TrailCast - Podcasting on foot

Thoughtfully transcribed by Eric West

You’re listening to TrailCast, I’m Robert Butler.

TrailCast is a podcast about hiking. Thanks for downloading Program #10.

A couple months ago when I started TrailCast, one of the first sites that I came across while I was looking for some interview ideas was Andrew Skurka’s, who at the time was still hiking his Sea-to-Sea Route, which he just recently completed, walking 7778 miles over 339 days. Andrew Skurka is the first hiker to put together a continuous hike out of a variety of these trails that connect the Atlantic and Pacific.

In our conversation, Andrew talks about the intense planning involved in putting together a hike of this length. Having to gather information from lots of different sources, a lot of the information was sparse. Andrew connected together a series of well-established long trails, as well as doing a bit of bushwhacking, to arrive at the Pacific Ocean. Here’s my conversation with Andrew Skurka.

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I really appreciate you taking some time to talk with me. You’ve probably been talking to a lot of people, I know that you’re going to be going to the ALDHA Gathering as well, and you’re going to be the keynote speaker?

Yes, apparently.

And also from what I’ve read, Backpacker magazine is nominating you Person of the Year, Hiker of the Year?

Yep, it was a nice honor, for sure.

You finished hiking 7778 miles on a trail that is…I mean, it’s really not officially established. Would you mind explaining or giving a brief history of the Sea-to-Sea Trail?

Sure, I prefer to call it the Sea-to-Sea Route, because the implication of "trail" is that it’s official, or that it’s set up, but a "route" sounds much more loosely defined, so that’s why I always go with Sea-to-Sea Route. But it’s basically a transcontinental network of existing long-distance hiking trails that go from Quebec to Washington. And the person who identified the possibility of linking all these trails together is Ron Strickland, who founded the Pacific Northwest Trail in the late 1970s, and in general has just been a big advocate of trails. So he managed to convince Backpacker magazine to cover the story, or at least make light of the fact that there’s this network of trails, back in their February 2003 issue. And that’s where I picked up the story, and kept on running with it.

Is that where you initially got the idea?

Yeah, and I was a senior at Duke at the time, and I didn’t have real concrete plans for what I wanted to do after I graduated. So I read the article and just thought that it’d be an awesome challenge and a great experience, and I wasn’t totally convinced that I was going to be able to do it when I first read the article, which certainly was something of immense interest to me. In fact I remember writing in my journal that night, which I rarely do if I’m not in the woods, but I was just so excited by it…but it took a while for me to actually figure out that it was possible to do, and then, figure out that I could actually arrange things so that I could do it. And then convincing my parents was a whole ‘nother issue.

Around this time you had hiked the Colorado Trail as well?

Actually the Colorado Trail was kind of a leadup to the Sea-to-Sea. I went out…just to give you a brief history…I hiked the Appalachian Trail in 2003, and I returned to school that fall for my last year at Duke, and the beginning of that winter is when I first heard about the Sea-to-Sea Route, and I had to finish up a ninth semester because I took a semester off, it gave me some extra eligibility with cross-country, I ran there. So that summer I went out and worked for GoLite, and that was just a great experience. And I graduated in December 2004, went back to work for GoLite to work that spring, hiked the Colorado Trail t hat summer, an
d then a month later started the Sea-to-Sea.

What were you doing with GoLite?

As an intern I was working on their marketing staff, and then as a paid employee I was doing a lot of website content and catalog text.

Were they the ones that helped convince you with the idea of actually getting sponsored? I see on your website that you have several sponsors…did you start with GoLite, and were you able to fund your trip with the other sponsors as well?

GoLite was definitely a good place to start, because they have a wide range of lightweight products that I used the entire way across. And also having GoLite behind me at the very start was really good for my credibility, my approach. Other companies like Montrail, DeFeet, Highgear…they were much more willing to support me knowing that there was a company like GoLite already behind me, and then the Balance Bar grant was unrelated to any of that. Balance Bar provides grants up to $10,000 for individuals and teams and it’s an online application process at balance.com, and I was fortunate enough to win one of the grants. And going back to your question, I didn’t incur much personal cost for this entire hike, which is really nice. It was an amazing experience, well worth the $8000 that it probably cost total, and it’s even better that I was able to defray most of the cost.

Did you find it pretty easy to get fully sponsored?

No, getting sponsored isn’t very easy at all, actually. Connections definitely help, and I was at GoLite already, so that certainly helped. But a lot of people have these impressions about the outdoor industry…it’s a very small industry, there are not many giants in this industry, and even the giants are very small compared to other retailers. I was actually at the Outdoor Retailers Show at Salt Lake last weekend and someone remarked about how if you put all of the outdoor shoe manufacturers in a basket, their sales do not even come close to those of Nike. So you have probably 15 shoe companies who are specifically making shoes for the outdoor market, and it’s still nothing compared to Nike. So it’s a very small industry and they don’t have a whole lot of resources to be throwing around on sponsorships, so I was fortunate to have a couple really great companies behind me.

Yeah, absolutely. Getting back to the initial stage of your trip, the planning. What was the hardest part about planning an unestablished route, connecting other established trails? I assume that you knew that you were going to have to be doing some trailblazing and bushwhacking?

You know, actually, that wasn’t so much a part of it. The big problem was figuring out where all the resources were. I should make an official count of this, but just quickly I’ll rattle off the trails that are involved in the Sea-to-Sea…you have the International Appalachian Trail, the Appalachian Trail, Long Trail, North Country Trail, Continental Divide Trail, and Pacific Northwest Trail. So that’s six trails right there, and then there’s an 800 or 850 mile gap in Montana and North Dakota between the Continental Divide Trail and the North Country Trail. And then there are about four major component trails within the North Country Trail…you have the Finger Lakes Trail, the Buckeye Trail, the Superior Hiking Trail, the Kekebic Trail, and the Border Route Trail. So you can imagine the task of just figuring out who all these trails were, exactly what resources I would be needing from them. For instance, the North Country Trail uses about three-fourths of the Finger Lakes Trail, so I had to figure out where exactly it connected with the Finger Lakes Trail and then where it left the Finger Lakes Trail, and things like that, and that was by far the hardest part, and it was made much harder by the fact that some of these trail organizations, I would say that probably the International Appalachian Trail and the North Country Trail being the biggest two, the
y’re not real well organized in their resources…they’re kind of scattered, they’re kind of incomplete, a lot of them are out of date, so I was pulling things from all over the place in order to make those routes hikeable.

I was looking at your photo album online for this trip, and it seemed like the beginning on the International Appalachian Trail, you had some road walking. Did you have to do a good bit of road walking on other parts of the trail as well?

