I Wanted to Quit My Thru-Hike, So I Did.

For six months, I planned a thru-hike of the Colorado Trail. I gave up my plan after a week.

“I just don’t care,” I complained over the phone to my partner. “I don’t give a shit about finishing the trail.”

I paced back and forth across the Riverside Inn parking lot in Fairplay, at mile 70, fending off mosquitos. Thinking. Thinking. Drinking a can of Yerba Mate tea.

I was only 7 days into my hike, but already something felt off, felt wrong. I didn’t want to be hiking. I’ve led enough multi-week trips to be familiar with the calibration period of going outside, that rollercoaster of anxiety, excitement, fear, and dread — and then as the novelty wears off, escapism. It wasn’t the mileage. It wasn’t because of the pain of hiking with a 35 lb. bag, or wiping my chaffed, bloody ass with toilet paper, or running out of snacks on day 3 and hitching to Bailey on a whim so I could feast on fried chicken at Smiley’s BBQ. It wasn’t even the flies.

Something about my goal of thru-hiking felt wrong.

I don’t know how to explain it. For now, all I can say is that in the 70 miles we’d hiked so far, each place felt more like a place to get through, a box to cross off, rather than a place to experience. But more on that later.

So, privately, I gave up the goal of finishing the CT. I gave it up in favor of the thing I had really come there to do: to explore these mountains, and my relationship with them, for a month.

My old plan: Hike the CT in 5 weeks, with two friends for 10 days, alone for 25, resupplying in Fairplay, Leadville, Twin Lakes, Lake City, Silverton.

My new plan: walk wherever I want for however long I want with whoever I want.

Why give up on “someone else’s dream?”

On day 8, I passed a bench outside of Breckenridge. I wanted to hang out, sun off, and read for a while. But I hesitated. I needed to get to camp by 6 so I could go to bed by 8:30 then get up early, around 6, so I could leave Frisco by 4pm tomorrow and camp with Laura at mile 109, yes, not 107, then hike 14 miles the next day, a lighter day, to get to Leadville by Friday, and then Twin Lakes by Monday.

I sat down. If I won’t even stop to read on a bench with a good view and enjoy the sun, then what am I here for?

It hit me then — and not for the first time — that prioritizing the challenge of finishing “on time” might actually interfere with experiencing these places, presently, in what felt right for me.

What I mean is that the goal of getting There reduced the experience of being Here to just miles to do before I could finish. Like hurrying through foreplay to achieve an orgasm. Every detail of the day centered around finishing. The summit. The end. I’d never gone into nature for the challenge, to test myself, or to compete. Never hurried to get through with it. And I didn’t want to start now.

All I can say for sure is this: thru-hiking the CT in the time I had wasn’t how I wanted to interact with this place at this time in my life.

Hiking as a cash-slinging, destination-freeing LASH-er

“I figure I’ve got five more weeks off work, and I’ll be damned if I don’t enjoy every single one of them.” –  egg woman

After leaving Fairplay, when other hikers would ask, “Are you going all the way to Durango?” I would say, “I’m walking in that direction, and I’ll see where I end up.”

I didn’t plan to get to the end. But I didn’t plan not to get there either. What did that make me? If you’d asked Salt, a triple crowner going NOBO with whom I shared a camp one night on Collegiate East, I was not even close to being a thru-hiker.

I told him, loosely, about my lack of plan. “That’s great,” he said. “That’s nice. Just don’t call yourself a thru-hiker.”

By the end, I became what is known in the thru-hiking community as a “LASH-er” (Long Ass Section Hiker).

People not steeped in the terminology of outdoor culture might ask: Who cares?

I did. And so did a few others, like Salt. For all his abrasive charm, I couldn’t help but feel like he embodied the fringe of thru-hiking purity, where there is definitely a right and wrong way to hike, and where HYOH is tossed up at the end of a statement like, “You need to limit anything that might slow you down, including side trips,” which another self-proclaimed thru-hiker told me after I shared my plan to hike Mt. Massive.

There seems to be an agreed-upon way to thru-hike that prioritizes getting to the end as quickly as possible and at almost any cost — at the cost of boiling a second cup of coffee in the morning, or carrying real, physical books.

I shouldn’t have been comparing myself to anyone else. But I couldn’t stop. It felt like I was doing something wrong, like I was cheating. I guess what I’m getting at is that I often felt lonely hiking as an aimless LASH-er.

***

I did meet one woman who was hiking in a similar way — and owned it. She had narrative tattoos scrawled all over her arms, and wore black, fingerless gloves. I saw her cooking an egg – yes, an egg – on top of a small mountain in Collegiate East, just south of Mt. Princeton.

“I was on the CDT for a while,” she told me, scrambling her egg with a stick. “After New Mexico, I was like, what if I hiked the CT instead? Or the Collegiate Loop? Or just like, hiked around?

“I dunno. I figure I’ve got five more weeks off of work, and I’ll be damned if I don’t enjoy every single one of them.”

