Years ago, I wrote an article called “What Is a Thru-Hike?“
The goal wasn’t to give the definitive answer, but to show that thru-hiking is more than “a long walk from Point A to Point B.”
It’s a cultural idea, a narrative, and, yes, a belief. A thru-hike is continuous travel across a defined route, but it’s also a story the community agrees to tell together.
Since then, I’ve noticed something else:
Not every long journey on foot is a thru-hike. And not every long-distance hiker is a thru-hiker.
Those two things overlap, but they’re not the same in my opinion.
Especially as you keep walking.
When people hear that I spent weeks roaming canyon country, or stitching together old roads and trails across New England, or rafting and hiking both through the Colorado Plateau, I get asked if I am thru-hiking.
My honest answer?
Not really.
These days, I consider myself a long-distance hiker who occasionally happens to finish a route, sometimes made up of trails.
And that difference isn’t about labels.
It’s about the journey’s intent.
Thru-Hiking: Walking a Defined Line
A thru-hike is a project. It has a start, an end, and agreed-upon parameters as I discussed in my original article.
Someone else built the route. Someone else wrote the guide. Someone else developed the app, which includes water data, campsites, and lodging notes. You step into a storyline that already exists.
There’s beauty in that. It’s egalitarian. You buy a plane ticket, book a shuttle, touch a monument, follow the trail, and end at another monument. You become part of a shared culture.
Thru-hiking gives you identity, community, and a clear narrative arc: Walk until there’s nothing left to walk.
It’s a fantastic thing to do.
It’s just not what I do most anymore.
At the end of Canada’s “Great Divide Trail” in 2018.
Long-Distance Hiking: Walking the Landscape
Long-distance hiking isn’t defined by completing a prescribed line, even on a linear journey.
It’s driven by spending a long time in a landscape, whether cultural, historical, or the land itself.
Routes, alternates, cross-country legs, historical alignments, old stock trails, river bottoms, mesas, abandoned roads—they all count. What matters isn’t finishing someone else’s definition. What matters is how you move through a region.
On a long-distance trip:
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The weather tells you what’s reasonable.
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Water dictates your plan.
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Geology shapes your options.
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History guides your curiosity.
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Curiosity itself becomes part of the route.
A long-distance hike often changes shape along the way. You might backtrack, linger, take a canyon instead of a ridge, add a side trip, or bail on a pass because a storm made it foolish. You might finish somewhere different from planned, and it’s still whole.
There’s no “incomplete” stamp because there was never a finish line to begin with.
And sometimes you may even use a different form of travel on a seventy-mile stretch of river.
No one sets the standards. There’s no talk of purity.
You may have an endpoint and a start, but the purpose lies in what’s in between.
Like some Taoist precept, it “just is.”
What Changed For Me
Thru-hiking gave me direction when I needed it—structure, confidence, community. I loved it, and I’m grateful for those experiences that shape my life in so many ways.
But over time, finishing the line stopped being the point.
These days, what excites me is:
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linking canyons into weeks-long rambles,
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weaving old roads across New England until home makes sense,
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connecting mesa systems and walking paths, before others did, long before me,
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returning to the same places at different times, in which the familiar becomes new
A monument or border does not necessarily define the journey itself, but rather serves as a bookend to what’s in between.
Even when I go on a traditional longer hike, it serves as a way to connect with the landscape rather than as a goal in itself.
The Middle Path: Routes with Rigor, Not Rules
Somewhere between the structured identity of a thru-hike and the fluidity of long-distance wandering, there’s a third approach I find compelling.
It’s the idea of a crafted route: not built for guidebooks or patches, but for a deep love of geography, history, and connection. And a desire to share the story with others.
You see this spirit in the Hayduke Route. In Jamal Greene’s Across Utah journeys, which inspired many of mine. And in the routes crafted by Brett Tucker.
Take Tucker’s work on the Grand Enchantment Trail and the Northern New Mexico Loop, for example.
It’s not about trail branding or badges. These aren’t designated national trails, nor trying to get official recognition, but you wouldn’t know that from the thought put into them. They’re cohesive, imaginative, and ask the hiker to engage, not just with the map, but with the land itself.
They aren’t about following blazes from one monument to another. There’s no purity test, no one true path with these routes.
Instead, you walk a thread that links watersheds and mesas, ecozones and cultural corridors. A route might traverse forgotten mining tracks, hop between sky islands, or trace faint washes that exist on a topo map.
And that philosophy has informed my longer routes.
I’ve come to think of this style as a kind of middle path. It blends the discipline and scope of a thru-hike with the openness of a more exploratory walk. You still plan and prep. You still hike hard. And you often have resources and information from others.
But the reward isn’t another set of initials. It’s the story the land tells.
I’ve felt it myself. On routes where I’ve combined map layers and history, walked old roads marked only by stone walls, or followed canyons past granaries and high alcoves.
These routes weren’t “official.”
But they were real. And in their own way, as meaningful as the hikes from my formative years.
When I walk these kinds of routes, or craft my own that echo that spirit, I’m not thru-hiking. I’m not making any profound statement, either.
I’m just choosing the story that best fits the landscape and the version of a story I want to tell one step at a time.
Not every long journey on foot is a thru-hike.
Not every long-distance hiker needs to be a thru-hiker.
There’s room for both. And something valuable in the space between.
None Is Better—Just Different Questions
Thru-hiking asks:
Can you finish this line?
Long-distance hiking asks:
What does the land want you to do next?
Thru-hiking gives you a story already built.
Long-distance hiking asks you to build one with the land ahead and the map in your hand.
One isn’t purer, tougher, or more legitimate.
These routes don’t need to be “high,” “hard,” or “official.” They need to make sense to you and the land.
They’re just different answers to celebrating the wild places –
We celebrate not the trail, but the wild places it passes through. – Ray Jardine, PACIFIC CREST TRAIL HIKER’S HANDBOOK, 1996
If you love thru-hikes, fantastic.
If you wander without a finish line as your ultimate goal, fantastic.
If you bounce between both, that’s welcome. Most of us do.
Myself included.
The Real Question Isn’t What You Finished
Outdoor dialogue loves to ask whether a hike “counts.”
I think there’s a better question:
Did the landscape and journey have enough time to let you reach your goal?
Not whether you completed a line on a map, but whether you were present enough to let the landscape make an impact upon you. Whether that’s on a national scenic trail or in a lonely side canyon no one bothers to name.
In the end, it does not matter which path you take.
It’s the journey itself that matters in the end.
