What has our friend Jake Aaron's been up to lately?

Let's find out.

Today I'm welcoming back, a good friend of ours, a friend of our,

friend of the podcast, a member of the 2022, our friend Jake Arons.

Jake, welcome back to Papa Bear Hikes.

Good to be back. It's been too long.

It certainly has been, but you have not been sitting around getting soft,

you've been out there, you've been working, I see that, and you've been out there you've been working I see that and you have been

planning now we're gonna cover two things here Jake first I want to talk about

this trip you're planning you have what sounds like an incredibly

exciting trip coming up. Start off by telling us a little bit about that.

So it's something called the trans European Alpine route and it was put together by a guy I believe is British. I don't even know his first name off the top of my head I should but I was put together by a guy who just kind of had the idea of like what would if you like to hike across the continent other than the United States. It's 4,000 miles. It goes from Spain to

Bulgaria. The original intent is that it's fight from west to east, from the Black Sea all the way to finish there on the Atlantic coast.

But because of like visa issues, we're going to have to do this kind of weird hodge

flip-flop, which I'm happy to get into the logistics of that

down the road, but it's 4,000 miles.

It's a similar average elevation to the Appalachian Trail. So it's not just one of these long trails. It's got easy grade. It's going to be brutal

But I was considering a CDT southbound hike for this year after finishing the 1822.

And my friend and I had been playing with the idea of the owl peanut at some point, which goes through the Alps.

And then I kind of brought up a couple of other international hikes that were cool over in Europe and we were thinking, okay, we'll do the Alpina in 25.

And then he comes to me and he's like, hey, I found this thing.

It's called the TEA R, the Trans European Alpine Route.

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