Yeah, absolutely. A lot of these trail aren’t completed fully, and I’m sure road walking isn’t real nice when you’re out for the weekend and you have a 10-mile section of road walking to do between two sections of trail. But I actually really enjoyed the sections of road walking…more than any other type of trail, it fosters interaction with the local communities, and that became a huge part of my hike, just learning from these people and meeting them and learning what they were all about. So there was a fair bit of roadwalking on some of the trails…the International Appalachian Trail basically isn’t done in New Brunswick and Maine. The Appalachian Trail is complete, the Long Trail is complete, there’s a road walk between the Long Trail and the North Country Trail for about 30 miles. There’s a good deal of roadwalking along the North Country Trail in places, particularly in Ohio, very western Pennsylvania, the lower part of the Lower Peninsula of Michigan, western Minnesota, and North Dakota.

What was the longest road stretch you had?

Good question…yeah, I don’t even know. Probably in North Dakota where all the land is privately owned and a place like that it almost doesn’t even matter whether you’re walking on roads or trails, because what you’re going to be seeing is essentially the same. It’s a wide open landscape, so if you’re walking on a gravel road that doesn’t get any traffic at all the entire day, what difference does it make if you’re walking on a trail that’s 20 feet to the left? But I would say probably in North Dakota somewhere.

Besides the logistics and putting the trail together, what other challenges did you face in preparing for this?

How to do it. Because there are three challenges about the Sea-to-Sea that make it arguably the most ambitious thru-hike out there. One is the length…7800 miles long, so you’re talking about a major investment of time. Then there’s the east-west axis that it runs on, so there’s no way for you to start where it’s warm in the south and then move north because both the ends of the route…up in Quebec and over in Washington are snowed in through the months of…you might be able to start hiking in Quebec in late April, probably more like May and about the same over in Washington. Although depending on the snow year in Washington, if you get a big snow year in the Olympics you won’t be able to start there until late May or early June…so there’s that problem, too. And then the northern location of the trail. And none of these states have friendly conditions during most of the year, and the warmest states along the route are New York, which gets a ton of lake effect snow during the wintertime.

It gets what during the year?

Western New York near the Buffalo area, they get a lot of lake effect snow because of Lake Erie.

Lake effect snow?

Yeah, lake effect snow is when…this is where Michigan and Minnesota get a lot of their snow from, too. You’ll have a low pressure center that comes in and water that evaporates off of the lake will freeze in the air and come down as snow. And it’s these large puffy flakes, and they have hardly any water content in them at all, so you get…you need snowshoes with serious float in them in order to travel in these areas during the wintertime.

That’s leads me to another question…so you did have to do a good bit of snowshoeing?

About 1400 miles worth.

Wow!

My strategy was to start in the late summer up in Quebec and I wanted to spend the coldest months in the warmest states. So I was hopin
g to get to western New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Lower Peninsula of Michigan. And my start date accounted for the possibility that I might incur an injury, something might happen to my family where I’d have to come home for a week, but none of those things happened, and I was hiking much faster than I thought I was going to. But not a whole faster…maybe a mile or two or three miles faster per day, but that over 150 days, which was how many days I hiked in 2004, you’re suddenly looking at about 300 or 400 or 500 miles ahead of where I should have been. So I ended up being much further into the Lower Peninsula of Michigan than I hoped to when I went home for the holidays. I reached Battle Creek, Michigan on December 21st, and I was hoping to be more like down by Cincinnati. So when I returned to the trail after the holidays, I was basically snowshoeing all the way to Ely, Minnesota.

Ely, Minnesota? I was just there this summer! What’d you think of Ely?

I didn’t really see Ely at a good time of the year because it was early April. It wasn’t winter, and it wasn’t spring, so you still had snow on the ground, but the snow was melting and all the snow was really dirty, and people were just kind of waiting for the canoe season.

Right, that’s all they do…that’s what that is, that’s the lake area.

That’s what most people think Ely is, but it’s a pretty big hub during the winter, too, particularly for dog sledding. On the lakes there, it’s really, really popular.

You know, I’d heard something about that…it just didn’t really click. I guess so.

But definitely, Ely is best known as the gateway to the Boundary Waters.

And that was part of the North Trail?

That was part of the North Country Trail.

Getting back…you did take off for the holidays. Was that the longest you were off trail?

It ended up being about two to two-and-a-half weeks. And I was ahead of schedule, so it was important for me to spend some time with my family. It wasn’t like I was running from winter!

Which leads me to follow up on something that you said regarding planning. You mentioned breaking the news to your parents. I assume…it sounds like you were close enough to your parents, that being away from your family was going to be a pretty big deal.

Yeah, I’m pretty close to my family. And I come home particularly for my mom, she struggles with me being out there, knowing that I’m sleeping in 20 below temperatures that night or something like that. So she struggles with that…anytime I have an opportunity to come home for a couple days and just hang out with her for a little while, and my father and my sisters. And that’s always nice. And also the breaks are good, it’s just a good mental break for me…what I was doing is I was going for long stretches straight without any breaks at all. And then I would take off three or four days.

Like when you mean a long stretch, what are you talking about?

Two or three months without a break, like no zero days, nothing. This is when I went from Battle Creek, Michigan on January 5th…I went all the way up through the Lower Peninsula of Michigan, all the way over to Marquette, where I took a zero day. And then I didn’t take another zero day until March 9th…basically two months with one day off, all on snowshoes.

What was your daily average?

It ranged . What I wanted to cover through the Lower and Upper Peninsulas was about 15 miles a day through the Lower, and 12.5 miles a day through the Upper. And I was exceeding that pretty easy, I was usually doing between 15 and 20.

And you said that’s with snowshoes?

That’s with snowshoes through about three or four feet of snow.

Wow!

So I was moving pretty well, and I was just making sure to utilize every second of the day. There were very few days if any at all where I would set up camp before it was dark. Normally what I would do is I would…late in the day I’d try to find a water source. I’d fill up my bottle, and then hike until I cou
ldn’t see the ground anymore. And then I would set up camp. And then I would melt snow for the next morning.

How was finding water, generally, along the trail?

Pretty difficult at points. In all those areas they’re not very well…there’s not a whole lot of relief there, so it’s not common that you’ll find springs or small streams. And even the small streams that you might find would all be frozen up. So the only time that I was finding running water was if there were large streams or rivers. And all the lakes were frozen over pretty big, too. By the time I got to Minnesota in the beginning, in late March, there was four feet of ice. And there was about 12 inches of ice in the Lower Peninsula when I started in January. So there was no way I was busting through that…you’d need a 200 pound rock or something. So it was definitely difficult, I was melting a lot of snow for my water.

