Episode Summary

Carrot and Margaret talk about all things hiking, including thru-hiking and ultralight hiking. They talk about how to choose the right gear for the right purposes and how to minimize the impacts of long distance hiking on your body. They go through the complications of bringing dogs on long hikes and how to stay safer around grizzly bears. They also spend a good deal of time critiquing The Last of Us while developing a theory on how to hybridize many hiking strategies to develop the ultimate form of apocalypse travel.

Guest Info

Carrot Quinn (she/they) is an author, thru-hiker and hiking coach. She is the author of Thru-Hiking Will Break Your Heart and The Sunset Route. Carrot has a new speculative fiction novel coming out later this year, hopefully. Carrot is also an avid blogger and you can find them at www.carrotquinn.com or on Instagram @carrotquinn and Twitter @CarrotQuinn

Host Info

Margaret can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy.

Publisher Info

This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.

Transcript

Live Like the World is Dying: Carrot on Hiking

Margaret 00:15 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host, Margaret Killjoy. And this week we are talking about walking and how to do it, the legs, the one in front of the other, etc. And in order to do so, we're going to be talking to an expert walker, or hiker, I suppose might be a better way of phrasing it, Carrot Quinn. And so we're going to be talking to her about all this stuff. Carrot writes a bunch of books about hiking and does a bunch of hiking. And so I'm really excited, because this has been on my mind a lot. But first, we are a proud member of the Channel Zero network of anarchists podcasts. And here's a jingle from another show on the network.

Margaret 01:55 Okay, we're back. So Carrot, if you could introduce yourself with your name, your pronouns. And then I guess kind of like your background in hiking, thru-hiking, that kind of stuff.

Carrot 02:07 My name is Carrot Quinn, and my pronouns are she or they and I got into long distance hiking in 2013. And long distance hiking is different from other kinds of backpacking, because you're just out for longer, I guess. And usually also, you're on trails that have a really specific weather window, which means that you need to hike more miles per day than you would on a more leisurely backpacking trip in order to finish in a certain weather window, or because the water sources are farther apart. So, you need to hike a certain mile per a day to get to the water sources, which means that you end up using different gear, because when you're out for that long and hiking that many miles, it's a lot more strain on your joints. And so, in order to be able to do it, you need to have lighter gear that puts less strain on your joints, or else you get overuse injuries. And you also wear different shoes. So, there's thi