Thru-Hikers vs. REAL BACKPACKERS with Vince Strawbridge (Bonus Thursday)
episode
Backpacking & Blisters: A Hiking, Backpacking, and Adventure Show
40 min
2 speakers
7 chapters
transcribed 1 month ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Who is Vince Strawbridge and what makes his thru‑hiking story unique?
Every team, every topic, everywhere. This is Believe.
Welcome to the Backpacking Bushes podcast brought to you by the ultralight quilt trusted by the best backpackers, Enlightened Equipment. Lighten your load at enlightenedequipment.com. With me today is a man who has successfully hiked the most famous long trails of the world, but somehow struggles to read a calendar. Vince Strawbridge, how's it going today, my friend? Yeah, that's right. Those are accurate accusations right there. Yeah, boy.
Both of them. Well, somehow we got the schedule and we're making it happen. I'm excited about it. Yeah, here we are. I thought you were going to throw it right back in my face and say, well, maybe if you had your calendar correct. The nice thing about the long trail is once you're dropped into a long trail, all you got to do is count days. You don't have to worry about dates and things like that. Like, you know, and what's an hour more or less? I think in the sun, you know, I'm more, you know, in that circadian rhythm is the way that I like it. Fair enough. Yeah. Yeah. So that's where your strength is, you're saying. Well, I would say that, except that I do remember having a very difficult time on one of our trails trying to calculate when I would reach a certain place eight days away. Oh, yeah. There's a big difference between eight days and the eighth day, which I got very wrong.
That's true. Cause yeah, that's, you got to count it differently for sure. Yeah, for sure. Okay. All right. Well, for folks, you don't know why you're super famous in the hiking world. Can you briefly tell them what you're known for? Well, I took my family, my wife, my wife and I took our four kids hiking in, uh, 2018 down the Pacific crust trail. We successfully through hike the Pacific crust trail. I came home. How many kids you have? I have four, four kids. Yeah. So four kids and so family of six. Yeah. Family six. My youngest at the time was 11 and we completed that trail and I came home and kicked my feet around in the sand for a year back here in Florida. And I was like, let's go do those other two trails.
And so we went and did it. Just casually saying that. Well, yeah, let me tell you something. My timing is excellent. You know, I can't keep a calendar. I can't time a thing. I walked in. My wife had spent a recovery period from our Pacific Crest Trail. We were homeschooled. So she had been reworking the homeschool calendar, gotten us all caught up and had planned their whole high school career. And I walked in the day after she'd got it all pinned to paper and said, hey, I've got an idea. I really want to go hike those trails. So we went to some marriage counseling for a while and eventually came to terms and then went and hiked a couple of long trails. Wait, are you being serious? No, it's even worse than that, Carl. No, it's even worse than that. My, my uncle, my wife and I were bickering about it. You know, we could not come to terms with it. And everybody, of course, as you can imagine, everyone was on her team, right? Like, like you and I, and maybe some of your listeners, and that's the only people in the world think this is a good idea. No one else thinks this is a good idea.
In fact, when I came home from having hiked the Pacific Crest Trail, we were the largest family ever to have done so, which I thought was pretty cool. Well, my uncle said, what does it feel like to have done something no one else in the world has ever done but be a joke in your hometown? Ooh. Was that like a sarcastic question or is that like a... He actually said, what does it feel like not to be regarded in your hometown for the thing that you did? That's the way he clarified it later, but I didn't hear it that way at first. But at any rate, he said... you two are bickering like a couple of unbelievers. What is wrong with you? Like, why are you adding to their throats? And I said, it's a good question. I don't know, but I'm about to give up because everybody says I'm crazy. And then he said, why is it the person with the outlandish or crazy ideas wrong by default? So then he suggested, and we took his advice to get four couples of friends of ours that were four married couples. And we asked them to sit in a room with us and watch us fight about it.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
Who is Vince Strawbridge and what makes his thru‑hiking story unique?
0:01–5:35
2
What was the family conflict that sparked the thru‑hiker vs. backpacker debate?
5:35–11:17
3
How do thru‑hikers and backpackers differ in daily mileage and resupply strategy?
11:17–16:55
4
Why do thru‑hikers often get blamed for body odor and gear weight?
16:55–22:03
5
Do thru‑hikers really support local economies more than backpackers?
22:03–28:08
6
What are the biggest pack‑weight and shelter criticisms each side has for the other?
28:08–34:11
7
Which side won the lightning‑round debate and what final takeaways emerged?
34:11–40:50
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Backpacking & Blisters: A Hiking, Backpacking, and Adventure Show
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