BY THE NUMBERS
MY FAVORITES
THE HIGHLIGHT REEL
JANUARY
I started the year living in MN with my family, spending most of my time working in coffee shops – both as a barista and as a freelance graphic designer – to save up money for the PCT in the summer. It was Linnea’s last month in the states before flying down to start school in Sydney, Australia so we played a good amount of monopoly, played with our new kitten, and visited Grandma’s house. The month ended with one last weekend with the whole family at home and saying goodbyes to Linnea as she started her new adventure.
FEBRUARY
I started February with a blizzard, delayed flight, and finally made it to sunny California to visit Dylan. We did everything we could think of with my week off of work – running, climbing, The California Science Center (where Dylan got to see the space shuttle Endeavour), The Getty (where I got to see one of my favorite photographer’s work, Sally Mann), camping in Joshua Tree, and a Ducks game. The rest of February I spent working too much and getting snowed on.
MARCH
Dylan visited MN in March – thank you Spirit airlines for dirt cheap flights between LA and Minneapolis – and we spent time with my family and made trips up to the cities and Duluth to visit friends. After Dylan left, I was still working a lot (coffee!), but almost had enough money for the summer and could see the end in sight. We visited Fargo for a weekend with the family and Hudson got a big-boy-bed.
APRIL
In April, spring had arrived in MN and the countdown to the trail really started to feel real. I quit my jobs, prepped my gear, made my final trips to Duluth, the cities, and celebrated Easter + my Mom’s birthday with the family before flying out to California. Dylan and I got to spend a couple weeks at his house before starting the trail, and we visited some of our favorite places. On our way to Joshua Tree we did trail magic by San Jacinto for PCT hikers that had already started, and hiked part of the CARHT.
MAY
May was the month we started the PCT! Our friend Dirt Devil flew down to California to start the trail with us – we took a train down to San Diego, stayed at Scout + Frodo’s house, and on May 8th, the hike began. We hiked 413 miles through the desert, which ended up being a lot less desert-y and much more rainy, snowy, and often cold. It was beautiful though, and we hiked with a fun crew along with CapCap who joined for a section from Julian to Big Bear. We ended the month with a zero day in Wrightwood where Dylan’s parents met us for the weekend.
JUNE
We hiked 444 miles through the month of June, and – like a lot of the PCT this year – it was nothing like we expected. The rest of the desert got to be more hot and dry, and we hit some trail-famous landmarks: 500 miles, Hiker Heaven, Casa de Luna, and the aqueduct. One of my favorite nights of the trail was night-hiking the aqueduct. We started at 6pm and hiked til about midnight, watching the sun set and gliding through the dark. Unfortunately, that’s about when Dylan’s feet exploded with blisters, and we fell behind most of our crew that we had been hiking with. Fortunately, we ended up hiking with Leuko and Wonderwoman and set out for the first section of the Sierras with them. The snow in that first stretch of the Sierras was challenging and beautiful, but it wasn’t what we were looking for in our hike. When our crew got to town in Bishop we sent home our snow gear, made plans to “flip” up to Sierra City, and hiked the rest of the month on mostly-snow-free trail.
JULY
We hiked 714 miles through NorCal and Oregon in the month of July, spending the 4th of July watching a parade in Chester, CA. The trail in Norcal turned out to be easier miles than we expected, and we were feeling really good to start pushing the miles. The beginning of July is when Dylan and I really clicked as a team – we hiked bigger, longer days and had a lot of fun cranking out the miles. We crossed into Oregon (our first state crossing!), and after that our motivation went way downhill. The trail was flat and easy, but not very interesting and the mosquitoes were INSANE. Leuko and Wonderwoman had gotten off the trail and there were no hikers around us going our pace, making the experience a lot more isolating and lonely. We questioned a lot whether we wanted to finish the trail, but instead of getting off trail, we decided to slow down (as much as we could afford to slow down to finish before snow) and enjoy more zero days. We ended the month taking an unplanned zero in Bend with an awesome trail angel – it was just what we needed at the time. But most importantly, July was the month that Kelly had Judah, adding another cute, chubby boy to the Lindstrom/Johnson clan!
AUGUST
We finished up Oregon in the very beginning of August, and the northern section of the state had no bugs and big views – exactly what we needed! We crossed the Bridge of the Gods into Washington the day before my birthday, and celebrated with my favorite thing: breakfast. Washington was beautiful, and in the first couple days we had our first rain in 1100 miles. We had rainy, misty days in Washington but we also had our fair share of beautiful blue-sky sunny days, which made those good days absolutely beautiful. Even though the terrain was tough and I hurt my hip for a week, it quickly became my favorite state of the trail. We crossed into Canada at the end of the month (646 miles), and spent a relaxing 3 days off with Dylan’s family in Washington as we made our plans to travel back down to the Sierras.
