Episode
Dark Miles - An Armsfull of Birds with Cara Benson
- Podcast
- Hiker Trash Radio
- Published
- May 18, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2623
- Processing state
not_requested
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Summary
Cara Benson spent years in active addiction before the Adirondack Mountains gave her something she’d been looking for in all the wrong places. She got sober. She hiked. She found a man named John who left rebus messages on the kitchen counter, little hand-drawn symbols instead of words, rays of sunshine about the most pedestrian things. Then John died by suicide. And the mountains that had carried her through addiction had to carry her through something else entirely. An Arms Full of Birds is Cara’s story, the ragamuffin who found her way to recovery, to love, to loss, and eventually to a converted church on a mountain where she walks out her door every morning into 1,500 wooded acres. It’s a story about what it costs to love, and why she committed to it anyway. Dark Miles is a narrative documentary series from Hiker Trash Radio. These are the stories that happen on the trail that the finish-line photo never captures.