foster a steep rut by cutting a switchback, we give water a chance to rush downhill—and bring precious soil with it. Athearn tells me that in high alpine environments, he expects only a foot of soil to linger above the rock, and it often takes a millennium to build just an inch of that soil. Cutting across a switchback can wipe it out immediately. “You’re looking at 10,000 years of evolutionary process just flowing down a hillside,” Athearn says.

And then, of course, there is the human effort that goes into building and maintaining these trails. It is easy to look at a trail and not understand the effort they require, but these things are built and maintained by people who, more often than not, love a place as much as you do. When Athearn describes the process of constructing a trail, my brain breaks a little—the scouting and inspecting and permitting and staging and building and maintaining. The folks on their hands and knees, moving rocks and smoothing dirt on that Sunday morning, were part of a multi-year effort to help that particular route endure increased traffic and erosion. Cutting a switchback is, then, a wordless “screw you.”

Athearn and his crews have heard hikers talk of trail gnomes who emerge in the middle of the night or pure divine intervention as explanations for trails and their maintenance. He can only laugh. “No, it’s just a bunch of us smelly workers out here for weeks at the time,” he says. “God didn’t place rocks there in a miraculous fashion. Mere mortals did.”

For me, this conjures the war against litter, which, as a species, we are still losing. If you’ve got trash in your car, the most expedient thing to do is toss it out, to make it someone else’s problem, to make it the environment’s issue. Why wait for a trash can when all the world’s available to be one? And why wait for a switchback when you can just head straight up hill? The same answer holds for both questions: because there’s more to the world than our immediate needs, and hoping to finish a trail a few minutes faster is not much of a need at all.

Grayson Haver Currin has written about long-distance hiking for șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű since 2020. He completed the Triple Crown in 2023 and has logged more than 11,000 miles on the United States’ National Scenic Trails. He writes about music for The New York Times, GQ, Mojo, Pitchfork, and many more. He lives high in Colorado’s Front Range.

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The Green Bay Packers were suddenly not the most interesting entertainment optionÌęin Mac’s Pub and Grub, a dim dive packed with people wearing Packers gear on a Sunday afternoon in October in the lakeside Wisconsin town of Merrimac. Unfortunately for me, I was.

Midway through the first quarter, I had slipped inside Mac’s, found an unoccupied stool, and leaned against a wall with clear sightlines of the bar’s TV gallery, exhausted and half-frozen like a piece of melting ice. I’d left camp 11 hours earlier, at 4 A.M., hustling 31 miles through a Sunday squall in order to make Mac’s, or to watch the Packers’ bout with the Detroit Lions among the locals. But I looked as if I’d emerged from the depths of Lake Wisconsin, as puddles of rainwater pooled beneath my feet and around my backpack. Every play or two, someone else glanced askance from the bar, as if Cheers had been invaded by some primordial beast from the bottom of Boston Harbor.

“Are you hungry?” a broad-chested man in a Packers jersey, belly to the bar and bottle in hand, finally asked. When I nodded, he grinned and pointed. “There’s food over there. Help yourself.” For the next three hours, my wife, Tina, and I gorged ourselves on what surely must have been the most delicious potluck ever—finger-thick slabs of candied bacon, brie wheels topped with baked salmon, tortilla chip smothered in cheese-laden chili. As we slowly warmed back to life after the windy November downpour, the regulars steadily realized we were hiking across their state, endeavoring to finish the 1,200-mile Ice Age Trail before the infamous Wisconsin winter arrived. Some of them, at least, became fans.

Mac had first said I looked like a wet rat; now, he spun our laundry in the bar’s dryer, then offered to let us camp beside the bar. A couple, Paul and Deb, peppered us with questions about the adventure, then feted us with their own wilderness stories—and several shots. Sue, a retiree who would soon head south for the winter, offered up a bathtub and bedroom, which we accepted after needlessly worrying we were being soft. “You kids be safe,” Mac said, smiling like a proud father as we followed Sue to her car, “and let us know when you finish.”

So goes my overall experience on the Ice Age Trail, a 40-day slog through pleasant but repetitive woods and along often-busy highways, alleviated by bouts of unexpected support and kindness from Wisconsin natives. Strangers handed us candy bars from open car windows. Fathers running errands made U-turns to scoop us from seemingly ubiquitous rainstorms, while trailside bar owners treated us like Edmund Hillary and Tenzig Norgay before offering to deliver us breakfast the next morning. A fleet of Ice Age Trail volunteers was seemingly always on call, too, ready to drive us from hotel toÌętrail or offer camping intel during extended road walks.

Though it is one of , alongside the more familiar and acclaimed Appalachian and Pacific Crest, the Ice Age Trail is decidedly not a premier thru-hike, best done in one continuous push. I do not recommend it as a thru-hike. But after 11,000 miles on such trails, I can say it is the friendliest long-distance experience I’ve ever had, both in terms of the people on or around it and the way its stewards have shaped and maintained it. Really, it is more of a linear community center that happens to stretch between the Minnesota and Michigan borders than a wilderness experience. The Ice Age Trail is, in every positive sense, Midwest Nice—pleasant to look at, if a tad boring, but as accommodating and kind as can be.

“Everybody takes pride in it in our own special way, whether it’s the person serving you breakfast in a trail town or the guy who walks the same five-mile segment every day,” Jared Wildenradt, who has now hiked the entire Ice Age Trail eight times, told me two weeks after I finished my walk.

“There’s a definite community here that people don’t expect when it comes to hiking in the Midwest,” he continued. “The people that power through here get to experience that, just like you did in 40 days.”

What is the Ice Age Trail?

More than many of its National Scenic Trail counterparts, the Ice Age Trail remains a work in progress. First envisioned in the fifties by a Milwaukee-born outdoors enthusiast named Ray Zillmer, it was only established by Congress during 1980. The trail roughly follows the terminal edge of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, as it about 10,000 years ago. Kettles, moraines, eskers, drumlins, wetlands, hanging valleys, outwash plains: Across, down, and up Wisconsin, you crisscross these glacial vestiges, repeated in random bursts like a particularly chaotic and tremendous .

Still, after more than four decades of route-finding, trail-building, and parcel-buying, only 700 miles of the 1,200-route is contiguous, winding across forests, around fields and farms, or through tiny towns. Nearly 500 miles still depend upon what the Ice Age Trail Alliance calls “connecting routes,” a euphemism for rural roads and busy highways. The imperative, then, is closing those gaps, pulling hikers off those connecting routes by securing land for actual footpaths.

Wildenradt has helped find six such parcels; he talks about the first one—a glacier-carved patch of property that interrupts a 25-mile road walk via a 0.7-mile roller coaster through the woods—like a father might extol a firstborn. When we spoke, he sat plucking seeds from pine cones that he intended to plant on that plot soon. “I went away and hacked at the dirt, started clearing away for trail. I was beat up from head to toe,” he said, laughing about the spot’s temporary nickname, Prickler’s Property. “I had close to 300 volunteer hours when it was done. I could easily drop 100 more.”

