A Timeline: Leaving a Corporate Career to Pursue a Life Outdoors

Here’s the thing: I don’t want to tell you about hiking.

Writing about hiking itself is boring. The PCT being my first thru hike, I did try this—that year in 2023. Initially I kept a “notes” column in my Google spreadsheet of daily data: mileage hiked, time start/stopped, if it rained, if I cowboy camped – almost always yes, et cetera, and I tapped out neat little notes like so in my first entry:

“Lots of water all over, never carried more than 2L except before Hauser in anticipation of dry camp. Green, and some flowers. Expect cacti to bloom soon. A bit sunburnt. Not too cold. Found perfect spot on ridge protected by rocks. Gorgeous. Feels like freshman year.”

It read a bit like facts. It only became interesting once I switched entirely to writing about the people and experiences. All I want to explore is who I am as a person and what I am personally struggling with and how my growth as a human is filtered through my experience of “trail”. 

The author on the LA aqueduct in the desert section of the PCT.

The exact moment I realized that I’d done that was about a day after the famed LA aqueduct walk. “It’s funny how the hiking is mostly uneventful and it’s really everything else that I find notable,” I wrote. What I was thinking about while I was hiking. Who I met and how our conversations shaped me. How I was making sense of how the trail was changing me. Only then did it go from “notes” to “journal.” Only then did it go from chronology to growth.

Hiking the trail is simply the vehicle, powered in my case by golden Oreos, the singularly consistently delicious Keebler cheese cracker, a rotating cast of chip flavors, Snyders honey mustard pretzel pieces, and Nutella. Beyond that, mostly couscous, and no mashed potatoes again after the Sierra.

Frankly though, “growth” is a bit of a tired term of the trail (like, let’s face it, “empowerment” and “confidence”).

What I mean by “growth”, then, is an expansion. A filling out of the self. A curiosity as to where your own borders lie, nevermind Canada’s. Canada is an arbitrary concept to you, as far as real things are concerned, until that surreal moment when, after 153 days of walking, you find that you can mentally time Canada down to six minutes away at a 3 mph pace.

This whole time you were actually out there looking for where the edges of your fear live. Where the spirit resides in your body. Where the mundane becomes beauty, and what was awe-inspiring becomes mundane. This is what they mean when they say they are going in order to find themselves.

The author with her hiking partners, at the northern terminus of the PCT.

These are the facts I’d like to lay out up front:

1. In 2013, when I graduated high school, I took an Outward Bound trip to Panama through the fruits of my Girl Scout cookie labor. I was an avid cookie saleswoman, which is how I grew up into a version of corporate America. There, one of my instructors said she would shortly be hiking the Appalachian Trail with her dog, and introduced me to the idea of the Pacific Crest Trail: of walking home to the state where I grew up – Washington. What I’m telling you is, I didn’t find out about the PCT through Wild. So there.

2. In 2017, when I graduated college, I thought I might try. I had five months between May and October before I started the job offer I’d taken. I did not try, because instead I, with a fondness for exploring many and every path instead of following one line, ostensibly wanted to do many small projects. I traveled Peru for a month with friends. I worked for a female mentor I still look up to, who had written a book called How to Have A Good Day (read: I was studying how to have a good day, instead of going out to try to live them). I dabbled in my dad’s preferred hobby, pretending that I was “already retired” when at the driving range.

Presumably to study wilderness survival skills for the PCT, I did a stint on Workaway for a bushcraft school in West Virginia and made great friends with a neighboring family who ran a small home blueberry farm, among other homesteading gems. I did learn to make a fire three different ways and also shoot a rifle. In reality I was just kidding myself in the way we women do when we think we’re not ready to do something. 

The author on one of her first backpacking trips, in Patagonia.

3. I worked at the company where I had received that offer for a period of about six or so years before feeling a certain level of competency over my chosen field (read: comfort) where I felt I was in a place to step away for a bit (read: shake things up). Also, I had discovered that I could no longer consider myself a recent college graduate.

Now, I want to emphasize here that I loved my job. I felt and still feel a strong loyalty to the firm and its people who gave me the space to create and facilitate what were nail-on-the-head transformative immersions for Fortune 500 corporate clients. I joked that I was an executive babysitter because it felt like play.

We believed that if you didn’t have fun solving a problem, you would never solve it. In that belief alone, we could shift the energy of a room, its relationships and its outputs. I loved that visceral staying power of an experience, of wrangling C-suite leaders to see that we were a kind of human-centered wizardry, not superficial “jazz hands”, that we were enabling them to actually accelerate months of “work” (really the product of silos and miscommunication) into days. And we had fun doing it. We lit up rooms and were called in to turn around the worst messes.

