Met a guy in the Wind River Range who swore by hiking 30 miles a day

I was on day three of the Cirque of the Towers loop last September, filtering water at Big Sandy Lake. This older guy, maybe 60, rolled up with a tiny pack and told me his plan was to do the whole loop in two days. He said, 'If you're not covering ground, you're just camping.' I stuck to my seven-day plan and saw way more. Who's right, the speed hiker or the slow traveler?

3 comments

3 Comments

kelly613mo ago

Reminds me of people who treat a cross country road trip like a checklist. They brag about doing it in three days but all they saw was asphalt. The point gets lost when you make it a race.

mila_sullivan18d ago

Yeah I learned that the hard way on a trip out west. My brother and I tried to hit six states in four days and honestly it was just a blur of gas stations and bad fast food. The best trips I've done since then were the ones where we'd pick just two or three spots and actually camp there for a couple nights, you know? Like getting lost in a national forest for two days taught me way more than any highway driving ever did.

evan_nguyen233mo ago

Wait, they drove across the whole country in just three days?