Hiker Trash Radio

Madeline Hryse has spent the last four years not having a home address, which is either the most impressive or most concerning sentence you'll hear all week, depending on how your mother feels about it. In Part 1, she explains how she went from walking across Asia to cycling from southern China to Sweden — a plan that, when said out loud, sounds like something you'd come up with at 2 a.m. and forget about by morning, except she actually did it. Highlights include the time she got 15 flat tires in a single day (personal record, not the good kind), a luxury camp chair that cycling purists would judge her for and she does not care, and a Hiking Poll score so low she immediately agreed it was fair. Also: how to travel for four years on $5,000 a year, why endless flat plains are worse than brutal mountains, and the art of pretending you're not slightly addicted to other people's grocery store splurges. Part 2 drops in 10 minutes.

Madeline Hryse has not had a home address in four years, which she will tell you is liberating and which her mother will tell you is a different word entirely. Three years walking across Asia, one year cycling solo from southern China to Sweden, and exactly zero permanent mailing addresses later, Madeline has a theory: the people with the stable job and the 401(k) are the scared ones, not her. This episode covers the mountain pass in Kyrgyzstan that made her the most unpleasant person alive for exactly one day before rewarding her with the best view of her life, the skill she had to learn the hard way about reading strange men on lonely roads, and a piece of string from a hostel free pile that may have saved her life in the Pamir Mountains. Hollywood would call this a midlife crisis. Madeline calls it Tuesday.

In Part 2, Shane Weigand gets into what it actually takes to run New Mexico Pack Burros as a going concern while holding down a full-time federal job managing public lands infrastructure. This half covers the guided expedition experience in the Pecos Wilderness — a four-day working trip where guests are assigned their own burro and expected to pull their weight alongside it; the logistics and surprises of race directing five pack burro races on the Southwest circuit; the racing season that runs from January in Arizona all the way through summer in Leadville and Fairplay; and Shane's proudest achievement in the sport, which involved 150 miles of the Colorado Trail, a wild burro he'd adopted two years earlier, and a race finish that told him the burro was family for life.

Christine Reed found the Appalachian Trail on a blog she stumbled across at a desk job in Arkansas, and within minutes she'd walked into her mother's office to announce she was going to hike it. That impulsive act of imagination, deciding to become a certain someone before she had any evidence she could be one, turned out to be the defining philosophy of her life. In HTR's first-ever Full Traverse episode, Doc pulls from four years of conversations with Christine to tell the complete arc: the AT hike she started four days before her mother died, the self-published memoir that found its way to ten thousand readers, the POTS diagnosis that reframed every mile she'd ever struggled through, back-to-back FKT attempts in the Arkansas backcountry, a move to Taos to finally put down roots, and a new edition of Alone in Wonderland released five years after the first. It's the story of a woman who kept betting on a version of herself that didn't exist yet, and kept being right.