The Mary Badass

As my time in Santa Fe was drawing to a close, I was surprised to find I was feeling nostalgic about the desert. I grew up on the East Coast and love the greenery. While I have enjoyed hiking the desert sections of the Continental Divide Trail, the PCT and the Arizona Trail, I never…

I mentioned before that Santa Fe has laws about what color the houses can be painted. There are a few gray ones but most of the dwellings are some shade of brown. Today on my walk I noticed that some of the houses had blue doors and window frames. Others had red roofs. I laughed…

People often want to know what I eat on the trail so I’m going to start with that here. I’ve gotten pretty good at calculating how much food I need every day. I dehydrate a lot of my food and especially like my dehydrated dinners which include eggplant Parmesan with organic whole wheat pasta, orange…

I thought I would share with you some of the steps I’ve been going through to plan for this next hike. When I first started hiking, planning a long distance hike was much harder because I didn’t have the advantage of all the information to be found on the Internet. Luckily for me, most of…

My plan had been to spend that first day off the Arizona Trail hiking in a slot canyon before catching a ride out the following morning. When I first planned on hiking this canyon, I didn’t realize it was the same one I had hiked from end to end a number of years ago. Knowing…

I managed to connect with a trail angel via text. She said she could pick me up in three days at the terminus. Since she was driving in the next morning to pick up another hiker, she would leave some water at the terminus with my name on it. Those arrangements would allow time for…

On june 12 from 12 to 1 Eastern time I will be part of a free presentation about paddling the Connecticut river. One other person and I will be showing slides of our paddle of the entire river. There will be time for questions. You can read about this trip in some of my earlier…

I was pretty pleased the next day with how I put into place the lessons I’ve been cultivating on the trails these past few years. I still had no idea how I was going to get from the trail’s end in the middle of nowhere on the Utah border to a paved road, and then…

The closer I got to the end the more eager I was to get there, but again I worked on staying in the present moment. My goal for the day was about 18 miles to what was considered a fairly reliable water source out of a cement trough. The wind stayed with me all that…

I was thrilled the following morning when it wasn’t too cold out. It made it easier to get out of my sleeping bag and get going. From the campground, the trail dropped down into a little ravine. As I dropped the temperature dropped with me. It became downright cold and I thought about pulling my…