CDT + GDT: Epilogue – The Trek

A small full circle

Throughout my hiking this year, I have often noticed that I never know where my narrative will end at the end of the day.

I intended to share a small epilogue that tells a few days as Brail Angeling for Slide, my hiking partner through the San Juans in Colorado this year, which has 7000 miles and 273 days in its triple crown of the year of the calendar of the border calendar to the border.

I supported its transfer of its completion of the PCT Sobo back to the east coast of Maine, where it will end in Nobo and Tag Canada before returning for a northeast fire closure on the PCT and then its last stage to the south of Georgia to Florida.

But the stories of life do not have a real epilogue, and each narrative develops in the next.

I rented a car and picked up a Kennedy Meadows South, where the PCT Sobo finished after an 82 mile marathon in 34 hours with only 20 minutes of sleep during the final miles of the mountains. I had not returned here since I entered the mountains while walking through the PCT at the end of May 2023, so it was nostalgic for me.

We conducted Las Vegas and in the morning my friend of RJ University picked us up for our flight back to the east. We stopped in his office and the Kalifano warehouse, his family’s business. RJ endowed for a crystal for balance and protection before taking us to the airport.

From Boston, my PCT Pisa friend took us to the house of my friends Alec and Jenna in Vermont.

This is the Jenna of the local bakery Wababaland, who handled my results throughout the season. I have been living in his renewed barn and I will be here throughout the fall and winter, so I am finally at home and I settled.

In the morning, Pisa left to walk the presidential traverse while Slide and I conducted Maine, where he had left the AT in April before turning to the PCT desert section. It was really special to see my CDT hiking partner knowing one of my PCT hiking partners. One of my friends from the Sierra team, Jackpot, with whom I had reached before driving to get sliding, said I would happily adopt slide in our little family of paths.

Before reaching his path, we stopped in an outdoor store to collect fuel for his stove and a couple of other things. The wife of the registered box asked if Slide headed north and seemed surprised to see a hiker so late in the season.

«It’s very slow,» I said. To slide, I said: «I think you should accelerate the rhythm.»

The AT at this time of the year is absolutely impressive with peak autumn foliage. It was a beautiful place to send it.

This goodbye felt harder than even day 40 when we separated as hiking members. I had to face the purpose of the fact that I was not really walking. This is not just a prolonged period of zeros. He was driving a car and standing by his hiking outfit while he was dressed in civil clothing.

Saying goodbye felt like saying goodbye to a part of me who only lived inside him, an identity on the road this year that he had only seen completely, by nature of being the only person with whom I spent any prolonged time with all the summer.

In Monarch Pass on the 40th when we separated the first time

In each of these videos I can only highlight a small fragment of how my day was. I can’t share everything, so I have to cure a narration of each day. You try to be authentic, but there is nothing like that in this medium of short format. It is a single sense conversation.

Slide was the only friend who constantly sent voice messages for the rest of my walk, while only one week was a week ahead of me. I had to do everything alone, but it never seemed to be walking alone.

We did many really difficult things together, but I remember that there were still many challenging decisions in the immediate days after we separated ourselves: steadic land and a rapid glissade in Lake Ann Pass. When I called him from Hope Pass while he was in the general store of Twin Lakes, he said that the only place where he had been worried about me was the fast crossing of Texas Creek, who had been deep hips about him as a higher human, so it would have been worse for me.

I crossed it on a cloudy day, so it was not a problem, but it meant a lot to me that stirred anything else knowing what I could do. I have been lucky to have walked only with men who believed in me more than I believed in myself.

If there is something that I have learned from my five months on the way this year, it is that

1) even on my own, I can handle more than I thought I could, and

2) I have a voice in a way that I never thought of possible.

Many people have told me that I have inspired them to go out, go to a walk or do the thing. And that is a beautiful side effect: I feel very honored to be part of your trip.

After many durations many news comes. The first time I brushed my hair again. The first time I opened my laptop. The first time I returned to a bicycle. It is good to be surrounded by all my things again. But I already strange the freedom to have anything and everything in front of me. Thank you all for being here. I am looking forward to the following.

And one more thing? I went to the postal office to thank the postal worker Laura for working with Jenna to send me almost 20 refueling boxes. «You have a package,» he said. It was my hat, emerging from his supposed retirement. Two hikers of the Czech Republic had found him and sent me by mail.

The stories are never over, right?

And with that, see you later.

XX

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