What was the driest stretch of the entire trail that you had to face?

Probably somewhere in North Dakota…not North Dakota, Montana. There’s hardly any surface water in eastern Montana, so I was relying on finding houses. If I could find two houses during the day, that was all I needed, because I had three liter capacity, and I’d fill up, and I’d chug a liter or two right there.

That’s a good bit of water to be carrying!

Three liters isn’t too bad. If you’re traveling in the desert, you’re carrying two gallons on your back! When you’re going for long stretches without water supplies like that, that’s really when going fast and light comes to your advantage, because in eastern Montana I was going 35-40 miles a day. So I was encountering a number of water sources and passing a couple of houses, whereas if you were only doing half that, the amount of water you’d need would be the same, but you’d have to be carrying a lot more.

Right, I definitely want to talk about your gear. I’m still interested…the planning of something like this seems like that could warrant a book just by itself.

It sure could, in fact I’m thinking about maybe putting together a Sea-to-Sea planner. Because it’s not an easy task bringing all of these things together. Even the smaller trails like…take the International Appalachian Trail, you still need to get your resources from about two or three places. At least, actually, three now that I think about it. And it’s now real clear on any website exactly where you needed to get the information, even on the International Appalachian Trail website, it’s not real clear how to plan for this trail. So if I came out with a Sea-to-Sea planner I could cover all of these individual trails as well as the entire trail.

That’d be great!

It wouldn’t…by no means would it be a New York Times bestseller, I think I’d be making copies at Kinko’s. It’d be more of a direct order type of thing.

Why you never know, there’s more and more people doing the AT, so…and apparently there’s a new buddy movie with Paul Newman and Robert Redford supposedly about Bill Bryson’s book, and that may drive some AT hikers off the trail, who knows?

Yeah, I heard about that. Is that going to happen?

Ye ah, I don’t know. Of course you have people that are worried that it’s going to cause a population explosion on the AT, which is entirely possible. I’ve read reports that just the book alone, Bill Bryson’s Walk in the Woods, did do that…the AT is pretty darn high-impact as it is.

Yeah, it definitely is. But that said…

It’s a trail, and they want to hike it, you know…

I think it’s important for people to be out there having a wilderness experience. So hopefully it will expose lots of people to not only the Appalachian Trail, but to the other trails that are available to them.

Getting back to planning this…did you get deep into figuring out your resupply options as far as trail towns, or is that something you kind of worked out along the way?

I had the whole thing dialed in.

Did you really?

Yeah, every single stop.

< p> And did that work out pretty well, or did you find that you were improvising?

No, it worked out pretty well. There were a couple of sections in particular on a couple of trails where you have to be really careful, where there just aren’t alternative options. You need to know what the heck you’re doing when you get there.

Did you get into any troubles, did you mail yourself…

No, I never had any issues, ’cause I had it all planned out. So I’ll give you a couple examples. There was one stretch…well, there were a couple of stretches in Montana, in eastern Montana. I’d say in the last 2000 miles my average restock was probably 150 miles apart.

How many days is that?

For me, depending on…it was five or six days of food.

That’s a lot of food to be carrying, especially if you’re doing that many miles…how can you possibly carry that many calories?

No, you can’t…you lose weight.

So what were you eating?

I was eating…my caloric intake was somewhere between 3500 and 4000 calories a day.

You were probably needing closer to 5000 or 6000, weren’t you?

I was probably burning about twice that. In the end, going through the Pacific Northwest Trail, I was hiking 12 or 14 hours a day, because I was just loving it. It would get to be 7 or 8 o’clock, and I was like "well, I could settle down, or I could hike another three or four miles tonight…I think I’ll go hike another three or four miles tonight." Just because the trail was so awesome.

What was your main staple, or was there one?

For breakfast…I’d pretty much eat the same thing breakfast through like 6 or 7 o’clock at night. It’s a steady stream of Balance bars, candy bars, granola bars…single-serving packages somewhere between 150 and 300 calories per bar.

Not a lot of cooking?

No cooking during the day, and then at night I would have a hot meal. I’d usually…my mom was sending out…and I was sending myself all my food in advance. I’d package it ahead of time.

Oh really?

I bagged it ahead of time, my mom just needed to look at the distance to the next resupply, do quick division…like "OK, he’s said he’s been averaging about 30 miles a day, he’s got 150 miles to the next resupply, that means I need to give him five days of food." And she’d just put it in the box and ship it out.

You were just resupplying your dinners?

I was resupplying all my food and all my dinners.

Why were you doing it that way, was it just easier?

There are a couple of reasons for that. One reason is that it’s the most efficient way of doing it. I can walk into a town, go to the post office, say "Hi, my name is Andrew Skurka and I’m here to pick up a package." They give me my package, I take the package, walk out to the sidewalk, and spread it all out, organize it, and throw it into my bag and get the heck out of town. So, compared to going into the grocery store, shopping around, figuring out…"OK, you know, this grocery store doesn’t have the Little Debbie granola bars, but they have the Chewy granola bars, so how many Chewy granola bars do I need for five days of being out there." You’re doing all these calorie equivalents, and you’re trying to minimize your costs…it’s just a pain in the butt, it really is. You lose a lot of time by going to the grocery store.

That is extremely hardcore that you had it that well planned out!

I didn’t want to be out there and have things messed up.

It’s just an amazing feat of logistics!

The other reason I was sending myself all my food is because most of the towns I was going through would not be able to supply me with the foods that I needed.

Getting back to that, what were they?

For breakfast I’d have 600 calories. It might be one Oatmeal Square bar, a Balance bar, and a candy bar or something like that. And then about every two or two and a half hours during the day I would have another round of 400 calories worth of snacks. A
nd that would take me up to about…my last eating period would be at about 5 or 6 o’clock, and I would have dinner at 8 or 8:30 or whatever. So that was a typical day.

What were you eating for dinner?

Dinner would be anything that was just…required me to boil food. So couscous, angel hair pasta, freeze-dried, rehydrated stuff from home.

Was there anything in particular that stood out that became a favorite for the trip?

My mom was making some pretty kick-butt dehydrated meals. Mexican stew, beans and rice…she knew how to work the dehydrator pretty good.

That’s awesome! So she just kind of kept experimenting?

Another big favorite of mine is instant mashed potato burritos. So you take a package of four-ounce Idahoan mashed potatoes, preferably the roasted garlic or Southwest flavors, or the loaded baked…those are pretty good too. So you have some tortilla shells…you cook up the instant mashed potatoes, lop it into your burrito, and you’ve got a nice pile of warmth in your hand. So not quite as good as the Mexican style, but it’s not bad.

