The Route Makers - Episode 3: The Concrete Wilderness

Show Notes

The first two episodes of this series took us into deserts you cross with a map and a compass, and Alaska tundra a week from the nearest road. This episode is about a different kind of empty space on the map — the one most of us walk past every day without seeing the line at all.

Because the impulse to look at a place and imagine a route through it doesn't need a trailhead. It doesn't even need a wilderness. Sometimes all it needs is a city.

Liz "Snorkel" Thomas — a Triple Crowner and, per Outside magazine, a living legend —took the entire framework of a thru-hike downtown, inventing "urban thru-hikes" like a250-mile route across Seattle and a 100-mile "brew-through" connecting Denver's breweries. Alexandra "Sunshine" Kenin, founder of Urban Hiker SF and author of three Urban Trails guidebooks, has hiked more than a thousand public staircases in a single city— and inherited the project from Adah Bakalinsky, the woman who mapped San Francisco's stairs by hand before Google Maps existed.

Along the way: why walking on pavement can be harder on your body than a mountain trail, why a route through a city might deliver more genuine adventure than a wilderness, why San Francisco is full of staircases in the first place, and how the urban route-maker's deepest cause turns out to be the same one a desert route-maker arrived at from the opposite end of the country — that a person on foot deserves to be safe.

This is the series' warmest chapter: proof that the wilderness maker and the city maker are doing the same thing, and that the best routes are the ones the most people can reach.

Featured routes:

San Francisco Roundabout · Crosstown Trail · the Denver "brew-through"· Seattle urban thru-hike · the New England Trail

Featured makers:

Liz "Snorkel" Thomas ·Alexandra "Sunshine" Kenin (with Andrew Skurka & Rue McKenrick)

Next time on The Route Makers — Episode 4: "The Eraser and the Gift," on what happensto a route after the map is drawn: the years of correcting, erasing, and handing it off towhoever comes next.

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