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Cover photo courtesy of Mentz Germishuis

Have you ever run 140 miles across East Africa? Me neither, but I tried. In June, I flew to Tanzania to recon an ultrarunning event called Traverse Tanzania. Red Knot Development, the nonprofit that organizes the event, needed a handful of creatives to test their concept: a 140-mile trail run over five days from Simba Lodge to Lake Natron.  

Prior to the experience, I had only ever run a marathon. That was at the age of 24—I’m now 35. I’ve dabbled in half Ironman triathlon, two-day team running events, and 24-hour races, but nothing of this caliber. But I have a deeply rooted confidence in myself to give things a go. Not necessarily to complete them, but to try. The worst that might happen is failure, and I can live with that. What I can’t live with is not testing myself, not trying. 

From February to June, I slowly ramped up my training, then hopped on a plane from Spokane to Seattle, Seattle to Amsterdam, then on to East Africa landing at Kilimanjaro International Airport.  Another runner, Carey, was flying in from Los Angeles. She sent me a message earlier in the year that read, “Hi!! I’m running [Traverse Tanzania] too. It’s my first ultra and I have no idea what I’m doing so…cheers!” We arrived at the Kilimanjaro airport late at night and made the 1.5-hour drive to Simba Lodge through scattered villages with bonfires ablaze and people hanging in doorways, getting haircuts, playing roadside pool. 

The following morning, we woke at 6 a.m. to seven other participants and a huge buffet breakfast full of crepes, potatoes, beans, watermelon and other goodies. Illuminated in the distance was Mount Meru along with other scattered hills that we would eventually run over and around. Before heading west, however, we would run a 50km (33-mile) loop to the east that peaked at the Shira Plateau on Mount Kilimanjaro. The stage was fittingly titled: Assault on Kili.  

As a tactic when attempting hard things, I tend to reduce the monolithic goal down to bite-sized chunks. In the case of stage one up Kili, five feed zones were set up for us, which made it easy to break the day down: Lemosho Gate at 7.5 miles, Shira 1 at 15.4 miles, Morem Barrier at 17.7 miles, Londorosi Gate at 26.1 miles, Forest entry at 29 miles, Simba Farm finish at 33.2 miles.  

We were given a start time of 6 a.m. rather than the intended 5:30 a.m. due to two buffalo attacks that happened in Mount Kilimanjaro National Park. Apparently attacks were rare, but the race director thought it was a good idea to give everyone a bit more daylight before entering the park. We all looked around at each other, nodding our heads vigorously and agreed. 

The morning of stage one I woke at 4 a.m. to a rooster screaming in the distance. A goat bleated. Other than that, silence. I unzipped my tent and at that moment swore I was the loudest human on earth. As dawn approached, we toed the start line, giddy with energy. We flicked on our headlamps—it was 6 a.m. and would be dark for another half an hour. The horn signaled our departure and we quickly broke into groups. Carey, Chris, Aaron, and myself up front, Ari, Ricardo, Cristy close behind. 

Immediately, I realized that this day would be a formative memory. Unlike shorter, faster paced events, I was able to take in the scenery, hold conversation, and stop to snack and make needed adjustments. Chris and Aaron pulled ahead, leaving Carey and I to chat amongst ourselves. 

You’d think that a long day out would be filled with small talk, but it’s incredible how easily you get into deep conversation while doing something challenging with other people. We went straight to the depths of our being. Why were we here? What challenges have we faced? Which relationships broke us? Made us stronger? Who are we doing this for? Ourselves? Someone else? Who we hope to be? Though we had only met 48 hours ago, it was as if we’d known each other for decades. 

Right then and there, we decided that we’d stay with each other and finish the day together. Run, walk, talk, eat, drink—for 10 hours, that was our day. We got into a flow as we climbed 7,000 feet to the Shira Plateau, saying “mambo” to porters as we passed them and receiving “pole pole” in response. “Pole pole” (pronounced po-lay) in Swahili translates to “slowly slowly.” What it really means however is, “go as slow as possible, trust the process, it works.” 

Spoiler alert: I finished the 33 miles of stage one; ran 20 of 28 miles on day two; 15.8 of 27.2 miles on day three; 13.5 of 29.3 miles on day four; and loaded up on ibuprofen to run the full 28.5 miles on day five. Total accumulation: 110 out of 140 miles.  

