There Is No "Done": Reflections on a Completed at Thru-Hike (2022)

After completing a 2,200-mile thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail, Emilee Hackney returned home to Virginia and reflected on her five-and-a-half-month journey that left her too exhausted to document experiences in real-time. She describes the difficulty of articulating the profound physical, emotional, and spiritual transformation of long-distance hiking, finding that simple words like "hard," "fun," and "rewarding" fall short of capturing the paradox of joyful suffering involved in the experience.