And you did have this trip just dialed in. For some reason I just assumed that since you were going to be on the trail for so long, and that you were going to be trying to interconnect trails, that you were going to be going through more towns that you would’ve just resupplied in town, but this was kind of like a surgical strike of a job here. It seems like it was planned like a raid.

Yeah, it was dialed in. I wasn’t messing around with it. You can do the grocery store route, I mean, that’s definitely one way to do it. But I never looked at this hike like Peter Jenkins looked at his hike, which was…I’m out there to kind of float and to explore America and be spontaneous. I mean, I had this thing dialed in, I knew exactly where I was going, I knew exactly where I wanted to go.

One gets that impression from reading your journals and looking at your commented photo gallery on your site. Especially looking at your 2003 AT hike, you did that in…just under four months.

95 days.

Yeah, wow. It said there that you didn’t have very many hiking partners…I’m sure not many could keep up.

No.

It wasn’t supported, but it was just truly business-like.

It is. Part of that was just a function of me needing to get back to school. I did it in between in between my junior and senior years of college, and I had to be back at school for cross-country training.

Would you have slowed down significantly if you had had more time?

Particularly in the beginning, I would not have been trying to push myself so hard. But I’m exhilarated at the end of a 35- or 40-mile day…I went up to Glacier National Park, I was there about a week and a half ago, and I did a 48-miler. And sure, it’s a really long day, but I covered in one day what most people that I saw weren’t even covering in three or four. So, as far as your bang for the buck, high mileage is the way to go. And since I carry so little equipment…I mean, everything that I need, but not much, it doesn’t weight much, I’m able to do that.

Let’s talk about that. This interview’s going to be a little scatterbrained, kind of bouncing around…I don’t really know where to focus on such a huge trip. But you’ve mentioned that a couple times, and I’m incredibly intrigued about what was in your pack because you keep talking about the fact that you needed to be light. What was in your pack?

When I finished my pack weighed…I was carrying a GoLite Jam which I’d cut down to about 1 pound 1.6 ounces, I had a 40 degree sleeping bag that weighed 1 pound 2 ounces, I had a tarp that doubled as a poncho so I didn’t need any raingear, I had one of those windshirts that weighs 3 ounces, I had a short-sleeved shirt and a long-sleeved shirt and a hat, a pair of nylon pants, like windbreaker type pants, alcohol stove, titanium pot, 2.5 pound camera [laughs], extra pair of shoes.

I saw a picture, you had an extra pair of shoes strapped on your p
ack there!

There are two items that most people would see as kind of extraneous in my pack. If I excluded those two items, my pack at the end would’ve weighed 6 pounds or something like that. So the 2.5 pound digital SLR camera is just satisfying to me, because I come across so many amazing places, and I would be really frustrated if I wasn’t able to photograph them appropriately. I need to be able to do justice to these settings and these landscapes, and I figured I was only going to hike across the country once, my pack only weighs 6 pounds, I can afford to take a 2.5 pound camera. So that’s the reason for the camera.

What was your food weight? When you were fully loaded walking back from a maildrop?

It would depend on how many days…I’d figure about two pounds per day. And I’d rarely have to carry…if I’m up in the mountains I rarely have to carry any water with me. I hit up the Rockies early enough in the season where there was still water up high, and usually I would just dip and drink…I purified my water once in the last 1500 miles.

Really?

Yeah. So I would just fill it up at a spring or stream, gulp it down, and then move on to the next one.

Since you only did it once, what did you use?

I had some Aquamira with me. I carried it in these little dropper bottles from BackpackingLight.com.

It’s really odd, over the last couple of years, on these hiking forums, I’m seeing a tendency that fewer and fewer people are treating their water, especially in the mountains.

Yeah, the whole giardia thing is completely overblown. Sure, there definitely is giardia in the water. You’ll never find me drinking water in some valley in Ohio, because there are going to be cow patties running into it, there might be pesticides, there might be agriculture runoff, there might be some pollutants from the factory upstream…you don’t know. But if you’re up in the mountains, say 6000 feet, and there’s a stream that you can see where it starts…there’s nothing getting in there, c’mon. Even if a mountain goat had pooped in it about a half hour before I filled up my water there, the amount of water that usually is running in these places will dilute it enough to make it not a big deal. I’m not a fan of purifying my water, I think it’s another barrier between connecting with the wilderness. And maybe I’ll take back all these words when I finally get giardia, but for now I’m going to keep taking my risks and trying to determine whether there’s good water or bad water. If you go hiking wi th me, you’ll see that I pass up water supplies sometimes. If I don’t like the look of the water, I’ll just go to the next one. And I cover enough miles in the day where I’m seeing plenty of water supplies and I can be selective enough about it.

I guess if you’re covering 30 miles a day, then that’s more of an option, as opposed to someone who’s only covering 10 to 15.

Exactly.

You did use trekking poles? I saw that you had trekking poles from the beginning to the end?

I used ski poles, though, because ski poles aren’t collapsible. I think once you introduce those joints into a trekking pole, those things rattle around, the forces of structural weakness…that I just find a pain in the butt. Not to mention that they’re really not conveniently collapsible…they’re constantly getting overtightened, they’re coming loose on you, they’re a royal pain in the butt. So ski poles, I find, to be absolutely perfect, because they’re lighter weight, they don’t make noise on me, they’re stronger than trekking poles…it seems like a no-brainer to me. I am hoping that Leki will come out with a non-collapsible trekking pole soon, but I don’t see them doing that.

No. There’s that thing Gossamer Gear sells, but it’s a carbon pole and it’s a single stick.

There are two companies out there making them. Gossamer Gear is one, and then Bozeman Mountain Works makes a pair as well…Bozeman Mountain Works is affiliated with BackpackingLight.com. And that is actually a composite po
le, and from what I understand, it’s pretty darn strong. The Gossamer Gear poles…

The Gossamer Gear poles look a little thin.

Yeah, they’re a little thin.

What about your tarp? You said you brought a combination tarp/poncho, was this like the Integral Designs Sil Poncho?

Probably something like that, it’s made by GoLite.

And that was your sleeping shelter and your raingear?

Yeah. It only weighs 10.7 ounces or something like that.

What was the dimensions, was it a 5′ by 8′?

No, it was 4.5′ by 8′. And I got caught in some nasty rainstorms with it, and there’s twice where I got wet. And the first time…even if you were in a four-season tent you would’ve got wet in this storm, because the air was so thick with moisture. I wasn’t actually getting rained on, I was just getting wet from the air.

