Why Less Talking, More Walking?
John likes to stop and talk to people on the trail. Jean likes to keep moving. Less Talking is what Jean sometimes wishes John would do and the trail name she gave him. More Walking is what Jean wants to do and the trail name he gave her.
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We started backpacking together over 50 years ago but most of that took place after we retired in 2010. John was 57 and Jean was 56. After living in the Seattle area for 33 years, we sold our house and spent the next 10 years living and traveling full-time in a modest-sized motor home. We traveled up and down the western US from Alaska to Arizona. It was a great time in our lives! Then in 2020 we settled down in Green Valley, located just south of Tucson, Arizona.
In the summer of 2010, we were backpacking in Tombstone Territorial Park in Yukon when we were talking with a group of 20 somethings. One told us they thought we were an inspiration to still be backpacking at our age. We were taken aback as we thought of ourselves as young. Afterall, we had retired nearly 10 years earlier than is common. Later that summer we were backpacking in Glacier National Park in Montana when a young man told us how great it was to see older people still backpacking. This time, we decided to embrace the reality that we were older and to be proud of our ages, and what we were still physically able to do.
For eight years while traveling in our motor home, we maintained a blog, panafoot.com, chronicling our backpack trips and John took thousands of high-quality photographs. Our last blog post was in 2018 when we hiked 500 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail through Washington State. We seemed to have just lost interest. And life’s circumstances led us to not backpack as much.
However, in 2025 when we were backpacking the PCT through the Sierra we started talking with a young woman on Glen Pass. After learning our ages (72 and 71) she said “You are so inspiring. You give me hope for my future”. It got us thinking. We had felt unfinished abandoning our blog so abruptly and this interaction made us wonder if we still had a worthwhile story to tell. Perhaps there are other backpackers who would be interested, even inspired. Perhaps it will be reassuring to them to know that there IS still backpacking after retirement!
