Trail Stories - The Full Range with Carolyn Highland

Carolyn Highland has been writing since she was seven years old, which means she has been trying to put into language the experience of being alive for a while, and she has gotten very good at it. Her second essay collection, The Full Range: Essays from a Life Outside, is organized around a single insight: that every experience contains a full range of emotions simultaneously, and that closing yourself off to the complexity is really missing a lot of the human experience. This episode traces the shape that insight took in her life: a summer of solo trail running around Lake Tahoe during COVID, a 40-mile loop in the Kings Canyon backcountry that ended with seized legs in a creek at golden hour with a bag of chips and no one to help her stand up, and the slow realization that what she had trained herself to do in a 50K (keep going when it was cold and wet and she was exhausted) was exactly the same skill she needed when a relationship ended and she had to get up and go to work anyway. The trail teaches you things. Carolyn has been paying attention. The full interview with Carolyn drops Wednesday in two parts on the Hiker Trash Radio feed.