From Trudging to Living: What a Hidden Trail Metaphor Taught Me About Looking Up

Steven Wright, author of The Weight I Carried

Last Wednesday night, the community room at the Samuels Public Library in Front Royal, Virginia, was buzzing. As an official Appalachian Trail Community, we gathered for the first event in a series celebrating, educating, and living the "trail life."

Our kickoff featured author Steven Wright discussing his memoir, The Weight I Carried. The evening was an absolute rollercoaster. We laughed and cried as Steve shared his journey with raw honesty, humor, vulnerability, and hope. His words left a visible mark on everyone in the audience—including one woman who was so moved by his courage that she was inspired to finally start writing her own story.

Afterward, the room filled with a warm energy as everyone lined up to purchase signed copies and sample the mushroom-related products Steve brought along. Foraging is a cornerstone of his lifestyle, earning him his well-known trail name: the "Shrooming Camel."

A Bond Forged in the Rough Miles

Steve and I connected on a level that can be hard for standard society to fully grasp. We bonded over the shared language of the trail, our parallel intersections with cancer—my own survival story and the loss of his wife to triple-negative breast cancer—and a mutual love for foraging.

Most deeply, we connected through a shared trust that the Trail provides (a providence we recognize as God).

There is a striking purity in that knowledge. Yet, for people like us, it often takes grueling, body-punishing miles to break through the surface and allow mental, emotional, and spiritual healing to take root. When the event ended, our local hiking family exchanged tight hugs, each of us clutching our new books with immense anticipation.

I couldn't wait to dive into his transformation. I wasn't disappointed.

The Danger of "Looking Down"

I am now about three-quarters of the way through the memoir, and a specific passage hit me so hard I had to pause, grab my journal, and bring it to this blog.

On page 146, Steve recounts a conversation with a hiking partner named Turtle while navigating the grueling 100-Mile Wilderness with his daughter. After a series of mishaps, Steve finds himself holding an intense conversation with God—unknowingly out loud. Turtle gently points this out, noting that many people on the trail are dealing with heavy, broken things.

Then, Turtle says something that made me stop and reread the page multiple times:

"Sometimes, you get so discouraged you can’t see up."

As an outdoor instructor, that line stopped me dead in my tracks. During our wayfinding and navigation exercises with student groups, we constantly reiterate one core rule: Look up often. You have to look up to check your surroundings and ensure you are where your maps or plans expect you to be.

But as Steve writes, the weight of depression and spiritual warfare does the exact opposite:

“It takes a little time, a little beating down of a soul over and over until the defenses are worn away. Then the lies come. They get fed into the system bit by bit and you believe them. When you finally look around everything is dark - you think, how the hell did I get here?”

Wayfinding for the Soul

A physical trail intersection forces us to look up and choose a direction—our mental and spiritual paths require the exact same awareness

It clicked for me right then. The physical lessons of wayfinding and navigation—checking your position to ensure you aren't lost in the woods—parallel our mental and spiritual health perfectly.

Many hikers get lost because they become utterly consumed by looking at their feet, hyper-focusing only on the next step to find the absolute best footing. Because their eyes are glued to the dirt, they fail to look up. They miss the low-hanging branch before they bang their head. They miss the brightly painted blazes on a tree indicating a sharp turn in the trail. Worst of all, they miss the breathtaking beauty right in front of them—the vibrant truth of the present moment.

They are no longer hiking; they are just trudging. That is exactly when you get lost, injured, or both.

It’s the same for our mental and spiritual health. If you don’t look up frequently to see the truth of yourself reflecting in the beauty of life in the present moment, you just trudge along into depression or worse.

This is exactly why I always advocate to trade screen time for green time. The screens we carry in our pockets demand that exact same downward focus. They pull our eyes, our minds, and our hearts down to a small, artificial glow. If you never look up from the screen, you completely miss the "green"—the living, breathing world, the healing presence of nature, and the spiritual guideposts God places right in front of you.

Both on and off the trail, the message is the same: to find where you are, you have to look up.

Chicken of the Woods - a mushroom that Steven ate frequently during his Appalachian Trail thru hike. It's one of my favorites!

Becoming an "Aliver"

Ultimately, the greatest piece of common ground Steve and I shared is that we both stepped off the trail as Alivers.

We chose to leave "survivor mode" behind—the exhausting state of doing just enough to exist. Instead, we chose to live intentionally, purposefully, and mindfully.

Steve has fully accepted a mantle passed down by his mother. He writes about a painful childhood moment with his father, after which his mother held him, asked him to state his full name, and declared: “That man will change the world!”

By stepping onto stages and pages to share his story with such unshielded passion, I truly believe he will. He has already changed mine.