Originally written for The Trek. See the original post here.

Leave No Trace is a moral code and daily practice for any thru hiker, section hiker, or day hiker. It teaches us to respect the ground we walk on, the plants that grow from it, the animals who share our space, and the other hikers.

Why is it that, as soon as we return to “the real world” we forget about the ways we lived kindly withe the natural world around us? We buy pre-packaged food and throw all the wrappers and scraps into the trash, we buy a iced coffee in a plastic cup and chuck it in the nearest trash can when we are done, we buy the cheapest things we can with no thought to how they came to be there or how they were made.

While I was on the Appalachian Trail, Leave No Trace was an ethos that I did my best to follow every day. Over the past year or so, I’ve started to think more about how Leave No Trace principles can extend to my off-trail life as well. What is the impact I have on this planet? How can I tread more lightly on this place we call home?

Not all of us are able to live trail life, or a more minimalist, nomadic lifestyle, for the entire year. When we get off-trail and go home to our apartment or house, how do we bring the lessons of the trail back home with us?

This led me to research and think about a variety of topics including self-sufficiency and zero waste.The Zero Waste International Alliance defines Zero Waste as:

A goal that is ethical, economical, efficient and visionary, to guide people in changing their lifestyles and practices to emulate sustainable natural cycles, where all discarded materials are designed to become resources for others to use. Zero Waste means designing and managing products and processes to systematically avoid and eliminate the volume and toxicity of waste and materials, conserve and recover all resources, and not burn or bury them. Implementing Zero Waste will eliminate all discharges to land, water or air that are a threat to planetary, human, animal or plant health.

I believe that, as people who love the trail – love a part of the natural world – we have a responsibility to see that it continues to exist and thrive for future years and generations. We have a responsibility to check and examine our own consumption and disposal habits and practices. We also have a responsibility to bring the power of our community to bear on the forces that would seek to undermine, destroy, or disregard these natural spaces that we care about.

A few ways you can start thinking about zero waste, self-sufficiency, and off-trail Leave No Trace:

1. Set goals for yourself. Can’t put plants in the ground because you live in an apartment? Try setting a goal to grow a few herbs on your kitchen countertop. Do you clean your house (if not, gross.)? Think about turning your last cleaning spray bottle into a reusable bottle. Mix up your own cleaning solution, and get to work! Set goals for 1 month, 1 year, and 5 years. Track your progress!
2. Engage in your community. Are you passionate about environmental policy? Write a letter to your representatives, or research the grassroots movements are happening in your area. Are you interested in eating local? Buy your produce at a farmer’s market or go visit a farm!
3. Advocate for Zero Waste and sustainable practices. Talk about this with your friends and family. Start a meetup! Research and share blog posts and recipes (you could start with this one!).
4. Be conscientious and deliberate. Research the companies and products that you purchase. Support companies and organizations that are transparent, sustainable, and considerate with their sourcing and production practices.

It seems like a daunting task to climb these mountains and implement these changes in my life, but as I well know, all hikes have to start with a first step.

So what am I doing?

My first baby steps down this journey are to be more deliberate about the cleaning products I use, how and where I get my food, and attempting a garden of my own.

All-Purpose Cleaner

Any aspiring zero-waster should invest in a good reusable spray bottle (or multiple!). A great mixture is 50/50 water and white vinegar. I’ve added drops of essential oil – rosemary and lemon – because I’m a sucker for good-smelling cleaners.

Air Freshener

You can also make DIY air fresheners using essential oils. I borrowed a recipe from Jill at The Prairie Homestead. Combine 3/4 cup of water with 2 tbsp of alcohol (vodka, rubbing alcohol, and vanilla extract all work, according to Jill. I used rubbing alcohol because it’s what I had on hand) and add your desired essential oil scents. I used lavender, rosemary, and lemon, for a refreshing and clean smell.

One of the seven Leave No Trace principles is to Plan Ahead and Prepare. Leave No Trace adds a sub-component of that principle by asking hikers to repackage food to minimize waste. This idea can easily be applied to off-trail life. Whenever you go grocery shopping, whether it’s at your local farmer’s market or a big box store, remember to minimize the packaging waste of the food you are purchasing. I’ve extended the zero waste impact of my shopping by using reusable bags.

