Trail Stories - The Circle on the Map with Kevin "The Animal" Koski

Kevin Koski was sitting at his desk one day, looked at a topographical map of the United States pinned to his cubicle wall, noticed an 800-mile-diameter circle nobody had ever officially hiked, and thought: somebody should walk that. The somebody was him. This episode covers three years spent building the Four Corners Loop on a mapping website during lunch breaks, a 47-mile dry stretch that required 14.5 liters of water and a stroke of luck involving two owl researchers at one in the morning, and a piece of hardware-store ice maker tubing that Kevin will defend to his grave as superior gear design. There is also a smoked trout, a 30-foot sandstone cliff he probably shouldn't have climbed, and, in the middle of all the engineering jokes, a quieter chapter about his mother that the episode doesn't rush past.