SEPTEMBER
September is when we started to finish the last 407 miles of the trail – we rented a car and drove down to Bishop, CA where we had left off. It was hard to get back on the trail after getting to Canada and wanting to be done, but once we got going (and once my altitude sickness wore off), we were SO happy we had come back. The Sierras were absolutely beautiful, absolutely difficult (even without the snow), and such a better experience than when we had been there in June. As we finished our last miles of the trail, the weather started to turn cold and we even had some snow, so we were happy to finish when we did. We finished the entire trail in Sierra City on September 24th and celebrated with champagne and burgers before driving back to Dylan’s house. The rest of the month we spent relaxing, recovering, and making plans for visiting Minnesota.
OCTOBER
October – our first full month back in the “real world”. We hung out in California for a while and celebrated Dylan’s birthday, eventually flying out to Minnesota to visit family. We celebrated my Grandma’s 80th birthday the first weekend, and the next weekend we went up to Fargo to see the rest of the family and so I could meet baby Judah for the first time! The rest of October was more of the same – visiting friends and family, and of course a trip up to Deer Camp.
NOVEMBER
November was a weird one. We spent the month in Minnesota, applying for jobs and feeling like we were prepared to leave and move at any given moment. It became pretty clear that the job-search wasn’t going to be as quick as we were thinking or hoping. We tried to fill our down time with date nights, walks (we called them “resupplies”), and I downsized everything I owned to fit in a car. It was tough not knowing where we’d be for the holidays, so I was happy when we ended up being there for Judah’s baby dedication, for Thanksgiving, and for Linnea coming home from Australia. For the first time since January, everyone was home and it felt so warm and happy to have a full house.
DECEMBER
In December, we jumped on a plane back to California to continue job searching and spend Christmas and New Year’s with Dylan’s family. This month has been more of the same: job searching, trying to figure out plans for the new year, keeping our time occupied with walks and projects. I got to meet up with Andrea and Mike in Joshua Tree to camp and take some portraits – it was so good to see a familiar face in a place that is so special to me and Dylan. Christmas came quick, and we celebrated with presents, french toast, and Christmas movies.
3 THINGS I'VE LEARNED
(in no particular order)
1 how to hold space for the light
The past couple months have been a big season of transition, with a lot of uncertainties that have crowded my mind. All the nagging what-ifs and what-do-i-dos and what-should-i-dos have closed in, and I’ve been learning (slowly) how to “hold space” for the little moments of light. Some thoughts from a couple days ago: “I’m holding space for the evening walks, holding space open in my insides to let contentment simmer, holding space in my attention to notice how good the air tastes and notice how the mountains look from far away and notice the orange tree we pass under every time we walk to the grocery store (alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity), holding space in my body to not think so much and instead just be so much. holding space holding space holding space for all of it because i don’t get it back. all that beautiful heavy wide wild difficult sparkling time passes and i don’t get it back.”
2 the practice of un-selfling and re-selfling
There are many gifts that the past two years of hiking have given me, but one I hold especially close is a practice/ritual that i call “unselfling and reselfing” – where you get so lost in the wonders of the people and places and thrilling details around you that you lose your sense of yourself in the act of observing. All of a sudden the boundary between yourself and everything else melts away, and you’re left swimming in this sense of wholeness, fully a part of the story. And that’s the beautiful part of the unselfing – when you get out of your sense of self and lose yourself in the fuller story, a newer, truer sort of self emerges. One that isn’t just in the space between your ears, or on your instagram feed, or in your life that you’ve built for yourself - but a self that lives fully present and open to what is around them. David Whyte describes this frontier: “I began to realize that the only real places were at this frontier between what you think is you and what you think is not you [...] But it’s astonishing how much time human beings spend away from that frontier, abstracting themselves out of their bodies, out of their direct experience, and out of a deeper, broader, and wider possible future that’s waiting for them if they hold the conversation at that frontier level. John O’Donohue, a mutual friend of both of us, used to say that one of the necessary tasks is this radical letting alone of yourself in the world, letting the world speak in its own voice and letting this deeper sense of yourself speak out.” And this space isn’t just found in hiking (although thats the easiest portal i’ve found), but it’s a frontier that, with practice and attentiveness, can become home.
3 love is delightfully ordinary
The more i’ve grown to know love and be in love with others has taught me most of all that love is so delightfully ordinary. It’s the walks and the phone calls and the how-are-you-doings at every hiking break. It’s the shared sips and the i’ll-fix-your-cars and the listening and the meals and the being-theres. I don’t have much else to say about this, because it’s so ordinary, and maybe so obvious… but the wonder of it needs to be acknowledged all the same. I’m thankful for the loving - of course the big but especially the small - from everyone in my life this year.
This year has been so different than I would have expected – the PCT wasn’t what we had planned, but we learned a lot about ourselves (individually and as a couple) and about what we want from our long distance hiking. Our job search and move isn’t going as fast as we had wanted and planned, but I’m learning to embrace the unsteadiness as an opportunity to step back and evaluate what I really want to do in terms of jobs/careers.
2020: the start of a new decade and a fitting time to step back and be thankful, to dream, to uproot and re-invest in a new place, to hold love close and to hold space for the little things. Cheers to a new year!