Not Bad for an Old Lady: Mary Davison on Evading Armed Cowboys, Hiking 12,000 Miles by Age 82, and Retiring From Long-Distance Hiking

For  82-year-old Triple Crowner Mary E. Davison, long-distance trails are all about choice. 

“You go down a trail, a bad trail, full of mud puddles, and you choose where you’re going to put your foot. Am I going to go fast on those bog boards? No. I’ll kill myself. So I think I’ll go slowly, but how will I do it? Long-distance trails are a nice metaphor for life.”

Mary is a celebrity in the backpacking world. Known as the “Old Lady on the Trail,” she began serious backpacking when she was 60 – and then just kept moving. Over the course of 22 years, she’s hiked over 12,000 miles, including the coveted Triple Crown of US long trails:  the Pacific Crest, Continental Divide, and Appalachian Trails. This year, at age 82, she finished the roughly 5,000-mile American Discovery Trail (ADT).

Accomplishing all this requires more than just grit and determination: Davison says it’s about making the right choices. A meticulous planner, every season, she chooses portions of different trails to walk for six weeks in spring and six weeks in the fall, often crisscrossing the country to check off different section hikes over a single hiking season.

“A long trail is never certain until the last step is taken.”

This approach gives Davison a lot of variety and options – and the chance to hike each section during the optimal weather window. It’s not so much a preordained multi-year plan as an unfolding adventure, one that evolves as she completes each goal, especially with input from hikers she meets along the way.  

That’s exactly how she stumbled on the American Discovery Trail, a nearly 5,000-mile route across the United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific that includes trails but also a great deal of road-walking in rural areas. “I was looking for something else to walk while finishing my Triple Crown that would be fairly flat and not too much work!”

Davison says the esat-west ADT is a fundamentally different sort of adventure than the north-south Triple Crown trails. “We don’t have a mountain range that runs east to west,” she explains. “So it’s not wilderness hiking, it’s an entirely different kind of hiking.” 

In some ways, she fell into this challenge after meeting a pair of hikers named Boston and Cubby and reading their travel blogs about the ADT. She could envision herself doing the same thing, albeit slower. Although, she tells me, she never intended to finish the trail – right up until she actually did.

After all, she says, “a long trail is never certain until the last step is taken.”

Planning to section hike the ADT was like assembling an enormous jigsaw puzzle. Davison prioritized completing the mountainous sections earlier in her hike because, in her thinking, these would just get harder as she aged.

“Every year when I train for hiking, my balance improves.”

As an older person on trail – one who mostly hikes alone – things do go awry at times. Once, she got so sick she had to throw in the towel for that year, hoping that, even as she approached 80, she would still have the energy and stamina to keep walking the following season.

Another time, she fell flat on her face and had to pull herself together enough to keep moving forward to the next town. 

“Older people are in danger from falling because our balance isn’t as good as when we were younger,” Davison says. But that doesn’t mean older people shouldn’t hit the trail — quite the opposite, in her opinion. “I can tell every year when I train for hiking my balance improves.”

When I ask if any of her friends or family try to dissuade her from hiking alone into her 80s, she says only her friend Beth, who often hikes with her in the Cascades near her home in Bellingham and was dumbfounded that Davison didn’t call for help or leave the trail after she fell. 

I’m with Beth here: falling on your face could take anyone off trail. But the very practical and unflappable Davison brushes my worry aside, telling me she knows just enough medicine to be dangerous. 

“Doctors aren’t going to do anything. They’re just going to say, wow, you took a bad fall. Yep. Got that.”

“I was thinking, ‘Don’t sit up. Don’t turn your light on … If I make a noise, I’ll be a target.'”

But I still wonder if she’s ever afraid out there. Davison tells me about a time in the desert when some drunk cowboys wandered into her campsite shooting guns. 

“I wasn’t particularly scared, but I was thinking, don’t sit up, don’t turn your light on. You’ll probably be fine because you’re so low to the ground. But if I make a noise, I’ll be a target.”

Davison hikes alone, but she was heavily supported on the ADT, mostly by friends she met throughout the years on trail and Facebook.