All that, mind you, for less than a mile. When the current executive director, Luke Kloberdanz, thru-hiked it in 2003, he was the eleventh person ever to do so. Only two decades ago, the mileage ratio was reversed, with nearly 700 miles of road walks to 500 on trail. He now believes the path will be finished within his children’s lifetimes, meaning his grandkids could walk from Minnesota to Michigan and touch very little asphalt.

“I always thought that completion was a long way off, that I was never going to be part of that,” Kloberdanz told me. “We may not reach the end of the tunnel in my lifetime, but we’re at least starting to see the light. I’ve never felt that way in my 20 years here.”

That aspirational pride animates the Ice Age Trail, end to end. I’ve never hiked a better-blazed path. Hikers can spotÌęits bright yellow stripes by headlamp as by sunlight. (When you fill out a thru-hiking certification upon completing the trail, the Ice Age Trail Alliance even asks how many times you get lost, so they can fix the problems.) And I’ve never encountered a volunteer network so robust and eager to help hikers; wherever you are in the state, you are almost always a phone call away from a free ride, meal, or bed. These volunteers raved about the contributions they and their friends had made to the trail, as if thanking me for using them, for making good on their hard work.

The trail is also dotted with benches, sometimes more than one per mile, and often dedicated to a late hiker who loved the place. They’re meant, of course, to make the trail more accommodating, to give people who aren’t aiming to finish 30 miles in a day a chance to rest. You won’t see that on any other National Scenic Trail. The friendliness is by both circumstance and design, pervading everything.

In 2020, to celebrate its 40th official year, the Ice Age Trail Alliance launched the Mammoth Hike Challenge—essentially, a reward for anyone who hikes 40 miles during the month of October, when the foliage of the Wisconsin fall is at its apex. The trail’s mascot is a . It’s so cute I now have one on my desk, dutifully carried for the last 400 miles. They’ve added one mile to that requirement each subsequent year.

On weekends, we’d meet couples and crews of friends in pursuit of their 44-mile quota. They were eager not only to share the best things they’d seen but also to hear ours. More than once, my answer was you, the people who love this trail so much.

Did I Like the Ice Age Trail?

On a cold Saturday morning at a Kwik Trip, a particularly bountiful chain of convenience stores launched in Wisconsin in the sixties, I was waiting in line at an automated espresso machine. “Are you hiking the Ice Age Trail?” said the woman ahead of me, her smile as bright as her pastel tie-dye. When I answered yes, her grin somehow grew wider. She introduced herself as Tarra. “I want to do that someday, too.” Several hours later, Tarra sent us an Instagram message with her phone number and an offer of help should we need it as we neared her home a few hundred miles east.

Turns out, we did. Due to a few work deadlines, we’d pushed our pace on the Ice Age, hiking at least 30 miles every day with zero rest days. As we neared the 1,000-mile mark, my body—specifically, my left IT Band, suddenly as intractable as a massive team of mules—tightening to the point that each step felt as if a knife was being jammed into my joint. At night, crawling into the tent, my knee looked like a balloon. I knew it was time to stop. The next morning, I hobbled two miles to a gas station and texted Tarra, asking if she knew where I might rent a car nearby. The sun wasn’t up yet, but she told me she was on her way.

As I lamented my knee an hour later, she texted a friend who happened to be her physical therapist. How soon could she see me? For two hours that afternoon, Jeanie Crawford—a , a blessed sorceress per my experience—pulled, tugged, straightened, bent, jabbed, and corrected seemingly every bone in my body. I had almost crawled into her office, but I somehow walked out with a mostly normal stride. She charged me half of her hourly rate, ostensiblyÌęexcited enough by the effort to cross her state that she practically gave away her day.

For the next week, I returned to more than 30 miles every day, moving at my normal pace because a stranger had been willing to leave her home long before her workday began and find me help. The Ice Age Trail didn’t dazzle me with scenery or variety, and it didn’t prompt me to learn any new backpacking techniques. Most days, truth be told, I didn’t even like it. I contemplated quitting more often than I’ve ever considered such for anything in my life.

But it did remind me of something obvious, something that can be easy to forget high in the mountains or deep in the woods: Hiking trails are for all people, and those interactions can take a dozen different forms, from the married couple hustling from one end of a state to another to the bartender who keeps asking for more of their stories, from the gaggle of retirees out for a slow Sunday stroll high on an esker to the trail runner bombing down a rock face in the rain. The Ice Age Trail is a gift from Wisconsin’s past to Wisconsin’s present and future. I’m grateful its people share it so generously.

Grayson Haver Currin has written about long-distance hiking for șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű since 2020. He completed the Triple Crown in 2023 and has logged more than 11,000 miles on the United States’ National Scenic Trails. He writes about music for The New York Times, GQ, Mojo, Pitchfork, and many more. He lives high in Colorado’s Front Range.

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French outdoor apparel brand Satisfy has perfected running shorts. Founded a decade ago by , the Paris-based company has performed a paradoxical miracle with distance running’s necessity. Their best shorts, the , feel as if you’re wearing absolutely nothing while actually being sturdy enough to store fuel (and even car keys) and prevent skin from rubbing against skin.

Since hiking the Pacific Crest Trail in a leopard-print pair in 2021, I have logged more than 10,000 miles in assorted versions of the Rippy with such devotion that, when it’s laundry day and I must wear something else outside, I will briefly consider not running or hiking at all. And despite the high price tag ($260), I’ve been stockpiling them for years, like a squirrel hoarding nuts, just in case Satisfy someday discontinues them.

Earlier this year, Satisfy announced it was upgrading the Rippy in an experiment, replacing the nylon ripstop shell for which it is named with a layer of Dyneema. Three decades ago, what would become known as Dyneema helped the AmericanÌęsailing team overcome the heavily favored Italians in the America’s Cup. As resilient as it was lightweight, the seemingly miraculous fabric—polyethylene sandwiched between polyester—has spread into cut-proof gloves, body armor, shoes, and both the waterproof backpacks and tents I have used for years. .

Still, the idea seemed silly, maybe even horrible, from the start: How would Dyneema, which repels water like a tin roof, respond to my excessive sweat? Where would it go? And how would material that can feel coarse and even stiff glide against my bare legs at high speeds and over long distances? Also, would they be hot? (“Hard boiled eggs,” one Reddit user said of his testicles when he imagined wearing them.)

Oh, and what about that price? Sure, the stateside shipping was free, but I wondered how many people could afford a $420 pair of shorts—and why did they cost that much, anyway? (In the sake of transparency, my pair was a sample sent to me by the company.) Aside from Satisfy’s limited-edition collaboration with eyewear brand Oakley, the Rippy Dyneema Trail Shorts are—as best as I or any of the multiple running aficionados I asked could remember—the most expensive pair of running or hiking shorts ever made. A Satisfy stan, I assumed they must be worth it.

I was absolutely wrong. All summer long, from the highest peaks in Colorado to long-distance lakeside runs in Chicago, I wore Satisfy’s Dyneema Rippy shorts, hoping to find a function that justified the indulgence. They have been hiking, running, swimming, and soaking in baking saunas, glacial lakes, slot canyons, and radiant deserts. And mostly what I’ve gained is a season of chafing so ghastly and intense that I’ve wondered more than once if I needed to see a dermatologist. Satisfy has perfected running shorts; by adding Dyneema, they have proven just how delicate perfection can be. Turns out, Satisfy agrees.

