Category: Uncategorized
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Rewriting the Narrative
As I work to heal from the first of numerous surgeries on my foot, I’ve been thinking about how what we experience in life creates the story we carry with us into our future. This impacts how we interpret the behavior of others and how we react in the world. Because of experiences in my…
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Scars, Post Surgery and Hiking
I’ve been thinking a lot about scars lately, both physical and emotional ones. Some scars barely impact our lives, but others have more lasting impact. When I burned 40% of my body over 30 years ago, I had some scars that were so tight I had to have them surgically removed and expanded by cutting…
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Building Support
Asking for help has never been easy for me. I’ve gotten better at it over these last few years of backpacking, in part because it’s the only way I was able to achieve my goal. For instance, without the help I received on the Florida Trail with people shuttling my car around so I didn’t…
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Finding a Door
There are many times in my life when I have felt hemmed in without a way out. It was certainly that way as a child growing up in an abusive family. As an adult, making the commitment to do the extremely painful work of healing trauma and reuniting my dissociative parts often left me feeling…
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Chipping Away at Life
I spent part of today chipping ice off my solar panels. They’ve been solidly encased in ice for almost a week. Pretty much every day I’ve brushed the new snow off them without being able to make a dent in the thick layer of ice underneath. Looking at the upcoming weather and realizing there was…
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December 25 2025
Where to begin? Perhaps by saying, I have thought often of all of you who read my blogs. I’m grateful to those who have checked in on me to see how I’m doing and who donated to the GoFundMe site after my foot was burned. Truly, my connections with people are one of the things…
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Update
I am writing this to inform you all of a major incident which has affected my blogging. And I am asking you to see this as a public service announcement, spreading the word to prevent this from happening to others. Last week I was hiking in Vt with Angela, who was on the verge of…
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Mary Badass in Alaska part 5
I’ve lived below the poverty line most of my life and I’ve done ok. One way I did that was to never eat out or buy new clothes and to almost never spend money on myself. After my ex walked out and cleaned out our bank account, I was even more afraid to spend money…
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Mary Badass in Alaska part four
I value the interactions I have with people I meet on my exploits as much as I love and value the incredible scenery. Many of my lifelong friends are people I’ve met on my recent thru hikes, and Alaska has certainly added a number of new people to my list of expected long-term friends. Grace,…
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Mary Badass in Alaska…Part Three
After leaving Anchorage, I drove towards Denali, spending one night sleeping in a pull off on the side of the road. Because the car I rented was a Nissan Sentra, it was too small to stretch my legs out in. I was pretty stiff in the morning and eager to stretch and hike when I…
The Mary Badass 