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 (almost) fully-GPS-recorded 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 250 times now!  I have a new goal of trying to do this 0.067-mile piece of trail (with exactly one white blaze in each direction, both on the same tree) 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.

  
  

  

  Remote pristine beach on the Kona Coast, requires a mile and a half walk to get there

  
  

  

  High on Mauna Kea on the trail to the summit, flanks of Mauna Loa in the background right

  
  
• 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.
  
  
  

  

  For 1000 years or more, these sturdy vessels called 'Dhows' have plied the African Indian Ocean coastal waters.

  
  

  

  The ancient, once major trading center of the Arab empire, Kilwa Kisiwani.  It's a UNESCO World Heritage site with no roads, no electric power, no motor vehicles (except three motorcycles), 1150 residents remain, getting by on subsistence agriculture (little garden patches) and the occasional cultural tourist group.  My son and I wandered far from the tourist's usual routes, deep into back stretches of the town, where this fellow had his smart phone charged and wanted a selfie with the old bearded white guy.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• 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.

  
  

  

  Back to Machu Picchu - Huayna Picchu is the prominent spire just behind the ruins

  
  
• 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, built about 1300, 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 downtown Sydney, Australia including the Royal Botanic Gardens and the Sydney Harbour Bridge, plus the Blue Mountains, including the Three Sisters from Echo Point Lookout, Katoomba.
• Grand Canyon, South Rim to the Colorado River and back—via the Bright Angel Trail (down) and Kaibab Trails (up).
  
  
  
  
  
  

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

Next Hiking Goal - a virtual Around-the-World Hike

Here is where I hiked yesterday—the Blue Ridge of Virginia.  It's not just about the miles!

The distance around our planet Earth - its circumference - is HUGE - 25,000 miles, more or less.

The exact distance depends on where you measure it, and for us number geeks, the exact number matters.  It is defined by the current accepted standard, called WGS84 (The World Geodetic System, 1984 version), and it is what your GPS uses to tell you exactly where you are.  These guys measure this stuff down to an accuracy of 2cm—that's less than an inch. 

The bottom line is that the exact distance around the world ranges from 24,901.461 miles measured around the equator, where the centrifugal force caused by Earth's rotation bulges it out, to 24,859.734 miles measured through the north and south poles.  As of this morning, as I write this (13 December 2023), I have a documented total distance hiked of 23,098.916 miles.  

To complete my virtual hike around the equator, I have just over 1800 miles to go.  That's the distance between Miami and Minneapolis.  It's less than the length of the Appalachian Trail.  If I decided to do a NoBo (northbound) thru hike starting at the southern end at Springer Mountain, Georgia, I'd be celebrating completion of my Virtual Hike Around the World here:

That's Franconia Ridge in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, one of my favorite places on the trail, and a place I just hiked again back in June.

Since I was born, I've definitely already walked around the world virtually, and I'm on my second circuit.  But I'm only counting the miles I've actually documented since the day I got my first hiker's GPS unit, back on June 12, 2010.

As part of these 23,000 miles, I hiked the Appalachian trail twice in one calendar year and I've hiked to the front door of every place I ever lived—everywhere from Colorado to the beaches of North Carolina.  I've connected 28 states (if you count DC as a state) with a continuous string of footsteps:

I've hiked the Florida Keys, the Swiss Alps, the tundra of northern Svalbard less than 600 miles from the North Pole, and as close as 2433 miles to the South Pole at Ushuaia, Argentina on the southern tip of South America.  I've climbed a 20,000-foot mountain in Argentina, summited Pequeno Alpamayo in Bolivia and Huayna Picchu, the jagged peak overlooking Machu Picchu in Peru.  I've hiked Sankei-En Gardens in Japan, the Blue Mountains of Australia, and extensively hiked Easter Island for 11 days, the Big Island of Hawaii for two months, and much of the interior of Moorea, French Polynesia during a memorable week there.

