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The Frog in the Boiling Water
As I rode my borrowed bike the 41 miles from Abercrombie, North Dakota into Fergus Falls, Minnesota, I found myself singing. One of the songs I sang over and over was “Happiness runs in a circular motion…” I realized that for much of this hike, I hadn’t been able to sing because it took too…
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Bike Your Own Hike
I have often talked about the need to hike your own hike. That is a hiker motto reminding people not to compare oneself to others in terms of speed and so many other factors. When I hiked the Appalachian Trail, both times in the 1980s, I was kind of a purist, following every blaze. On…
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Saved by Angels
I was as close to giving up on the North Country Trail as I have ever been on any of my 21,500 miles of backpacking, except for when I had three broken bones in my foot on the Pacific Northwest Trail. My foot was excruciatingly painful. Temperatures were in the nineties, made worse by a…
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Weird Thoughts I Have When Hiking
After my last blog about the wind, I have mixed feelings reporting that the wind has dissipated quite a bit. It still comes up during storms and threatens to blow my tent down, but unfortunately it’s lessened in these days when the temperatures are in the high 80s and 90s. Just now I would gladly…
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Things we get used to
For me, the incessant wind in North Dakota is a bit tiring. It reminds me of the wind in the great basin in Wyoming on the Continental Divide Trail where some hikers feel the wind is making them crazy and they end up screaming for it to stop. The wind certainly has given me something…
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Holy Shit day number one on the NCT
There are about 100 people who get a ping sent from my Garmin satellite device every night showing where I’m camped. Most of the time it says “on the north country trail” and the recipient can scroll in and see where I am. But every once in a while a message goes out that says…
The Mary Badass
A Ruminating Blog About Personal Healing, Adventure and Day to Day Life