“If I had to do a Version 2 of these shorts, I would probably not go for Dyneema,” Partouche told me on a recent weekday, laughing from his office. “It’s a failure, because we tried to be over-technical. People overpaid for a technicality they didn’t have a chance to fully explore. It’s good to accept that some products are better than others.”

The idea to substitute nylon for Dyneema has a sensible-enough origin story. Satisfy wanted to build an ultra-durable pair of shorts that could withstand ultramarathonsÌęthroughÌędesert brambles and snagsÌęor forests dense with deadfall. What’s more, they wanted a fabric so strong it could hold heavy loads for runners moving long distances between aid stations. And, of course, it needed to be light. Dyneema fits those criteria.

These parameters, Partouche admitted, are very particular, and Satisfy never spelled them out clearly. They never specified how limited their functionality might be. It’s the kind of small-run experiment, he said, that big companies ship to athletes to try in challenging conditions. “For us, that would be way more expensive,” he said. “At Satisfy, what we give to athletes in terms of technology and what we offer the final consumer is exactly the same.”

All my apprehensions about the shorts were right. Satisfy’s regular Rippy shorts work so well because of the way they hold sweat. As the traditional nylon cover becomes saturated, it begins to cling to a base layer of “technical silk” Satisfy has dubbed “Justice”—basically, the most comfortable pair of biking tights you’ve ever worn. They stick together and move in tandem, meaning you mostly avoid the friction that leads to chafing over long distances.

This doesn’t happen with Dyneema. The top layer instead bunches up, so the silk beneath it rides upward as it absorbs water. You see where this is going, right? A discomfort so intense you want to bail on whatever miles you have left, then jump into a vat of Gold Bond.

Fall is coming quickly to the mountains of Colorado, where I now live. That means that my summer experiment with Dyneema—in which I tried but failed to test the second-most expensive running shorts ever until I fell in love with them—is almost over. Last Sunday, though, I slipped them on one more time for a long run followed by a long hike.

All season, I’d been stuffing gel packets and drink mixes into the three pockets that line the rear waistband. I finally remembered to try the two pockets that Satisfy added to the silk layer beneath the Dyneema, a first-time feature for the company. I loved them, slipping gels out of the pockets on the front of my legs without breaking stride, even as I made haste down a canyon. When I asked Partouche about those pockets a few days later, another Satisfy employee, Tommy Hubert, told me they would soon make several more appearances in their 2025 lineup. That is, I could have the pockets without the chafing.

At last, I realized that’s what makes Satisfy stand out—a willingness to try, fail, learn the lessons, and then succeed. They attempt outlandish things all the time, from that are a real joy to wear on a hot day to a with modular Primaloft padding that remains the single most confusing piece of clothing I own. Some work. Some don’t. All of it helped lead to the shorts I covet, and maybe, next year, willÌęget even better. Partouche often talks about Satisfy in terms of punk rock, which can be hard to square with a pair of shorts that costs as much as aÌęcar payment. Part of the ethos, at least, translates.

“We dare to try. We dare to change the status quo, to polarize. Big companies can’t polarize, but Satisfy can,” he told me. “I don’t care if people love us or hate us, which puts Satisfy in a very unique position where people say, ‘What the heck?’”

That’s when I learned to love the shorts I thought I hated, even if I don’t think I’ll ever wear them for long distances again.

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Snacking is the secret pleasure of backpacking, but it can also feel like the biggest chore. During a day of long miles and steep climbs, calories are as important as the right shoes, the fuel that makes it all possible. But how many Clif Bars, Snickers, Haribos, and peanuts can one human stand? After 10,000 miles, I’ve lost the ability to stomach those hiker standards very often. I forever crave something novel.

So in trail town grocery stores, or when thinking about before a long hike, I’m always on the hunt for a new snack, a new texture or taste that entertains me as I literally move through my day. These additions are mutable, of course, though some have stuck with me, little treats I tell fellow travelers about around the night’s cookpot or when we’re in the aisles together, trying to decide what food we’re putting in our packs for the next several hundred miles.

Below are the five best hiking snacks that I’ve discovered recently, listed chronologically for how I consume them during the day. These are all small businesses to one degree or another, so don’t expect them in a trailside convenience store. You may need to order them online in advance of your hike, or, if you’re lucky enough to have someone mail you supplies from home, have them add it to your tab. Food is a joy of long-distance treks and day hikes alike; here’s what’s providing so much of it for me lately.

no normal’s Coffee Paste

Gummies, powders, gels, bars, and, of course, coffee: If there is a way to transport caffeine on trail, I’ve tried it. Or at least so I thought until a friend sent me a link to coffee, a Zurich startup squeezing ultra-concentrated coffee paste and a touch of beet sugar into a big black metal tube. The strategy, founders Philippe Greinacher and Alexander HĂ€berlin told , stems from Switzerland’s postwar prepper strategy, where innovations with shelf-stable foods were safeguards for potential invasion.

On trail in the Swiss Alps and on the beach in Africa, the pair longed for coffee that tasted better than flakes of the acrid instant stuff and didn’t need much water. They got it right. Though the paste works well dissolved in hot or cold water, I find myself taking tiny sips straight from the tube before an arduous climb or a long haul, the stinging bitterness soon dissolving into a subtle sweetness. It works as a spread, too. , it’s pricier than Folgers Instant but cheaper than the new wave of niche instant brands. And the satisfaction of swilling coffee from a tube in front of strangers? Priceless.

Best Buckin’ Jerky

During my first thru-hike, I had been a vegetarian for a decade. But nearly every account of on-trail nutrition I read referenced the supremacy of jerky as a lightweight vehicle for protein and flavor. So my wife, Tina, and I bought boxes and boxes of vegan jerky, devouring it along the length of the Appalachian Trail with near-religious devotion. It tasted, I must admit now, like salty cardboard, but twice as tough. There have since been remarkable advances in meatless jerky, from to ’s textured soy protein. But I have recently been on a meat jerky tear, trying to find a brand that has the strongest flavors without filling me with preservatives or the dregs of the butcher-shop’s wastebin.

I finally found it in , the rightfully named company of San Antonio meat-curing fiend Joli Phillips. A former spa manager in Santa Fe and catering company owner in Austin, Phillips is on a few parallel missions. First, she wants to buck the notion that jerky is a manly domain. Though her husband, Adam, is a professional chef, he is only her taste-tester.

“This gal doesn’t sit side-saddle,” as her website proclaims. (, too, an organization linking girls with STEM educations.) Second, using specifically chosen and especially lean cuts of beef, she aims to create thin and tender strips of jerky with piquant flavors. Inspired by Ruth’s Chris steakhouse, her Cowgirl flavor melts in your mouth like carpaccio. And loaded with bird’s eye chilis, Phillips’ Khaw Keirl version kicks harder than any jerky I’ve yet to find in a grocery store. I’ll be ordering a box before my thru-hikes this fall, and it will certainly taste better than the cardboard in which it arrives.