Wildlife.  I've hiked with Walrus, musk ox, and reindeer on Svalbard, Polar Bears in east Greenland (not recommended - they want to eat you, and they will.  We beat a quick retreat back to town, our shotgun toting guide bringing up the rear), met the legendary Lagarfljót Worm of NE Iceland and one of their famous Trolls.  (I'm leaving the Troll story for the end of this post.)  I've seen Moose in Maine (including one this past July, which I didn't get a photo of), and in August I hiked literally under a bear in an overhanging tree just ten feet up, directly above the Appalachian Trail:

The day before yesterday I visited with a Great Blue Heron fishing.

I could go on.  You might say I've been around.  But not quite yet.  Not all the way around.  So that's my current goal.

Sometime in the new year, I'll cross the finish line.  It might even be in Madagascar, where I've booked a trip to visit the Baobab trees.  But more likely it will be closer to home.  Winter is here.  The leaves are all off the trees and yesterday I shot this one, generously dabbed by frost.

'Tis the season, as they say, and one of the trails I hike takes me directly beneath a three-foot ball of Mistletoe, perched high in its favorite host tree, a red maple.

So far, I've only walked here alone.  No chance to take advantage of the situation.  But be forewarned, ladies, if you get an invitation to take a hike with me!  LOL.

And now the Troll story from Iceland.  It's a seasonal thing too.  In the caves at Dimmurborgir, thirteen 'Yule Lads' seem to magically appear around this season.  The first appeared just yesterday, on Dec 12th, and the last will arrive on Christmas eve.  Each one can be spotted for only thirteen days.

And, although it was August (2022) when I was there, our group managed to capture one of them on video:

Quite the project - a Virtual Hike Around the World.  It's the ultimate circuit hike—the longest way home!  It's the kind of huge goal that obviously takes time.  I haven't set a deadline, *yet*, to get it done.  If I do decide to make it a sprint to the finish, you'll be the first to know.  Keep an eye right here on this blog.

I'm going to try to keep this post updated daily with my progress, then hand off to a new post after a week or so.  Please do stay tuned for the LIVE UPDATES (or nearly so):

• Wednesday, December 13th, 2023: 4.254 miles.  After I published this post, I went out and hiked some woods roads around The Cloister at Three Creeks, the destination being 'Half-Volcano Rock', where I once built a seven-stone cairn to top it off.  The photo was taken back in October.  Total miles: 23,103.170
  
  
  
• Thursday, December 14th, 2023: 4.536 miles.  Just a two-hour ramble during the best part of the day (11AM to 1PM) on some fairly flat territory, visiting an old homestead site for the first time.  This was a two-story house (note the second fireplace halfway up), probably abandoned no more than a century ago.  Total miles: 23,107.706
  
  
  
• Friday, December 15th, 2023:  3.006 miles.  A short ramble through my *infested* little valley.  The last weekend of deer hunting is here, so they'll be gone.  But bear hunters are the worst.  They hunt with packs of dogs wearing GPS collars and drive all over the place tracking them.  My peaceful little valley will not be peaceful until bear hunting season ends on January 6th.  I can't wait!  Meanwhile, here are some Osage Orange fruits under the tree that dropped them. 
  
  They just sit.  They will sit there all winter and slowly rot.  No creature eats them.  Their wood was prized by our First Peoples as the best wood by far to make bows.  Meriwether Lewis reported in 1804 that the people of the Osage Nation "So much ... esteem the wood of this tree for the purpose of making their bows, that they travel many hundreds of miles in quest of it." A good bow made of Osage Orange wood could be traded for a horse and a blanket.  Because no living animal consistently touches these huge fruits (the size of a softball), and because their range had become limited to east Texas despite it happily able to grow nearly everywhere in the US, it has been speculated that their seeds were once spread by one of North America's extinct megafauna species.  <<<That article in the link is a great read.  Please take a look.  Have pollen studies been done to establish the range of Osage Orange 15,000 years ago and longer?  I'd love to pursue this speculation further.  Total miles: 23,110.712
• Saturday, December 16th, 2023.  3.643 miles.  Just a relaxed early morning ramble in nippy, frosty weather.  Started out in the mid-20s F but was warming nicely under the bright sun.
  