Perhaps if I had understood the meaning of “pole pole” better, I would’ve taken it to heart and slowed my pace, made smarter decisions, and been more tactical in order to complete each stage. As it stands, I didn’t fully understand “pole pole” until returning home and reflecting on my trip.  

During Traverse Tanzania, they were just words with a definition but no personal meaning. I see now that it fits into all aspects of life. Move slowly, put one step in front of the other and trust the process. As I look to future goals—athletic, work, creative—I will remind myself, pole pole. Go slowly. Trust the process. It works. And maybe I’ll even return to Africa next year to finish some unsettled business. Pole pole. 

Sammy Berryman is a writer based out of Sandpoint, Idaho. She’s currently training for Lauf Gravel Worlds 300-mile bike race while wondering why she agreed to go.  

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By Claire Thompson  

Cover photo courtesy of Xander Demetrios

Not far from the trailhead on the Indian Creek trail in the North Cascades’ Glacier Peak Wilderness, an unnamed side stream spills from the eastern flanks of Mount David into the White River. A few summers ago, my Forest Service trail crew and I spent many weeks on Indian Creek, replacing a bridge that had buckled under winter’s heavy snows. We hiked the first two miles of that trail over and over, hauling tools into and out of the bridge site, often with the help of our string of mules.  

That side stream—steep, rock-tumbled, and log-jammed, its banks clotted with brush—proved tricky for the mules to cross, so we spent half a June day making it more passable for stock. We brushed the banks, rearranged boulders, and cut and moved waterlogged wood, our fingers growing numb from repeated plunges into water that had been snow hours before. Through July and into August, I’d pause at that stream on my way to or from the bridge, to top off my water bottle and rinse the sweat from my face. By September, the stream crossing lay dry as a bone, just a spray of cobble across the trail.  

I was first drawn to trail work out of a typical twenty-something hunger for adventure and novelty. I kept at it because I loved how it challenged me mentally and physically. I loved the people I met, every one of them with stories and experience to share, and I felt at home in the quirky community to which I now belonged. Mostly, I couldn’t imagine anything better than getting paid—however poorly—to camp, hike, and work my body to exhaustion every day in wild places. Eventually, I kept at it because I couldn’t imagine anything else.  

I loved the way trail work activated my imagination, changing the way I saw the world around me. Working on a Forest Service trail crew means covering the same routes over and over, stopping for minutes or hours to work in places a hiker would never pick for a snack break. You end up noticing things—like the seasonal fluctuations of a minor stream, or the sheer quantity of squirrel caches in a stand of fir—that might not otherwise draw your attention. Insignificant parts of the overall scenery become familiar, take on meaning. The rock halfway up Buck Creek the exact shape and size of a throne; the lone larch growing in a scree field off the switchbacks below Stuart Pass. Working on trails strengthens a connection to the wild landscape as a whole, yes, but also to certain of its individual parts, denizens you’ve grown to recognize and depend on as markers of both constancy and change. 

We build connections with the more-than-human world the same way we build any relationship: through interaction, cooperation and friction, intimacy and specificity. An admiration for the wild can come from the wonder of summit views or wildflowers on windswept ridges. But for me, the real intimacy is in the smaller things: the comfort of reaching an unassuming camp where I’ve sheltered before, of touching the skin of a cedar whose shape I remember, of tracking the recede and return of trickles not marked on maps. Of returning to places with which I have a bond built by labor, not passive appreciation. By lingering, not passing through.  

It’s only recently, as political chaos has forced me to face the end of my time as a professional trail worker, that I’ve started to understand the deeper reason I’ve stayed all these years. Every day I spend doing trail work, even the sloggy, tedious ones with wet socks or stubborn logs or silly spats with colleagues, reinforces my relationship with the land and landscape, and reminds me how that relationship has shaped my own life and understanding of the world.  

I want everyone to have the chance to experience that intimacy, to feel our innate connection to the more-than-human. To touch grass—and sage, and huckleberry, and spruce bark and snowmelt. Trails themselves are, quite literally, conduits for such connection. When I’m clearing trails, I can tell myself I’m also, in a way, clearing some of the gunk out of a clogged-up system that has tried for too long to separate us humans from the wild world we’ve always been a part of.  

