2,000 MILES TOGETHER

A travelogue of a northbound hike on the Appalachian Trail by a family of eight.

Crawford, the author of Unleash Your Family (2020), presents a compelling account, written with McCracken, of his challenging 2018 thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail with his wife, Kami, and their six kids, ages 2 to 17 (the youngest child was carried). The book is effectively an accompaniment to an array of social media–based accounts of the Crawford family hike, as it includes frequent links to videos and other resources as well as photographs and posts from the children’s journals; the latter can be distracting when treated as illustrations rather than text. Overall, though, Crawford’s book provides a raw, honest look at the family’s five-month adventure. During the hike, the author came to terms with abandoning thru-hiker orthodoxies: “We had to remember that we weren’t on the A.T. to please other hikers, internet observers, or some fictitious panel of judges grading our purity. All that mattered was hiking the hike that worked for our family.” Crawford also poignantly describes how they faced a bureaucratic tangle that prevented their ascent to the summit of Mount Katahdin, the trail’s official northern terminus. During the journey, the family also learned to accept help, including offers of food and lodging from strangers. The book includes unsparing accounts of moments when Crawford felt that he’d failed his kids as well as times when he learned not to underestimate them. His real-time social media accounts of the hike generated negative commentary on Reddit and other sites, and he writes about this frequently, as well. Overall, this is an engagingly written memoir that addresses not only the challenges of all-weather long-distance hiking, but also the evolution of family dynamics in the face of tough decisions. It also hints at a previous affiliation with a traditional religious community that the family had long since left, but it provides little detail about this part of their past, which may leave some readers feeling frustrated. However, this doesn’t detract from a compelling narrative that seeks to include readers on the hike every step of the way.

An often challenging but delightful account of personal growth and pushing one’s limits.