I’ve been taking account and my mind boggles to reckon with facts like:
-I have written and published over 1,000,000 words
-Covered at least 18,221 human powered miles
-Over the span of 7 years
-Engaged in 6 modalities (hiking, river rafting, sea kayaking, road biking, mountain biking, canoeing)
-Crossed 14 countries
-Worn through 34 pairs of shoes in the course of Her Odyssey.

In this expedition and undertakings, I strive to learn from and honor those who have gone before. I work to promulgate the stories of our foremothers and others who have labored greatly, often unsung, to steward the land and open the way.

The other path openers, are books.
Women and Books are keys to understanding and growth.

To conclude this digital account of Her Odyssey, I would like to share the earliest record I’ve found of a modern person walking the length of the Americas.

And she did it alone, or, rather, with a dog. I

learned about her through our mentors, Keith and Heather when they loaned me the book the Stars My Blanket by Beryl Smeeton. Beryl went for a 1,000 km horseback ride around Patagonia just before WWII broke out and included these travails in a short and enrapturing text. In 2016 our contemporary and friend, Stevie Anna, who I met back in Bariloche, also traveled the remote reaches of the southern cone on horseback.

Beryl writes of encountering something we often did, people (generally men in remote locations exercising the full extent of limited power) barring your way, saying “es imposible” and making themselves the roadblock. Unlike us, Beryl didn’t have an inReach nor much command of the language, she had her wits and the story of Margaret.

While crossing the homestead of an aged German rancher, she writes:

“He told me of another woman traveller, who had come through Patagonia a few years before, a German named Margaret Geist. She had walked with an Alsatian dog from the snow-line in Alaska, and after 7 years, had actually reached Punta Arenas.”

-‘The Stars my Blanket’ Beryl Smeeton p. 35

So far, I have found precious little about her. The few details I have found were gathered by Manya S. Chylinski for a biographical sketch.

Margaret was a German born, US school teacher who, alongside the donkey she walked across America with, joined forces with General Rosalie Jones’ Army to march on DC in 1913. She was quoted as saying, “I shall travel twelve more years, she declared. I shan’t take a donkey or gun along next time however.”

From what little I have found, it seems she went on and did just that. But after the efforts at getting publicity which followed her US walk (largely arising from local papers or where her route intersected with the suffragette march), there is nothing online about a trans-America walk. This tells me, she knew how to garner attention (and some small funding) but either
a) She chose not to
b) No one has gathered the tracks due to lack of social interest, funding, and/or digital records

I yearn to dive into that research. Traveling to dusty archives and out of print newspapers, dreaming of the journals she might have kept, put together a timeline. A woman whose footsteps I unwittingly followed. Simultaneously I rifle through the wooden toy chest my grandpa made for me as a toddler and which now holds my own journals and mementos. Somehow, the vacuum of her story adds gravity to telling my own.

In a quick conversation with Manya, the academic mentioned:

“In my research on Margaret Geist I didn’t find anything about a walk from Alaska to Punta Arenas, only the walk across the US. My goal was to find as much about her as I could, including her suffragette work, and I was disappointed that I didn’t find much information. Even after writing the piece, she remained an enigma to me.”

Manya never even found record of Geist’s death. Which, as my writing coach Donna pointed out, depending on Geist’s religion, race, or sexual orientation, WWII made for a lot of abruptly ended and undocumented lives.

Whatever became of her, and whatever may be gathered of her records, meeting her even just in one sentence on a page, I wept with relief to have ended this Odyssey having found a forgotten mother.
I’ve been blessed with many mothers. As the eldest child of a Motherless Daughter, I am familiar with the maternal collective our clan create and rely on to survive. I’m looking at you too, aunties and uncles.

We inherit grief and joy and pass on stories and ceremonies by which to process it. A massive extension of this network enabled Her Odyssey: mothers who hoped their children might be as warmly received and cared for in my country as they received us. It also helps us piece together these bygone paradigms. To at least be able to speak the names of buried leaders and voices.