ČőłóÄć°ù’s “Original” Trail Mix

Spend long enough on trail, and the G in —that is, good ol’ raisins and peanuts—sublimates into “gross.” As the name implies, that two-ingredient blend is a standby and the basis for with most anything you can imagine, from M&Ms and almonds to peanut butter cups and Beer Nuts. Browsing the grocery store’s trail mix zone, I sometimes get the sense that manufacturers suss out their surpluses and simply dump whatever’s there into bags. I do not get this sense from Peter Rushford, a former pro skier turned gear guru who has spent the past decade trying to find his perfect trail mix, one that balanced salt and sweetness, crunch and chew, nutrition and taste. The quest led to , his Austin-based company that, simply put, makes the best trail mix I’ve ever eaten. And there are no peanuts or raisins.

Instead, his “original” nine-ingredient blend pairs four whole nuts with coconut slivers and three fruits dried just to the point of chewiness—blueberries, cranberries, and incredible . Oh, and there’s chocolate from a 160-year-old San Francisco chocolatier. Rushford was so careful in his quest to create the perfect trail mix that each ingredient sports a , and all the packaging forgoes plastic. As a small company with big ambitions, ČőłóÄć°ù isn’t cheap, but the stuff is potent; I downed a small bag midway during a recent six-summit day, and I had energy to finish the hike without more food.

Honey Mama’s Cocoa Truffle Bars

I have a possibly unhealthy ritual on long trails: Every night, whether tucked into a tent or spread out under the stars, I take a few puffs from a joint, massage my tired legs as deeply as possible, and eat an entire candy bar. The problem, of course, isn’t the puffs; it’s the fact that and are rafts of corn syrup, sugar, and palm or sunflower oil. Maybe that’s not the best for a body that’s walked 30 miles—with plans to repeat it in the morning. I was relieved, then, to stumble upon three years ago on the Pacific Crest Trail. I began lining my food bag with enough of the paper-wrapped wonders to make it to the next town. My ritual feels a bit more reasonable now.

In a previous life, Portland, Oregon, native Christy Goldsby ran a traditional bakery with her family. While helping a friend negotiate a health struggle, though, she began searching for a dessert that didn’t skimp on the indulgence of a cake or brownie but offered up better nutrition. Her truffle bars became a Pacific Northwest hit that have since hit refrigerated shelves nationwide. Always starting with honey and coconut oil, Goldsby makes rich treats with surprising or comforting flavor profiles—tahini and tangerine, for instance, or coconut, pecan, and cocoa. My favorites? Lemon Blueberry and Peanut Butter Cup. Though cooled in the store, they stay soft and safe for several days on trail, giving you the uncanny sense that you’re somehow downing brownie batter in the tent. That’s not just the indica talking, bro.

LMNT’s Chocolate Caramel Hydration Mix, Served Hot

If I stay somewhere swanky on trail, I tend to leave with a half-dozen tea bags, pilfered from the hotel lobby or the breakfast spread. When the weather turns toward winter, I turn into the tent-bound version of the , its living room and red stocking cap swapped for my Dyneema confines and a blaze-orange beanie. You can guess the tea’s upshot: I inevitably crawl out of my cozy lair at least once per night, losing whatever warmth I’d gained. The new play, though, is a packet of LMNT’s , especially formulated to be enjoyed hot. Simply drop it in eight ounces of warm water and swirl. That’s not enough water to send me outside past hiker midnight, and it serves a crucial purpose: replacing some of the day’s electrolytes without giving me a late-night sugar buzz.

LMNT is passionate, above all, about salt. “Stay Salty,” reads one company slogan. Another? “Salty AF.” Cofounder Robb Wolf has even regarding sodium, writing that the link between sodium and blood pressure rests on “conjecture.” LMNT uses three ingredients—salt, potassium citrate from Aspergillus niger, and magnesium malate—to deliver electrolytes in several flavors with less than 10 calories. (If you favor their science but not LMNT’s cost, they offer , too.) The ones meant to be taken hot work as my new nightcap. Drinking salty water with a touch of cocoa powder from a titanium pot? Surprisingly delicious.

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My wife Tina never got tired of waiting at the bottom of some long descent—or at least she never showed it.

For the first several years we spent hiking together—back when a “thru-hike” was little more to us than some inexplicable abbreviation—I would motor uphill, only to lag badly on the way back down. I loved ascending from the start (see those tips here), because I was good at it. But I cursed the other direction for the opposite reason. Whatever faint sense of machismo I had made me wonder if women’s physiology was better suited for descending trails, or if my then-girlfriend was simply showing off. My final verdict? I was just really bad at hiking downhill.

But this not-so-radical act of self-acceptance coincided with a burgeoning ambition to climb bigger mountains—and so, to come down them, too. If I were going to do that, especially safely, I knew I’d need to get better at the seemingly easier part of hiking that, at least, for some of us, is torturous on the knees and nerves. Where getting better at going up, though, seemed intuitive and even obvious, improving my technique and pace at downhill hiking was a mystery. How do you get better at what is essentially controlled falling?

Well, turns out, by falling, getting up, figuring out why you fell, and doing something about it the next time. During 10,000 miles of thru-hiking, I’ve tumbled so many times (mostly while going down) that I’m lucky to remain in one piece. I’ve considered and internalized my errors and gotten much faster and more confident in my strides down both modest trail and steep mountain.

But I’ve still wondered about the techniques and tricks out there that make a hiker great on descents. So a few weeks ago, I called , a Washington State-based physical therapist and avid adventurer who has worked on bodies in Antarctica, helped launch the , and long been a part of the U.S. Ski Team’s medical pool. “When I’m on trail, I can feel the increased forces going downhill versus uphill,” explains Majerus. “And that’s because there is an increased tensile force going downhill, because that’s an , not concentric. That puts more demand on the muscle. We have to make sure we train that way.”

I wanted to know if the changes I’d made to help train myself might help others descend, too. Turns out—and I’m sorry for this joke—but maybe I’m on a roll?

Pay Attention to the Terrain

Unless you’re on an exposed ridge, there’s typically only so far you can fall while hiking upward. You stumble, maybe you skin your knee, and you get back up and press on. Falling while hiking down is, of course, an entirely different proposal, since the same gravitational forces that ostensibly make going down easier can also send you end over end or headlong into a tree. And for my money, there’s no easier way to hate an activity than to get badly injured while doing it. So watch out for roots that will trip you, rocks that may give way, or sand, water, and snow that may make the next surface more slippery than the last. I often compare hiking downhill to clambering through a new-to-me boulder field, when I am acutely aware that each rock may shift and cause me to wipe out. The mental calculus of this awareness eventually becomes automatic. And when you do slip, you’ll know enough about the terrain around you to respond.

In fact, hikers not paying attention are one reason Majerus still has a job. She can “prehab” athletes all she wants in order to prevent overuse injuries, but mindless accidents will always happen. “People say ‘Aren’t you putting yourself out of business by giving us advice before we’re hurt?’” she explains, laughing. “But people lose attention for a moment, and things happen that are beyond their control. They can still come to us.”

