In 2020, Emily Pennington set off on the trip of a lifetime. Her goal was to visit every national park in the United States in one year. She wasn't sure what she'd find out there in the wilderness, but the time was right for Emily to quit her job, hit the road, and find her way outside.
In 2020, Emily Pennington set off on the trip of a lifetime. Her goal was to visit every national park in the United States. Emily wasn’t sure what she’d find out there in the wilderness, but she needed a change - she was burnt out from her life in Los Angeles and reeling from personal losses. The time was right for Emily to quit her job, hit the road, and find her way outside.
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Emily Pennington:
There are few things in life like the wilderness that are actually big enough to hold the enormity of our human emotions, like grief, and rage, and joy. I came away from the trip a completely different person, but also so much more in love with the national parks than I think I ever had been.
Shelby Stanger:
In 2020, Emily Pennington set off on the trip of a lifetime. Her goal was to visit every national park in the United States. Emily wasn't sure what she'd find out there in the wilderness, but she needed a change. She was burnt out from her life in Los Angeles and reeling from personal losses. The time was right for Emily to quit her job, hit the road, and find her way outside. I'm Shelby Stanger and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living an REI Co-op Studios production. A note, this episode discusses mental health and sexual assault, listener discretion is advised.
When Emily Pennington decided to tour America's national Parks, she thought it would be the perfect chance to pursue her dream of becoming an adventure journalist. Emily already had a regular column with Outside Magazine and she wrote about her trip while she was on the road. She also posted on social media and her journey made for pretty good storytelling. In 2023, Emily ended up publishing a book called Feral, Losing Myself and Finding My Way in America's National Parks. In Feral, Emily Chronicles the physical and emotional challenges she faced.
The trip was delayed by COVID, rocked by a breakup, and even impacted by climate change. Her adventure had some serious ups and downs, but Emily was expecting some surprises. Visiting every national park is no small feat. When did you have this wild idea?
Emily Pennington:
The idea came after having my ass handed to me by a really rough year in 2016. I worked in Hollywood for over 10 years and it's brutal. I almost got these life-changing opportunities and then they fell apart. I went through a really bad breakup. Then, I also, unfortunately, I had three younger friends passed away unexpectedly. I was suddenly facing my own mortality in a way that I never had before and in a way that I think is unusual for someone who's only 29 years old. I just had this notion of, why am I pushing so hard for a career that's going to keep me chained to a desk forever?
When I could be out, living a little more paycheck to paycheck and being a little more irresponsible, but actually living and actually doing the thing that my friends who just passed away couldn't do. The guy that I had the breakup with was actually the guy who also introduced me to backpacking. I had this new love of the wilderness and the national parks that I was just beginning to harness, and I was like, I don't want to ever have to have a man teach me how to do things in the outdoors. I want to be confident going by myself or bringing girlfriends along and teaching them how to do it.
I had this nuts idea to save up all my money for two or three years, build out the cheapest little van I could find, and then just hit the road for a year straight and try to write about it.
Shelby Stanger:
Oh, that's awesome. The way people get wild ideas to me is really fascinating. That exact idea to just go visit all 63 national parks, how did it come to you? Did you have a dream? Did you see this idea? Did it slowly marinate in your head and one day you're like, "Yeah, that's it. I'm doing it."
Emily Pennington:
I wish I was that impulsive or cool, but honestly, I'm so type A and practical. There was a part of me that was like, "All right, Emily, you want to go do a big thing, you're climbing a lot of mountains, you're doing a lot of solo backpacking. What is actually feasible in a year time span?" A year has 52 weeks and there's 62 national parks, and a lot of them are small, so you don't necessarily need a whole week to do it. You might need one or two days. I chopped it up into these little manageable chunks where it was like, okay, I live in California. There's a lot of parks here.
I could theoretically move around to them when the weather's a little bit colder and it's winter, and work my way out from there. Like I said, I wish that there was a little bit more of a poetic reason for why my brain just glommed onto the national parks, but some of it was feasibility. I think some of it was also, at the end of 2016, as I mentioned, I was just getting into backpacking in the national parks for the first time ever. I didn't grow up doing a ton of camping or doing a ton of wilderness adventures. I got into it in my late 20s.
I think that there can be something really empowering, especially as a woman, when it comes to totally shifting your notion of what your body is capable of doing and what your body's built for. It's like, oh, actually my body can carry heavy stuff up a mountain and then set up a house only with stuff that I carried on my own back. It sounds really simple, but it felt really transformative in a way that it's hard to describe, I think, if you haven't lived in LA for almost 20 years and really needed to have your reality rocked.
