[cdt-l] Average CDT age?

[John Brennan]

I'm a little late on this thread.

 

I turned 40 on the PCT in 2002 and I'll be 44 when I finish the CDT this
year. I did not find a lot of people my age, and I often think that maybe I
should be working on my career, etc. 

 

I want to tag on to what GottaWalk said below. In my
pre-long-distance-backpacking days, I always felt that the fact that I was
gay was invisible. When I hiked the PCT the activist in me wanted to be
visible as a gay man.  That's one of the reasons I took the name Cupcake.
Somewhere along the way (as "we did our miles and found the water and camped
out"), it stopped being important. I was a hiker. On the CDT, I tried to
switch back to John, but most people knew me as Cupcake. 

 

It's been great to meet the other LGBT hikers out there and my visibility
has facilitated that, but in the end we are all just hikers. Cool.

 

Wouldn't it be great if a thru-hike was a prerequisite for world leaders?
Image "World Troop" thru-hiking, including Bush, al-Sistani, Talabani,
Ahmadineja, Jong-il, Karzai, Putin, Blair, Olmert, Abbas, al-Assad and
Abdullah. 

-John / Cupcake

  _____  

From: cdt-l-bounces at backcountry.net [mailto:cdt-l-bounces at backcountry.net]
On Behalf Of Marcia
Sent: Thursday, January 11, 2007 12:55 PM
To: cdt-l at backcountry.net
Subject: Re: [cdt-l] Average CDT age?

 

<Snip>One of my happiest realizations was that I was a hiker. I walked my
miles like everybody else and hung out in town with the other hikers. I
didn't feel like a female or older hiker...I was just one of the hikers to
the point that a Hiker isn't a gender, age, income level, education level or
former occupation. I was a Hiker just like the others and we did our miles
and found the water and camped out.

 <snip>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.backcountry.net/pipermail/cdt-l/attachments/20070117/2a48497d/attachment.html