09/24/2026
There must be at least a couple of people wondering where I disappeared to this summer. It's a story worth telling here, because it reveals the true value of a life spent hiking uphill, beyond the beauty of sunsets, friendships, and photography. This post is about leg strength, stoicism, mental attitude and resilience in the face of life's tragedies, especially after a major surgery.
In mid-May, I was camping near Flagstaff, perfectly positioned to launch the summer field season of 2026. Around 7 that evening, I got a call from my sister informing me that our mother had just suffered a hemorrhagic brain bleed.
I needed to get home to North Carolina as quickly as possible.
I drove almost straight through, arriving physically spent at her bedside — just in time to take the night shift in a hospital recliner.
I spent the next three nights in that chair, relieving other family members who had been there from the beginning.
At that point, we were exhausted, frightened, but hopeful.
The doctors had stabilized her. The hemorrhage had happened, but she had survived it. Now came the long road of rehabilitation — rebuilding as much function as possible and helping her regain some independence.
And there was good reason for optimism.
A week after the stroke, she was released to a skilled nursing facility at the retirement community where she lives. We thought the worst was behind us.
We were wrong.
What followed became an emotional roller coaster that threatened to pull a strong family apart.
Something critical had been missed in the discharge paperwork by the nursing staff. We didn't actually receive that paperwork until weeks later, but it showed that her sodium level was already low when she left the hospital — 134 — and that she was supposed to be placed on a water restriction.
That didn't happen. Quite the opposite.
She was given water whenever she asked for it.
Over the next week, we watched our mother deteriorate right in front of us.
The woman who had seemed hopeful and present immediately after the stroke quickly began slipping away. She became increasingly confused and eventually delirious. She suffered horrible leg cramps. She became desperately thirsty. She vomited.
And despite being sent to a skilled nursing facility for rehabilitation, there was no rehabilitation taking place.
We kept watching. We kept asking questions. We kept hoping that what we were seeing was simply part of the difficult recovery from a major stroke.
It wasn't.
One week after being discharged from the hospital, she was rushed back to the ICU.
The diagnosis was "profound hyponatremia."
Her sodium had fallen to 109.
For perspective, normal blood sodium is generally around 135–145. A level of 109 is dangerously low and can be life-threatening.
ONE LESSON FOR HIKERS IS THAT WATER ALONE ISN'T ENOUGH. YOU MUST ALSO REPLACE THE ELECTROLYTES THAT WATER IS FLUSHING OUT!!
We had gone from watching our mother begin what we thought would be a difficult but hopeful rehabilitation to watching her fight for her life again.
And this time, the crisis wasn't the brain hemorrhage.
It was something that, in retrospect, appeared to have been sitting in the discharge instructions all along.
That week changed everything for our family.
It wasn't simply the fear of losing our mother.
It was the realization that the place we had trusted to care for her after the stroke had failed to recognize — or act upon — something that was critical to her survival.
And that created a different kind of exhaustion.
Not the physical exhaustion of driving 2000 miles in three days, or sleeping in a hospital chair.
It was the mental and emotional exhaustion of constantly having to pay attention.
To ask questions.
To challenge answers that didn't make sense.
To become advocates for someone who was too sick to advocate for herself.
We were forced to make expensive decisions about her future, without knowledge about what the outcome might be. Meanwhile, serious mistakes at the nursing facility continued compound.
That experience will stay with me for the rest of my life.
And then, four months later to the day, I found myself on the other side of the equation.
Suddenly, I was the patient.
Four months after driving almost nonstop from Arizona to North Carolina because of my mother's stroke, I found myself being transported by ambulance to a hospital in Lynchburg, Virginia.
The diagnosis was a perforated gut.
There wasn't much time for deliberation. I wanted to go 90 minutes south to a hospital near home. They said, You don't have time. Emergency surgery at the nearest available hospital (60 minutes north) was the only option.
And then, almost immediately, something interesting happened.
The doctors and nurses began commenting on my physical condition.
They noticed that I was in unusually good shape for someone my age. They noticed that I was mentally engaged, positive, and determined. They noticed that I wasn't taking much pain medication.
Most of all, they noticed that I wanted to get moving.
I was up and walking the hospital halls on the second day after surgery.
It wasn't pretty.
It wasn't easy.
But I walked.
And the next day I walked some more.
I wasn't trying to prove anything to anybody. I was doing what I'd done on thousands of miles of trails over the years: figure out where I am, figure out where I need to go, and start putting one foot in front of the other.
The nurses kept commenting on it.
The doctors kept commenting on it.
On the fourth day, my surgeon came in to check on me. After seeing how well I was doing, she told me she wished she had 100 patients like me.
That touched my heart, because I knew exactly where that resilience came from.
A DEEP FAITH IN GOD COMBINED WITH FORTY YEARS OF HIKING UPHILL!!
I've hiked when I was tired. I've hiked when I was hot, cold, wet, hungry and uncomfortable. I've climbed out of the Grand Canyon when every muscle in my legs was telling me that it would be much easier to stop.
THERE'S A LESSON YOU LEARN ON DIFFICULT TRAILS THAT GOES FAR BEYOND OUTDOOR RECREATION:
You don't have to feel good to keep going. You just have to keep going.
After surgery, that lesson has served me well.
There was another challenge waiting for me once I left the hospital. Because the original surgery had taken place out of state, getting the medical supplies I needed turned into a bureaucratic obstacle course.
There were roadblocks.
There were delays.
There were things that should have been simple that weren't.
It took a couple of days to get everything sorted out.
But by then I was already beginning to understand that this recovery was going to be a lot like a hike in the Grand Canyon.
Giving up wasn't an option.
You don't stand halfway up the Bright Angel Trail and decide that you're finished because the climb has become difficult.
You improvise and solve the problem in front of you.
Then you take another step. Then another. Keep moving forward.
And eventually, you get there.
Today is 10 days after the surgery.
I just met with a surgeon here in North Carolina who will handle my follow-up in six months.
He said you look amazing, and couldn't believe I was only 10 days post-op.
Neither can I, really.
I'm not going to pretend that I'm completely back to where I was.
My legs aren't the steel bands they were back in May.
But they're still my legs, and they carried me through the most difficult summer of my life.
They'll get rebuilt.
That's perhaps the biggest thing I've taken away from all of this.
For most of my life, I've thought of physical fitness as something that allowed me to go farther — deeper into a canyon, higher up a mountain, farther down a trail, into places most people never see.
I understand it a little differently now.
Strength isn't just about what you can do when everything is going right.
It's about what you've built inside yourself before something goes terribly wrong.
The miles matter.
The hills matter.
The hard days hiking through freezing rain matter.
The times you wanted to quit but didn't matter.
Because you never really know when you're going to need all of that.
Sometimes the trail is a spectacular canyon in the Southwest.
Sometimes it's a long hospital hallway.
Sometimes it's getting through another day when someone you love is desperately sick.
And sometimes it's waking up after major surgery and discovering that the simple act of standing up has become an accomplishment.
I've spent a lifetime hiking uphill.
I suppose I've finally learned why.
The trail was never just preparing me for the next hike.
It was preparing me for the next uphill climb — wherever that climb happened to be.
Of course, death comes for us all eventually. My mother will be wheelchair bound for the rest of her life, which isn't likely to be very long. We'll never know it it might have been otherwise.
More time has been gifted to me, but in the scheme of things, it will only be the blink of an eye.
That's where SPIRITUAL FITNESS comes in. It can carry you through things that physical fitness and mental toughness never will. If you're not ready to stand before God, right now, don't waste any more time.