Hiking so aimlessly has its advantages

The best thing about hiking as an aimless LASH-er is that it allowed me to follow my intuition (even at the cost of progress). This allowed me, around mile 145, to find something of a flow.

I decided to take a third zero in Leadville and explore the public library. That evening, I ate a cheese-less pizza from High Mountain Pies at the “hidden bench,” located on a hill outside of town. I hiked back into town in the dark. Drank three gin and tonics at a dive bar. Fell in love with the live music playing in the basically empty Golden Burro cafe.

I hitched out of town the next day with Kelly, a woman from Denver. In three days, I hiked a whopping 3o miles, stopping to explore every footpath, every creek, that drew me in.

Meeting good people

When I arrived in Twin Lakes, I met a woman named Hamburger. She introduced me to her friends outside of the General Store, and I pounded several Coors Light tallboys. These other thru-hikers were fun, around my age, and genuinely good to be around.

I ended up sharing a room that night with three strangers, Laura, Karl, and Michael, in Winmar Cabins. They became some of my favorite people on the trail. At the Winmar living space, we watched Deal or No Deal with Cody, a local boating guide. The next morning, after we cooked an egg and bacon breakfast, and after he ripped two long dabs, he looked at us and asked, “Wanna ride to the trail?”

I then decided to hike Collegiate East, not West, with these new trail friends – opting for desert company over the solo, alpine challenge I first planned for. That day, we swam in a creek. The next, I swam in Harvard Lake, all, all alone. I slept well. Woke early. The next day, I drank 4 IPAs in a hot Spring, then unknowingly paid $30 for a gold-flaked hamburger at Mt. Princeton. Moving. Moving. 23 miles to Butterfly Hostel. Hitch to Salida with a family of four. Hitch back with a woman from New Mexico catching a flight from London but who stopped “Cause you didn’t look like a killer.”

Amid the hunger, and the lonesomeness, I had several days of genuine, unhindered fun.

Deciding to Leave

Salida. Day 25 (?).

In Salida, I laid down on a couch in the public library for a couple hours. I decided that I was ready to leave the trail.

Why? I wasn’t injured. I wasn’t going (that) crazy. Wasn’t going (that) broke. Sure, I was hungry enough to regularly erupt into tears after lunch (I never learned how to buy food at rural grocery stores that was both light, healthy, and somewhat cheap, while requiring 3x the amount of food I usually need on expeditions). And yes, my pack, built more for backpacking, was heavy. Like, way, way too heavy, especially if you asked Hamburger, who, in Twin Lakes, heaved my freshly resupplied Osprey Atmos 65L pack onto her leg and cried out, “Oh my god, dude. What is in this thing!”

I decided to leave the trail because, well, I wanted to.

I wanted to take care of my body. I wanted another week to prepare before my 3^rd semester of grad school started, and I wanted to see my girlfriend, who I’d been away from for most of the summer. I wanted these things more than I wanted to get to the San Juan Mountains — though I wanted to do that too.

The calculation to leave isn’t straightforward. I don’t have advice for anyone else thinking about leaving the trail, except to first answer these questions before doing your own internal calculus.

 ***

I left on a good day.

Day 27. Mile 300.

After two mellow days tromping up and down Sergeant’s Mesa, I arrived Lujan Creek Trailhead. I would camp there for the night. And leave tomorrow.

There was a sign at the junction. It read: “Trail Magic this way,” with an arrow pointing right. I stared at it, unsure what to do. I was so hungry. But I would leave the trail the next day. Should I still accept trail magic? Is that ethical?

“Yo, dude,” a voice (Pantry) called. “Come eat a hotdog.”

My body carried me over to his van and tent. Spoonless was there! I hadn’t seen him since Breckenridge. His friend, Pantry, who’d set all this up, prepared over a hundred hot dogs, two hundred rice crispies, forty-eight cokes, sixty-four oranges, and forty bags of chips. It was the first trail magic I’d seen so far.

“I’ll be in Gunnison tomorrow,” I croaked. “Other hikers need this more than me.”

I realized that I hadn’t said a word in two days to anybody, because I hadn’t seen anybody.

“Chill dude. I got a hundred dogs right here, and only ten people have shown up today. Eat as much as you want.”

I downed eight hot dogs in less than two hours.

I could only moan, “Thank you,” over and over, to Pantry, while I shoveled more jalapeno-cheddar Cheetos into my mouth. Behind my sunglasses, I was crying. I cried because I was so fucking grateful for these hot dogs, and so, so ashamed for eating them before I left. Pantry assured me there was enough. And there was. There were enough leftovers to feed a whole 5^th grade soccer team. But I couldn’t see past my shame, couldn’t tell Pantry, Spoonless, and the other guys that I was leaving for good the next day.

The next morning, Pantry dropped me off in Gunnison. And that was it.

I’ve been off trail for a month now. And I’d be full of shit if I said I didn’t question my decision to leave – especially when I see pictures from the San Juans posted by thru-hiker friends. But I’m glad that I did what I did, that I hiked the hike I wanted. Next time, I want to embrace it.