That Americans like to paint everything they can with nobility is well known: there are pop kings, King Trump, animal kings, royal kings everywhere. But at least one crown deserves salutes: the Triple Crown of long-distance trails, which includes routes through the Appalachian Mountains, the Pacific Ridge and the Continental Divide. Together, they travel more than 7,000 miles across the United States and attract thousands of hikers each year. Walkers like Jeff Santos, 54, from Divinópolis, who just completed the third leg of the journey.
Santos, who rejects the adventurer label and says he started his life on the trails in 2015, works in event production and first donned his backpack while hiking the Caminho da Fé, which has several spurs through the Mantiqueira mountain range, passing through the cities of São Paulo and Minas Gerais, all leading to Aparecida do Norte, in the interior of São Paulo.
“I was never the type to travel, camp, go into the woods,” Santos told Folha, laughing and still trying to regain the 12 kilos lost on this adventure. “But I was going through a period of depression and decided to try walking.” Four hundred kilometers later, he got a taste for it and went to Estrada Real, from Diamantina (MG) to Paraty (RJ). “Then it was 1,200 kilometers and I discovered the trail thing was really cool,” he admits.
For those who had hiked 1,200 kilometers, the next logical stop was the Northern Hemisphere, where the most famous of the Triple Crown trails, the Appalachians, offers 3,538 kilometers between Mount Springer, in Georgia, and Mount Katahdin, Maine, crossing 14 states on the American east coast and hiked by about three million people each year.
“It was a worthy challenge,” Santos says. “But there was one detail: I had never camped in my life, I had never spent a single night in a tent and my first time was in the Appalachians,” he says with amusement.
It was while talking with people through the forests and mudflats of the Appalachian Mountains in 2017 that I learned there were two other trails to complete the Triple Crown. Returning to Brazil, he wrote a book about his experience on the East Coast and returned to the United States in 2019 to hike the 4,260-kilometer Pacific Crest Trail from the Mexican border to Canada along the Pacific Coast.
The pandemic got in the way of plans to ride the third trail, the Continental Divide, in 2021. It was only this year that Santos set foot back on the road to take on the challenge.
The Continental Divide, 4,873 kilometers long and considered the most difficult of the three, connects Alberta on the Canada-US border to Chihuahua, Mexico. With less infrastructure than the others, it presented the most challenges. It’s no surprise that its motto is “Embrace the brutality”, or embrace the brutality, loosely translated. Yes, it’s disgusting.
“The power of nature is always scary,” Santos says. “There was two days of walking along a dry river bed where there had been a fire years ago and a flood this year, it was total devastation, you have no trail, you don’t know where to go, you don’t see anyone for days and you just kind of orient yourself around a rock, a log,” he recalls.
The aridity of the dry river was followed by a long storm in the New Mexico desert. “The weather changed and a shower of lightning fell all morning, something both wonderful and frightening, lightning everywhere, I felt the earth shaking,” he reports.
But he said he felt a greater tremor as he approached the Mexican border, a priority target for U.S. immigration authorities. “I kept imagining that at any moment an ICE car (the immigration enforcement agency that is spreading terror across the country) was going to show up and arrest me and disappear with me,” he says. It was only after completing the journey and far from the border that he had the luxury of celebrating. And how was it?
“I danced laughing and singing in the middle of nowhere!” he exclaims.
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