  I wanted to get out early to beat the buildup of clouds and enjoy the prettiest part of the day.  There's a serious storm currently forming just north of the Yucatán Peninsula (southern Gulf of Mexico) that is going to rake up the whole US east coast bringing heavy rain and strong winds tomorrow and Monday.  The highlight of the morning hike was a close inspection of the important Monarch Butterfly attractor, Climbing Milkweed, also called Honeyvine even though it's toxic to humans.  The name refers to the fact that it often gets infested with oleander aphids, which do what most aphids do—secrete a lot of sugar-rich 'honeydew' that ants love.  Ants then protect and defend the aphids to preserve their food source.  The web of nature's interactions is just fascinating.  
  
  Here the climbing milkweed's dead winter vine sports its big seed pods under the bright blue sky with a seasonal color scheme.  Some pods have opened and released their seed, and others are still closed.  Each seed looks like a perfect little medallion.  Its fibrous 'parachute' strands seem spring loaded.  They spread out instantly once they are freed from the pod.  They are so light that they can drift on the wind for miles, and the geometric pattern the seeds create while packed into the pod is truly magical.  Total miles: 23,114.355
  
• Sunday, December 17, 2023.  5.571 miles.  Storm looming!  I headed out before sunrise and tried to beat the rain.  Didn't quite succeed, but only got damp.  I hiked under the open sky early on and captured a pretty good photo of a multiple-layer cap cloud.  Total miles: 23,119.926
  
• Monday, December 18th, 2023.  Today I concentrated on a photography mission.  It's fully documented in this new post. Just a reminder: I live within a couple miles of the Appalachian Trail, and in a certified Trail Community.  Miles hiked today: 3.562.  Total miles for this "new" project: 23,123.488
  
• Tuesday, December 19th, 2023.  2.112 miles, rambling around the Cloister at Three Creeks on a cold day.  Total miles: 23,125.600

Harvard Physics Professor shatters Women's speed record running across America

Screen shot of the Outside Magazine article published Nov. 21, 2023.

 

Jenny Hoffman is an over-achiever.  She's both a record setting ultra-marathon runner and an award-winning PhD professor of Physics at Harvard.  She just completed a certified Fastest Known Time transit of the US via the same route that Pete Kostelnick ran in 2016.  Here's a link to the Outside Magazine article covering Pete's record, written by the same author as above (Martin Fritz Huber).

Jenny has unwittingly managed to combine two of my core interests—quantum physics and traveling continuous long distances on foot, and this post is as much about her accomplishment as it is about her reaction to it vis-a-vis her Physics career.  In an online Physics Today article covering the achievement, she offers the following quote:

“Running is a good balance for physics,” says Hoffman, who got into running in seventh grade and into ultrarunning—covering distances longer than marathons—when she was a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. In physics, she explains, luck plays a large role in success and failure: “Does your cryostat leak?” for example. In running, she says, “there is more correlation between hard work and success. The numbers are what they are. You finish in a certain time. And there is no anonymous peer reviewer who will undermine that. It’s good for my mental health to have a pursuit that is more clearly merit based and fact based.”

This floored me, and it bears repeating: Traveling on foot is more Merit-based and Fact-based than the study of Physics.

The scientific process that establishes 'facts' is indeed a pretty tortuous one.  I know this first-hand from my own 25-year career at NASA writing and publishing peer-reviewed papers for scientific journals.  Traveling on foot is just simple, pure, raw, and easy to prove.  The FKT certification of Jenny's run required her to provide a GPS track, some photos and other documentation, but the GPS track is by far the most important.  Anything can be faked, but, as Jenny says in the Outside Magazine article:

“FKT.com just asks for the specific GPX files and, frankly, I think that’s the strongest evidence you can have. Guinness imposes these additional requirements, like written witness statements. I got them all, but that would be really easy to fake. Just make up some names. Guinness also requires ten minutes of video every day. Again, that’s easy to fake: I could video myself leaving the RV, get ten minutes of video, and then sleep in the RV all day. So I don’t think that those additional requirements actually add anything to the evidence.”

