Budding: Three Years Off On the Trail

As our civilized world seemingly crumbles, more and more of us are seeking solace in wilderness. Venturing into wilderness on a trail offers a diversion from civilization, while providing a relatively clear way forward.

Thru-hiking is an extreme expression of this. Completion of an end-to-end hike of the Appalachian Trail or one of its lesser- known, more challenging alternatives can meet the need for accomplishment while soothing stress bred by civilization. Crossing all three, known as the Triple Crown of American Long-Distance Hiking, is the extremist’s response to the urge to take a long walk on the wild side of our world.

It seems so unlikely. Still all indications are that it was an inexperienced outdoorsman who somehow first thru-hiked the Triple Crown, more than 8,000 miles across the Pacific Crest, Appalachian and Continental Divide trails, in consecutive years.

This amazing realization only came clear to me, more than a third of a century after it was I who had reached Columbus, New Mexico in December 1987, and the end of the “trail”.

Even before my magazine article on the hikes hit subscribers; mailboxes and store shelves, I was back at work as a newspaper reporter, soon after a husband and then a father. The unlikely, singular adventure faded slowly into the past.

More than 800 have since reported their Triple Crown completions to the Appalachian Long Distance Hiking Association-West, formed seven years after my finish and apparently the only organization keeping track of this.

Finally retired, my search for other more likely candidates has so far failed to turn up anyone to have made all three of these thru-hikes before me, virtually certainly not in consecutive years. And for this reason – and others we will revisit in the pages ahead - I will try to retrieve it all from the past and bring it into context for hardcore hikers and armchair adventurers alike.

The timing seems right.

“What was once considered an undertaking for only the fringe of society—I mean who on earth would want to hike 20 miles a day being tired and dirty for months at a time—has actually started to become very popular,” Chris Cage, an AT thru-hiker and trail-food maker, wrote more than a quarter century later, in 2020. Long-distance or thru-hiking continues to grow in popularity.

In 1921, the idea of setting aside American land for extended nature hikes away from civilization was floated by a land conservationist named Benton MacKaye, leading to the creation of the Appalachian Trail (AT). Congress eventually established a system of scenic trails, including the Pacific Crest (PCT) and Continental Divide (CDT).

Early AT crossings made legends of Earl Shaffer (recently discredited) and Grandma Gatewood, and Robert Redford brought the trail to the big screen. Less well known are those who thru-hiked the PCT and CDT, although Reese Witherspoon’s starring role in Cheryl Strayed’s story of her abbreviated PCT attempt certainly drew my attention to this long-distance trail.

Waiting multiple decades to tell a travel story isn’t new.

“Starting at dawn, ending at dark and only separated by light sleep, each day in the mountains seemed to contain a longer sequence of phases than a week at ground level. Twenty-four hours would spin themselves into a lifetime, and thin mountain air, sharpened faculties, the piling-up of detail and a kaleidoscope of scene changes seemed to turn the concatenation into a kind of eternity,” English travel  writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, wrote - describing his hike in the Carpathian Mountains in Hungary - in ‘Between the Woods and the Water,’ the second of three parts of his retelling, 40 years later, of his travels across Europe, from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople.

In addition to a distance allowing for a more introspective narrative, the waiting leaves room for a look at changes to the trails, the landscape and the environment, the marching forward, perhaps to the end, should we complete destruction of remaining wilderness, the whittling away of nature, despite the warning signs.

“Back in 1985, there was no monument. Rather than a check-in station, the walls of an old border station in Mexico marked the beginning of our PCT hike and my 500-plus adventure,” I responded to a May 2025 Facebook post about another beginning. What a difference a third of a century can make.

Memories merge, muddling the past. Journal entries help take us back to where it all began at the Mexican border in 1985.