Episode
Trail Stories - "Just Go" featuring Heather Anderson
- Podcast
- Hiker Trash Radio
- Published
- May 23, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 1880
- Processing state
not_requested
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Summary
On day two of her 800-mile solo, unsupported hike through Arizona, Heather Anderson fell, split her head open on the rocks, and kept going. There was a water cache a hundred yards away. She didn't use it. There was a town nearby. She didn't go. She used her sun hat to stop the bleeding, let the desert sun bleach the stains out of her clothes, and finished 22 days later with a handful of granola she didn't even eat. She tells this story the way most people describe missing a bus. Heather Anderson is a triple-triple crowner: she has completed the Appalachian Trail, the Pacific Crest Trail, and the Continental Divide Trail three times each. She is a National Geographic Adventurer of the Year. In 2018, she completed all three trails in a single calendar year, nearly 8,000 miles in eight months, one of only a handful of people ever to do so. She has just released a memoir about that year called Farther. This episode of Trail Stories traces the arc from a girl in Michigan who read about a man walking from Georgia to Maine and simply decided she would do that , to become one of the most accomplished long-distance hikers alive. Along the way: the routing logic of a calendar year Triple Crown, a winter storm on the AT that left her running down a trail in the dark with frozen hands and a soaking wet tent, a stranger named Brian Robinson who slept in his car at a New Mexico trailhead for three days waiting for her to finish, and a calamity sequence on the Arizona Trail that includes killer bees, a mountain lion, a Pringles can, and a 32-ounce jar of Nutella she force-fed herself for four days just to have something to drink coffee from. The full uncut conversation with Heather drops Wednesday on Hiker Trash Radio.