GPS tracks can be faked, too.  But it's a helluva lot of work to fake GPS-tagged photos if they are regularly taken and also contain visual cues about the location, and personal daily accounts posted in real time.  I have my own certified FKT record for my double thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail, which combined GPS tracks and tagged photos with daily posts on this blog.  Jenny went the extra mile and also carried a live tracking device and is jumping through all those hoops that are required to establish her feat as a Guinness World Record.  

Peer review in the world of Science goes far beyond what Guinness requires for a world record.  Yes, the system can be flawed, and fake science results sometimes get published.  But over the long term, such frauds are almost always caught.  The review process is the best method humanity has come up with to establish what we call 'facts' or 'truth'.  ***And yet ... 

Here on this blog, I have been discussing Physics topics at great length, many in the same field (the bizarre world of quantum mechanics) that Jenny works in, and I try to take pains to identify what I believe can be tested through experiment and ultimately peer reviewed and published.  ***But ... the amazing thing about Quantum Physics and the frontiers of modern science and mathematics these days is that there is a fundamental blur at the end of the scientific and logical process.  Facts and Truth, it turns out, do not stand on a firm foundation that we can call 'Reality'.  Rather, our own experience plays a critical role.  Even Einstein, late in his life (in an article he wrote for the April 1950 issue of Scientific American [Vol. 182, no. 4, page 17]) has confirmed this:

“Experience alone can decide on truth.”

This utterly fascinates me, and I've spent a lot of time exploring this.  I do not go those further steps to do the proposed experiments or to submit papers for peer review.  I'm simply having fun in my retirement years with the Philosophy of the origins of or universe and of reality in general.

So ... I'm posting this remarkable news about Jenny breaking the women's record by more than a week over the previous record-holder's time as much because I dream of achieving such epic feats myself, but because her life resonates with me in a much bigger-picture sense.  I wonder if she ever dabbles in Genealogy.  She has three children, and obviously a remarkable genome.  What I can attempt to prove (the free WikiTree web site is especially good for this) is whether there is a provable connection between Jenny and me, and if so, how many degrees of separation.  I bet there is.  We are, in the end, all related.

Genealogy requires no specialized degree or peer review, but there's plenty of rigorous research, even science, at the root of good quality Genealogical work.  Because of its intrinsic factual basis, yet also because it touches on the origins of reality itself (the origin of life), Genealogy is the third of my recent trifecta (or Triathlon) of active interests.

Ultimately this post is to serve notice that nearly all blog posts coming from me from now on are likely to focus on one of these three topics:  The philosophy-science interface, Family roots and the origin of life, and long-distance travel on foot.  All three are worthwhile journeys and I envision each of them as a heroic quest.  I hope you'll follow along.

Appalachian Trail thru-hike memoir - Live! on Amazon

Front cover

 

Footprints in the Wilderness: A Quest to Day-Hike the Appalachian Trail both ways in One Year: Wetzel, P.J.: 9798303387881: Amazon.com: Books

Big news - nearly twelve years in the making. I've finally published the memoir of my Appalachain Trail thru-hike. The actual hike began January 1, 2012, and I've been promising to publish a book ever since.

I also submitted the documentation of this hike to FastestKnownTime.com and it has been recognized as a record setting accomplishment--fastest known AT double (yo-yo) thru-hike. I'm very proud of that.

The book is 260 pages ALL in COLOR, with 150+ color photos and maps printed in 'premium color', so it is not cheap, but Amazon is offering it for sale at a pretty good discount as of the time of this post, so it might be a good time to order.

If you do order, and like the book, I would very much appreciate if you take the time to post a review at Amazon.

Also please pass the word (share this post) to any hiking friends and colleagues who might be interested. Thanks in advance!