Keep a Loose Body Posture

Majerus wants you to visualize a basketball player catching a pass and immediately shifting into the famous . Their feet are shoulder-width apart, with their knees slightly bent, chest out, and their head up. They can survey the court before them, then shoot, pass, or dribble from that position as the situation demands. They are in a versatile position, body loose and ready to react.

No, Majerus doesn’t want you to drop into an actual triple-threat stance on trail, but the mechanics aren’t so different: Maintain a slight bend in the knees, but mostly remember to avoid tensing up throughout your body, as if you’re trying to preempt a spill by resisting gravity. Indeed, for years, this was my foible. I’d stiffen while descending, locking my back and butt and knees with oaken obstinance, hoping to fend off the inevitable. And then, of course, I would fall, anyway; my muscles would ache, too, from the exertion of my tetanus-like rigidity. When we’re loose, we already have an advantage when something bad does happen, because we’re ready to respond like that basketball player. Our bodies know how to move downhill; we just need to give them space to do so.

Plant Your Heels

If you’ve ever walked down a steep snow field, you’ve probably used the . That is, you sit back in your stride with a slightly wide stance and plant one heel in the snow; you settle in and then repeat with the opposite foot, your heel again cutting into the snow first. Walking down a steep hill sans snow? Do a less hyperbolic version of the same motion, bending your knees and leaning into your butt ever so slightly while leading with your heel. Follow through your arch and, just as you start to rise on your toes, repeat with the other foot. You’ll modulate momentum this way by counteracting gravity from your very position. Too, you’re using a more stable part of your foot.

If you’re a fast runner, this may feel counterintuitive, since running swiftly downhill often entails landing on your toes or maybe your midfoot, with your heel barely touching the ground if at all. Coming off a glacier and onto scree one time, Majerus remembers a friend telling her to just run to the bottom already. “Those were the biggest splits I’ve ever done, with a huge pack on,” she says, grimacing. “I destroyed my adductor muscles where the groin is. Why did I do that? I had been in walk mode, back on my heels a little bit. When I started running, I had nothing beneath me.”

Keep Your Weight Off of Your Hiking Poles

We’ve all seen and possibly even done it (I’m guilty): someone leaning so far forward over their hiking poles that they look like some kind of quadruped robot from a sci-fi series or a tech-school’s cutting-edge lab. It feels instinctive, of course, not only to give yourself more points of contact with the ground but also to feel like you’re parallel with the slope. But best-case scenario, your back is going to ache when you reach the bottom; worse-scenario case, you hurtle onto your face should your foot catch anything or the poles slide out from loose terrain. Don’t do it, then. Remember your bent knees and planted heels, and keep your poles to your side or barely out front. Think of them a little bit like a backhoe’s stabilizers, appendages that keep the machine from tipping as it works.

Pole length and size, however, comes down to personal preference, and one of the only wrong scenarios with them is what I describe above. Majerus suggests poles be high enough to render a 90-degree angle at the elbow; if I’m going down something especially steep, I might make them slightly longer in order to catch myself better during a big missed step. What’s more, if I’m using poles at all, I use only one, Warren Doyle-style, because it keeps me more aware and reactive. But that’s just me. “Poles create a little lateral stability, though ultimately, we want our glutes and core to create that lateral stability,” says Majerus. “But I’ve seen people who want to keep charging up and down mountains as they get older, and maybe they lose a little eyesight. Think of a pole as a proprioceptive feedback tool.”

Practice and Prepare

If you’ve ever been on a long downhill run or hike, you understand the strain it puts on your quads after you wake up the next morning and shuffle through your house, wondering if your legs will ever again feel whole. Remember, after all, what Majerus said about the force that the legs are enduring and about downhill exercise being eccentric exercise—that is, the muscle is extending. To prepare the quads, Majerus recommends . But it’s not only your quads that need help; your hamstrings should be sharing slightly less of the load, at an approximate ratio of three to two. Make sure to stretch and load those, too. And given the relative gravitational perils of going downhill (that is, taking a big spill), remember to work on stability beyond toting trekking poles: core strength, glute exercises, single leg deadlifts, basic balance drills.

Last tip? Find ways to actually practice going downhill, whether that means having someone drop you at the top of progressively higher roads or simply as part of a long weekend hike. Several months ago, I moved to the top of a canyon in Colorado’s Front Range, and I run 20 miles down its paved switchbacks almost every Sunday, getting faster and more confident each time. I can already feel that accreted strength back on trail. Please don’t suddenly go from flat city greenways to hill repeats on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, but go practice going down, and your hiking will get stronger and more enjoyable. You don’t want to make someone wait, right?

The post Want to Hike Downhill Pain-Free? Here Are Five Tips. appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

The critics were correct—of course we should have had a Garmin inReach.

Early last October, after nearly 10,000 miles of hiking together without major incident, my wife, Tina, and I became separated on the Continental Divide Trail. A snowstorm had swept through the San Juan range of southern Colorado, and we’d unknowingly taken different routes on that choose-your-own-adventure trek. For 36 hours, walking back and forth while postholing in fresh snow, we couldn’t find one another. There was no cell service, and since we’re accustomed to moving together in relative lockstep, neither of us carried a Garmin inReach—the rugged orange rectangles dangling from the front of backpacks that allow adventurers in the backcountry to communicate with one another.

Instead, I used the relatively rudimentary satellite function of my iPhone to text an SOS message to an emergency responder. After some back and forth, the responder told me that Tina had made it to town, and I was able to tell the operator that I was mostly safe and on my way, too. It was the most embarrassing and unsettling instant in two years living outdoors. As șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű readers , I really should have had a Garmin, bro.

But only nine months later, Apple might be upending that quip. On June 10, amid a flurry of announcements at its , the company revealed that its forthcoming iPhone operating system, , will indeed allow users linked to satellite to send text messages to others, not just to emergency services. While the iPhone’s current capabilities managed to tell me which way to go and find me a ride from a high mountain pass, that all would have been unnecessary had I simply been able to ask Tina where she was (or vice versa), much as I could have done with a Garmin.

With iOS 18 or a Garmin inReach, there would have been no tentless night in the Colorado cold, no search-and-rescue duo dispatched, no exhausted day off in a Silverton hostel. Instead, Tina and I could have texted one another with a simple link to a satellite, saving ourselves 36 cold and anguished hours and a lot of emotional anguish. We would have simply rendezvoused and continued south.

Exact details about Apple’s new service remain scarce, but a source close to the company did confirm a few key components to șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű: When iOS 18 is released, likely this fall, those with an iPhone 14 or newer will be able to send satellite-based iMessages and SMS messages, complete with emojis and in-line replies. Two phones connected only to satellite, as in my hypothetical, will be able to text one another. There will be no quota, meaning you can send five or 500 such messages. And at least until late 2025 for current iPhone 14, 15, or 16 users (or two years after the purchase of a 14 or later, if you’re now in the market), the functionality is free. No future price plan has been announced. Apple believes it has the satellite capacity to handle this new volume, though the service will not support RCS messages, calls, or data.

