What I Almost Missed on the Trail
On nature, real community, and finally getting off the sidelines
The morning after the 2025 North Carolina Spring Xtreme Hike to benefit the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, I sat at breakfast on the pool deck of Harrah’s Cherokee Casino and listened to people tell stories about their day on the Appalachian Trail.
This was new for me. My wife Nicole and our son Zach had just finished their second Xtreme Hike, on a team with our friend April, her sister, and her sister-in-law. The first two years I’d cheered from the sidelines... tailgating at aid stations, waiting at the finish line, proud of them but quietly thinking I’d never put myself through that kind of punishment. I’d hung out with everyone the night before at dinner, staying up way too late with a group of people who had just spent twelve-plus hours on the trail. But the breakfast was different.
People were trading stories about magical moments on the trail. Striking up a conversation with someone they’d never talked to before and ending up in a long, deep one. The strange emotional weight of finishing something that hard. I was watching, from the outside, a community that had pulled itself together from every direction... parents of kids with cystic fibrosis, grandparents, friends, people living with the disease themselves, and a not-insignificant number of people with no personal connection to CF at all. Through some event or just the appeal of the hike, they’d become true believers in the cause.
That was the moment I decided I was in. At lunch on the drive home, I told the rest of Nicole’s team.
I had to announce it before I chickened out.
That was May. In July, I tore the meniscus in my left knee helping a friend load a U-Haul. A month and a half with a sports chiropractor ended at an orthopedic surgeon’s office, where I learned I’d need surgery. I stayed active through all of it... running, going to training hikes with the Fall Xtreme Hike group, and keeping up on our 25th anniversary trip to Hawaii’s Big Island. The surgery happened in October. I started PT right away and slowly built back up before hike training started in January.
I’ll be honest, the first few training hikes weren’t the magical events I’d imagined from those breakfast stories. I was so focused on not re-injuring my knee that I barely noticed I was outside. Then, after one of them, I saw a post in our Facebook group from one of the coaches. It was beautiful and a little poetic... a description of the nature he’d noticed that day, with gorgeous pictures from the same trail we’d just hiked.
I hadn’t noticed any of it. I hadn’t taken a single picture.
When was the last time you were in nature? Like, really in nature. For me, it’s not something I experience often enough. As I write this, I’m sitting on my back patio in the last couple hours of daylight, a cool breeze coming through. The view is fine. A 180-degree wall of green trees. But I can’t see the horizon, and it feels closed in. The noise of modern machinery never quite stops, either. Cars on the nearby road, lawn mowers, leaf blowers. The major irritant last Friday was the generator on the mobile dog groomer’s truck two doors down!
On the next hike, I made a point of not always looking at my feet. I looked at the views. The signs of spring breaking out along the trail. The quiet of the forest, broken only by the occasional plane overhead. The peak of a mountain wrapped in fog. I was finally taking it in.
And as I started paying attention to the trail, I started paying attention to the people on it.
The trash cans. If you know, you know.
Real community is something I’d been quietly looking for, for years. I’d tried the places where it’s supposed to be easy to find, the ones that put it right on the welcome sign. For me, it mostly didn’t take. What was happening on these training hikes was different.
The format almost forces it. Pace varies, the line stretches and clumps, and you end up hiking next to whoever you end up hiking next to. The conversations range from the mundane, like what people do for a living and how training is going, to the deeply personal, to the absurd. We all have different things motivating us, but we’re all here for the same reason. I’m not someone on the sidelines anymore, watching this play out in other people’s lives. I get to be in it.
We finished our last training hike this morning... just over seven miles, on a familiar trail we’ve done more than a few times. As we started, I noticed a chorus of birds overhead in the trees. Thousands of them, it sounded like. Unlike anything I’d heard before. At the top of Crowders Mountain, instead of snapping a quick picture and plowing through like we usually do, we all paused. Took it in. Took more than a few pictures.
This Saturday, we’ll wake up hours before sunrise and get dropped off in the dark on the Appalachian Trail. It will be grueling. But through the chaos of life and work this week, I’ll be looking forward to spending an entire day in those mountains with this group of people I’m proud to call friends. Hoping that, eventually, our efforts will help make CF stand for “Cure Found.”
Another trash can selfie. It's a whole thing now.
If you’d like to support our hike, here are our fundraising pages. Every dollar goes to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.
Nicole’s page: https://fundraise.cff.org/springhike2026/Nicole
Zach’s page: https://fundraise.cff.org/springhike2026/Zach
We'll be cheering you on...go for it!