Ep. 804: Creating Your Own Thru-Hiking Route - Revisited - Erik Schlimmer
Adventure Sports Podcast
Curt Linville
4.6 • 579 Ratings
🗓️ 4 February 2022
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Originally aired on April 29, 2019.
Erik is an experienced peak-bagger, long-distance hiker, author (of seven books), and has immense amounts of knowledge about off-trail travel and wilderness adventuring, especially in the northeast of America. He has climbed over 200 remote peaks in the Adirondacks during winter, with many of them not having a trail to the summit. He’s an expert in toponym research (why things are named what they are) and sustainable trail design.
All this knowledge and skill has led him to achieve what many outdoor enthusiasts can only dream of, creating his own thru-hiking route; the Trans Adirondack, a 235-mile backpacking route in the Adirondack mountains that includes off-trail navigation and bushwacking. It’s broken down like this, 182 miles of trails (76%), 50 miles of roads (21%), and 8 miles of trackless woods (3%) to get from one end of the Adirondack Park to the other.
His knowledge is vast, his demeanor unassuming, and his attitude superb. I hope you’re as inspired as I am after this conversation with a truly humble legend of trail travel and development.
Don’t forget to buy some of his books at the links below!
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | And you'll eventually hit a zone called crumholes, which is a German word for crooked wood. |
| 0:05.5 | And that's where the trees are really intertwined and you have to force your way through. |
| 0:10.8 | There were plenty of times I was doing maybe a half mile an hour. |
| 0:15.8 | I mean maybe. |
| 0:28.6 | Yeah. Hey, Hey folks, welcome to the Adventure Sports podcast. |
| 0:35.7 | You know, a lot of us on this show dream about doing a big through hike, you know, Appalachian Trail, Pacific Crest Trail, something, somewhere. But not a lot of us dream about actually creating our own route, our own through hiking route. Well, Eric Schlimmer had just that. He wanted to make his own route. so he decided to create the Trans-Adirondack |
| 0:55.8 | route that goes across the Adirondack Mountains around 250 miles. And we're going to hear about |
| 1:00.7 | the experience today, what it was like, where the idea came from, and how you actually go about |
| 1:05.8 | doing that and writing a book about it and spreading the word, letting people know, hey, there's a new |
| 1:10.4 | trail out there |
| 1:11.1 | now. So we're going to hear about that experience. Maybe that's something that excites some of you |
| 1:16.2 | more than actually hiking the route. Somebody's got to create them, right? So people like Eric are the |
| 1:21.8 | reason these trails exist in the first place. So, yeah, it was a great conversation from a few years ago. |
| 1:28.3 | This is a throwback episode. And I wanted to also apologize for not getting it up yesterday. |
| 1:33.0 | I just ran out of time, had some technical stuff, I was not able to get it out. So here it is. |
| 1:38.2 | And yeah, welcome. |
| 1:58.0 | Thank you for having me. Much appreciated. Yeah. and so you have a pretty diverse and interesting background. |
| 2:04.0 | I'll try to cover it all, but basically you're an adventurer. |
| 2:07.2 | You do peak bagging. |
| 2:08.5 | You've done lots of hiking. |
| 2:10.1 | You are familiar with trail building. |
| 2:13.3 | You have some books out that we can talk about. |
... |
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