“Oh, the first half was more straight east to west of whatever I picked. In the West, it’s entirely different, because you’ve got big tall mountains that have snow on them. I can do snow, but I’m an old lady, and I’m going solo, and I really don’t want to kill myself right now.”

For Mary – and many of us older hikers – managing heat is much harder than managing cold. And even though she climbed Mounts Baker, Rainier, and Shasta in her 20s and lived in Colorado as a youngster, it’s much harder to manage high altitude. 

“And then you have deserts, which are very, very, very hot in the summer, and I don’t want to go then because I don’t want to kill myself right now,” she says with a laugh, as if unafraid of tempting fate at this point in her life. 

Davison always enters the trail with a plan, but she says that doesn’t mean she has to stick to it. Any number of events, from bad weather to injury, can derail even the most carefully laid plan. Davison is well-versed in a concept that all long-distance hikers must eventually discover: flexibility is key.

“I’m an old lady, I’m going solo, and I really don’t want to kill myself right now.”

“I used to always say, ‘The mountain will still be there.’ Then St. Helens blew up, so that’s not entirely true,”  she half-jokes. A resident of the Pacific Northwest, Davison is proud to say she stood on the top of Mt. St. Helen’s as a young woman, well before it blew up.

During her 22-year career as a long-distance section hiker, Mary has had to have two knee replacements and two shoulder replacements, both of which slowed her down considerably but did not stop her. 

Her advice for people wanting to keep backpacking after joint replacement? “Therapy matters.”

It’s important to establish a partnership with your physical therapist, she says, and be absolutely clear on what you need your body to be able to do once therapy is over.

“I must be able to get up and down from the ground. I can’t get in my tent if I can’t get up and down from the ground,” she says. Another example: “I have to be able to pee and poop in the woods. I mean, you got to tell people what you have to do!”

Speaking of pooping and peeing, that’s one of the perennial problems of a trail like the ADT, which is often so close to civilization that there’s nowhere to hide. 

“My editors were a little bit unhappy with me that I put so much in my books about trying to find a place to go to the bathroom, but honestly, it’s a problem! You’re not on a bicycle, you’re not in a car, you can’t go to the next town. The next town’s 13 miles away — that’s your whole day of hiking!”

“We don’t last forever.”

Davison has two books out now: Old Lady on the Trail about her Triple Crown and Aren’t You Afraid? about the eastern half of the ADT. Her third book, Not Bad for an Old Lady, is expected later this year and focuses on the western half of the ADT. 

A self-described optimistic realist, Davison is retiring at 83 from long-distance backpacking — although that doesn’t mean she’s stopping hiking altogether. She also has a huge garden, fills in for other pastors as needed, and has ten grandchildren.

“I’m four years older than the longest-living person in my immediate family. I do know that I’m in better shape than any of them were at this age, but, you know, we don’t last forever.” 

That being said, her mantra for her upcoming book is, “Already but not yet.” 

With a nod to Mary Oliver, she offers up a bit of wisdom on how to live our lives. “Life is going to change for everyone as we age, period. We’re not the same person we were before. Those past years were the alreadys, and now we’re in the not-yets, and what do we choose to do in our not-yets?”

It’s back to that whole idea of choices. Time is limited, and so are our bodies. But what can we do — and most importantly, what do we choose to do — with what we’re given?

All images, including featured image, courtesy of Mary E Davison

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Comments 3

  • Jess (Sassafras) : Oct 16th

    What an incredible lady! Excited to pick up one of her books. Thanks for sharing.

    Reply
  • Bill M : Oct 18th

    I am 63 years old and have been reading “Old Lady on the Trail”. I hiked the PCT many years ago when it was still kind of evolving back in 1981. Seems like all the alternate routes are permanent trail now. I did the JMT this last summer and Mary echoes many thoughts us old people have. My retirement plan is to Do the PCT again in sections by state. Then the CDT the same way. Mary is definitely a Legend.

    Reply
  • Drew : Oct 20th

    Since I’m now aging into my 60s, this lady is one of my idols.

    Reply

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