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Growing up in small town Midwestern America, I was no stranger to hiking, what with many years of my older brother dragging me along on his pointless wandering. He loved to simply take a compass bearing and walk into the woods or swamp on a game trail (which always disappeared). After hours of falling in the mud, being accosted by wood ticks, and lacerated by briers just for the sake of knowing what the terrain was like, he would look at his compass and walk right back to the road where we started.

I joined the Army straight out of high school, just before Desert Storm. Humping 100 pounds of land mines in an external frame pack and walking through stream beds up the side of the South Korean mountains in the dark didn't help my affection for hiking.

While in South Korea, I sustained a major back injury (I was knocked off a tank, falling ten feet into rocks and landing on my tail bone). Over the years, this injury worsened, leaving me unable to walk for days at a time. When I could walk, it was with a limp and a hunched back, but the only thing that relieved chronic nerve pain in my back and legs was walking. I walked around our neighborhood before and after work to ease the pain and stiffness. In 2001, I finally agreed to back surgery after realizing that I couldn't even hold my infant daughter, Reed, for any length of time. Sometime during this process, I decided that if I needed to walk all the time, I would at least get out of town and see some wilderness.

ARTICLE OUTLINE

  • Introduction
  • Beginning to Backpack
  • Sharing the Gift
  • A Trail Name
  • Figuring Out the Details
  • Sunshine's Interview
  • Gear List

# WORDS: 2600
# PHOTOS: 13

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