Agate is pleased to share this story transcribed from Points North, a podcast from Interlochen Public Radio. Reporter Patrick Shea introduces us to two people who hiked the North Country National Scenic Trail, the longest trail in the National Trails System, winding 4,800 miles from Vermont to North Dakota. (Please note that this story includes a brief mention of suicide).
On the outskirts of Duluth in early December, reporter Patrick Shea met up with 74-year-old Joan Young of Scottsville, Michigan. She was hiking a nearly 15-mile section of the North Country Trail that follows the Superior Hiking Trail through rugged scenery in the northeast end of the city, five miles from Lake Superior.
Joan considers herself to be on vacation. “I love the North Country Trail,” she says.
Her ideal is to hike about 15 miles a day. “I realized that I could probably do the entire trail if I did what’s come to be known as a North Country Trail flip-flop.” That means hiking from one end of the trail to a half-way point; then driving to the other end and hiking back. The idea is to avoid the worst of winter, and finish somewhere a little less snowy – like southern Michigan, or Ohio. Joan started in Vermont and walked to Michigan. Then she drove to North Dakota, turned around and started walking back again.
About 1,600 miles of the North Country Trail are on roads. A lot of distance hikers don’t like that because it’s not as peaceful as walking through the woods, and pavement is hard on the feet. Joan says that’s why some people write off the NCT, but she doesn’t think that’s fair.
“We have over 3,300 miles off road, which is more miles than the Appalachian Trail is long,” she says. More than three million people visit the Appalachian Trail every year, and around 3,000 of those people try to hike the whole thing. That’s called a “thru-hike.” Joan says, “I don’t think this trail will ever have the number of people attempting to hike the whole thing as some of the other trails because it’s just so big.”
According to the North Country Trail Association, fewer than 20 people have done it since the trail was founded in 1980. But in the farm country of northwest Ohio early last winter, Patrick Shea met someone spending his last day on a thru-hike of the trail.
Aaron Landon literally stumbled across the trail about 20 years ago, when he was canoeing in the Boundary Waters Wilderness in northern Minnesota.
“I think I was at a campsite on Snowbank Lake and I just kind of wandered into the woods and came across a trail,” says Aaron. “There was a blue blaze on a tree, and I had no idea what it was. The trail just kept going into the woods, which is not normal for the Boundary Waters.”
The “blaze” was a light blue stripe about six inches long, and Aaron was surprised to see them painted on trees in a wilderness area.
“When I got home, I did a little bit of research and it just blew my mind that from that campsite I could go basically halfway across the country,” he says.
The blue blazes are an iconic symbol of the North Country Trail. They let hikers know they’re on the right trail. And Aaron Landon followed them for a long, long time. When he met up with Shea, he’d been on the trail for eight months and eleven days.
After that long-ago canoe trip, Aaron had joined the North Country Trail Association, which had sent him detailed maps of the entire route.
“I wallpapered my bedroom with those maps, and I would just stare at them as I lay in bed. For a long time, I talked about it, but it was more of a pipe dream, a fantasy, not really expecting to ever actually do it.”
But several years later, he tried his first thru-hike in Florida. That’s where he was given his trail name, ‘Soda.’ “I was talking with a group of hikers down in the Everglades, and they all laughed at the way I kept saying I was from ‘Minnesota.’ So eventually, after a bunch of hiking, one of them gave me the name ‘Soda’ because of my Minnesota accent.”
After that hike, the North Country Trail didn’t seem like a pipe dream anymore.
“My mother was actually the one that was pushing me for it. I’d come back from Florida, and Florida’s got an awful lot of roadwalks. She suggested those roadwalks might be good practice for the section of the North Country Trail that has a lot of roadwalks.
“I would come back from different hikes and say the same thing to her, ‘That would be good practice for if I did it.’ And she would correct me and say, ‘When you do it.’ So she was the first one that actually pushed me into making me believe that I could do it.
Aaron’s mom saw how good it was for him. “When I left for Florida the very first time, I wasn’t really going down there to thru-hike. I was at a very lost place in my life, and she saw what that first thru-hike did for me. I was suicidal. I was at my wit’s end, and I found a reason to keep going, a passion really. When I came back, I was a completely different person.”
Aaron followed this trail across the prairies of North Dakota, and through the bogs and pine forests in Minnesota. He walked along the North Shore of Lake Superior, cut across the top of Wisconsin, and traversed Upper and Lower Michigan. Then he crossed into Ohio and stopped in a town called Defiance.
He came to love these long walks. When he finished one, he was already planning for the next. As the years went on, he made a list of seven thru-hikes that would prepare him for the NCT.
“And it was after checking off about three or four, when it was suddenly not a fantasy anymore; it was more like, ‘This is actually realistic. It could actually happen.’”