The announcement sets up a sort of satellite race with Android, too, as it began to last month that they too were eligible for satellite messages. The real competition here, though, is not between Apple and Android, as it seems clear both will offer two-way satellite messaging within the next several months, anyway. Instead, the question is what happens to Garmin, , and the bevy of similar devices that have long enabled such satellite communication from the backcountry without the same mainstream cultural cachet as Apple.

Are these outdoor gizmos doomed to become dodos, fated for extinction as their particular niche disappears? In the long run, barring innovations of their own, perhaps. (Garmin recently declined to comment on Apple’s iOS 18 announcement.) Still, after our incident in October, Tina and I did indeed buy a fleet of Garmins. We’ve since toted them on backcountry ski or snowshoe adventures in avalanche country and canyoneering escapades down in the Colorado Plateau. They’re going with us on thru-hikes later this year.

Indeed, I’m not getting rid of them as soon as iOS 18 arrives. Remember, inReach and other SOS devices are made for heady outdoor travel, whereas an iPhone and Android are not. We’ve bricked supposedly waterproof phones in rain jackets and broken multiple screens amid alpine boulder fields. In the desert, heat has temporarily deactivated my phone, just as cold has done on the mountain. Batteries fail.

The Garmin inReach and its ilk are little rubber-bound bricks, readymade to be dropped or rained on and abused. Their batteries last a long time (you’ll need a lot of backups to charge an iPhone for 14 days, ) and, perhaps more important, are separate from that of your phone. As last lines of defense go, they are made to be resilient, perhaps even to outlast you. And though Apple’s new operating system will add hiking trails only in national parks to its fleet of maps, many of these satellite-based devices include native maps, route tracking, and weather, however frustrating and non-Apple-intuitive their proprietary platforms can be. That is to say, they are made for people who are trying to disappear from cell phone service, not for those who happen to disappear from it. That’s why they’re bound to stick around, if only for a little while.

Our smartphones have become the Swiss Army Knives of digital existence, in the woods as in the city. They are our map and our camera, our newspaper and our entertainment, our calculator and our compass. But when Karl Elsener in 1897, he enabled Swiss soldiers to do lots of things reasonably well—pop corked bottles, open canned rations, punch holes in leather, cut through fabric. The Swiss Army Knife wasn’t the best at most anything it could do; it could and can still simply do lots of things with some measure of inefficiency. The tradeoff is that you have it all in one compact form.

At this early stage, that’s how I think of Apple’s attempt at comprehensive satellite coverage in the backcountry, too: most likely good enough for most circumstances, but perhaps a little flimsy and unproven when I know the situation could get extreme. The market will likely never be big enough for some near-unbreakable endurance version of an iPhone or Android, something you can take deep in the woods or down a river without worrying about its ability to withstand the elements. For that reason, at least for now, I guess I really should have that Garmin, bro.

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If the cab fare to the southern end of the Pacific Crest Trail cost $1,000, so be it: I was not going to spend an hour crowded into a van grousing about the world with a hiker named Honest Abe.

Abe and I had met on the Appalachian Trail in 2019, and it did not take much conversation for us to intuit that we were opposites—not friends, perhaps even nemeses. I am a middle-class Southern nerd who went to college, then got paid to stroke his beard while tapping thoughts about music into a machine. Abe, meanwhile, had grown up in rural Missouri and joined the Marines before becoming an electric lineworker whose work powered my machine.

Our politics followed predictably: I was the liberal activist who believed Donald Trump was coming for my vulnerable friends back home. Abe, meanwhile, was the Trump advocate who I assumed had at least one Gadsden flag bumper sticker on his pickup. Marching alongside a Virginia creek bed one humid afternoon, we had a brief but pointed exchange about our opposing views. We both walked away scowling.

Whenever we’d spot one another during the next 1,800 miles, we’d silently glare and maybe nod, sworn enemies simply acknowledging one another’s existence.

But here we were, in the spring of 2021, slated for the same shuttle to Campo, the California border town where the PCT begins. A mutual friend we’d both met on the Appalachian Trail had volunteered to ferry us and a few others to the start in a van that was also her home; assuming everyone was a reasonable adult, she hadn’t bothered to warn anyone about who else was coming. I was already apprehensive about this 2,600-mile walk, so I didn’t want to begin it by arguing about Covid lockdowns and Capitol rioters with someone I despised. Were it not for the wisdom of Tina, my wife and hiking partner, I would have called that cab to Campo.

And then, something unexpected happened: Abe and I grew to like another. For the PCT’s first 400 miles, or until he sped ahead to meet a deadline, we walked and talked and debated and laughed—so much that my other pals wondered if I’d had some MAGA epiphany. No, neither my nor Abe’s politics had changed much, but our old perspectives on ourselves—that we each had to be right, that our worldviews were so valid they did not warrant explanation or defense—magically softened. We talked about privilege and welfare, transgender rights and reproductive access, and our chats rarely rose into arguments.

American rancor had reached new heights since we first met in 2019. Somehow, though, he was less bitter, and I was less vitriolic.

So what had changed inside of me and Abe in those two years? Turns out, we’d both walked enough—often in silent solitude, where our own roiling thoughts could mellow into a simmer, and sometimes with others who didn’t always see the world the same way—to be able to listen. Walking had warped our brains, and we were happier for it.

Both my job and my hobby have perennially demanded a kind of unapologetic certitude. A music critic since I was 18, I have had to wield my opinions as something of a sword, brandishing them upon arrival for two decades of bylines. And then, in my early thirties, this conviction translated into absurdist political activism, where humor was weaponized to lampoon those who I felt were wrong. (Well, they were wrong and still are, but whatever.) In a campaign that soon spread to other continents, Tina and I mocked abortion clinic protestors with handmade signs. We followed a few hundred friends every week to blow airhorns at North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory to protest his assaults on transgender rights; that campaign eventually and debatably altered North Carolina’s 2016 gubernatorial. Very little of my life and what might be regarded as success involved listening.

That was, more or less, my mindset when I headed north from Springer Mountain on the Appalachian Trail in 2019—be right, never waver. But today, after walking 10,000 miles through Southwestern deserts and New England forests, over Rocky Mountain heights and across Florida swamps, I know that my mind has changed, and that virtues like patience, humility, and empathy have steadily swollen to crowd out the ego, arrogance, and anxiety that once dominated my mindset. I first noticed this soon after the AT, when my longtime instinct to critique something yielded to the desire to hear someone’s story and help tell it. The encounter with Abe, where two peas from very different pods started to fashion our own trail bubble, felt like absolute proof: Thru-hiking had absolutely altered my brain for the better. I notice it even now, in my daily relationships and interactions off trail, and I hope it never fades.

“Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord,” Rebecca Solnit wrote early in her great . “Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them.”

