So, You want to do a Long distance Hike?

Amazing.

Kinda surprised no one has done it.

And I wonder why this was chosen as the longest. The Pan-American Highway is just shy of 30,000 km. Maybe that route is not considered “walkable”?

Could be STRAIGHT UP HOGWASH!! Honestly,  someone just sent that to me in a text and I thought it was interesting/ amusing..

And I wonder why this was chosen as the longest. The Pan-American Highway is just shy of 30,000 km. Maybe that route is not considered “walkable”?

However, two people have been recorded as completing the entire walk, including the Darién Gap, on foot. The first adventurer to complete the Argentina-Alaska trek was British former sailor George Meegan. Beginning in 1977, it took Meegan 2,425 days to complete the 30,608km multipart journey

Then you build skin-on-frames, follow marine mammals along the ice shelf, and colonize Chile.

haha, definitely interesting!

My first thought was “aw hell no, I don’t want to spend a sizable percentage of my life doing that” But then the inner science fiction nerd in me started to think… Maybe this will be a thing with future generations who live twice as long as we do and are of good health for a larger percentage of their lives than we are.

On a more pedantic note, couldn’t one make a longer trek by following a raster scan like pattern over those four continents?

Or use higher and higher order fractal curves to explore a single square mile:

Or, more interesting, a path that visits all the countries of Africa and Eurasia.  I’ve most often seen that sort of thing for driving through all 48/49 states:

(I grabbed that image off the web and had read that article before but just noticed they clearly missed ND nor have they optimized it very well).

More realistically there’s now the Calendar Year Triple Crown, .. where the AT, PCT, and CDT are attempted within 365 days.   Met one who took a bird bath in a gas station to shave off 3 hrs of waiting for a bucket shower at a community center open afterschool.  That’s holding to a time table, but figure it’ll need to be over 30 miles per day with minimal stops for about ~ 10 months hiking… as hikers usually don’t want to be on any of those North American trails late Dec to January.

One young ‘round-the world hiker (pushed a baby stroller-like “trike” gizmo) just finished a round the world hike with a small dog for company.  Think he walked across the populated continents in a zig zag pattern as opposed to a straightish line around the equator.  He had some serious ultralight-ish camping gear but dog was mostly in the stroller.

Circa 1984, I helped a guy with his harness set-up for a cross-country peace trek of some kind.  He had a trailer behind him, made of aluminum, half the volume of a shopping cart.  Senior citizen, he was planning on about 15 miles a day.  His doctor told him to take his resting pulse each morning and if it was more than 10 bpm higher, make it a rest day.

He’d gotten 20 miles from his start at the Pacific Ocean when he stopped in our backpacking shop.  We got a postcard months later that the harness was still working for him.

Back to the OP: no geopolitical concerns along that route, huh?  One of the really long hikes in Guinness had some bad outcome, something like one of the two brothers was killed by bandits and the only one of them completed the trek.

And here’s me, thinking that crossing the length of the Pyrenees was “long distance”… 🤣