Produce Bags

We’re all used to those flimsy plastic bags at grocery stores. What are they good for once you get home? I’ve used them in the past to pick up dog poop or line small trash cans, but that’s really their only use, and then they go in the trash. Why not invest $10 and get some cotton mesh bags that you can reuse again and again? There are a variety of options out there, but I bought these on Amazon.

Grocery Bags

Reusable grocery bags are even more common than reusable produce bags. Your grocery store probably even sells them. Find yourself a couple of tote bags, and don’t let the cashier ever give you a plastic bag again!

Buying in Bulk

In addition to having your own bags, consider finding a store where you can buy in bulk. Why buy pre-packaged goods when you could buy exactly how much you need for the next day, week, month, or year – without the excess packaging.

Container Garden

This season, I attempted to grow a container garden. We gathered some 5-gallon buckets, drilled a few holes in the bottom, and planted some seedlings purchased from our local nursery. We have 5 tomato plants, a few okra plants, 4 bell pepper plants (all varieties), herbs, and some strawberries (these didn’t fare as well as the rest).

Next year, I’ll probably try a few more varieties of vegetables, and I might even be a little more scientific about it by looking up a growing schedule for my region. I also hope to invest in canning supplies so that I can store my vegetables for less bountiful months.

Composting

I haven’t yet built my own compost pile, but most cities have opportunities for composting. Some have businesses that offer composting services (think of it as a utility, like garbage, water, or electric), some have local farmers who would be happy to add your food scraps to their piles, and some offer a variety of composting as a part of standard yard waste disposal.

Another of the seven Leave No Trace principles is to Dispose of Waste Properly. On the trail, this includes not leaving your food scraps around for people or animals to find. Why shouldn’t we continue this practice off-trail? Landfills keep trash for years, and organic matter can get buried and sealed under non-organic trash. This creates a vacuum where the organic matter breaks down anaerobically and creates methane, which is a very environmentally damaging greenhouse gas. If you want your favorite trail to be here in the future, compost!

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Back when I was thru-hiking every few years, it was so easy to stay in shape for hiking. Whatever I was doing for work at the time, I could take one day a week to go on a twenty-mile hike and feel just fine. These days I spend too much time in the office, so I can’t take this kind of thing for granted. A few years ago I decided I needed a good way to keep myself motivated and stay in constant motion.

Being the nerd that I am, I needed a combination of tools to keep myself motivated. iOS had recently added HealthKit, which automatically counts your steps as you walk around with your phone. Pair that with some SMART goal setting and a spreadsheet, and I had a plan!

To set up my annual goal, I started with the easy parts. The Time constraint was the calendar year, and the Measurement would be done with my Health app’s mileage measurement. I decided to use the mileage rather than step count because, even if it’s less accurate, it’s a more meaningful number for me. Finally, the Relevant criteria comes from the fact that my goal would involve walking, hiking, and backpacking. Staying in shape for hiking by getting myself out on the trail more often seems pretty relevant to me!

Next up was the fun part: what Specific goals do I set, and how do I decide if they’re Achievable? Since it’s hard to say what is achievable, I decided to err on the side of extreme specificity. That way I could modify my goals for the following year based on the current year’s performance. For example, here are my 2018 goals:

1. Walk, hike, or run a total of 2018 miles.
2. Spend 40 nights out on overnight hiking trips.
3. Hike a total of 80 days. (in this case, a day of hiking must be at least 4 hours, so I could spend a night out on a hiking trip without counting either day as hiking).
4. Hike a minimum of 4 days per month.

That may sound unachievable to you, but it sounded right to me at the end of 2017. The idea was to be very difficult, but possible. Turns out, I failed at all those goals for 2018, but that will help me set new goals for 2019.

To measure my progress, I set up a pretty detailed spreadsheet. If you’ve read any of my previous posts, you’ll know I love a good (and frivolous) spreadsheet. Keeping track of progress as I went along helped keep me motivated, and gave me some daily or monthly mini-goals to add on. As I write this post (about a week before year’s end), it’s obvious that I won’t hit my overall goal, but it did serve its purpose of keeping me in hiking shape. Maybe next year I’ll be able to tailor my goal to something a little more reasonable.

You can get a copy of the spreadsheet here. Feel free to either use it as is for your own goals, or modify it for your own crazy goals. If you’re using it as is, the only fields you need to enter text into are the highlighted ones. Dates and averages are all taken care of. Good luck sticking with your 2019 goals. Let’s compare notes in a year!

