To the gorge

To the gorge Running, grief, resilience & 460 miles on the Pacific Crest Trail

Emily Halnon

Book - 2024

"When Emily Halnon lost her beloved mother to a rare uterine cancer at just sixty-six years old, she wanted to do something monumental to honor the person her mother had been: adventurous, courageous, inspiring. Emily's mom had taken up running in her late forties; she ran her first marathon at fifty. She learned to swim at sixty so she could do triathlons, and she lived through a grim diagnosis with extraordinary joy and strength, still going for long bike rides and walks up until the final weeks before her death. She even went skydiving to celebrate her sixtieth birthday. It was going to take something special to pay tribute to such a remarkable, lifeloving spirit. Emily, already an accomplished ultrarunner (inspired to initiall...y start running by her mother), decided to try to break the record for the Fastest Known Time by a woman on the Pacific Crest Trail's 460 miles across Oregon. As she laid out plans for her run, she began to wonder: Could she also break the men's record? To the Gorge takes the reader through her 7 days, 19 hours, and 23 minutes on the trail, covering nearly sixty miles a day on foot over rugged terrain, and battling all the issues that could arise during such a monstrous undertaking: hammered muscles, golf ball-sized blisters, sleep deprivation, alpine storms, and debilitating self-doubt. All the while, she simultaneously struggles with how to get through the profound grief of losing her mom and grapples with how to move forward after experiencing devastating loss. Interwoven with Halnon's eight-day effort are her remembrances from her mother's life and death, exploring the complicated experience of grief--and what shines through it. To the Gorge will resonate with anyone whom life has hit with a hardball and has had to dig deep as they wonder how they will pull through. Filled with adventure and heart, To the Gorge invites readers to consider what our greatest losses can teach us about how to live the one life we get"--

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Subjects
Halnon, Emily > Travel.
Mountain running > Pacific Crest Trail.
Mothers > Death.
Grief.
Cross-country running.
Loss (Psychology)
Pacific Crest Trail > Description and travel.
Autobiographies.
Genres
Autobiographies
Published
New York : Pegasus Books 2024.
Language
English
Main Author
Emily Halnon (author)
Edition
First Pegasus Books cloth edition
Physical Description
208 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : color illustrations, maps ; 24 cm
ISBN
9781639366651
  • Prologue-Last Gasps of Love
  • McClure Miller Respite Home-Colchester, Vermont
  • January 2020
  • Chapter 1. Running North
  • August 1, 2020
  • Day One-California Border to Keno Access Road
  • 62.8 miles, 8,947 feet of climbing
  • Chapter 2. Positivity is on Another Planet
  • August 2, 2020
  • Day Two-Keno Access Road to Crater Lake National Park
  • 72 miles, 9,324 feet of climbing
  • Chapter 3. Possibility is a North Star
  • August 3, 2020
  • Day Three-Crater Lake National Park to Windigo Pass
  • 59.5 miles, 6,745 feet of climbing
  • Chapter 4. The Charlton Lake Party
  • August 4, 2020
  • Day Four-Windigo Pass to Charlton Lake
  • 48.3 miles, 6,401 feet of climbing
  • Chapter 5. Out of the Woods
  • August 5, 2020
  • Day Five-Charlton Lake to McKenzie Pass
  • 59 Miles, 6,870 feet of climbing
  • Chapter 6. Through the Storm
  • August 6, 2020
  • Day Six-McKenzie Pass to Breitenbush Lake
  • 61.1 miles, 8,878 feet of climbing
  • Chapter 7. Running is a Love Language
  • August 7, 2020
  • Day Seven-Breitenbush Lake to Mount Hood
  • 54.7 miles, 5,719 feet of climbing
  • Chapter 8. To the Gorge
  • August 8, 2020
  • Day Eight-Mount Hood to the Bridge of the Gods
  • 59 miles, 8,547 feet of climbing
  • Epilogue
  • Appendix I. What it Takes to Run 60 Miles a Day
  • Appendix II. The Things I Carried
  • A Note on Mileage from the Author
  • Acknowledgments
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In this affecting debut memoir, athlete and essayist Halnon resolves to run across Oregon on the Pacific Crest Trail after her mother dies of cancer. Halnon's mother, Andrea, lived out her later years as a "running, walking, biking billboard for physical fitness," until she was diagnosed with a rare uterine cancer in her early 60s. At 66, she entered the final stages of the disease. Halnon decided to pay tribute to her mother's tenacity by not only crossing the Beaver State on foot, but by doing it faster than anyone ever had. It was no small goal: at 460 miles, the distance nearly quintupled her longest continuous run, and the Pacific Northwest rains promised to be unforgiving. Despite the long odds, Halnon pulled it off, running the route in just over a week, beating all previously recorded paces. While pulse-pounding descriptions of Halnon's athletic feats will be catnip for adrenaline junkies, what makes this sing is the author's remarkably clear-eyed approach to loss: "I knew my attempts to outrun my own grief would be futile," she writes. "I'd learned many times that... trying to avoid it is its own purgatory." Halnon's unflinching gaze elevates this above the crowded field of memoirs about losing a loved one. Agent: Stephanie Evans, Ayesha Pande Literary. (May)

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