Ever since finishing the CDT, I’ve been trying to sum up the last six months for family and friends who want to hear all about the experience. “What did you miss the most?” they ask. “What was the best part?” Even while we were still on the trail, people we met always wanted to know about our experience thus far. “What’s the craziest thing you’ve seen?” was one of the most common questions.

I love sharing the highlights, the scary bits, and all the best stories, yet I’m finding that superlatives don’t quite capture the reality of the hike. Still, I default to these stories, perhaps because the most memorable moments – even though they make up just a fraction of the hike – are the easiest ones to condense into something I know how to share. After all, how do you try and explain six months worth of moments?

It doesn’t mean the superlatives and general statements aren’t true. This hike was the most challenging thing I’ve ever done – both mentally and physically. It was also one of the most incredible. But underneath all the ‘mosts’ and ‘bests’ and ‘worsts’ is the reality of living outside for half a year, of getting up each morning and simply walking hour after hour, and that is what made this hike a life-changing experience in the truest, unexaggerated sense of the word.

Before starting, I thought I knew why I was going on this hike. I wanted the adventure and challenge, and to see new places. I wanted to be able to say I’d walked across the entire country. Then we started walking, and suddenly those things seemed often distant, because the reality was I had a pebble in my right shoe, my backpack was digging into my sweaty back, I was hungry, and was it really only 9:26 am? I struggled with lack of stimulation and finding enough to occupy my mind during long stretches. I missed having time to write since each day was taken up almost entirely by walking. When other hikers were talking about how much they loved this trail life – how amazing it was and which hikes they were planning after this one – all I could think about was how much I missed showers and regular food and wifi. I struggled with being one of the slowest hikers on the trail, and feeling like somehow I was letting both Britta and myself down when I could only make it around 20 miles a day (most hikers averaged at least 25 or so).

The trail simply wasn’t what I expected. I’m an obstinate person, however, and after that first step away from the Mexican border, there was no way I was going to stop anywhere before Canada. So, I modified my expectations. This hike became no longer about having a fun adventure or gaining bragging rights, but an experience that would shape and become a part of me, something to accept as it was – the good, the bad, and the unexpected.

I will always have this, I whispered to myself whenever I began to wonder again why I was there. This: each moment, forever archived in the catalogues of my memory.

It became my mantra. When each footstep sent aching shockwaves up my legs or my lungs screamed for oxygen on a steep ascent, I’d remind myself, I will always have this moment where I didn’t stop, where I pushed myself forward. When we ran out of food near the end of a leg, or conversely when we arrived in town and got to sit down to as much food as we wanted, I’d think, I will always have this newfound appreciation for food. I’d wake in the middle of the night to coyotes yipping in the distance and stare up at desert stars which dusted the sky in swaths of jeweled light and tell myself, I will always have this memory. I’d whisper the same thing as I stood on the lichen-covered top of one of Colorado’s alpine ridges, rocky rows of mountains spread out beneath me, or when I watched wild horses race across the endless Great Basin, manes and tails streaming out in a tangle of wind and dust and freedom.

Instead of just the anecdotes and big-story-adventures that I expected, the hike became something different for me. It became the scent of Colorado thunderstorms and the wet sweat beading on my forehead as a hot sun slow-roasted the sand under my shoes. It became the struggle of postholing in snow, step after step, and the sheer exhilaration of finding a way over a crusty snow cornice and glissading hundreds of feet down the other side. This hike was the sharp bitter scent of sagebrush, deep cracks of thunder rolling across the sky, writing by headlamp in the tent at night, squeezing cow water through a clogged filter, tiny wildflowers painting the entire landscape into a rainbow, days spent searching a damp gray sky in hopes the sun would appear, and the sound of my shoes crunching, swishing, padding over the ground step after step, one at a time, all the way across deserts and rivers and snow and mountains and New Mexico and Colorado and Wyoming and Idaho and Montana.

That was my hike.

I’ve loved being able to share pieces of this whole crazy experience with all of you, so thanks for reading and following along. It’s been fantastic.