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How to Give the Gift of Guthook

For the ULTIMATE THRU-HIKER

For the INTERNATIONAL HIKER

For the WEST COAST HIKER

For the EAST COAST/CENTRAL US HIKER

Or shop based on the LENGTH OF EACH HIKE…

The trails are listed here by the average time it takes to walk the entire trail. Some people hike faster, some slower, and some only hike a section.  In other words, these time periods only provide a rough estimate of how long it might take to walk the trail.

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Prices are listed as they were at the time of writing. No products were donated or given for the purposes of review.

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In 2016, Katahdin Woods & Waters National Monument became the newest addition to our National Parks system. This bit of forest in northern Maine is a great place to cross-country ski, mountain bike, canoe, and hike. You can also begin a longer trip on the International Appalachian Trail and hike to Canada. For now, there’s little in the Monument besides some trails, old logging roads, and campsites, so it feels especially wild. But I was curious about the plans for the future. Would there be a visitor’s center? Would the roads be paved? And would the Park Service build more shelters and campsites, or even trails? It’s been two years since the Monument’s designation, and it still seems as remote and quiet as ever.

I’ve found great solitude in the Monument in my past trips there, which is something I treasure about it. But I also hope for more visitors to enjoy the wilderness there, which leads to a dilemma. As more visitors came to see the Monument, could some of that wildness be lost? Now that the campaign to create the Monument was over, I figured I’d just have to wait and see.

At the meeting, I found a friendly crowd of curious members of the public already looking over displays that highlighted aspects of Monument management needs. I looked through displays about Natural Resources, Land Use & Forestry, Scenic & Cultural Resources, Recreation, and Other Unique Qualities. A planning team, consisting of a local consulting firm, National Park Service employees, and volunteers, had set up the meeting. With public meetings like this one, they would listen to the public, then use what they’d learned to create a management plan for the future of the Monument.

As we wandered about, visiting the displays, volunteers explained some of the necessities of the Monument’s management. Mostly, they answered our questions and took notes about what we wanted from the Monument. Many of us went for the “Recreation” station, but I saw plenty of interest in history and conservation as well. I was excited to see all this enthusiasm for just the possibilities of what could come. The few suggestions I made were pretty obscure, but the volunteers seemed eager to hear about them anyway. Some day, maybe I’ll go to the Monument again to backpack on some of the trails that I suggested. Until then, it’s just nice to know that the management plan will take opinions like mine into account.

There will be more public meetings for Katahdin Woods & Waters’s planning phase, and comments can sent online if you can’t make it to the meetings. And if you’re not interested in being a part of planning for this particular Monument, I encourage you to keep an eye out for opportunities to get involved in your local public lands. Especially with new parks, it’s well worth the time to weigh in on what you’d like to do and see during your future visits.

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I’m going to be honest… before I started working here at Atlas Guides, I had no idea what thru-hiking was. I love to hike, but for some reason (probably having to do with me being in a college bubble in this small town of Flagstaff for the past five years), I had never heard of thru-hiking. So I googled it… and this is what I found:

Good ol’ Wikipedia: Thru-hiking, or through-hiking, is hiking a long-distance trail end-to-end within one hiking season. In the United States, the term is most commonly associated with the Appalachian Trail (AT), the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), and the Continental Divide Trail (CDT), but also refers to other end-to-end hikes.

The Appalachian Trail Conservancy defines a thru-hike as: “a hike of the entire A.T. in 12 months or less.”

Working at Atlas Guides for almost a year and a half now, I have been completely immersed in the thru-hiking culture and the community that surrounds it. Yet, I still can’t explain what thru-hiking means to me because I have never done one. Yes, it’s possible that I may do one sometime in the future, but right now I’ve just developed my ideas off of the countless articles I’ve read and all of the stories I’ve followed from hikers on Instagram.

I wanted to capture the perspective of people who have actually been out on the trail and experienced thru-hiking themselves. So that’s what I did and this is what they had to say:

“What does thru-hiking mean to you?”

“Solace.” – Nikki Hughes

“Start to finish.” – @bfdtcb

“#endlesssummer” – Grouchy, CDT 2018

“Fueled by gummy candy. Lots of it.” – Flip, AT 2017

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Last week I had the privilege of traveling to Vancouver, Washington for a symposium celebrating the 50th anniversary of both the National Trails System Act and the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. The four-day event, organized by the Partnership for the National Trails System and the River Management Society, celebrated the past 50 years of protecting trails and rivers, and addressed key issues as we look forward to the next 50 years.

