Jeff Garmire

The turmoil of 2020 changed everything and I was initially distraught. There was nothing sitting out in my future, no record to attempt, nor many thousands of miles of hiking to cover. The future was empty and my immediate reaction was to think of it as a wasted year and to try again in 2021. But there was much more that postponing goals offered.

For weeks I stayed inside, thinking years forward, wondering what to do with this blank slate. Should I do more of the same, or make a pivot? I had been continually moving forward down a predestined path for years but then the reset button was pushed in March of 2020. There was no more pressure to continue finding something more intense, faster, or longer.

At the same time that I wondered what the future held, there was this underlying relief. After weeks of being tied to the news, my girlfriend Maggie and I decided to go car camping. Getting out and away from the crazy world was essential. We each brought a book, put our sleeping bags in the back of the truck and enjoyed being out of town, away from cell service. In Montana there are plenty of remote car camping spots, and we explored so many new places by car, but after weeks of this, we wanted to get further away. It was time to go backpacking.

With spring snow still on the ground, we chose an easy hike to Lava Lake. It was only one night and a very short hike, but it was a lesson in why I love hiking and backpacking. The evening was cold, but the comfort of our sleeping bags was immense. The soft crisp breeze broke up the stillness and through the mesh, we could see the millions of tiny stars lighting up the sky. It was refreshing. Since I could remember, my family had backpacked this way; hiking three miles into a lake and enjoying a premier campspot. It was so far from the 50 miles per day that most of my recent records have required, but it was exactly what I needed. 

We backpacked together the rest of the summer, taking each hike at a comfortable pace and leaving any method of quantifying our effort at home. There was no criticism of our pace, time, or style. We slowly built up to being out multiple days at a time. We had progressed from car camping to short overnight backpacking trips to multi-day stretches. The next step was to go on a thru-hike together.

We settled on hiking the Ouachita Trail because of its perfect length, time of year, and also that neither of us had ever been to Oklahoma or Arkansas. The 223 miles would give us a chance to spend nearly every waking moment together whether we liked it or not. Our hike began at 8 pm, much past Maggie’s usual bedtime, but we made the unanimous decision to hike for an hour in the dark, and that hour kicked off my first complete thru hike with a partner.

The challenges were many, but self induced by our “rookie mistakes.” Before leaving on the hike I forgot a charger for my watch. On day one Maggie popped her sleeping bag. On day two she noticed her headlamp only had an hour of battery life. Now these mistakes that we should be above making didn’t put a damper on the hike, they enhanced it. We got to start over and make the mistakes that sat thousands of miles in my past. It was refreshing to plan days that didn’t stretch deep into the night. We stopped for coffee every morning, and we ate satiating cooked food. It was this step backwards, into the shoes of a 20 year old me on my first thru-hike in 2011 that brought the last ten years full circle. We finished our completely ordinary and average thru-hike but had an extraordinary time throughout the 13 days. It didn’t take a record or a first to have a time that rivals all other experiences.

After years of finishing one challenge and finding a new goal to continue to raise the bar, it took something radical to reset the expectations. 2020 was the year of getting to start at zero and slowly progress through the phases of experiencing the outdoors. I got to crawl, then walk, and finally run again in nature. Luckily, this time I had years of experience so I could do it at an accelerated pace.