What were you using as a groundsheet?

I had a silnylon groundsheet.

Really, did that actually keep you dry?

It’s silnylon, yeah, it’s waterproof.

I heard that once you start laying on those, that water has a tendency to seep through.

I never had a problem.

OK, that’s encouraging, that’s kind of what I’ve been looking at. So a 4′ by 8′, and obviously you had some experience with flat tarping before?

Just with a tarp/poncho. I pretty much went straight from…on the AT I used a bivy sack, which was pretty stupid in retrospect, and I guess then I just kind of adapted to the tarp/poncho.

Let me tell you, tarping by itself is pretty macho, but using a tarp/poncho as your primary shelter…I mean, what do you do if it’s raining and you’re rolling into camp. How do you get situated dry?

There are definitely some issues with it, it’s not for everyone. There were a couple points where I was wishing I had a little bit better or a little more secure rain shelter. One of them was, I remember one day in Ohio where I had to break down camp in the rain, and it was pouring down rain, so what you kind of do is you pack up everything you possibly can in your pack, then you stick your head through the hood, and you’re kind of wearing the tarp as it’s still staked into the ground. And then you just kind of go around to all the corners and pull out the stakes, and then you’re moving. But what can I say…if you’re out in the elements, I don’t care what you have with you, you’re going to get wet. There’s no way you can avoid it. If you wear a rain jacket, your gear still is going to get wet. If it rains on you all day, you’re still going to get wet. And the important thing for you to do is, the first day of sunshine, you take your stuff out and you lay it out and get it all dried out, and then you’re on your way.

Obviously you slept out the majority of the nights…how many nights did you spend, while on the trail, under a roof of some kind?

It depended on where I was. I would say, in 2004, August through late November…maybe once in ten days, once in two weeks I’d get inside.

And were they motels, hostels, what were they?

There are no hostels along any of these other trails, hostels are totally unique to the Appalachian Trail and Pacific Crest Trail. So they were ??? [40:37] or members of the local trail association.

Did you find a lot of that kind of hospitality?

I found a lot more of that starting in mid-November when I got into Ohio, because that’s when the conditions started turning south. And when I started to encounter…people, particularly in the Buckeye Trail Association, they heard that I was coming through and they’re more than willing to put me up. So that started in like mid-November, and then through the first half of December, I was just trying to get by with the gear I had out there, I didn’t want my winter stuff out there, I was just trying to squeeze through the last week or week and a half. And I was getting pretty desperate, I guess, as far as my…or maybe I was just getting very resourceful, that’s a good way to put it, with where I was staying at night. So under pic
nic shelters at city parks, in dugouts at ballfields…

Oh really?

By that point I was in western Ohio, and I was following the North Country Trail…through that section, a good portion of it is following an old canal towpath. And all the towns in the region are built around this canal, so often times the towpath will take you right into downtown and right out of town. There were a couple days where I would go through four towns a day. And it was funny, you’d leave the town and you could see the next town on the horizon, you could see its water tower.

Were you following, at any point, railroad tracks?

Yeah, lots of rail-to-trails, particularly in the areas…where are you from?

I’m in Louisiana right now.

OK. I’ve never been to Louisiana so I can’t…

Flat, moist, and moist…

And mostly privately owned?

I guess so, yeah.

So I’d say it’s almost easy to build a trail like the Continental Divide Trail, Pacific Crest Trail, or the Pacific Northwest Trail because they cross so much public land. And coordinating trailbuilding efforts with the Forest Service or the Park Service is so much easier than trying to convince a landowner that they should allow 100 hikers across their land per year. So when you get…and not to mention that the land ownership patterns are often very small parcels, so you might have to get permission from, say, 10 landowners just to get a section of trail that’s a mile and a half long.

Or have to deal with some kind of easement, which…

Exactly. All the legal stuff, or you get handshakes…so there’s just lots of issues once you start trying to get a trail through an area that’s dominated by private land. However, there are a number of corridors that can be purchased by the government or that the government already owns. Like rail-to-trails are purchased, because they were abandoned by the railroads and governments often take them over and just have them, so they’ll just make good trails. And then the canal towpaths are another good example…the canal was abandoned after the railroad came through, so you jus t have this empty waterway sitting there and it somehow got into the hands of the government, and now it’s a good corridor to put a trail through. So that’s why you’ll often have those types of trails through those regions.

Did you hike with anybody while you were doing this?

There were a couple people I did hike with, but not for any extended period of time. There was a guy, a GoLite sales rep from up in the Northeast, who joined me for a day up in New Hampshire, a guy from the Buckeye Trail Association joined me for about eight miles in Ohio…

But these were people that were specifically looking to join you?

Yeah, they’d come out to join me. When I got up to the Upper Peninsula I hiked with two people, there was Ellie and Chris, who I’d met on the Appalachian Trail, they joined me when I was up near Marquette, Michigan. And then in the eastern part of the UP I was joined by an Eagle Scout and his father. And this Eagle Scout, Ethan Parker, had maintained a six-mile section of the North Country Trail as part of his Eagle Scout project.

That’s pretty ambitious!

Yeah, it’s definitely a big project. He said actually he didn’t have to do much of the physical labor, he was doing much more of the management. But yeah, definitely a big project. And he was real excited about hiking with me, or snowshoeing with me, through his section when I came through, so I was all for doing that. But in general I’d say 99.8% of the time I was hiking alone.

What were some of the odd challenges that you had to face while you were actually hiking? I don’t mean the planning, but some areas where you found that you either had to improvise or, something that you just sit and think about?

