Maria "Beans" Romfoe has thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail, the Pacific Crest Trail, and all but New Mexico of the Continental Divide Trail, carrying cans of beans the entire way. Known to her Instagram followers as The Beans Babe, Beans joins Hiker Trash Radio to explain how a broke-college-kid joke in Alaska turned into an actual bean sponsorship, why her base weight is nine pounds including the can, and how "vibe drinking" unfiltered water in the San Juans ended her CDT with a giardia evacuation — and a very short-lived Walmart bikepacking career. Plus: the Triple Browner club, an unexpectedly sharp conversation about what solo female thru-hiking is actually like, and the great Alabama alligator-beaver debacle. (This is Part I. Be sure to listen to Part II.)

Show Notes

Maria "Beans" Romfoe — AT and PCT thru-hiker, CDT finisher-minus-New-Mexico, and the internet's foremost beanfluencer — joins Doc for her first-ever podcast appearance.


Beans traces the origin of her trail name from a can of Bush's Beans on an Alaskan summit through a viral sponsorship dare to her current partnership with Eight Trak Foods, the woman-owned organic bean company whose founder sends her hand-drawn care packages on trail ("She's my bean lady"). She defends the engineering of a nine-pound base weight built around canned goods, recalls the three family-sized cans of barbecue baked beans that snapped her pack frame in the Smokies, and reveals the one piece of gear she'd never leave behind: the can opener that has saved more than one trail-magic cooler full of inaccessible food.


The Hiking Poll digs into the story that reshaped her Triple Crown: drinking unfiltered "poop water" in Colorado's cattle-grazed San Juans, the giardia that followed, and the most miserable six-mile evacuation of her life — followed by a 46-mile attempt to finish the CDT by Walmart bike that ended in tears at a Superfund site water source. (The bike went back for a full refund. She calls this "renting.")


The back half goes deeper: growing up in Cudahy, Wisconsin in a not-especially-outdoorsy family; a year at the University of Alaska Southeast that lit the fuse; trail crew and conservation corps seasons that made a tent feel like home before her first thru-hike; and the things she strategically doesn't tell her mom until long after. Beans also gets refreshingly honest about solo female thru-hiking — the double standards, the "are you out here alone?" conversations, why menstruating through a thru-hike should earn hikers more credit rather than more doubt, and her simple request for the trail community: a woman talking to you is not flirting; let her tell you about the snake she saw like everyone else.


Segments include the Trailblazer's Toolkit (Six Moon Designs), the Hiking Poll (Triple Crown Coffee — she scores a 21), the Hiking Hack (O.T.T.R.) featuring two highly specific foot hacks, Off the Beaten Path (Hilltop Packs) with a recommendation for Marty Stouffer's gloriously chaotic 1980s docuseries Wild America, and a Pay It Forward shoutout to the Greenwater Fire Department, local wildland firefighters, and the Pacific Northwest Trail Association's volunteer trail crews.


Follow Beans on Instagram at @thebeansbabe. Follow Hiker Trash Radio on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, or write to HikerTrashRadio@gmail.com.


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