The Story of a Flat-Footed Flatlander

Hello All! I am Guinevere. I will be going NOBO on the AT. I recently graduated with my master’s in parasite systematics and I am excited.

You want a story?

Everyone asks me, “Why do you want to hike the AT?” Well, here is my story.

I thought I was doing it right, the first time I planned to thru-hike. Not the AT like I am planning now, but the PCT. It was 2021, I was at home for the holidays with my family. At the time, I was studying my master’s to become a parasitologist, I was working on a scientific publication, and the world was still in a panic over COVID-19. From the outside in everything looked ‘okay’. Sadly, that wasn’t the case. I was in a graduate program at a University that strived to support the wellbeing of students before, during, or after the pandemic. I was barely living while working on my master’s. I was alone, miserable, and needed a reason to live.

I needed something to make life worth living, when I came across some suggested youtube videos about the PCT. I had read about thru-hiking. Hell, I had read A Walk In The Woods and Wild. The bat shit concept of walking thousands of miles was not new to me. I had met thru-hikers and thought they were insane. But when I watched those videos, the idea of a thru-hike stuck with me. The idea of walking thousands of miles actually sounded compelling, or at least more compelling than being in a program that told me everyday I was worthless and a waste.

Thru-hiking wasn’t a huge stretch for me. I had been a rock climber during my undergrad and had spent plenty of time outside camping or hiking to the next crag. I was located in a town in a National Forest and had gone on several overnight trips with fellow students. It wasn’t a stretch me for to want to go on bigger longer hikes. Right? Hell, I had done a fourteener with no prep and didn’t die (just hypoxia and a ‘touch’ of altitude sickness). I am young and perhaps an over-achiever, taking six months to go on one of America’s longest scenic trails seemed like the natural progression of things.

That was it, that was the light at the end of the tunnel. It was the little nugget of hope I needed to get me through the hell I was living.  I was going to hike a thru-hike the PCT in 2022 when I finished my graduate program. I gladly announced the ingenious, albeit ambitious, plan to my family. My parents encouraged me and my mom decided it was time for a midlife crisis and she was going to go too. That was it… or so I thought.

A year later, I was deeper in depression and hiking as much as my schedule would allow. My feet started to hurt when I hiked. I thought it was nothing to be worried about. It had to be because I was out of shape. That almost 2 years inside due to a pandemic and graduate school had changed my lifestyle. Perhaps it was somatic and I was just lazy. The worries about my feet were pushed to the side when my greatest fears turned to reality, my father who had been diagnosed with cancer had passed away. A sudden heart attack, not the cancer had claimed him. My biggest supporter, the man who got me into the outdoors and encouraged me every step of the way was dead.

My father hadn’t been well, he was a disabled Army vet. He had spent 22 years in the Military serving as a special operations pilot and working in Strategic command. I had not seen him in peak health since he had returned from his second tour in Afghanistan. But he didn’t appear to be that unwell. Either way, due to the loss of my father, plans had changed. My mother could no longer join me on our PCT journey and then eventually the foot pain I was experiencing was soon diagnosed as tendonosis of the Posterior Tibial Tendon. I had flat feet and was walking in the wrong shoes for far too long. I was going to need to see podiatrists and be in physical therapy until it was manageable. My trail plans laid dead before me. There was no use in trying… at least for this season.

Since the shock that has been the craptastic year that was 2022. I have graduated my master’s program, moved back home to the flatlands of Nebraska to support my mom through this transition, and have since ‘graduated’ from six months of physical therapy. I hiked up Mauna Loa (on shitty feet) and yeeted my dad’s ashes off into the mountain winds where I then proceed to inhale my said father’s ashes.

The Now

Things are better than they were. But the call was still there, I still needed to thru-hike. I still needed to at least give it a try and heal from all that had happened. I was working through my grief, when I remembered that my dad always wanted to hike the AT. He wanted to walk from Georgia to Maine. So, now it is my goal, and here we are. In the Flatlands of the Great Plains training for a thru-hike.

Now, I sit here typing this. Sharing my story with you all. I am overwhelmed but so excited to share future stories about my process, my goals, my journey towards healing from grief.