I had everything kind of dialed in, so there weren’t a whole lot of unexpected surprises. There were a couple very difficult sections…one of them was in Wisconsin, it was in late February or the be
ginning of March, and we just got whacked with this three day long snowstorm. It was all lake effect snow, but each day it would dump six or eight inches of new snow on the ground. So by the end of these three days, there was a fresh foot and a half of new snow on the ground. And it just blew my mind, because by that point I had almost been out on the trail during the winter for two months, and I was kind of getting tired of the winter thing, it wears on you. None of the attention that you have to…just staying warm, to make sure that your hands have enough dexterity, make sure that you’re not sweating too much as you hike, just the general discomfort of being out there all the time, it definitely wore on me. And then we got whacked with this snowstorm, and I was just not prepared for it. I kind of let my guard down because we’d had some nice days prior to that, and I was like, maybe spring is on its way. So that area was pretty bad. Another area that I point to was eastern Montana. I remember getting into eastern North Dakota and I met a farmer one night, and I was looking around on his property and I’m like, so is this about as desolate as it gets out here? Eastern North Dakota is like the surface of Mars, I mean there’s no one living there! And he said, are you kidding me? You said you’re going to go through eastern Montana…you haven’t seen anything yet! I totally did not believe him, not one bit. So I finally get to eastern Montana, but the last night in North Dakota I slept on the banks of the Yellowstone River. And I got there really late at night, and the only thing I could see was just house lights, and in the Yellowstone River valley there were lots of houses, because they irrigate the crops there, and they can support a large number of people. But as soon as you get out of the valley there’s nothing out there, and my first day in Montana I was just so overwhelmed by the vast emptiness of the state that I actually, at the end of the day, I knocked on a farmer’s door to get some water. And he gave me some water and I began to become sad, I was like, sir, I’ve never done this before, but it’s been a really, really hard day and I would love to call my mom. And just be in that comfort, because I was just so…the idea of hiking through a state that was just as empty and as barren as eastern Montana seemed to be, I wasn’t sure what I was in to or in for.

Well, did he let you?

Oh yeah, he let me call my mom. That’s one of those things I found out through this trip is that people get really nice when you start to get into the rural areas, and to no fault of people who live in the more built-up areas, you just…I’m from outside of Providence, Rhode Island, and you just can’t live your life trying to go out of your way for every single person that is in need of some help or assistance. You could make a lifetime out of it, you really could. Whereas in Montana or North Dakota or even Ohio, the number of people who were in need of assistance was much lower and people are more willing to go out of their way.

Here’s a couple questions that I was always like to ask hikers that do long-distance trails. I usually throw them around near the end, but we’re kind of bouncing around…what was the oddest moment that you had on your hike?

There wasn’t one particular moment, but going back to what I was just talking about…there were some moments when people were being so generous, so trusting, that I actually felt uncomfortable with the situation. I realized that I would be forever indebted to them, and there was no way that I could ever thank them enough for what they were doing.

Give me an example.

So I was in…it was like my third-to-last day, I’m in the west coast of the Olympic Peninsula, and I get caught in this nasty, nasty rainstorm, an inch and a half in twelve hours. And serious winds…pretty typical for the Olympic Peninsula, but I managed to get soaked through this affair, partly because I had to stake my tarp down that night using big rocks, and about 5 o’clock in the morni
ng one of the stakes pulled out, and I was just thrown out into this raging storm. And I ended up getting soaked. So I start running down this little logging road in the wee hours of the morning, I can barely see, and I get out to this more main road that would take me to the coast. And this guy passes me and I flag him down…sir, is there a house or somewhere coming up ahead where I can just get underneath and dry some stuff out? And he says, my house is at mile 9.7, knock on the door and she’ll take care of you. That’s all he said, and then he was off to work. So I ended up another three or four miles down the road, and when I got to his house, it was his mother-in-law who was there. Her name was Elizabeth Barlow, and she took me in, fed me another breakfast of hot cocoa, oatmeal, let me use the dryer to dry out all my clothes…we hung out for probably two hours. She had a show-and-tell session of showing me all these Indian artifacts from the turn of the century, like 1900s…woven baskets, and some of the treasures that she had found along the shoreline. She’d found this…it was like a tooth of some type of dinosaur or prehistoric animal, that she found washed up on the beach. And she was showing me all these things, and it was just this amazing morning. And I walked out of her house at probably 9 or 10 o’clock, and it was an entirely new day. And I couldn’t thank her enough for what she had done for me. I mean, it wasn’t a whole lot…she just took me in, let me use the dryer, fed me breakfast, but to the traveler and to someone who’s just a big soaked rat, that just means so much. And for the rest of my life, I’ll be taking people in and making sure they have what they need, because people did that for me along this trip.

I like to ask best and worst moments…some people can’t really make a distinction between them, or some people feel hesitant to try to say that there was one best or one worst, but I’ll just throw it at you. Was there any one moment, moments in particular that stood out as best, worst on this trail?

Not particularly. The best one, and there were so many of them, were those where I would just realize how fortunate I was to be out there. And sometimes it would happen as I’m up at 6000 feet in the Olympics, and there are these crazy gardens of wildflowers, and it’s a beautiful day, and I’m just having a grand time, and I’d start just yelling out woo-hoo! and scream my head off, and making a big racket because I was just so happy to be out there. And then other times it would be like…when I was in Minnesota and Ken Oelkers, who lives in Silver Bay along the north shore, he met me on March 24th, which is the day before my birthday, to bring me angel food cake. He’d driven like two hours to bring me angel food cake for my birthday! And I was so fortunate to be out there, and to have met him, and just to have had that whole experience. And those were the moments that I treasure most and some of the times that were most meaningful. But some of the worst moments, they turn into, in retrospect, they turn into some of the best moments. I remember, I was up in Quebec coming through the Chic-Chocs, which is the very northern extension of the Appalachians.

Chic-Chacs?

The Chic-Chocs, have you been there?

No, I just wanted to get the name, that sounds great…Chic-Chacs.

Yeah, they are just ferociously hard mountains. Imagine Katahdin, but about 70 miles of Katahdin. So just very, very rocky, rooty…just very hard walking, there’s no other way to put it. And I happened to cross that section as I was in the midst of a tropical storm, and it turned what was already a mountainous swamp into a mountainous sea. It was mud, and they don’t help things up there with their trail construction…their definition of a foot trail is very primitive: no bog logs, no switchbacks, no rock staircases, no bridges. So if you would need to cross a swamp, they just blaze a route across the swamp, and…have fun! It’s not fun walking sometimes. And I get done through the Chic-Chocs, and
I was just so relieved to have gotten the heck out of there. But now I look back and it wasn’t fun, but it was a section I’m pretty proud of.

Was there a favorite state that stood out in particular, or section of the trail that you enjoyed the most?