Last September, my crew spent six days clearing the Indian Creek Trail. For all my time on its first few miles, I’d never made it to Indian Creek’s upper reaches. As we pushed toward Indian Pass from our base camp nine miles in, stopping along the way wherever the work demanded it, I felt the heady rush of discovery—peaks and meadows and old-growth groves I’d never seen before—begin to mingle with the warmth of familiarity. A slow burn of belonging not unlike falling in love.  

Claire Thompson worked on and led trail crews on the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest for eight years. She teaches English at Wenatchee Valley College and is pursuing an MFA in Nature Writing from Western Colorado University. 

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 Cover photo courtesy of Maura Lammers

About two minutes before I broke my ankle, I had just reached the turn-around point on my run near West Central; two miles down, two to go, as I eased myself into a running routine. Last March, I was gearing up for a big job change and looking forward to doing what I loved more often, including what I was doing at that moment: running on the Centennial Trail on a blue-sky spring afternoon. 

That day I was wearing noise-cancelling earbuds, but even with music I could hear the grumble of an engine behind me. I looked over my shoulder and saw a small vehicle speeding toward me on the trail. I did the split-second math you sometimes do when you’re sharing a trail: I was parallel with the two walkers to my right, and since someone was coming up fast, I should scoot to the right. Who knows what kind of calculations the driver made—but, of course, anything with an engine didn’t belong on the Centennial Trail to begin with. The impact was violent and sent me careening sideways to the edge of the trail. 

Maybe my body rolled from the crash, or maybe I skidded across the pavement; I don’t remember. I do remember pressing myself up on my hands, and everything throbbing, and turning back to look at my bloody ankle in a daze. Much of what happened I pieced together with help from the two walkers who stayed with me, a couple named Amme and Dave. The scene turned into a hit-and-run when the kids on motorized bikes fled, and Dave called 911 and followed them. Thanks to adrenaline, I was in pain but managed to stand up after a few minutes and, leaning on Amme for support, limp my way to the nearest street where a friend could pick me up. 

What followed was a series of medical mishaps mixing terribly with my own stubbornness. Despite my description of the accident, the providers at urgent care chose not to request an x-ray. For about three weeks, I self-medicated with ibuprofen and ice, marveling at my swollen ankle and the impressive handlebar-shaped bruise on my right butt cheek. 

When I finally followed up with my PCP and showed her my ankle, she ordered an x-ray immediately. When the x-ray tech showed me the image of my fractured fibula, he wisely said: “It’s always women who say nothing is wrong when something is broken.” Since the fibula is not a weight-bearing bone, that explained why I was able to walk, albeit with notable discomfort. After a few more appointments with orthopedic specialists who gave conflicting opinions, I settled with one who was confident that the break did not require surgery. Now all I needed was rest and physical therapy. 

Over the next six months as I healed, graduated from PT, and slowly started training for a comeback 10K, I reflected on an important element of running: discomfort. When you’re a runner, you learn to tolerate discomfort. When you’re a female runner, that’s doubly true, when combined with monthly menstrual pains and our socialized grin-and-bear-it tendency. Famously, runners thrive on this brand of “Type II Fun,” where you’re miserable in the moment but enjoy even the worst run in hindsight. 

After my fibula fused back together and I could run again, I had to carefully explore the edges of discomfort: was this pain productive, or was I overtraining and pushing myself too hard? Was this discomfort healthy or unhealthy? Yes, I could withstand pain, but that didn’t mean I should. Likewise, I had to explore where my notions of strength and weakness came from, and how this led to me denying the severity of my injury. Like most women, I grew up hearing I was too sensitive. I had disproven this run after run, stomping all over a notion of weakness that began as societal and then became a self-imposed prison. Really, this denial of sensitivity didn’t make me any stronger; it just meant I didn’t listen to my body. 

This March, I’ll hit the one-year anniversary of the accident, and I’ve toyed with signing up for another big race to celebrate. Regardless of whether I reach another race milestone, I hope to usher in a new season of running where I can test the limits of my joy instead of the limits of my discomfort. 

Maura Lammers is a writer and runner who has some cool scars on her right ankle. 

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Cover photo courtesy of Olivia Dugenet

I was backpacking alone because I had desperately needed a break from my everyday life. I was in the Lewis range of the Montana Rockies, in summer, and I had been rationing a low water supply for a couple of miles. There were no streams at that elevation. Just ragged stone against plump white clouds that stampeded east, shapeshifting as they ran. My thirst compounded with every step. Close to finishing a long climb, I walked in long, fast strides up and over the ridgetop where the wind hit me suddenly with invisible force. 