Patrick Shea met Aaron on the historic Miami-Erie canal in northwest Ohio. It was the last day of Aaron’s journey. He was philosophical. “It’s kind of a strange feeling, because as much as I do want to soak that in, it’s not really happening that way. I’m just walking, you know? It’s not sinking in that tomorrow I don’t have to get up and do thirty more miles.”
“It’s kind of why I chose that for my eventual end point because I like the name of that town. I also thought it would be a great place to buy a train ticket out to Vermont and flip.”
In Vermont, he turned around and headed west. He crossed the White Mountains, then the Adirondacks in New York. He hiked through the hills and hemlocks of the Alleghenies in Pennsylvania. And when he reached Ohio for the second time, his route meandered for about 1,000 miles.
“It takes you through middle America. You talk to a lot of people as you’re coming through these towns, and you’re getting a sense of what that local community is like. It’s a wonderful trail to come learn what America is truly like.” And he loves telling people he meets in those towns that they can walk all the way to Vermont or North Dakota from their backyards.
On all his previous hikes, Aaron kept in close touch with his mother; he’d give her updates on his progress, and she’d encourage him to keep pressing on.
“Every single hike I would call her at about this point right here, and she would walk across the finish line with me on the phone. And this is the first hike that’s not going to happen.” Aaron’s mother passed away in 2020. He took care of her for the last few years of her life. Then he quit his job, moved out of his apartment, got rid of most of his belongings and put the rest in a storage unit. He was all in.
“I promised her I would. There was no reason not to. Every single reason I had not to hike the hike was gone. Everything was pointing to do it. Financially, mentally, spiritually, physically, to actually take that leap of faith and believe everything’s going to be okay.”
But there were times when it was hard to believe everything was fine, moments when Aaron really didn’t think he could go any further. That was especially true as he approached the NCT’s official halfway point in Lowell, Michigan. He started thinking about everything he’d been through so far.
“The snow I went through in North Dakota or the infection that sent me to the hospital when I was coming through Maplewood, Minnesota. The flooding that I had to deal with in the Boundary Waters. I was thinking back about all these things that had happened, and it became overwhelming to me. Those things were so far back and so long ago, and I had the same amount of time and distance ahead of me. It wasn’t an exciting moment; it was actually a disheartening moment of ‘Oh my gosh, I don’t know if I can go on.’”
He thought about hopping on a bus in Grand Rapids, Michigan and going home. But what kept him going were his friends, some old, and some new, he’d met on the trail.
“There’s about five or six people within a week period, around my halfway point, who pulled me out of that funk and got my mindset to the reality that I didn’t want to quit. I wanted to continue this hike and carry on.”
Two of those people were waiting for Aaron at the finish line, in downtown Defiance.
Buck and Jenny Hough live in Alto, Michigan, close to that halfway point. They’re what’s called “trail angels,” people who help hikers by bringing them supplies, or even giving them a warm place to stay. Aaron had spent a few nights at Buck and Jenny’s place last summer, and they quickly became close friends.
Now, they were there for him again as his journey approached its end, in December, 2022.
“We came down yesterday, stopped at Subway and got Aaron some lunch for the day just to surprise him,” says Buck. “I keep in contact with Aaron regularly on Facebook and texting with him, but just to see his smiling face again was just great. It was great.”
Buck and Jenny like to help people finish the North Country Trail. “The trail being 4,800 miles, it’s not necessarily a physical game,” says Buck. “It’s a mental game.” Jenny adds: “These people have walked so far and been alone for so long. If I can cook for them and do their laundry and mother them a little bit, it makes me happy, and it brings joy to them.”
As he walks the final few steps, Aaron takes off his backpack and rests his hand on a North Country Trail marker. He’s grown long hair and a shaggy beard over this hike. And now, a huge smile spreads across his face.
He sees that Buck and Jenny are there to throw him an impromptu party, along with a few folks from town joining in to celebrate his arrival.
Pressed to make a speech, he declines. “It was a long ways, man. That is basically all I have to say. That it’s a long, long ways and I can’t believe I’m standing here. Looking back a year ago, how I’d think about this moment – I don’t know, I’m speechless. It’s nothing like I expected. Nothing,”
He doesn’t have the words right now to describe what finishing this journey means to him. But one thing’s for sure – the North Country Trail brings people together; people who know a thing or two about perseverance and the kindness of strangers.
Podcast available here:
https://www.interlochenpublicradio.org/show/points-north/2022-12-09/the-trail-less-traveled
Patrick Shea was a natural resources reporter at Interlochen Public Radio. Before joining IPR, he worked a variety of jobs in conservation, forestry, prescribed fire and trail work. He earned a degree in natural resources from Northland College in Ashland, Wisconsin, and his interest in reporting grew as he studied environmental journalism at the University of Montana’s graduate school.
