Like the title says, I’m officially finished with any PCT hiking for the rest of the summer thanks to a combo of the stress fracture and timing. After getting off trail, I crashed with Britta for a good six weeks until I was walking again, and then — since my leg was still gonna need at least another month or two to work back up to longer distances — I decided it made the most sense to move on to other life adventures, so I packed up my West Coast life and moved to Washington D.C., as one does.

I don’t know when I’ll plan any more long-distance hikes.

Just typing that sentence puts a little pit of longing in my stomach, and a nostalgic tightness in my throat. It’s a funny thing to love something so much, and yet also know it’s time for a hiatus of undetermined length. What I wrote earlier this year about dreaming of hiking when I’m off-trail? That’s still true. It will always be true. But so is the fact that there are a hundred other adventures I want to try, and not all of them are compatible with packing up a life every year to spend months on the trail.

I’ve gotten to thru-hike thousands of miles. I got to hike for weeks this very year, a good 150 miles on the PCT, and I loved every single second of it. Warm nights and cold wind, bright stars and tiny wildflowers. Sun and sagebrush and sand. Of course I want more, and just as true: I also want a little less limbo in the non-hiking parts of my life. I want to have a chance at some of those other adventures on my bucket list. Sometimes, a dozen different contradictory feelings can all be true, and I don’t have any choice but to hold them all together.

Let me leave you with a short video.

When I started on the PCT this year, I decided to film a couple of seconds each day. Just a couple of seconds, just once a day. Most of the time I grabbed each day’s footage whenever I first turned on my phone for the day, so what you’ll see aren’t the highlights of each day, but just snapshots of the trail. Hope you enjoy!

Maybe at its core, moving on towards new adventures is not so different, really, from thru-hiking, where every moment you’re moving forwards through a landscape you know you’ll probably never see again. Always forwards, always new.

Thanks for following along and sharing all my thru-hiking adventures – it’s been a blast.