But I could see the writing on the wall, and after COVID, a lot was changing at the firm where I worked. I recall my initial conversation with my father about wanting to take a sabbatical. We were in the car, and he was driving me home after picking me up at the airport. “Dad, I think I want to take a sabbatical,” I said. “Why?” he asked. “You have a stable job.” “Exactly.” (Ever the discussion between an immigrant parent and their firstborn, first-generation child.)

The other reason, which elided our discussion mostly due to my unwillingness to try to figure out how to translate more emotionally complex subjects into Mandarin, was that I felt at a crossroads of either committing fully to the track I was on (pursuing a path to becoming a Partner at the firm), or leaving. 

4. In the summer of 2022, following repeated glorious remote-work pandemic summers hiking, cycling, backpacking, car camping (and buying a van to renovate, like everyone else) around the American West with a brief interlude in Europe on the Tour du Mont Blanc, I decided I would take leave to hike the Pacific Crest Trail in time for the tenth anniversary of my finding out about it. I joked that, at 27, it was my quarter life crisis, its onset two years delayed by COVID.

The author’s non-ultralight setup at the time, camped along the Tour du Mont Blanc route, summer of 2022: the trip where the author tried to hike 20 mile days to see if the PCT was possible.

This time, I did decide to try, because I was beginning to realize that if you hold onto a dream too long it might stop to make sense. It might no longer connect with your reality enough where you can still pull it into reality’s orbit. Had I continued to defer mine, I feared it would have been the crusted-over sugary kind of Langston Hughes. The kind where you dream about what might have happened and who you might have become. 

I chose to test if I really could commit to something—one line, one goal—for five months. 

5. My trail and off-trail friends all joke that I am not someone who appreciates comfort. My parents bought my sister and me hard plastic desk chairs so we “wouldn’t sit for too long.” (They did, however, allow our baby brother to select his own preferred model of cushy ergonomic desk chair a decade later, of course.)

My mother’s first memory at age four was of the Communist party raiding and ransacking her Shanghai home due to the perceived misaligned loyalties of her father, whose brother had recently escaped to Taiwan, so whatever struggles I had were by comparison a great privilege and easy comfort. She still has the formal apology they issued her, red text preserved on fragile yellowed rice paper, like what you’d see behind glass in museums.

My maternal grandmother is herself (in fact, each of my grandparents) a product of a people who, unlike their modern grandchildren escaping to nature to “find themselves”, escaped to the countryside during Japan’s WWII invasion of China. She responded to my plan to hike the PCT in loving mockery: “What, so you haven’t eaten enough bitterness in your life?” (chī kǔ, a common Chinese refrain) “You have to seek out suffering for fun?”

Yes, 阿婆, I believe that comfort can be a little crushing sometimes. A muscle only rebuilds stronger when provoked to the point of pain. A body optimizes for the stresses it endures. So it should come as no surprise that I went to hike the Pacific Crest Trail northbound on April 1, 2023, unflinching snowpack and all the type 2 fun that implied.

The author’s Sierra team climbing a snow bank after crossing a creek in the Sierra in a record snow year, early June 2023.

6. That hike changed my life: a loaded and thoroughly wrung-out phrase for how frequently it is used. I simply had no idea what it would mean to have done such a thing. What it means is that you must be re-domesticated. Every long distance trail is a way out of Plato’s cave, and there is no route back. Like all thru hikes, like life itself, it is one way.

The author on one of the coldest days her team experienced in the Sierra.

I became a version of myself on this trail that was like I’d boiled off all the excess and left only the richest flavors. It was beautiful and hard, a kind of conversion, an evolution, an entropy where you cannot go back to what you were.

And that new version of myself was named Stitches, for the two separate incidents where I had received such medical care (more on that later). That version of myself did not know how to be reabsorbed back into the folds of society properly, if there is a proper way to do such a thing.

Suddenly the world seemed so restless compared to nature, which is always on time yet never hurried. (Is it odd how ‘world’ connotes man — and ‘nature’ is everything else? Can man still be called “of nature”?) Suddenly I felt unmistakably pulled apart when I had to both speak to a client and answer someone’s ping simultaneously. Suddenly the way a plane lands and you are surrounded by all-new trees and all-new birdsong was jarring and remained jarring. Suddenly the eyes are open and you realize you actually have to go. 

7. So I did. And will again.

Last year, I took some time off work and hiked myself out of my post-PCT depression on the Colorado Trail. This break was prompted by the questions raised by my time on the Pacific Crest Trail. I needed to figure out which path I wanted to continue down: settle into an established career track, or make my own trail?

This year, I have my answer. Starting on April 21st, I’m attempting to be the first woman on record to connect the Continental Divide Trail and the Great Divide Trail: three thousand miles northbound from the Mexican border and seven hundred more in Canada. I will need to average at least 30 miles a day, including breaks in town. And yes, I’ve resigned from the safety of my corporate career to fully commit to this track and where it may lead. This is decidedly off-trail – and it’s where adventure can begin.

The author, on the desert section of the Pacific Crest Trail.

xx

stitches