Shelby Stanger:
Emily continued working for three years before she actually hit the road. She had to save money, buy a van, acquire gear, and figure out her route and her schedule. She wanted to hit the parks during the shoulder season. This would allow Emily to avoid the peak season crowds, but still experience the parks in ideal weather. I also want to point out that when Emily started her trip, there were only 62 national parks. A 63rd park was added to the register in late 2020, just as Emily was nearing the end of her journey.
Emily Pennington:
I thought it was really important to not only do every national park, like I was checking off a list, but also I want to at least be able to do some of the top activities or find a cool hidden trail in every national park. My goal was, okay, I'm going to buy carbon offsets. I'm going to buy the tiniest most fuel efficient van I can find. I'm going to unfortunately spend a lot of time driving to make sure I'm getting to places when it's actually nice to be there, because I'm writing about them as a journalist. With that in mind, I did this big loop that was Southern California, Southwest.
Then, I went up towards Michigan, Minnesota. Then, I came all the way back home to go north to Washington, up to Alaska. Then, I chased autumn all the way across the East Coast. I saw my first fall foliage ever in my whole life. Then, ended the year in Florida and Virgin Islands and Hawaii, which are a little more tropical.
Shelby Stanger:
You did this solo, but also sometimes with friends. Talk to me about the choice to do both and how you dealt with fear when you were alone.
Emily Pennington:
I actually started the trip by myself, but I had a partner that I was living with named Adam. He was based in Los Angeles, but he was also not super happy at his job. There was a little bit of talk about what would happen if he quit his job and hit the road for a couple of months and then maybe came back to LA and got a different job? Which I thought would be really fun because I knew that I was going to do most of the trip alone regardless. At the beginning of the trip, I thought that the book was going to be about the wild idea of carving out an uncommon life for yourself and your partner that's fulfilling because you're not abiding by society's expectations of what a partnership or a job is supposed to be.
Then, Adam and I, this is not a spoiler because it's in the synopsis of the book, but then Adam and I end up breaking up in Alaska in the very middle of the book. I end up finishing out the second half of the parks pretty much totally alone. The book became much more about surrendering to the fact that the void is the rule, not the exception, and you're going to have to get comfortable with discomfort very quickly if you want to survive by yourself in the wilderness. I was careful to give myself these little carrots in front of my face of friends who would occasionally join me for Acadia National Park.
I had a friend who wanted to bring these two plastic kayaks to Congaree National Park, and I had zero paddling experience. We decided to do this all day paddle on this creek through these crazy cypress trees, and that was cool. I think that some of the more funny moments of the book are the moments when I have friends with me, but I think that some of the deeper learning and growth and healing took place alone. To answer the second part of your question about how I handled the loneliness of traveling by myself for so long. I would say that I had to let go of the notion that I was a badass who could do everything and anything all the time.
Just like maybe how in your apartment you want to sit down and watch a movie or read or not do anything for an entire day, you have to allow yourself to have these moments of downtime in the van. You can't be all epic all the time. Sometimes you're cackling maniacally, and sometimes you're sobbing over a panini that you made in your van. I tried to be as open and honest as I could while still maintaining the integrity of the book's commitment to describing and visiting all the parks. I think that I'm really proud of how it turned out, because it's this weird little nugget of what a grief-filled healing journey is actually like.
Shelby Stanger:
You did it in 2020, most of it, right?
Emily Pennington:
Yeah. I had the trip planned for a long time. I quit my job at the end of 2019, and we didn't have any inkling that 2020 was going to be this gnarly year where there was obviously a pandemic. I think I had done 15 national parks by the time the shutdown hit in March. Then, everything shut down for two months, and then the trip got really weird.
Shelby Stanger:
Tell me more.
Emily Pennington:
Basically, a lot of things had to be rebooked over and over again. The timeline that I had so carefully considered had to vanish and become even more grueling, because the two months that I spent sitting at home was obviously a lost cause. My notion of what my schedule was going to be also flew to the wayside. I had to start really living the reality of, nature's going to be unpredictable and intense, and weather stuff's going to come up, and roads are going to be closed because of snow, even in June. I had to start letting go of this perfect idea of what I thought the parks trip was going to be. It became very much a meditation and discomfort rather than a carefully articulated year-long plan.
