At 11 p.m. on a spring night in 2008, Logan Miller and Nick Rutecki decided to walk the 12 miles from a friend\u2019s house to Rutecki\u2019s.<\/p>\n
That decision was the start of something much bigger. <\/p>\n
\u201cI still remember the excitement of leaving \u2014 walking into the dark foggy night with just a light jacket on,\u201d Miller wrote in the duo\u2019s blog. \u201cWe slowly walked along paths and roads, through the soft, eerie orange glow of Juneau\u2019s streetlights … to Nick\u2019s house. We sat on his roof as the early summer sun began to rise somewhere behind Juneau\u2019s thick cloud ceiling, and the wetlands became a pale gray-green, with silver sloughs of salt water running through them. As we perched on his shingles and watched the clouds break with light, we talked about one day finishing college, and just walking.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now, eight years later, that\u2019s what they\u2019re doing. At the end of 2015, Miller and Rutecki set off from New Orleans and became \u201ctwo guys walking around America with backpacks and no plans,\u201d as they describe themselves on the blog. So far, they\u2019ve walked more than 500 miles.<\/p>\n
Part of the reason they like walking \u2014 as opposed to bicycling, which they also talked about doing \u2014 is its slow pace. <\/p>\n
The South would be a good place to start, they figured, because it was more likely to be warm. That hasn\u2019t worked out that well; the South has been seeing some cold weather.<\/p>\n
While sleeping in a shelter on the Applachian trail, they and a few through-hikers \u2014 people hiking the trail from its bottom, Springer Mountain in Georgia, to the top, Mount Katahdin in Maine \u2014 ended up fending off snow blowing into the shelter.<\/p>\n
\u201cEveryone was pretty wet and cold,\u201d Miller said. <\/p>\n
Another reason they chose to start walking in the South is because, after growing up in Alaska, \u201cit\u2019s the most out of our comfort zone you get, culturally, while still being in the same country,\u201d Miller said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s enough to see in America that we didn\u2019t really want to leave,\u201d Rutecki added. <\/p>\n
So far, they\u2019ve walked from New Orleans to Pensacola, Florida, then \u2014 after a break to visit family for the holidays \u2014 hopped over to Mobile, Alabama, walked through Alabama, through Atlanta, and are now in northern Georgia, both on and off the Appalachian Trail.<\/p>\n
Though they like the trail, they prefer to stick to the roads, as Miller describes in another blog entry \u2014 because \u201c98% of Americans will never hike a long-distance trail, and when traveling by roads and towns, we get to spend time with those people every day. And that is really what the Walking Trip is about.\u201d<\/p>\n
Some of those people have made an impact. Because of the slow pace of the walkers\u2019 trip, they have days to think about them.<\/p>\n
In Alabama, Miller wrote about a girl the two met, whose happy, loving demeanor inspired him to call her \u201cWisp\u201d on the blog. She ran after them with a small backpack, saying she\u2019d walk with them for a while; they all sat down in the woods to talk, she pulled out some marijuana, two cops walked up, and she got arrested. <\/p>\n
\u201cShe was cute, and she was really fun for me to talk to, and then it was almost like a mild crush \u2014 and then she got taken away just as fast,\u201d Rutecki said. \u201cThings happen at such a slow pace, when you\u2019re out walking around, that was quite the pick up.\u201d<\/p>\n
Other people they\u2019ve met have tried to save their souls, give them rides, have gifted them oranges, offered the places to stay, and more. <\/p>\n
So far, they\u2019ve found most people are \u201cincredibly generous and open, but a lot of those people are also still very wary,\u201d Miller said. \u201cThey\u2019re always warning us of the dangers out there and stuff like that. That\u2019s kind of an interesting thing. We go to small towns, and people tell us cities are dangerous. We go to cities, and people tell us small towns are dangerous. So far, nowhere\u2019s actually been dangerous, knock on wood.\u201d <\/p>\n
Though people may be suspicious of them initially, \u201conce you\u2019re in that community and you\u2019re deemed to be a safe member of it, then the hospitality is just incredible,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s one of the things their blog focuses on, Miller wrote \u2014 \u201cthe unexpected and often comical situations we encounter, with a theme of showing the remarkable goodness and trust of the American people that we regularly experience.\u201d<\/p>\n
Read the Walking Trip blog at www.thewalkingtrip.com. <\/p>\n
\u2022 Contact Outdoors editor Mary Catharine Martin at maryc.martin@capweek.com.<\/p>\n
Editor\u2019s Note:<\/em><\/p>\n This is the first week featuring a column by Logan Miller, who is walking around America with fellow Juneauite Nick Rutecki. Keep an eye out for his thoughtful ruminations on the country they walk through and the people they meet in future Outdoors sections.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" At 11 p.m. on a spring night in 2008, Logan Miller and Nick Rutecki decided to walk the 12 miles from a friend\u2019s house to Rutecki\u2019s. That decision was the start of something much bigger. \u201cI still remember the excitement of leaving \u2014 walking into the dark foggy night with just a light jacket on,\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":26796,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":7,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[149],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-26795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-life","tag-outdoors"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26795","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26795"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26795\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26795"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=26795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}