Solnit wrote that back in 2000, years before social media demanded that everyone have and share an automatic opinion about everything. It has only become more salient as we have become more reactionary, piling takes atop takes until we have built a pile of trash with no foundation. But crisscrossing the isolated Continental Divide in Montana or pushing through the canyon of the Gila River in New Mexico, this isn’t an option, simply because you don’t enough have cell service to be in or contribute to the proverbial know. Even when you do, the root that could trip you and cost you your hike matters more than what some stranger thinks of another stranger on a screen. You have time, then, to be still with your thoughts, to examine them from every angle, because you simply have less access to and stamina for an incessant opinion factory. Your mind is less busy with the world, racing less to keep up with a pace none of us can match, anyway.

This begets a new sort of patience, too, or at least it did for me. When you accept that you need not have a readymade take on everything, you instead become comfortable with interrogating an idea more deliberately, with letting a thought tumble around in your brain until it is as smooth as some river rock. This process also mirrors your daily existence on trail—methodical, consistent, slow. Rushing anything means enjoying it less; rushing too much risks an injury from overloading the system. Walking is an invitation to settle into that system, to indulge in the steadiness of the long haul, both mentally and physically.

And then there is the question of the people you meet out there, strangers you get to know simply because there is no one else around. In the woods, I’ve heard so many ideas and perspectives I’d never before considered, just because I chose to hear what someone had to offer rather than walk in silence. In turn, I’ve listened to their reactions to what I’ve had to say. This is the bilateral breakdown of the clique, or of the circles of ideological reinforcement that we build around ourselves for validation, both online and in physical communities. By the time Abe and I reconnected on the PCT, we were far enough away from our own cliques—and lonely enough, maybe?—to listen for real and, in turn, be heard.

Almost 100 years ago, guidebook editor Harold Allen the Appalachian Trail was “remote for detachment, narrow for chosen company, winding for leisure, [and] lonely for contemplation.” His words transcend the AT and fit any space where you can put any foot in front of the other for a long time. These are places to let your mind indulge in all the things that our ever-busying world frequently denies it: room to roam, freedom to change, an opportunity to open again.

I am, unfortunately, not naïve enough to think that incredibly long walks are some workable political solution, that they are either practical or applicable for the average American. We live in an era of almost unconscionably high stakes, when our societal embrace of brinksmanship could push us over a half-dozen abyssal brinks. One of the most well-armed countries in the world has killed 34,000 of its neighbors since October. We lack the political, economic, and personal will to change our systems enough so that we don’t destroy our own planet. Women’s rights, trans rights, voting rights—somehow, a quarter-century into the 21st, these seem as contentious now as they have ever been.

No, long walks in the woods aren’t going to fix that, even if I could change the mind of someone who didn’t buy all this global warming hullabaloo with every new on-trail debate. Aggressive activism remains essential and urgent. I don’t want to suggest that we literally walk away from it or that getting along with someone in the woods is in any way a substitute for substantive changes in ideology or policy.

But these treks have gifted me a new kind of wherewithal, a burgeoning understanding that none of these fixes will be instant and that none of them will be implemented by continual yelling into the void. I spent so much of my life judging, speaking, and preaching, all impulsive acts rooted in convenience and quickness. It is much harder to slow down—to listen, think, and talk, to try and find a way forward that is more than an assertion of your own arrogant will. I have walked that fever off, at least for now, and I feel better about my ability to move in and relate to the world even if I feel worse about the actual state of the world. That is, it feels a little better to be alive, to be in my own head.

I am still honest with Abe and tell him when I think he’s wrong, which remains pretty often. But after our own walks in the woods, I can actually hear where he’s coming from before I try to change his mind, too.

How a Short Hike Can Change Your Brain

At this point, I have altered my entire life to make way for long-distance hikes, setting aside a chunk of every year to do just that. In this regard, I am incredibly lucky and privileged, and I know that many Americans don’t have the resources or luxury to disappear into the woods for six uninterrupted hours, let alone six months.

The good news? You don’t have to. You can use the fundamental takeaways that have helped to change my brain as I have walked across the United States, whether you’re walking in a state park or simply strolling the sidewalk or rail trail with your dog near your neighborhood. Here’s how I think of it.

Put your phone away
Some folks may tell you that you should just leave your phone at home, that the purpose of hiking is to disconnect and that’s the simplest route. Bollocks. Maps, a camera, an emergency escape—your phone has it all. But put the thing away. Try not to see your stroll as a chance to catch up on scrolling, so that you can be incensed by the news on Twitter or envious of friends on Instagram. Step away from the feed and just let your mind unpack itself. I’ve got a treadmill with a TV attached, and the impact of walking while watching Netflix or reading the news is never the same as it is outdoors, free of screened input. “[Walking] leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts,” Rebecca Solnit writes. Revel in that gift.

Hike often
How often are you riled up by news, distracted by your phone, or simply taken away from your thoughts by the world at large? All the time, yeah? You’re not going to be able to match that number blow for blow with walks, but do your best. My mind didn’t change after my first day on the Appalachian Trail or even my first 100; this is an accretive process, so give yourself as many chances to be in motion and still with your thoughts as possible.

Talk to people on the trail
I know I’ve said a lot about walking in silence, but one of the most salutary parts of hiking for me has been hearing other people’s perspectives and trying to understand the way they see the world. I’m not a naturally empathetic person, but as walking has worn down my own arrogance, listening to strangers in the woods has enhanced that part of my head. Strike up a conversation, and see what you learn.

Remind yourself of a hike is its own miracle
Sorry to end on a New Age note here, but I guess hiking is to blame? Seriously, remember that this is all pretty incredible—you have the ability, space, and time to go for a walk, the culmination of millions of years of evolution and geologic deep time, all far beyond your control. Want to feel less arrogant and convinced of your correctness? Remember how you’re just lucky to be here, and keep on walking.

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I often joke that thru-hikers are total fearmongers. Alone on a trail with nothing but a few friends, a cell phone that has no service, and all our thoughts, we dwell on the challenge posed by upcoming terrain, and we then spread these worries to one another like a common cold.

Oh, man, you think Tennessee is tough? I heard this statement a dozen times on the Appalachian Trail. Just wait until we hit Virginia. Brutal, bro. When we did in fact hit Virginia, Pennsylvania became the new object of our collective dread—and on and on, up the spine of those old mountains. In thru-hiking, whatever comes next is almost always going to be the worst thing ever.

But I’ve wisened to this fearmongering. In early November 2023, I finished the Triple Crown of Hiking, a process I started in 2019 when I withstood the Virginia Blues and Rocksylvania to reach the northern end of the Appalachian Trail. The hardest part of a thru-hike, I can now say with 8,000 miles and 22 states of certainty, is not always what comes next. Some states feel like actual walks in city parks, because they sometimes are; others summon Odysseus, seabound on his ship and seemingly only getting farther away from home as one disaster precipitates another.

To clear up any future on-trail confusion and jitters—and perhaps to provide some insight to those who are just looking to trek across one state and not nearly half of the 50—I’ve ranked them from hardest to easiest, or from the ones that felt like they were trying to kill me to the ones that felt mostly like items on a checklist. This, of course, is entirely subjective, based only on my experiences in 2019 (Appalachian Trail, northbound), 2021 (Pacific Crest Trail, northbound), and 2023 (Continental Divide Trail, southbound). Go find out for yourself.