Shelby Stanger:
Early on in the trip, Emily had to throw her plans out the window. As a type A person who had done a lot of prepping, it was hard to let go of her schedule, but by the time Emily hit the 62nd park, she was way better at going with the flow. This was just the first of many ways that the adventure opened her eyes. When we come back, Emily tells the story of a hard moment on the trip and shares how her journey helped her to slow down and focus on her own mental health. In 2020, writer Emily Pennington set off on a mission to travel through every US national park. She planned her route, bought a van, and packed up her life.
Emily anticipated being impacted by nature in some profound way, and she even hoped to have some life-changing revelations, but parts of her trip turned out much harder than she could have ever imagined. A warning, the story that Emily shares next concerns her experience with sexual assault. Is there a story you have about how nature cracked you open in a way that you don't feel like you could've been cracked open?
Emily Pennington:
Yeah, a couple of things come to mind. When I was in Florida, I purposely planned my trip to be mid to late November, when it was supposed to not be hurricane season, but because of global warming, we have a longer hurricane season. I had to rebook for the third time multiple South Florida National Park excursions. I decided it was going to be a great idea to practice some self-care and book a massage. I went online, I looked at Yelp. I had this woman recommend this guy that she had worked with a bunch. I had this experience of I wasn't even supposed to be in Florida.
I wasn't supposed to be waiting it out for five days in a cheap Airbnb. I got sexually assaulted by a masseuse. Then, two days later, with my entire sense of safety and body security totally shaken up, I had to jump on a crowded plane to the Virgin Islands to go to my second to last national park on the East Coast. I'm not really a beach person. I like beach activities, I don't like being on the beach. But this was coming at the end of two months of absolute solo travel, where I was already at my wits end even without a massive trauma. I think a mile into the Lind Point Trail, I came across this tiny little beach that had one other lady on it that was called Solomon Beach.
I was like, "You know what? I'm tired and I want to cry, and I'm just going to sit on this beach." I literally just sat and read my Kindle all day long. In the background there was this metronomic whooshing of the waves, which felt like it was the earth's pulse or heartbeat, lulling me back into this state of safety and okayness with the world. I had this moment where - it was almost like self baptismal in a weird way. I don't want to get too woo, but I had this moment where I basically said thank you and goodbye to the beach before I left to go back to my hostel, where I let myself float with my face and my stomach facing the sky, and I let myself be totally rocked by the waves.
Then, I dipped myself under and started crying because I realized that I should feel sad for this person, but I also shouldn't let their bad behavior ruin my life. There are few things in life like the wilderness that are actually big enough to hold the enormity of our human emotions, like grief, and rage, and joy.
Shelby Stanger:
You really are raw and honest and vulnerable. I'm just curious, have you always been that way or did this journey make you less afraid about everything else?
Emily Pennington:
I think in the true spirit of your podcast, one of the reasons I wanted to switch careers in my early 30s and become a writer, and go on a journey that I knew would push me to the edge of my comfort zone again and again, is because I also wanted to not only challenge myself, but also give myself permission to not always show up as the most polished, beautiful version of myself in the world. Coming from a film industry background, everyone is very image conscious and very mindful of how they're portrayed at all times. I was just really done. I was done with all the fakeness. I was done wearing makeup every day. I didn't want to wear high heels ever again. I think I was just done.
Shelby Stanger:
Well, I think you also just said something that really struck a chord. In our most fun moments in the wild wilderness, we are not polished. When I'm surfing and having the time of my life, I got a wedgie. My hair is all over the place, you got dirt in your fingernails, but you're probably filled with a massive amount of joy. I think we just need to showcase that being dirty is beautiful. I want to know more about your mental health journey and how that changed in the wilderness. I know we've gotten really deep here, but your book is called Feral. It's raw, it's real, it's rugged. You did something that not a lot of people have the opportunity to do. Talk to me about your mental health journey in the wilderness.
Emily Pennington:
Yeah, it's a weird one because finding a suitable ending for the book was really challenging for me because a lot of people have talked about the fact that they have anxiety before they do a ski competition, or, "Oh, I have anxiety sleeping by myself as a solo female van lifer." But I think that one thing that hasn't been talked about quite as much in the outdoor space is what it's like not only to live with anxiety as an ever present entity and still want to go out and do big things, but also how the adventures themselves can sometimes heighten our anxiety.
Because depending on your luck, the adventures themselves could amount to a series of little T traumas that build up and cause your brain to start reacting to things in a different way. Towards the end of the year, partially because of COVID, partially because of the massage incident, partially because of the breakup with Adam, but also partially because of just being on the road and hiking alone for so long, my brain decided to stop sleeping. I had essentially a mini nervous breakdown before my last two parks that I was very much in the process of healing from while I was writing the book.
