Just before Emily Ford became a teenager, she announced her plans for her debut long-distance hike to her mother, Paula: come Saturday morning, she was going to wake up well before dawn and trek the railroad tracks through their Minnesota neighborhood for as long as she could stand. Her mother sighed, then consented.
Around 3 A.M., Ford stirred from bed and gathered her supplies: a tub of peanut butter, a few saltines, a pack of gum, a little water bottle from Walmart. She hit her de facto route through Brooklyn Park, a large northern suburb of Minneapolis, around 5 A.M. By mid-afternoon, she’d covered 12 miles before calling her mother to pick her up.