Hi, I'm Willow Belden, and you're listening to Out There.

This is a podcast about the outdoors, from your window box and garden, to the fields on the edge of town, to the forests, prairies, seashores, and wilderness.

On the show, we explore our relationship with nature, through stories, interviews, essays, and even some fiction.

We travel around the U.S. and the world with tales of love and heartbreak, passion and

adversity, desperation and triumph. Our story today begins in the spring of 2015, when a man named Chilton Tippett quit his job and set off on a

really long hike. The plan was to walk all the way from Mexico to Canada on the Continental Divide Trail.

If you're not familiar with it, the Continental Divide Trail or CDT is kind of like the Appalachian Trail,

only longer and tougher. The five-month journey took

Chilton up the spine of the Rocky Mountains, through New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho,

and Montana. Along the way, he made friends, pushed himself to exhaustion, delighted in the natural

splendor of the American West, and got a taste for what

it's like to live life as a vagabond.

In some ways, he learned lessons you'd expect someone to learn on a trip like this, like how

to rely on himself in difficult situations.

But the trail did something else to him, too, something quite unexpected.

On this episode, he shares his story. Corey paused at the edge of the hanging ice sheet. Peering over his pack, I could see why.

The trail we took, sidelined a steep slope, ran right into the sheet, and disappeared within the

ice. Corey turned to me. I think you're going to have to go first, he said. You're the only one with crampons.

Okay, I told him, affixing the spiked plates to my shoes, trying not to look down.

Give me a second.

From where we stood near the top of the mountain, I could hear wind rushing through tree tops in the basin below.

It sounded like the roaring of a crowd in a distant stadium.

...