Trying to put a shiny sparkly period at the end of a sentence when life is not a linear three act structure was really challenging. I thought it was really crucial for me to showcase some of the fragility that can exist behind the veil while you're doing these big adventures that are still worthy and life-changing, even if the backend is messy.
Shelby Stanger:
Despite the intense challenges that Emily faced, she learned a lot about her needs and how she processes emotions and trauma. When she returned to LA, Emily began to struggle with insomnia and anxiety, but she took this as another opportunity to examine her lifestyle and make a change. Something that's not talked about in a lot of books and in a lot of adventure tales and magazines is reentry after an adventure, especially a grand adventure, can be really challenging. How did you deal with it?
Emily Pennington:
Yeah, I think that ties in brilliantly with what I was talking about when it comes to, we have a little bit of a narrative around people having performance anxiety when they're about to do or in the middle of doing these huge grand adventures. But I think that when your nervous system gets used to either being on edge for a really long time because maybe you're doing a crazy siege style climb of an 8000-meter peak or something. Mine is much smaller than that, but I was living in a van and I was dealing with the safety issues of being a woman alone during COVID for 12 straight months.
Yeah, coming back to Los Angeles after that I think is perhaps, now that I have had a little distance, I think that that is perhaps one of the reasons my brain was like, I can't sleep. It was fixating on mocking birds, car noises outside and neighbors' voices and footprints upstairs. I hadn't had upstairs neighbors in a really long time, and I felt like I was losing my mind because I knew that they weren't being that loud. Then, my brain it was akin to a little, like a matador and a bull stomping around in my apartment all the time. To be totally honest, I think my therapist's advice for me when I was trying to navigate reentry as a newly single person, who had to move all her stuff into an apartment and try to figure out how to even be in a city.
His advice was, clear literally anything from your schedule that feels like work. Only do the deadlines that you absolutely have to do as a writer, and don't judge yourself for having a couple of weeks or a couple of months where you literally do nothing. Around this time is when I also wasn't sleeping, so to be totally honest, my memory loss from the two months that I got back from the trip is pretty intense. But over time, it is true that if life is the thing that can somatically break you with its stressors, then you can somatically heal yourself by removing as many of those stressors as possible.
It's definitely not at the same level of getting professional help and getting on medication, I ultimately learned. But taking as many things off my calendar as I possibly could for a couple of months and just not taking any new writing assignments helped. I don't know if that's the answer you wanted, but that is what worked for me.
Shelby Stanger:
What lessons do you feel like you really learned from this big grand adventure? What do you think you most took away from it?
Emily Pennington:
I think I learned as a type A overachieving person that the days where you might feel like you're doing nothing and you're just sitting by a lake or you're just chilling in the van watching the sunset, they might feel like you're doing nothing. But recovery is actually an active process of doing the big adventure. I would also say tangentially there's no wrong way to experience a national park. I think if you map out the kinds of adventures I'm doing over the course of the year, they get smaller and smaller and much more manageable. At first, I'm doing these big 12-mile hikes and these big solo backpacking trips where I'm sleeping in 28-degree weather and I'm not sleeping well because I'm freezing.
Then, by the end I'm like, "I don't know. I'm just going to sit on this beach." Or, I'm like, "I don't know, man. I'm just going to hang out by this crater in Hawaii and look at this lava." I don't know. I think it's funny to watch the unraveling of this past shadow version of yourself that you think is so essential that's propping you up and really allow the difficulty of the wilderness and adult life commingle to lay your ego bare so that you have no option other than to just be with what is in that moment. Otherwise, you're going to exhaust yourself needlessly all the time.
Shelby Stanger:
I think the best adventure books end with surrender.
Emily Pennington:
Yeah, that's basically, yeah, that's a much more succinct way of saying what the end of the book is, so thanks.
Shelby Stanger:
What I love about Emily is her openness in talking through the hard stuff that happened to her. She also has incredible insight into how these challenges are part of the human experience. By writing about them in her book Feral, Emily tells a vulnerable story that I hope encourages other folks to find their own way outside. Emily, it was such a blast to talk to you. You can get Emily's book on Amazon, and you can follow her on Instagram at Brazen Backpacker. That's B-R-A-Z-E-N B-A-C-K-P-A-C-K-E-R. Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network.
It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Peers Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. Our senior producer is Jenny Barber. Our executive producers are Palo Mottola and Joe Crosby. As always, we love it when you follow the show, rate it, and write a review wherever you listen. Remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.