I stumbled all over the place, shuffling my feet and flailing my arms to maintain balance, but the heavy backpack threw off my center of gravity. I landed hard on my hands and knees and caught my sunglasses with one hand just as the wind ripped them off my face. I shoved them in through the collar of my shirt and speed-crawled to the leeward side of an enormous stone cairn. I sat down, wiggled out of my backpack, and leaned into the stone.  

Some part of me had hoped that immersion in wild nature would produce answers about how to escape the difficulties that had recently plagued me. For example, several days earlier I had accidentally chopped the tip of my thumb off with a kitchen knife. That’s the sort of mishap that makes me want to throw chairs through windows. There were other things: divorce, financial losses, isolation, a child’s health crisis, a car crash, job change, emergency vet, etc. I had handled all that, but I drew the line at a thumb stump, which was now throbbing and wrapped in bloody, dirt-crusted bandages at 7,600 feet.  

I squinted up at the surrounding stone and sky and wondered if I could distill wisdom that amounted to anything more than confirmation bias. I was looking for potent insight grounded in raw physical reality. Sitting there in the dirt, though, all I got was thirstier and farther behind schedule. I recklessly drank my last four ounces of water and stepped back into the barreling wind. 

The trail snaked for miles along a narrow spine, skirting oblivion. Eventually it rose steeply to a lookout platform situated in the middle of nowhere with shock-and-awe views of the surrounding landscape—a massive assembly of towering peaks and arétes, sharp as blades. I scrambled up, uttering expletives to keep my spirit light while gusts hurled me toward the cliff edge. 

An agitated young man stood on the ridge fidgeting and watching me climb. Enormously tall with a wild expression and broad build, he charged toward me. “We’re lost!” he shouted over the wind and waved a GPS device as proof. He blurted out a story about how he’d gotten disoriented and stumbled mistakenly into this unknowable and sinister region. As I was the only other person he’d seen, he was convinced I had also lost my way. 

I don’t know why I believed him. Instantly I felt my heart drop, and dug my phone out of my pack to have a look at my own GPS app. “Where are you heading?” he said. I told him the name of the lake and he shouted in triumph. “I knew it! You are so lost. You’re going the wrong direction. These are the wrong mountains.”  

He held his digital device up so I could see. I leaned in close and studied the one-dimensional black outlines of various peaks that appeared on his screen. Then I looked up and around at the mountains themselves, silent snow-spotted giants. How were the mountains wrong? This guy wasn’t making sense. “Hold on,” I said. “Where are you going?” Watching the worry on his face, I wondered which was more dangerous: getting physically lost in the wild, or mentally lost in a maze of disappointment and despair. 

He told me his destination and I laughed out loud. “You’re not lost,” I said. “I passed that lake earlier today. There is one trail between here and there, and you are on it.” 

“How can that be?” He held up his GPS again.  

“Don’t overthink it,” I said. “I promise you’re on the right track. Just keep going.” 

“But this wind—it isn’t safe. This can’t be right.” he said. 

“That’s true. It isn’t safe,” I said. “This isn’t normal wind. It’s a storm. Be careful out there.” 

I wished him luck and moved on, glad to distance myself from his gloom, but also grateful for the encounter. I thought of Alfred Korzybski, the philosopher and engineer who had offered the simple yet profound observation that “the map is not the territory.” When we find ourselves resisting the challenging terrain of true experience, it’s a clue that we’ve strayed into abstraction. Coming into the trip, I had been sure my difficulties were “the wrong mountains.”   

My mouth imploded with thirst. A few more miles of dry, wind-scattered scree later, my backpack and I were jogging down wildflower hillsides toward the blue lake. I filtered cold, fresh water and marveled at its sweetness, its revitalizing power, its weird, shape-changing properties and the alien feel of it on my lips. The way I was experiencing water felt like . . . potent insight grounded in raw physical reality.  

I walked my whole sweaty, aching body in for a swim. I treaded water with my injured hand suspended above the surface, the aching digit inside its soggy gauze encasement forced into a persistent and involuntary thumbs up. 

Olivia Dugenet is a Spokane writer and frequent backcountry traveler whose left thumb is just a tiny bit shorter than her right. 

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Cover photo courtesy Ammi Midstokke 

Not everyone feels the same about risk. It’s a subjective assessment, nuanced by things like how many kids you still have to feed and who will see you shit yourself if things go wrong. 