The first time I spoke of it to a friend, aquiver with excitement at my discovery, after the briefest of pauses he replied, “so, you’re not the first?”

Whereas I felt I’d found a glimmer of guiding light, I was crestfallen to realize how a people honed for competition over cooperation would receive this: any other light shining in the darkness is seen to diminish the significance of yours, rather than to celebrate another beacon by which to find our ways.

To this, I want to share three Tenets & Hypocrisies I’ve encountered in the development of my relationship with Feminism.

The first is, from current context, recognizing how, in our [white women’s] clamour for rights, we abandoned our BIPOC sisters and many other minority groups. We alienated ourselves in our scramble to get closer to the top.

I spent a month nestled in to the Bender Reading Room in Stanford’s Green Library going through anthologies from the 1960s-1980s by Black and Latina Women decrying this while also going about the work of naming and making space for themselves. I was introduced to these works by Layla F. Saad in her workbook “Me and White Supremacy”.

Filling in our understanding of intentionally ignored histories is to set a long missing and critical footing for a solid foundation in any world view. Anti-Racism work is a challenging and fruitful personal excavation. Be warned, there are skeletons buried in that soil.

Secondly, reaching even further back, Margaret followed in the footsteps of others. Most ‘Firsts’ are claimed at the expense of those who went before. We walked in the footwells of the Incas on the Qhapaq Nan, which was built atop the roads of peoples ‘conquered’ by their empire. 500 years later, we still covered ground at roughly the same pace as the chaskis. Pregnant women in wagons walked the Ruta Patrimonial into deep Patagonia when even the governments didn’t dare go. It was a woman with a delighted cackle and a basket of fruit, who popped out of the jungle of the Darien to warn me the border police would not let us pass.

We are all inheritors of the work and warnings of those who’ve gone before. It is why my heart gladdens to witness the effort to elevate indigenous voices, stories, honor, and names; finally, bringing them back to the lands they tended. Let us learn about and acknowledge each step in this dance which we call progress. So, for example, when the Blackfoot and Ktunaxa call it “the mountain that moves” maybe don’t build a mining town and name it after yourself directly in its slide path. Or do and your rubble becomes a road-trip stop in 100 years.

I do not believe our movement into the future is aided by denying others’ experiences, perspectives, and inheritance. All that claiming ‘first‘ or ‘only‘ buys is a jolt of passing and isolating thrill of attention and is often done at the cost of denying those who opened the way.

Why do headlines use language like “smashed” or “shattered” records? Why not “built” or “improved on.” Why do we value competition above cooperation? Or go looking for more and more specific and ludicrous parameters. I mean, sure you can climb a 14er on a unicycle or in high heels but at that point…what? I settle my bristling frustration by thinking of contemporary heroes, like Jennifer Phar Davis, Liz ‘Snorkel Thomas’, and Anish who have held FKTs on US long trails and when someone sets a new record, they celebrate it! That is the spirit which heals.

By not learning about and acknowledging those who have gone before, we shortchange our capacity for the future. My road to and along this path has been greatly aided by words of wisdom, encouragement, and context from George Meegan, Polly Letofsky, Gregg Treinish, Joey Shonka, Justin Keller, and several other long walkers with whom I’ve cultivated conversation.

For Neon and I as individuals, by not jumping on our own band wagon and claiming to have changed history, we shortchange our chances at publicity/monetary success/recognition but in so doing, also fill the stores of energy and resolve with knowing they are out there. It feels like a trade off of integrity for fame or maybe that’s a false dichotomy I’ve set up for myself?

The third understanding I’ve lived and learned on Her Odyssey is recognizing that Feminism does not play out distinctly along gender lines. During the Suffragette movement, some of the biggest detractors were housewives of wealthy men and some of the biggest assets were business and media men like George Francis Train.

There are too many men deeply invested in Her Odyssey to name all of you here but a few who have been of critical aid and heavily relied upon are: Matts, Uncles, Bens, Keiths, Dougs, Scotts, Johns, Ales, Jan Dudeck, Cris, Chip, Dani, the list spools on. We are grounded, ignited, and empowered by this network of strong men.

