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!

Breaking my New Year's Resolution???

 

As I posted on January 1st, my resolution for 2025 was to do an outdoor hike of at least five miles every single day this year, no exceptions, no excuses.  It's been great motivation, and it had been a very positive experience on balance ... so far.

But what about injuries?  What about a catastrophic illness?  What if I'm kidnapped by Aliens?

Shit happens, right?  Just look at that photo of my left ankle.  It was May 6th.  The story is such a typical one.  It was not a hiking-related injury.  I was preparing stuff in the kitchen and dropped something really hard and heavy, and tried to intercept it—to break its fall—with my foot, soccer style.  Big, stupid mistake.  It clobbered that ankle, which is always sensitive because there's a bone chip in there from when I broke my ankle 37 years ago and the orthopedic surgeon told me he wasn't going to operate because the ankle was stable enough.

It hurt like hell.  It began to swell up, and soon the swelling had spread all the way up my lower leg to my knee.  I could barely walk.  The pain was biblical!

I would surely have to stay off the leg until the swelling went down, right? 

Well, I wasn't going to give up without trying.  I took some aspirin (I don't even keep Ibuprofen around) and headed out to at least try to walk a bit.

It was pure torture.  I limped along gamely for just a single mile, and it took an hour and a half.  But then the aspirin seemed to kick in, just enough that I was able to pick up my pace.  It was still as painful as a root canal, but I could see hope of getting in the five miles and living to tell about it - keeping the resolution alive for at least another day.

And I did it.  It was no fun at all, to say the least, but I'd had a day like that with a twisted ankle when I hiked the AT in 2012, and it all worked out for the best.  Back then, I had been almost back to normal the next day.

But that was a twisted ankle.  This was a blunt-force trauma injury.  What would it be like the next day?

May 7th: The swelling was down, back to just a very sensitive local area around the ankle.  I headed out to try to walk and was shocked to find that walking did not aggravate the pain.  This was not systemic, not down in the guts of my foot where bones rub together.  I was able to get my five miles in at almost a normal pace.  And best of all, I was able to actually enjoy the experience!

Normal service resumed!  New Year's Resolution kept alive ... at least until the next big disaster strikes.

That January 1st post has grown long and unwieldy, so I'm retiring that one and picking up the coverage here.

Spring has sprung and it's one of the best times of the year to be out.  The bugs haven't proliferated yet, temperature hasn't gone into a tropical sizzle, the new greenery is all fresh and perky, and the birds are singing up a storm, and I'm loving my life in the woods again, and eager to share my joy, whether in words or in photos.  

The Month of May was a delight.  I had no more problems with that ankle, except for the usual twinges of that bone chip, and hiked a total of 187.653 miles.  Five months of adhering to the resolution—seven to go. 

In June the heat arrived.  Priority for hiking was to get out as soon as daylight arrived, often as early as 5:30AM.  Trying to stay in the deep woods as much as possible, and hiking along my wonderful noisy cool streams at the Cloister at Three Creeks.  The water in those streams never gets truly warm—65 degrees F at the very warmest.  Total miles hiked in June, just 2½ miles shy of 200.  This month puts me past the 15 total years of documented hiking with a GPS and gets me past the half-way point on the Journey to Nowhere other than to daily consistency that is this year's New Year's Resolution.  Total miles for June: 197.572.

July was brutal.  I spent most of the month walking from before sunrise to a few hours after sunrise, not often able to 'stop and smell the roses' because of the oppressive humidity—I just wanted to finish—but also because of the swarming, relentless eye gnats that seem to want nothing more than to commit suicide by dive-bombing into your eye.  This was the month that I realized why this resolution is a real challenge, even if I remain healthy and fit.  It is, on some days, keeping me from spending the time I want focusing on other things—things that I can do indoors, bathed in a fossil-fuel-generated artificial environment of 'conditioned' air, something I grew up without in southeastern Pennsylvania.  Was it cooler in mid-summer back then?  You bet your sweaty head band it was!  Total miles for July: 174.777.

In August, I started toying with the idea of hiking one small (0.065-mile) piece of the Appalachian Trail, past a tree with a nice white blaze on both sides:

as many times as there are completions of the entire AT reported to the AT Conservancy.  That would be more than 25,000 as of their most recent report.  Not yet fully committed to that goal, but I did walk back and forth on various days until the total passes reached 500.  This had already been part of a longer piece of trail to a viewpoint that I had hiked more than 100 times over the years (about 0.8 miles long).  August is also the month when I stop exploring and bushwhacking in the woods because the yellow-jacket wasps, which live big hives in holes in the ground, begin to very aggressively defend the space around those nests because the new Queens are hatching.  Amazingly, bears love to dig up those colonies to eat all the juicy protein-packed grubs, surely getting a bazillion stings to the nose in the process.  Blessed cooler air arrived around the last week of the month and has hung around.  Total miles for August: 175.049.

