Two Sticks, One Path: A Journey Beyond Fear on the Colorado Trail

At fifty-five, on forearm crutches, Darrow Kirkpatrick set out to hike the hardest long trail in America — 500 miles across the Colorado Rockies.Decades earlier, he'd climbed the big walls of Yosemite. Now his own mind and body were the mountain. A breakdown had once derailed his career. In retirement, a hamstring injury had spiraled into chronic pain his doctors couldn't fully explain. Anxiety was never far behind.The sensible advice was to choose a smaller dream. He chose the Colorado Trail instead — some of the highest, most punishing terrain in the continental United States. Over six years and twenty-eight segments — through river crossings, lightning, and freezing nights alone above 12,000 feet — he learned something that has little to do with hiking: how to move through fear instead of around it, how to carry pain without being ruled by it, and how to reach again for a dream the world had quietly written off.Two Sticks, One Path is a trail memoir for readers who don't see themselves in most trail memoirs: anyone living with anxiety, chronic or mind-body pain, a physical limitation, or the quiet fear that their best adventures are behind them. Read more