Episode Details

Brandon Weis is from Ottawa, Ohio — farm country, flat, not a hiking family. He grew up playing football and basketball. His first experience in the mountains was a 2018 university group trip to the High Sierra, where he earned a trail name by carrying sixty to seventy pounds of group gear because he was the biggest one there. They called him Horsepower.

Three years later — one pandemic canceled PCT permit later, hundreds of hours of research later, one Jeff Garmire book later — he stepped onto the Appalachian Trail in Georgia on January 13th, 2021. His stated reason: Garmire's account of completing the CYTC in nine months at age 20 didn't sound easy, but it didn't sound impossible. His parents, when told, sat quietly for a half-minute and then said: okay, well, good luck.

This bonus episode of The Big Year follows what happened over the next nine-plus months. Day 17 frostbite in a North Carolina shelter that left him unconscious and woke him with the sun shining on him — and no particular desire to quit. A May Sierra snowstorm in summer gear with icicles growing off his face and a microspike saving him from a pile of rocks at Glenn Pass. A campfire in a Wyoming blizzard with eight other people trying to dry their socks as if that was going to do anything. A 600-foot vertical drop in the Wind River Range, a rock he couldn't reach, an action-movie maneuver back to the top, a 400-foot slide down a mountain face, and the Rage Against the Machine playlist that got him through the rest of the day.

He finished October 25th, 2021. The 13th completer in history. A year later, he watched the 2022 class — the largest in CYTC history — attempt the same thing he had.

He's not that fast, he says. He just walks for a long time, and he's really stubborn, and he doesn't take breaks.

Bonus episode — Hiker Trash Radio / BLEAV Network The Big Year: A Calendar Year Triple Crown Documentary Series

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