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șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű’sÌęTrail Magic hiking columnist Grayson Haver Currin recently completed the triple crown of hiking when he finished the Continental Divide Trail this past November.Ìę

The Mountain View Motel & RV Park in Lima, Montana is a bit of a broke-down relic, a roadside archive of interstate architecture weathered viciously by time. Its front office is a riot of maps, souvenirs, and ostensible trash, all tossed akimbo. The room doors are faded and bent, handles catawampus in a way that suggests the long-ago spats of late-night fights between young lovers.

And the rooms themselves are reliquaries of another America, where thrift and permanence had yet to make way for planned obsolescence. The curtains are retired bath towels, the bedside tables survivors of a town thrash heap. Stained from decades of bodies and bubbling soap, the graying porcelain tub is surrounded by the exact cerulean tile I sledgehammered in my grandmother’s bathroom as a preteen.

This is the type of motel that my mother never would have allowed us to stay in during our family road trips decades ago. She would have demanded that my father press ahead in the family Ford Explorer to some chain hotel along Interstate 15.

But early last August, standing on the shoulder of an I-15 frontage road beneath ominous slate skies, I desperately waited for a ride to The Mountain View Motel as though it were some Edenic haven, an oneiric escape. By then, my wife Tina and I had trudged more than 800 miles through Montana and Idaho along the Continental Divide Trail (CDT), crossing roller-coaster terrain with 6,000 feet of gain and loss a day earlier. We collapsed into the wounded little sedan that eventually shuttled us there as though it were a chariot of the gods. We ate so much breakfast at Lima’s only open restaurant that we didn’t worry that the steakhouse everyone loved was closed for the day, meaning we’d need to forage in a convenience store for supper.

At The Mountain View, where the night’s stay cost $51 split three ways, I rifled through that waste in the front office—actually, a series of three overflowing , full of secondhand supplies—like it was the grocery store Lima doesn’t have. I sank into the bathtub, its dirt less a concern than my own, and stayed in its simmering water so long that I emerged deliciously woozy from the heat, staggering around in a towel destined to become drapery. That evening, the stranger in the room next door, living largely out of his car, offered to fry us potatoes on his propane stove while we lay in bed, blissed out on gas-station ice cream, Shark Tank reruns, and weed we’d walked with since Helena. Long before dawn, I was up writing at a wobbly old desk with chipped veneer. The Mountain View had everything I needed.

I adored it, still do. Because even the Mountain View felt like an oasis during our thru-hike.

What Should a Room Cost, Anyway?

Estimates vary wildly, but recent studies suggest that the average American hotel room runs from $ to $ a night. I am happy, however, to report from the front lines of dirtbag dives that all the luxuries an exhausted adventurer needs—a hot shower, a bed, and, in most cases, even a little black refrigerator that smells permanently stale—can be found from coast to coast for $100, or often, much less.

There’s the Hitching Post Country Motel in Cornwall Bridge, Connecticut, for $85 along the Appalachian Trail; the Y Motel in Chama, New Mexico, near the Colorado border on the CDT (also $85); the Packwood Inn in Packwood, Washington ($129), where the Pacific Crest Trail veers toward Mount Rainier. These are all beaten but beatific spaces, family-owned joints that care not about welcoming you into the lap of luxury but about providing just enough to send you back on your way the next morning.

As I’ve walked up and down the country and across half of the American states during the last five years, cheap hotels have served as crucial stopovers. Their staffs are rarely judgmental about how dirty I am when I arrive, how much trash I put in the dumpster when I leave, or how many hikers we squeeze into a single room. They are accustomed, after all, to transience, to people arriving on one personal threshold or another.

Such spots are under-sung hubs of outdoor adventure, allowing for big conquests that adhere to relatively little budgets, no matter if you’re walking the CDT or biking or it, canyoneering along Arizona’s Mogollon Rim, or climbing in California’s Pinnacles, living in a van and needing a break, or just on a car-camping road trip. I want to say thanks to those who own and operate these cheap hotels, to the often-ignominious or altogether overlooked dives that enable us to press on. They hint at the comforts of home but not so much that we stay for too long.

Not Only a Stopover

There is, of course, a privilege to all this, to so much of what we do outdoors and adjacent to it. I have chosen repeatedly to slog my way across the United States and to stay in places that fellow middle-class Millennials would see as roughing it. My neighbors in these places have often been the dispossessed or houseless, down and out for any of a dozen reasons.

Several folks staying at The L Motel in Flagstaff, Arizona (where rooms start at $35 despite that town’s tourist boom) seemed like they’d always been there and had no plans to depart. My wayside indulgence was their survival, and respecting the space we shared despite that difference has been a crucial elements of my long walks. We spend so much time in our cloisters, walled off from the ways the rest of the world lives. I’m as guilty as anyone. These hotels are a reminder of our own relative comforts, no matter how much your legs and arms ache.

It all reminds me of something the artist and songwriter wrote while a student at what would become CalArts, back when it was bankrolled by Walt Disney. “The quaint American town doesn’t have a wrong side of the tracks,” he railed in a diatribe against Disneyland’s fake utopian microcosm. “The castle doesn’t have serfs.” It is good to get out of the woods and into the world, to recognize the difficulties our society shares. Along with a shower and a sleep, these hotels allow for an essential bit of real-world seeing.

When In Jackson Hole

About 200 trail miles south of Lima, an old hiking friend scooped us from the Old Faithful Inn in Yellowstone and braved the park’s seemingly ceaseless construction to drive us to Jackson Hole. There are, of course, very few towns in the United States better and worse suited to adventure pursuits than Jackson. It is surrounded by an absurd abundance of pristine public land, but it is also home to the absurdly wealthy, meaning that my beloved $100-or-less hotel rooms are almost impossible to find. You can park your RV downtown, as I often have, but finding a low-end room is a low-odds endeavor.

So we went the other way entirely, getting comped a room at the goddamned Four Seasons at the base of Jackson’s most famous ski resort, because I happen to write for this magazine. It was a wonderful and ridiculous and silly experience, with an hour-long personal tour of the imaginative wildlife art that graces its hallways like some hidden museum and a truly gluttonous steak dinner that, were it not also free, would have tanked our hotel budget clear to the Mexican border. In the room, the pillows felt like dinner rolls allowed to rise to maximum loft, the sheets like premium lotion. My mom would have loved it, and she would have insisted that we never leave.

But swollen from steak and wiped from walking, I found myself in bed that night doing what I almost always do in a hotel while on trail: a little stoned, a whole lot of Shark Tank. All of this luxury was nice to have, sure, and I’d be a hypocritical ninny to complain about it, to describe such a gift with anything other than gratitude. I didn’t need any of it, however, and none of us really do. Thru-hiking resets my baselines with social media, food, suffering—and, turns out, with the level of luxury I want.

I woke up before dawn the next morning and wrote at the Four Seasons’ desk, just as I’d done in Lima, until it was time to leave. I grabbed a few fancy tea bags on my way out and tucked them into my backpack, assuming they wouldn’t roll like that at the Pronghorn Lodge in Lander, Wyoming, a few hundred more miles to the south. They did have a tub, a bed, and a television. That was enough for me.

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