On foot
The walks, in the order they happened.
I don't hike to get away from things. I hike the way other people finish a long book: slowly, on purpose, and all the way to the last page.
The big one, walked in segments over years rather than in one push. Most of it is behind me now, only a few short stretches left to connect before the whole thing is closed.
In progress
Yellow arrows and scallop shells all the way west. The walk that this page is quietly designed after: the waymark you keep seeing is borrowed from trails like this one.
Completed
Not the summit. The trek to the foot of it, through thinning air and the Khumbu valley, to the place climbers stage from. Higher than anything else I've walked.
Completed
Why I keep going
A long way is just a short way, done again.
There's a patience in me that the trail rewards. The same patience that taught a six-year-old to count to a hundred, then to read, then to play: applied to a footpath that runs from one end of the country to the other.