Thursday, August 21, 2025

25,000+ miles! Recap of a Hiking Life (so far)

Onward and upward!  Don't look back and never give up.

This is no melodramatic 'I'm getting old, and this might be the last you'll hear from me' post.  It's just a quick summary of an ordinary person with a love of walking, keeping on and keeping on, until the result seems pretty extraordinary.

It was and it wasn't.  It's been one-step-at-a-time ordinary while being punctuated with the joy and wonder of so very many extraordinary places.

Map of my Personal Continuous Footpath across America (with two disconnected bits in Viginia Beach and the Eastern Shore of MD and Delaware.)
The motivation for this post is the passing of a big milestone. As of April of 2025, I've completed my virtual hike around the world (the equivalent of walking around the world at the equator—25,000 miles).

Lately, I've been hiking around my current home in the Blue Ridge of Virginia, near and on the Appalachian Trail.  I've walked one section of the AT 177 times now!  I have a new goal of trying to do this 0.07-mile piece of trail once for every reported completion of the AT (as reported to the AT Conservancy office in Harper's Ferry).  As of this July 15, 2025, the ATC reports that there have been 25,429 officially reported completions.  Hiking that small piece of trail that many times would add up to nearly the length of the entire trail—a very do-able goal.  Maybe a little monotonous, though!  When I hike something over and over, I use the time to turn my mind inward, to some of my philosophy and cosmology/science projects, which the reader will find liberally sprinkled among the hiking posts here on this blog.

The map above shows the track of my completed 'Hiking Home' project.  In about 2010, I established the goal of connecting a continuous string of footsteps between the front doors of every one of the roughly two dozen places where I've hung my hat and received mail (places I've called home).  I reached the last front door in the Colorado Foothills in early November of 2019.  Included in this continuous footpath are connections to 27 states.

The Appalachian Trail is the 'backbone' of that track.

I hiked it both ways in 2012, documented it meticulously (with a GPS and here on this blog), and as of this writing, I'm still the nominal (only documented) holder of the Fastest Known Time doing an AT 'yo-yo' or double thru-hike.  My time was a very ordinary 307 days.  Others have done the yo-yo much faster.  Brian 'yo-yo' Doble reports on Trail Journals that he did a yo-yo in 2008 in 181 days, and Ward 'Spooky Boy' Leonard probably did a yo-yo in the early 1990s, perhaps in less time than that.  AT hall-of-famer Warren Doyle vouches for this.  Problem is that neither of these two provided any documentation, so their 'records' can't be proven.  I certainly hope that someday before I do take those last steps up to the great footpath in the sky, that somebody will legitimately beat my FKT.  It certainly is there for the taking.

But back to the bigger picture.  My 25,000-mile trek has included many other small, disconnected walks that I've done in some really exotic places.  Here, I'm going to list some of the highlights and include a few photos.  The list is the core of this post, and I'll be adding to it over the next few weeks (or longer), so stay tuned.

Seventeen special walking destinations on six continents:

  • Switzerland, specifically the Bernese Oberland, including the amazing Eiger Trail and the freakishly scary trail to Bäregg Hut.  That's where the headline photo was taken.
    The gang enjoying a stunning sunset with the iconic Eiger in the background.
    Stunning vistas were everywhere.  One of my favorites (and also J.R.R. Tolkien's) is the Lauterbrunnen Valley, which Tolkien used as his model for Rivendell in Lord of the Rings.
  • Easter Island.  Hiking with the moai!  Spent ten days walking halfway around the island.
    The 'Travelling Moai' at Tongariki.  Rano Raraku, the quarry where the moai were created, is the mountain in the background.

  • Hawaii.  I lived on the Big Island for two months in 2017, hiked virtually every day.
    Ohia blossom with Mauna Kea in the background with its telescope domes gleaming in the sun on the summit.

  • North of 80ºN latitude in the North Atlantic, walking on the deck of a cruise ship, and many day-hikes on Svalbard, just a tad further south.
  • Torres del Paine National Park, Chile, South America—four days of hiking much of the "W" trail including the 'Base of the Towers'.
    The towers of Paine.  Yep, a tough hike to get up here.  When I arrived, low clouds were completely blocking the view, but as I was leaving, a little patch of blue sky rolled in, so I hurried back to get my mug shot.

  • Iceland.  Land of fire and ice, geysers, glaciers and waterfalls ... and trolls!  

    Hikes on six days all around the island.

  • Mozambique and Tanzania, Africa, multiple day hikes—Baobab trees, giant flying fox bats, and Red Colobus Monkeys.



  • Mid-winter walk to the Bush Pilot's memorial, an overlook outside of Yellowknife, NWT, Canada.
    Great Slave Lake at 10:30AM on a late December morning
  • Moorea, French Polynesia, in the South Pacific, three or four connected day hikes in the interior highlands, plus, of course, some amazing beach walks.
    View north from Belvedere Overlook, which was actually the trailhead for three different day-hikes.

  • Climbing half a dozen mountains in South America—Peru (climbed Huayna Picchu overlooking Machu Picchu)
    Looking down on Machu Picchu from the heights of Huayna Picchu

    , Bolivia (Pequeño Alpamayo),
    Pequeño Alpamayo
    and the Atacama Desert of Northern Chile (6000+ meter Cerro San Francisco) and adjacent NW Argentina (20,000+-foot Medusa).
    Medusa is the peak I'm pointing to, my bucket list 20,000-foot summit.

  • Greenland, both the remote east coast at Ittoqqortoormiit and several day hikes on the west coast.
    Ittoqqortoormiit girl.  Below is a view of the town on a sunny afternoon.

    The epic icebergs of Ilulissat, formerly known as Jakobshavn, western Greenland.

  • Seychelles—hikes on four different islands in this Indian Ocean tropical island nation.  Tortoises by the hundreds on Assumption and the nearly impossible to visit World Heritage site, Aldabra.  Plus world-class beaches on La Digue.


  • Beechy Island in the remotest part of Canada's Northwest Passage, hiking to the graves of sailors who died in the ill-fated 1845 Franklin Expedition in search of this elusive passage through the Arctic from the Atlantic to the Pacific.  Also got great video of Beluga whales on this hike.
    Beechy Island
    This was part of an ultra-bucket-list NW Passage cruise with other day hikes in Pond Inlet, Baffin Island, Gjoa Haven, Cambridge Bay, Dundas Harbour, and Resolute in Nunavut, Canada, and Herschel Island in Yukon Territory, and with multiple sightings of Polar Bears.
    View of Arctic Ocean from a summit outside Dundas Harbour, Devon Island, Nunavut, Canada

  • A stroll through Sankei-En Gardens, Yokohama, Japan
  • Home villages of my ancestors—Kritzkow and Walkendorf in Mecklenburg, Germany (former East Germany)
    Church at Kritzkow, Mecklenburg, Germany, where my great-great-great grandfather was sexton and school master.  Taken on 12 October 1992, exactly 500 years after Columbus began the westernization of the New World.

  • Hiking in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, Australia
  • Grand Canyon, South Rim to the Colorado River and back via the Bright Angel and Kaibab trails.

There you have it.  Hope you've enjoyed!  Happy Trails!



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