Thru-Hiking Will Break Your Heart: An Adventure on the Pacific Crest Trail.
Carrot Quinn, confused about her identity and her future, decides to take a hike. On the Pacific Crest Trail. A minimalist at heart, she soon embraces her sparse, ultralight trail life.
Quinn is new to backpacking at the start of her hike, but quickly becomes an expert. She hikes both solo and with others. Falling into and out of a succession of trail families and partners and eventually a love interest, this book is about people as much as hiking or scenery.
But Quinn never loses the intensity of her core connection with the natural world. That intensity is well communicated in her playful but piercing prose. I can still taste the fruit pie she downs in the trail town of Stehekin.
Using very spare first person present tense, Quinn is brutally honest about her faults and her personal life. From the low points of life as hikertrash to ecstatic intimacy, she tells it all without affectation. The end result for readers is a very human and sympathetic main character.
By the end of her hike, Quinn transforms into a courageous and elite trail athlete who will go on to cover thirty or more miles a day on multiple passes over the PCT, the CDT, and the Arizona Trail. She also becomes one of the leading writers on the experience.
In later years, the prolific Quinn has published a memoir of her traumatic early life, and has completed her first novel. She’s also written countless blog posts and zine pages about her travels. But she’s most affecting when recounting her ongoing attempts to make sense of a short human life in an achingly beautiful but transient world full of suffering.
Her advice, as she has titled her new Substack: “Sunsets are the only given.”
“Long-distance hiking is almost nonstop suffering, and you’ll hate it. If you enjoy your regular indoor-cat life even just a bit, you’ll hate it. I promise. On the other hand, if you like your euphoria in 10 to 40 minute increments between 5-10 hr stretches of physical deprivation, you might just take to it.” —Carrot Quinn
Trail Memoir 