It brought together a variety of different individuals and organizations, from federal agencies to non-profit conservation groups to for-profit companies.

Since the signing of the National Trails System Act, the system has grown from two National Scenic Trails to 11. It has also expanded further with the addition of 19 National Historic Trails, almost 1300 National Recreation Trails, and thousands of miles of rail trails.

Day 1

Before the official opening of the trails portion of the conference, I attended a session put on by the Leave No Trace Center for Outdoor Ethics. As an avid hiker and someone who lived religiously by LNT guidelines while thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail, I was eager to learn more and expand my knowledge of LNT best practices.

When educating or persuading others, it really comes down to the why. People are more likely to follow Leave No Trace practices when they understand the impact of their actions.

However, this comes with a huge caveat: an authoritative stance and tone will not help you. Finding common ground and approaching the issue with positivity can influence long-term change in behaviors. In turn, this creates a lasting impact and cultivating intrinsically motivated stewards of the land.

Almost all park or trail visitors want to take care of the land and want to be a part of the solution.

Day 2

Day two of the event opened with a keynote speech by Carolyn Finney, author of Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors. She discussed issues of diversity and inclusion in the outdoors. This set the tone for a major theme of the next few days of talks.

While we were all there to celebrate the work of the past 50 years, it is also important to address issues and conversations that still lie ahead.

To date, public lands recreation and management has been done by a largely homogenous group of people. Dr. Finney opened the door for ongoing conversations about how to engage people from more diverse backgrounds with the outdoors and especially with public lands.

After Dr. Finney’s opening talk, I attended another session about diversity and inclusion. A panel of speakers from the Next 100 Coalition engaged audience members in a discussion about how to begin doing the hard work of bringing diverse perspectives into the conversation.

The discussion covered many topics, but often came back to the idea of stories and narrative. If we, as an entire community, can accept, embrace, and listen to stories from a variety of perspectives, we can discover our shared narrative and common values and start from there.

After the panel, I attended two talks about using technology to help manage outdoor spaces. Specifically, using GIS. The first talk discussed the gaps in adoption of GIS technology among management agencies and conservation groups. The difference in size, funding, and capability of organizations has a huge impact on their ability to implement GIS technology effectively to help manage their piece of public land.

The second talk dealt with using GIS technology. This technology can help create better tools and materials for conservation organizations and the general public. They discussed the use of ArcGIS Online to create a robust database of trail data. This enables individual organizations to more effectively create and share materials, including interactive Story Maps.

The fourth talk of the day was centered around arts on public lands. Arts on National Trails and in National Parks can help engage the community. Artist in Residence programs can help provide opportunities for artists. The last talk of the day discussed technology on the trail and gave advice for using technology to promote National Trails.

In the evening, I attended a film screening for a variety of films about public lands, trails, and wild rivers. They were thought provoking, inspiring, and beautiful!

Day 3

The third day of the symposium was devoted to day-long field trips. The one I chose to attend was Enduring Stories of Tribal Survivance & Collaboration Along the Columbia River.

This session focused on telling stories of native peoples. These stories that have largely been left out of the mainstream narrative of parks and other locations along the Columbia River. This field trip was hosted by the Confluence Project, a group dedicated to telling these stories.

Our first stop was to Fort Vancouver National Historic Site. Fort Vancouver was originally a main depot for the Hudson’s Bay Company. It was an early center of trade for settlers in the Pacific Northwest. Much of that trade occurred with the Chinook peoples who lived along the Columbia River.

There is a complicated history of diversity, land ownership, and land theft that occurred in this area. This complicated history is often not told from all perspectives.

Confluence describes the project like this:

“Learn about the site’s indigenous plants as you walk along the land bridge, which leads you up to a grand view of the river and the surrounding mountains. From the south, walk under the land bridge’s Welcome Gate, designed by Native American artist Lillian Pitt. Two cedar canoe panels, each adorned with a cast-glass sculpture of a Chinook woman’s face, evoke the site’s role as a historic tribal crossroads as well as a point of contact between European and Native people.”

We spoke with Lillian and learned about her people’s history (as well as other Native tribes) with the Columbia River. Afterwards, we traveled to the Sandy River Delta to visit Maya Lin’s Bird Blind.