I might just be biased to it because it’s where I finished, but I thought the Olympic Mountains were just fantastic. I’ve never encountered anywhere else where you can experience in a weekend about five or six different ecosystems. You can go to the western side, you can go to the coast and do the whole ocean walk thing, you can go into the rainforest and play with banana slugs that are bigger than hot dogs…it’s crazy, and moss grows on everything in there, you could do that, you could go up at 6000 feet and it smells like you’re in a perfume shop, you can go and play on glaciers, I mean there’s just so many different parts of the Olympics. And it seems like you would never get tired of being there because there’s so many different things to do. As opposed to being in Colorado, which is a place I’ve spent a lot of time, there’s only so much you can do in Colorado. There’s a lot of high peaks, there’s a lot of glaciated terrain, but you’re not going to find trees that are 12 feet thick, and it’s mostly going to be very dry, small trees. So I thought the Olympics were pretty fantastic. And my favorite trail, and again I might be biased toward it because it was the last one, but the Pacific Northwest Tr ail was totally underrated. For the hiker who wants a really good challenge, as opposed to something like the Appalachian Trail where you can hike the entire thing without seeing a map, and you could never get lost…although I know people do, but the Pacific Northwest Trail is 1200 miles long, goes from Glacier National Park to the Olympics, it goes through terrain that most people in America don’t know about, they think of eastern Washington as being this very high desert, they think Spokane. But instead you’re going over these big ranges, 6000, 7000 feet, many of which are above treeline, and it’s a very challenging trail. Sometimes the guidebook sounds like a scavenger hunt because it’s so specific in its directions on where to pick up the trail. It’ll say something like, OK, you’ll get to this clearing and the trail disappears, so there’s a tree on your left side that has the letters TR painted on it, so from that tree go 255 degrees across the meadow to a rock that’s about three feet tall and has a blue dot on it, from the blue-dot rock go 10 steps to the left where you’ll pick up a scratch of a trail again [laughs]. It’s amazing sometimes, and it challenges all these skills…routefinding, map and compass, snow skills. And then you’re also this is extremely remote, most of the restocks there are probably about 150-200 miles apart.

I assume that you did have to use a map and compass a good bit on this?

Yeah, particularly early in the season when I was above treeline and the route was still covered with snow. But generally, once you’re in the woods you’re generally OK. But from these trails that are used and haven’t been maintained in 50 years, it’ll be the old telephone wire trail that used to run up to a lookout, or it’ll be an old summer pasture trail that used to be used by the guys who put their free range cattle up there. So a lot of them are very old and primitive, but it’s a fun trail by that point I had acquired all those skills from all my previous walking, so it was a good time to do that trail.

Was losing the trail a problem, was that a challenge?

In the winter it was. The North Country Trail through Michigan is pretty well blazed, Wisconsin is pretty well blazed, but the blaze they use a lot of white blazes, and they’re usually not line-of-sight, it’s just a confirmation that you’re on the trail type of blaze, so that was sometimes an issue. I definitely had some issues when I got up to Minnesota along the north shore of the Superior Hiking Trail, and there there are very few blazes, they’ve tried to make it as much a
wilderness trail as possible. So I became a real expert with finding a trail buried under three or four feet of snow.

What was the furthest you got off trail?

There was one time in the Pacific Northwest Trail where I was in a location I could not pinpoint on my map. And it was because I’d taken an alternate route around this particular section and it took me off my map. And I must not have done it right or the directions were wrong, because I didn’t come out where I should have. But no big deal.

Did the trail get lonely for you?

No, I enjoyed the solitude, and I think that’s part of the experience. I enjoy traveling alone, the only thing I’m for responsible to is me, and I don’t have to make any compromises or be worried about anyone else. That said, I went hiking with a friend in Glacier and had a really good time, so I’m not opposed to the hiking with someone thing, but I definitely enjoy solo travel. And then the other thing was the solitude that every three or four days I was coming into town and meeting people or staying with someone, so it wasn’t like I was out there for a month or two months without any human interaction. But it was always interesting to me when I rolled into a town after literally not seeing anythi ng for three or four days, or five or six days, and then suddenly I would be forced to speak again.

Kind of a Robinson Crusoe problem.

Yeah, when was the last time that you went five or six days without saying a word?

Yeah, I haven’t. All my long-distance trips have been with a friend.

The solitude thing, you need to be comfortable with yourself. If you’ve taken the Myers-Briggs test and you come out as an extrovert, then solo travel is probably not for you.

The Midas-Briggs test?

Oh, the Myers-Briggs! So no I, you need to be an E…no you need to be an I, OK!

No Es.

No Es, all right.

If you’re an E, you need someone to be hiking with.

What about stress injuries? I see that you were a runner in high school and I also saw in some of the pictures here, especially around the International Appalachian Trail, you were running on these roads!

Yeah, it would depend on where I was. When I was on the International Appalachian Trail on some of those logging roads…they’re basically logging roads, it’s a federal highway but the only vehicles on it were logging trucks, I mean I just wanted to get the heck out of there as fast as I could, so I was running. But no stress injuries. I’ve had a history with stress injuries when I was a runner in high school and college, I definitely had my fair share. But walking is a very low-impact sport, and I wasn’t carrying a whole lot of weight, so I was just out for a walk. I built up to a level of fitness that I hadn’t been to or been at with hiking before. There was a point where I just wasn’t worried about stress injuries anymore.

One thing that struck me particularly while looking for your photos was that you look pretty much the same at the start as you do at the end, literally everything from what you’re wearing…your weight, your condition, you do not look…you see some of these AT photo journals, you see people…a lot of people like to grow beards, you know they look thinner, they look more haggard. The one thing that I’ve noticed is that you really did seem to approach this kind of like a Viking raid. Since it was obviously as well planned, and you were in good shape for it. Is that a thread in your life, are you just kind of naturally an organized and focused person, or is this something that you’ve been learning?

I think it reflects the way I go about life. I try to be as spontaneous as possible, but I like to have things dialed in. And I don’t like to mess up because of bad planning. So when I started this hike I pretty much had the whole thing dialed in…I’d just come off the Colorado Trail, so I was in pretty good shape. I’d had my gear pretty much dialed in…you’ll notice that what I started with as far as gear goes, is pretty much about th
e same thing that I finished with. I don’t know what else to say to that, you’re pretty much right on with your assessment.

Well, what’s next? You got to have something in the back of your mind, please tell us.

This fall I’m trying to find myself a job in some type of Boulder, Bozeman type setting, doing some part-time work and writing a book proposal. And then, starting in January I’m going on a nationwide road tour that’s being sponsored by GoLite and hopefully a couple of other sponsors, where I’ll be stopping at various retailers around the country in order to share the Sea-to-Sea experience, and hopefully inspire them a little bit.

Will you be giving slides, or some kind of presentation?

Yep, there’ll be a slideshow and a talk. And it’ll be talking about the trail and my experience on it…

When is this starting in?

This starts in January and it’ll go through about May. I’ll be stopping at about 100 retailers.

We assume probably the bigger retailers like REI and maybe Cabela’s and stuff like that?

Not Cabela’s, but definitely REI. The objective for me of the whole thing is to share this experience. I wish that we were all able to hike across the continent, but a lot of us have jobs and wives, or just don’t want to do it. I mean, my dad’s a good example…he’s got a job, he’s got a wife, and he doesn’t want to do it.