Total documented miles hiked since I started recording my walks with a GPS on June 12, 2010:  25,834.503 miles!

Photo Archive follows:

This is Western Maidenhair Fern, one of my favorite deep-woods plants, and very difficult for gardeners to grow.  It's called 'western' because its range is up and down the US west coast--including among the huge Redwoods and up into Alaska among the giant Sitka Spruces, growing all the way out into the Aleutian Islands.  But somehow there's a rogue colony of it in the mid-Atlantic, and it's actually reasonably common around here.  (There's another colony in Vermont).  I love the way ferns unfurl in spring, and the delicate, fractal-like geometry of their leaf pattern.  Walked past two small clusters of these on May 10th, not on any real trail--just a route I took through the woods around my retreat at the Cloister at Three Creeks.

White Spotted Slimy Salamander (yes, that's it's official name, not my description).  Accidentally discovered when I turned over a log on June 1st.  Native to the Blue Ridge and vicinity in the Mid-Atlantic.

May 13th: Flooding rains at the Cloister at Three Creeks.  This is a view at the convergence of two creeks.  The water was higher in this episode than it was here in the Blue Ridge of central Virginia during Hurricane Helene last fall, and the biggest flood I've ever seen here since moving here about 4 years ago.

Tulip Poplar flower.  This has been my favorite species of tree since I was a kid and planted a seedling and watched it grow to more than 100 feet tall and four feet in diameter.  Yes, it's a fast-growing species. It has a truly unique leaf shape (also shown in the image) and these unique flowers that bloom in May.

May 16th: This is not a fungus.  It is called 'Wolf's Milk' and it is a slime mold--related to the single celled amoeba, these 'creatures' exist independently as single cells most of the time, and yet they signal each other chemically when conditions are right, and aggregate into these pustules in order to reproduce.

Stopping for a break beside a noisy mountain stream, the biggest of the three at the Cloister at Three Creeks.  June 21st.

Pine log with a display of knots, one of a bazillion blowdowns caused by Hurricane Helene and cleared from the Mountains-to-Sea Trail near Asheville, NC, where I did a few hikes.  August 5th.

August 25th.  The Crane Fly orchid has a bizarre lifestyle.  This is the shoot of the single leaf it unfurls in September, which hangs around the forest floor all winter absorbing sunlight, and shrivels up in spring.  Just one leaf, never more.  Then the plant sits dormant until it puts out a leafless flower stalk in July.

Where's PJ - April 2024? Africa!

Greeted by school kids, Pemba Island, Tanzania

It's my sixth continent.  Antarctica alone now awaits my footsteps.  I wasn't seeking a wife (though the next shot might look that way):

but mixing with the local culture in out-of-the-way places was definitely the most memorable part of this trip.  The village on Kilwa Kisiwani has about 1000 people, and the island has no roads and exactly three motorbikes.  Otherwise, you get around on foot or by bicycle.  They only have a few solar panels for power, and yet this fellow had a smart phone and wanted a selfie with the strange westerner with the big white beard.

Wildlife wasn't bad either.  No safari on this trip, so no pics of the 'Big Five' and their cohorts.  But there were rare Zanzibar Red Colobus Monkeys, and out in the Indian Ocean on some of the remote islands of Seychelles, there were many encounters with giant tortoises.

Among the flying creatures were fruit bats called Flying Foxes, red-footed boobies, Frigate Birds with the male's distinctive red throat pouch:

There were giant coconut crabs.  These guys were more than a foot across, but they get as big as three feet!

Then there were the massive baobab trees.  The ones on Madagascar are well known.  I had intended to see them, but a travel restriction on visitors from the African mainland (due to a cholera scare) nixed that visit.  I had to settle for other species that aren't quite so cartoon-like, but still monstrously impressive:

Let's just keep the pics going.  The ancient Arab-origin Dhow is the standard fishing vessel of east Africa. Note that the mast and boom supports are just made from ordinary 'sticks'.

Mozambique

Yes, those African sunsets were killer -- even caught a good 'green flash'

More to come in May.  Stay tuned.