Our party of three was not in agreement about how we got here. And by here, I mean clinging to the rocky edges of Mount Olympus, staring down a Chasm-of-Imminent-Death on one side and a Crash-Plummet-of-Maiming on the other side. We were wearing helmets, but helmets don’t keep you attached to the mountain. 

My most reliable adventure buddy, Liz, and I had invited ourselves to visit an old friend in Greece and created an itinerary of sailing, seafood and tsipouro, and this one hill we wanted to climb. Judging by the loss of color in Alex’s face that afternoon, we did not have the same definition of what constitutes risk.  

Olympus is a moderate climb from the east-facing side of Greece. We began at the Prionia trailhead, planning to overnight at a refuge perched in the last of the trees just below 7,000 feet. We wound our way into the folds of the Olympus Range, through a forest of beech and oak, and ever upward into the thick, swaying black pines. These trees have their own distinct sound, and, as the evening winds picked up, we listened to their symphony while sitting at picnic tables, chatting with other climbers. 

Looking at the other hikers, I assumed the climb was benign. There were a lot of retired Germans drinking a lot of wine and bragging about days in the Dolomites and their La Sportiva expedition grade boots. I may have both a fluent grasp of Deutsch and a fair bit of judgement. Also, I read the reviews online: hike with a brief scramble to the summit, average of one death per year from all causes, including cardiac events, falls, exposure, etc.  

Alex had spent a lifetime playing in the area mountains, backcountry snowboarding, visiting the other refuges, but never summited the 9,572-foot peak of Mytikas. In our 25 years of our friendship, we’d never climbed mountains together. Which is kind of funny, because it’s generally a friendship prerequisite for me. I made some subconscious assumptions that were not fair or fairly assessed—such as that we’d have the same comfort level on exposed rock and he knew what he was getting into.  

The following morning, the higher we climbed out of the trees and the wind-rattled alpine fields of flowers, the more I was filled with joy and purpose. I can’t say whether it’s the powerful wind gusts or the wide and endless expanses of possibilities in the form of ridges and sky that fill my soul. Mountains always offer me a sense of deep satisfaction and simplification of my purpose: to get to the top. But safely. 

We reached the ridge and paused to question the jagged, exposed, and much-more-vertical traverse to the summit. The route looked challenging until we saw some teenagers returning in jeans and Nikes. I forgot teenagers have an exceptionally dulled sense of risk. Something got lost in the wind or my pursuit of joy, and we agreed to try the route. Or maybe just look at it. In any case, I picked my way across the face of mountain, Alex and Liz bringing up the rear. 

Somewhere along the eastern face, I noticed Alex’s scowl connecting his two eyebrows into one strip of pissed-off. Liz had a head cold and had grimaced her way up the mountain while producing inhuman amounts of snot. She didn’t look happy either. I assumed they just didn’t have a good bowel movement that morning. I was still in my uncontained happy place, grinning wildly.  

I looked around at the dramatic, exposed rock and casually referred to it as a no-fall zone—a place where you don’t fall for a number of reasons related to homeostasis. 

“It would be a bad idea to fall here,” I said, helpfully. Alex wasn’t particularly calmed by this piece of guidance. Liz might’ve flipped me off if she could’ve peeled a hand off the rock for long enough. I know what she is capable of, and I know she’d tell me before she was no longer capable (or wanting). But I didn’t know Alex’s ability or comfort level. That is perhaps the most risky thing of all.  

At the summit, he described our route in terms varying widely from how I would describe it, as if ‘deadly’ and ‘dangerous’ were interchangeable. Where he saw imminent risk of death, I saw a handholds and stable footing. Where he saw a “vertical face,” I saw a Class 3 scramble (confirmed by research). 

Right or wrong about descriptors, he did not have as much fun as I, and that is a loss. 

The scramble to the summit became an important reminder about safety in the outdoors. It’s not just about what we’re carrying in our packs, but how we communicate with our companions along the way. Our responsibility lies in sharing our needs, fears, and abilities and also in proactively checking in with others so they might share theirs along the way. 

At least by the time we descended back to the safety of beech trees and cold creeks, we were talking about other routes to try. I wanted to explore the whole magnificent ridge. Liz wanted a nap. Alex wanted a rope. 

Ammi Midstokke is a columnist for Out There and loves mountainous nature and friends. She aims to preserve both. 

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