I climbed above the tree line just after sunrise. There was a light breeze and the sky was clear. Forty years had passed, but I was back to visit these eight Four Thousand Footers in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. I hiked toward Bondcliff, the first summit I would cross as I tried to complete a single-day Pemi Loop. I had about 14 hours to go. An hour earlier, I had stepped in a mud hole in the dark and broken one of my trekking poles as I fell. There was no guarantee I would finish all 30 miles and 9,000 feet of climbing on this iconic route. Doubts crept in. Maybe it was kind of stupid to try this loop in a single day. I shook it off and took one step after another.
I’m an airline pilot. I swim through a river of people when I’m at work—crowds in the airport, lines through security, people on the airplane. When I get home to Duluth, I want to hit the trail and get away from all that. In 2014, my dog Leo and I ran all 310 miles of the Superior Hiking Trail in 41 sections over a five-month period. In 2018, Leo and I spent five days on the 40-mile Kekekabic Trail, a remote backpacking route through the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. But a single-day Pemi Loop? That was stepping it up a notch. I got the idea from Jessie Diggins, America’s greatest cross-country skier.
My favorite outdoor activity is cross-country skiing. I just completed my 21st American Birkebeiner 50k ski marathon this year. In my sport, Jessie Diggins is royalty. In 2018, along with Kikkan Randall in the team sprint, Diggins and Randall became the first Americans to win gold in Olympic cross-country skiing. She has an Olympic medal of each color now. She just won her third overall World Cup title this season. As a lifelong cross-country skier, I feel lucky to be alive at the same time as Jessie Diggins.
She’s my idol because of all that—but also because of something she calls “The Big Stupid.” She defines it this way on her website: “an adventure that really isn’t the smartest from a training perspective for my sport, but is very necessary in order to feed my soul and sense of adventure.” The first time I remember hearing about The Big Stupid was when she ran the Pemi Loop in August 2020.
Earlier that year, the pandemic hit. The more the pandemic drove us into isolation, the more I liked it. Some of my cross-country skier friends have Finnish heritage. As the 6-foot rule came out at the end of ski season, we joked, “Why so close?”
I run Grandma’s Marathon in Duluth pretty much every year in June. It was canceled in 2020, but they offered a “virtual” option. I got creative. My wife, Shelley, and my daughter, Grace, shuttled me to a trailhead west of Duluth. I jumped on the Superior Hiking Trail and ran 26.2 miles to finish at my house. It took eight hours, but I finished.
This solo trail run got me thinking: What other big projects could I do? Solo was encouraged—mandated, even. So I embraced it. In September 2020, Shelley helped me shuttle cars so Leo and I could hike for six days along the 65-mile Border Route Trail through the Boundary Waters. Then I thought I could run 53k for my 53rd year. In October 2020, I ran two 16.5-mile loops from my house so I could resupply after my first lap. My wife and daughter joined me for the first 5 miles—Grace ran with me, and Shelley rode her mountain bike. They ended up with their own 10 miles as I limped around the rest of the day.
By now, The Big Stupid concept rattled around in my head while I did those pandemic projects. But none seemed big enough or stupid enough to be called a Big Stupid. In 2021, I decided to repeat the birthday run with a 54k run for my 54th year. But I wanted to make it interesting. I’m not sure how, but I got curious about what it would take to run from a state’s low point to its high point. Conveniently, Minnesota seemed to be one of the best places to do that. Lake Superior is the lowest elevation in Minnesota, and Eagle Mountain is the highest. I scouted a route from the mouth of the Cascade River at Lake Superior to Eagle Mountain. It was only 18.2 miles—way less than the 33.5 miles I needed. But what if I ran from the Minnesota low point to the high point…and back? That scratched the itch. It would be more than enough miles.
My wife and daughter supported me on a beautiful day in September 2021. I ran almost 37 miles from Lake Superior to Eagle Mountain and back in 10 hours. During the 7-mile Eagle Mountain portion within the Boundary Waters, Shelley, Grace, and Leo joined me for a picnic lunch on the summit. Ten hours was the longest I’d ever moved on my own two feet. The last time I checked, I still hold the Fastest Known Time (Supported) for the Minnesota Low to High to Low. Mainly because I invented it. You can look it up.
I was having fun building outdoor projects. I could do whatever I wanted. I didn’t have to line up with 10,000 people at a start line. I could build my own Big Stupid adventure. Thanks, Jessie.
I had a back injury in 2022. Throughout that year, as I healed up, ideas kept bouncing around my brain. I wanted to build something longer than 10 hours—something I wasn’t sure I could finish. Finally, I just copied Jessie’s Big Stupid concept by stealing her Pemi Loop idea. I went to high school in New Hampshire and hiked all those peaks in the ‘80s. I’d revisit the mountains of my youth and visit my parents in Maine while I was back East.