And he doesn’t want to do it!

But he wants to hear my story about it. So that’s the whole point of me doing this. And I feel like I should be sharing this experience, because I’ve digged through a lot of important lessons from it, it’s very much a feel-good story about this country.

Will you have a schedule of your appearances on your website?

Yeah, there’ll be an itinerary on my website, andrewskurka.com, as well as golite.com. And then if we can work another sponsor or two to be heavily involved, and I think it’ll probably be up on their website, too.

I will be put a link to your website on the show notes. For those who are listening, it’s andrewskurka.com, just like it sounds. And you have a lot of information, you’ve got information about your AT thru-hike, your Colorado Trail, your Sea-to-Sea trip logs…a very, very comprehensive site. And hopefully we’ll see a schedule of your appearances. Besides doing that for GoLite, you are going to be speaking ALDHA, which is in October, that is October 7th through the 9th.

Yep, I think so.

And that is in New Hampshire, at the Dartmouth campus in…where in New Hampshire?

Hanover, New Hampshire.

In Hanover, that’s right. They swap every now and then…it’s in Virginia, then it’s in New Hampshire. And where else are you going to be? Where can the people hear about you, or read about you, or see you?

Well, I mean, the retailer stuff is a pretty good opportunity. I think that the book is a way’s away, because I’m writing a book proposal in the fall, hopefully a publisher will pick it up sometime before the holidays, I really won’t be able to finish writing the book until the second half of 2006, and then they say it takes about nine to 12 months to get it on store shelves.

If anyone is listening right now, would you welcome any publishing advice to be sent to you?

Yeah, sure. I mean, it’s a new territory for me, and I understand that it’s a pretty big project, writing a book, and there’s a whole lot of stuff involving literary agents and publishing and advances and all that stuff. So yeah, if someone wanted to contact me about that, that’d be great. And I would also make an open invitation to anyone who’s interested in hiking the Sea-to-Sea or some of these component trails, particularly the North Country T
rail or the Pacific Northwest Trail, to shoot me an email if you have questions about it because there aren’t too many good resources out there for thru-hiking. There’s those two trails and I…I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that I’m one of the authorities now on them.

Oh no, absolutely! In fact, I’m looking forward to seeing the definitive Sea-to-Sea Trail guide. I’m sure that’ll be…you’ve got to publish that! There’s also got to be another big hike on the horizon for you, is there something that you’re thinking about?

Yeah, you bet. You know I was hoping that I’d know exactly what it was when I finished, but it hasn’t struck me yet. I mean, there are a couple things out there that I’m looking at. I think something like…it’s funny, because Backpacker magazine, John Dorn’s most recent front page, opening letter w as talking about Scott Williamson who did the Pacific Crest Trail yo-yo, and there’s some mention about how no one’s done the CDT yo-yo yet. So you have to look at things like that, you have to look at doing something like a Yosemite to Yellowstone trip, using this existing corridors. It’s hard, it’s like, pushing the envelope with hiking is no different than a mountaineer trying to push the envelope. And fortunately mountaineers are able to become guides and make money off of that. But for a hiker, it’s not quite as lucrative, and these year-long investments of time are not really conducive to anything else. So girlfriends, dogs, income stream, I mean…those things all kind of get sacrificed when you’re taking off for eleven months. So we’ll see, I’m sure I will not stop hiking, but I can’t tell you exactly what the next project will be.

What about school, where are you in school?

Well, I graduated…my bachelor’s from Duke, and I graduated in December 2004.

What did you get in your bachelor’s in?

A double major in economics and political science.

That readily applies to the trail, doesn’t it?

You bet [laughs]. And I don’t see myself going back to school for a little while. By the time I finished up at Duke, I was like, alright I’m done with this place.

Really, OK.

Let me go play for awhile.

Any thoughts about a European or Asian hike somewhere? Have you explored anything in that area?

It’s funny you mentioned that. There’s a guy, a ranger over at Glacier National Park, who I talked to for awhile, and he was really pressuring me to do this hike over in Siberia. Apparently there’s this area that’s hardly been penetrated at all by humans, and it’s very wild and very remote. And he thinks it would make a phenomenal thru-hike. I’m not so convinced, but I’m not really seriously considering an overseas thing. One of the things I liked most about the Sea-to-Sea is I was in my own country, and I feel much more connected with America now than I did, say, twelve months ago. So I would be much more willing…I think I’d be more inclined to do something in the States. Lots and lots of parts of the country, I’ve never been before, so.

Congratulations, Andrew! This is an absolutely amazing accomplishment. First of all, I both envy and pity…what’s it like being off the trail now?

Let me tell you, it’s not very fun. I’m back in Massachusetts at my parents’ house, where I know I will always be sheltered and fed, but I’m trying feverishly to find a job for the fall and get out of Dodge. It’s tough being home, I have a really good family, and it’s a nice town, but there’s no mountains, no trails, a lot of development, and all of those things really hurt me. So I’m looking to move back west, and that will hopefully help things a little bit. But, you know, I even find myself discouraged a little bit when I think about going for a five or six mile run…it’s like, alright, five or six miles, that’s going to take me about 35 minutes, as opposed to having hiked, where I’ve been hiking 14 hours a day a month ago. It’s a tough transition. The big thing you see is you see a lot of waste, and you see a lot of unnecessary comple
xity. Those are the two big things that you notice right away after you step off of a big hike like that.

Andrew, thanks a lot for taking the time to speak with us. I know that you’re going to be kept busy with your promo tour and your other talks, in fact, I may actually go to the ALDHA Gathering, so I’m looking forward to meeting you if I do. And I wish you the best of luck…if anyone out there is listening to this and can offer a job or the means to do some more hiking, please do so! Obviously, the man will do it…he just finished hiking close to 8000 miles. If there’s anybody worthy of being sponsored, it’s you.< br> Thanks for having me on the show, I really appreciate.

It was my pleasure, and I wish you the best of luck.

Alright, thanks a bunch.

OK, take care.

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Well that’s going to do i for Program #10. A big thanks to Andrew Skurka for that great interview. Andrew has already posted a schedule of tour stops for his upcoming "Two Seas, Two Feet" road tour. I’ll post a link to his website on the show notes. If you have any questions or comments, or would like to suggest an interview idea, please shoot me an email at trailcast@gmail.com. Special thanks to Chris Erswell, aka Tom Joad, and Jorge Arroyo, for providing the music for TrailCast.

TrailCast is licensed under the Creative Commons 2.0 license. For more information on that, please check out the TrailCast website at www.trailcast.org.

Thanks for listening to TrailCast.