Hello, beautiful hiking world!

About me

Hello Appalachian Trials world! I’m thrilled to be a part of the community. I’m Mischa. My husband Caleb and I plan to complete a NOBO thru-hike in 2016. We hope to get started the first week of March…we’re not afraid of the cold and we anticipate being slow. Growing up, I didn’t do much hiking or realize that it was an actual hobby (walking…for fun?). My introduction to hiking came from Caleb. Our sophomore year of college, Caleb suggested we hike the Knobstone Trail, the longest trail in Indiana (about 50 miles). I was terrified and slightly horrified at the thought and didn’t want to have any part of it. But, long story short, I agreed to do it, and we (kinda) did. I plan to dedicate an entire post to what went very wrong on that first trip so long ago…but the takeaway here is that I caught the hiking bug.

From that point onward, we’ve been seeking out anything from nature preserves to wilderness areas to explore, camp, hike snowshoe, etc. Thanks to a rocky start to our professional careers, we’ve had the opportunity to live in Utah, California, and now Portland, Oregon after leaving the Midwest. In a fit of job-induced despair in 2014, Caleb and I made a pact that we were going to do something great in our 20s. And what better thing than a 2,000+ mile trail?! We wanted to wait until we were financially stable, so we chose 2016. So we’ve been biding our time for over a year now, and man am I ready to get started!

My #1 reason for hiking

When I signed up to be a blogger, I hadn’t read Appalachian Trials. And to be honest, even though I have now owned it for at least 6 months, I’m not all the way through it. BUT I have gotten far enough to make my lists. And why am I doing it? I think the number one reason is that I need to re-asses my direction in life. Caleb and I have a lot of things we’re interested in doing, and working 40+ hours a week staring at a computer isn’t exactly what either of us had in mind. It’s easy to get in that rut, though. It’s nice to make money, and Portland is a beautiful city with endless goings-on, but everything just feels kind of meaningless. I want to do something that pushes my physical and mental limits, because I know I will learn from it and come out stronger. I want to spend the time on the trail to think about what I really want out of life, and I think I can learn a lot from other hikers. Since it’s supposed to be the heaviest year on the trail, it seems like we will have ample opportunity to get some diverse perspectives!

Thanks for reading, and feel free to reach out – I would love to hear from you!