I planned a big year of prep in 2023. At my age, you can’t brute-force things. I ran a 50k trail ultra on the Superior Hiking Trail in May. I ran my annual Grandma’s Marathon in Duluth in June. I climbed Mount Elbert in Colorado with some buddies in mid-July.
Then I entered the Voyageur 50-mile trail ultra in Duluth at the end of July—my first 50-miler. I changed my mindset from the spring ultra. In the spring, I bonked impressively. I had thought of it as a run where I hiked some of the time. I flipped it for the 50-miler and thought of the Voyageur as a hike where I ran some of the time. That helped my mental state, and I finished in 13 hours. My wife and daughter met me at the turnaround of the out-and-back course and asked how I felt. I said, “Okay.” At the finish, they asked again and I said, “Okay.” I think that was a victory. I almost fell asleep while sitting on the curb at the finish, but I was happy.
Then, in August 2023, Shelley drove me to the Lincoln Woods trailhead in New Hampshire for the Pemi Loop. At 4 a.m., I turned on my headlamp and jogged across the pedestrian bridge over the Pemigewasset River in the dark. Frankly, I was amazed I got through the whole year of prep events healthy enough to even start The Big Stupid.
I broke that trekking pole before dawn and had to buck up with the whole day in front of me. I trotted over Bondcliff and Bond and South Twin. I stopped at the Galehead Hut to refill my water and eat my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I was pretty tired after the steep trip over Garfield. Then an alarmist Aussie wearing all of his winter gear appeared in front of me. “Sixty-mile-an-hour winds!” he warned. He had just come down into the trees off Lafayette, and I was about to head up. “Great,” I thought. When I got up there, it was the 25 mph winds I expected from the forecast. As a pilot, I know wind. It wasn’t 60, that’s for sure. Thanks for the false alarm, mate.
After Lafayette, I got a second wind as I walked along the magnificent exposure of Franconia Ridge. I texted Shelley from the summits. She was with Grace and my parents, who came over from Maine to support The Big Stupid. I was behind the timeline. If I made it in the planned 16 hours, I would finish before the end of twilight. I was 45 minutes late and knew I’d finish in the dark instead. I dropped off the ridge. No more cell coverage.
I was pretty fragile at the end. With each step, I set a personal record for the most hours I’d ever moved in one day. I was tired. My headlamp had a screw loose and the beam of light bounced erratically. I thought I heard classic rock music coming through the woods. I thought I heard people talking to each other over by the brook. Well, dear reader, it was just me and the water and the woods. No campgrounds or people nearby—it was a long day.
I saw the pedestrian bridge across the river back to the trailhead. As I got closer, I saw a little cluster of lights. I crossed the bridge and walked up to the parking lot. Sure enough, it was my family in a worried huddle around their mobile phones. I snuck up on them from behind. The Pemi Loop took me 17 hours. I slept pretty well.
I could wrap this up neatly with a bow and say some clichés: “You can express your creativity by building outdoor adventures. You can do more than you think you can.” Even before this Big Stupid year, I already knew outdoor projects are a creative outlet. I already knew I could do more than I thought, as long as I prepped and used my head and got lucky—no surprises there.
But there was a surprise in all these years since the pandemic: The bigger the solo effort was, the more I needed help. Shelley shuttled me to the starts and scraped me up at the finish. She helped me position cars at the takeout of the trails. Shelley rode her mountain bike alongside some of my 53rd birthday run. Grace hiked with me at Eagle Mountain and helped crew my 50-miler. Shelley, Grace, and my parents stood in a worried little circle in the dark and anxiously waited for me to finish the Pemi Loop. The more I went solo, the more help I needed from my family.
My path to The Big Stupid started during the pandemic. The pandemic taught the same lesson: The more isolated we were, the more we needed help—the more we needed essential workers like the minimum wage guy that dropped off groceries at my door. We are all connected. We are bound to each other. Inseparable. This is what I really learned from The Big Stupid.
In 2024, the year after my Pemi Loop, I was depressed. I didn’t have a Big Stupid in front of me and I felt a little lost. Grace came up to me that summer and said, “We should ride the whole Traverse.” Duluth is blessed with 100 miles of singletrack mountain bike trails. They are stitched together by a 40-mile connector called the Duluth Traverse.
“I haven’t been riding much,” I said. I didn’t know if I could do the whole thing.
My 20-year-old daughter said, “So?”
We rode together for seven hours. Grace saved my year with a Big Stupid idea. We smiled as we finished, exhausted and covered with dirt. Shelley dropped us off at the start, met us halfway with lunch, and picked us up at the end. Grace and I couldn’t have done it without her.
