The Route Makers Episode 2: Rue McKenrick, Kevin "The Animal" Koski, Wesley "Megaman" Tils, and Andrew Skurka on what it costs to walk a route no one has walked before — the American Perimeter Trail, the Four Corners Loop, and a self-invented Mexico-to-Canada line.

A route isn't real when you draw it. It's real when somebody walks the whole thing and comes back and says: it goes. This episode is about the proving — the deserts, the −40 blizzards, the years, and the toll a first traverse takes on the body and everyone waiting at home. Settle in for the second episode of our new documentary series.

Show Notes

The Route Makers, Episode 2: "The Proving Ground" — Rue McKenrick, Kevin Koski, Wesley Tils, and Andrew Skurka on what it costs to prove a route no one has walked.


Last episode, we watched five people look at a map and see a line that wasn't there. This episode is about what happens when the paper runs out — when a route stops being a plan and becomes a body on unmapped ground.


Because a route isn't real when you draw it. It's real when someone walks the whole thing, corner to corner, and comes back to say it goes. The people who invent long-distance routes call that process "proving," and it's where they find out what their line actually costs.


Wesley "Megaman" Tils invented a Mexico-to-Canada route as a thirtieth-birthday present to himself and met a −40 blizzard on day one. Andrew Skurka — who circumnavigated Alaska largely off-trail — describes the psychology of true wilderness, where "there's always a cloud." Kevin "The Animal" Koski's proving hike of his own Four Corners Loop went almost exactly to plan, until it didn't. And Rue McKenrick, who scouted the American Perimeter Trail alone over three years, is unflinchingly honest about the physical price of that undertaking — and about why he'd do it all again for the people who come behind him.


This is the hardest, most honest episode of the series so far: the improvising when the map fails, the decisions no spreadsheet prepares you for, and the truth that the line on the map is never free. What these makers pay for it — and why they consider it worth paying — is the whole story.


Featured routes: American Perimeter Trail · Four Corners Loop · the "Fourth Crown Route" (Mexico–Canada) · Great Western Loop · Alaska-Yukon Expedition Featured makers: Rue McKenrick · Kevin "The Animal" Koski · Wesley "Megaman" Tils · Andrew Skurka · Renee "She-Ra" Patrick


This episode includes candid discussion of serious injury, physical hardship, and loss. Next time on The Route Makers — Episode 3: "The Concrete Wilderness," where the route-making impulse leaves the backcountry and heads downtown.


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