Ben Crawford - 2,000 Miles Together: The Story of the Largest Family to Hike the Appalachian Trail

2 ,

miles together

Ben Crawford

with Meghan McCracken

copyright 2020 ben crawford

All rights reserved.

2,000 miles together

The Story of the Largest Family to Hike the Appalachian Trail

Graphic Design: Anton Khodakovsky

Layout Design: John van der Woude

isbn 978-1-5445-0242-7 Hardcover

isbn 978-1-5445-0240-3 Paperback

isbn 978-1-5445-0241-0 Ebook

isbn 978-1-5445-1632-5 Audiobook

This book is dedicated to all the thru-hikers who have walked away from comfort and chose homelessness with intention. You are my heroes.

2018 witnessed an extraordinary group expedition up the Appalachian Trail, an undulating patch of green extending close to , miles connecting the summit of Springer Mountain in northern Georgia to the majestic summit of Mount Katahdin in central Maine. This footpath should represent freedom of movement through public spaces; freedom to take risks in the true spirit of outdoor adventure; freedom from the institutional pollution of liability and fear-mongering; and the potential to find oneself in relation to ourselves, our loved ones, our fellow travelers on the way to becoming, and within our civilized cultural conditioning.

What made this group expedition extraordinary is that it consisted of the largest family to ever attempt a thru-hike. The Crawford family hike was undertaken by middle-aged parents and their six children aged two to seventeen years old (four daughters and two sons). Not only was theirs the largest family to hike the trail, but each family member completed what they set out to do, and learned many valuable lifelong lessons along the way. These lessons can only be learned through the hardships, suffering, pain, frustration, joy, and elation endured and experienced by walking for days in bone-chilling rain, snowstorms, heat, and humidity.

I have personally organized, as a labor of love to fulfill my calling as a social change educator, ten groups to hike the entire trail with phenomenal, historic completion rates. But in doing so, we were day-hiking with van support. Our youngest was fifteen years old; our oldest, sixty-eight years old. We didnt have any youngins, nor the challenges inherent in backpacking with family members. I believe that hiking the entire trail with a group has a different set of challenges then hiking it alone or with a friend. That is why you probably can count on two hands the number of groups of over four people that have accomplished this enormous undertaking.

This book is the Crawfords storyraw and unvarnished, and truthful in a sensitive, caring way. It is radical and rambunctious; thought-provoking and intelligent; and full of questioning, of oneself and the world. It is a tale of a different type of family values that isnt based on religion or Republicans. It is about the joys and challenges of striving together.

This narrative is neither sugar-coated nor sanitized. (Thank goodness it will be self-published!) Prepare yourself for a read that includes freezing, self-doubting, frustrated people; a family campout in a public bathroom in the middle of a blizzard; the social media haters/guilters (which has also especially been a problem in the 2020 A.T. covid season); visits by Child Protective Services and National Park Service rangers; institutional injustices; and collective familial barfing.

But also look forward to reading a celebration of the wonderful acts of kindness and encouragement that the Crawfords received from fellow hikers, trail angels, and hostel owners along the way. Bask in how this family grew and learned along this sacred pilgrimage, and how they overcame setbacks that would have stopped others forward progress.

They won the hard fight for togetherness; they are certainly worthy of my respect and admiration for this, and hopefully you, the reader, will feel the same way.

Dr. Warren Doyle

Member of the Appalachian Trail Hall of Fame;
Founder of aldha , the Appalachian Long Distance Hikers Association;
,-miler, a record traverses of the entire A.T.more than anyone in history;
Director of the Appalachian Trail Institute

When I sat down to write this book, the story of our family hiking all , miles of the Appalachian Trail, I had no idea what kind of book I was writing. I just knew that my family had a story to tell, and that enough people had told us we should share it.

But how?

I didnt want to write a how-to book or a guide to thru-hikingmostly because were not typical thru-hikers. As a family, we enjoy hikingsometimes. Its always been more of a means to an end for us, a way for me and my wife, Kami, to build closer relationships with our kids. We dont believe in a one-size-fits-all model for parenting, and even if there were one, we wouldnt say its thru-hiking.

I also didnt want to write a memoir, a book that was all my story. The first thing we heard from people when they asked if we were writing a book about our hike was, We want to hear from the kids! Well, it turns out that writing a book is hard (surprise!) and something our teenagers didnt really want to do. After working through ten versions of this manuscript, I can understand why. For a time in the creation of this book, my wife, Kami, and I were co-authors, writing our familys story together. Her experience on the trail was just as important, and just as compelling, as mine, and at times it was difficult to tell where her opinions ended and mine began. The same goes for our four daughters and two sons: Dove, Eden, Seven, Memory, Filia, and Rainier, who was only two years old when we hiked. Their unique thoughts and feelings about our trip are just as interestingprobably more interesting, honestlythan mine. What Kami and I found when we started writing, though, is that this is a complicated story with a huge, sprawling setting and a giant cast of characterskind of like Game of Thrones but with gummy bears. We saw right away that we needed one unifying voice to tell such a complex story, and since I was doing the bulk of the writing, the voice that came through the clearest was mine. So, while this book primarily represents my viewpoint, Ive done my best to incorporate as much insight and perspective from Kami and our children throughout the story as possible. To do this, Ive included entries from their journals and quotes taken from over of our trail videos.

Originally, I started off writing an adventure book. People seemed most interested when we told stories of bears, snakes, snowstorms, and Child Protective Services busting in on our familys camp. All of those things happened to us, and then some. It would be pretty easy to write about any number of hardships we faced, and the courage we had to find to overcome them and come out on top like heroes.