It has been one of the interesting turns of Her Odyssey that, while I set out with an idealistic vision of community support and focus on praise of women, we’ve accomplished the undertaking with the support of men, women, and children alike. At the same time, it was sobering that two of our earliest and biggest detractors were fellow female athletes.

The first was living in the same community as I did in Colorado while I was planning. She said she planned to hike it southbound from Alaska to Patagonia, carrying full mountaineering and climbing gear, followed by a film crew, and that she would do it to set a record. She suggested we do it together, so we went on a small ice climbing adventure together to feel it out. She had a seizure half way up the wall and it later was revealed by someone else that she had a TBI and these seizures were a frequent enough occurrence. When I addressed the matter directly, she snapped that it was none of my business. I disagreed and suggested instead that she stick to her original route plan, I’d stick to mine, and we’d cross paths somewhere in the middle and exchange beta.

She spent the next year sending nasty messages, having friends and herself creating fake Facebook profile accounts to leave bad reviews and rude comments. She maintained a steady trickle of provoking text messages to my phone and email inbox until a friend taught me how to block messages. It tore me apart that, before I could even begin, the project was being attacked by another woman. I didn’t know how to cope with it, so I kept quiet and mustered on.

A few years after we’d begun, another woman began coming along behind us. She first reached out on Facebook asking if we wanted to race. Around that same time, she also privately messaged some of our male counterparts asking the basics of how to load a backpack and what kind of stove fuel to use. It seemed like she could use some help so I started emailing her our beta, routes, resources, and folks along the way. Several times in the years since she has reached out for more help and information, which I provided.

Then I noticed that in her public content, she cited the references I passed on as if she had found them. She completely omitted us from her story, which I didn’t understand until I realized she was obtaining funding and followers on the claim of being The First Woman. Some fellow expeditioners addressed the matter with her and she denied it, countering with the fact that we river rafted 500 miles of Peru, then blocked their comments.

She again reached out for guidance a few months ago as she heads toward the Darien Gap and Central America. I’ve spent several hours already addressing her questions on the dicey region but when she asked about our route through a particular valley in Colombia followed by stating that she plans to be “the first person to walk it” since the latest landslide, I stopped trying. Her best help will be the local fellows who no doubt have already found a way around or through.

I advised that through Central America she be heedful of the Maya folks, those who’ve long known the lands she’ll cross and who have been persecuted and slaughtered as a result of colonial interests in their homes. She assured me that she had heard about how they will try to rip you off and had trained her dog to growl and be aggressive to keep them away.

All this to elaborate that there is plenty afoot, internally and externally, which help me understand why Margaret Giest’s accomplishments and pursuits might not have attracted much attention. It’s not just an uphill battle to garner attention, it’s a struggle to remain socially engaged at all. There are sickening components of our societies, enough to overrun and disillusion someone who has lived so deeply in the strength of the earth, her body, and wildling soul.

I’ve recognized over the years, the only folks who connect with us are those who practice being both Uncomfortable and Curious, which is rare enough in humans. Heck, this entire project’s public reach has been limited by the fact that, I’m a writer and almost 1/4 of American adults haven’t picked up a single book in the last year.

Both Lauren and I are honored to take our places in modern history and have completed a uniquely human powered, trans-continental expedition. We have followed in and learned from the footprints and paths set by others. We’ve done our best to contribute to the responsible promulgation of access and awareness to projects and areas like the Greater Patagonian Trail, the Maranon River, the Darien Gap, the Rockies, and the Arctic Drainage. I enjoy advising other audacious dreamers when they reach out during their own research.

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If you are interested in scheduling a speaking engagement, class, or otherwise working together; or, if you would like to consult on your own spark of inspiration I can be reached at:
Bethany Hughes 86 (at) gmail (dot) com

If you would like to make an individual gift to support this final and crucial stage of translating Her Odyssey into a Book:
PayPal @HerOdyssey
Venmo @Bethany-Hughes-26
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I conclude this account with a poem by one of my favorite contemporary poets, Rupi Kaur: