Hiker Trash Radio

Doc, Bleav

Join Doc and his guests on Hiker Trash Radio, the outdoor adventure podcast that takes you on a myriad of trails. With interviews from thru hikers, skydivers, adventure athletes, big wall climbers, and more, each episode is packed with trail talk, gear tips, and hilarious misadventures. And if you thought the great outdoors was all sunshine and rainbows, think again! Tune in for tales of blistered feet, helicopter evacuations, and Type II Fun that will make you appreciate the comforts of home. Settle in and get ready to trade the city for the wilderness. It's time to embrace the suck!

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22 episodes
Updated Yesterday

Episodes22

Newest first

Yesterday · 36 min
Carry the Damn First Aid Kit - Dave, aka Slowfoot (Part II)
In Part 2, Dave's background comes into full focus: an inner-city kid from just outside Boston who read a book about walking in high school, went to an ALDHA gathering in his early 20s, and never really came back. His grandfather helped cut the last section of the AT as a teenager with the CCC. Dave eventually took over as head of trails for the Forest Service, caretaker at Upper Goose Pond Cabin for 20 years, and wilderness EMT who watched the rescue numbers climb decade by decade. He also walk
Yesterday · 47 min
Carry the Damn First Aid Kit - Dave, aka Slowfoot (Part I)
Dave thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail for the first time in 1996. His trail name was given to him by Earl Shaffer — the man who made the first recorded AT thru-hike in 1948 — who caught up to Dave on trail, noted that he moved at his pace, and named him SlowFoot on the spot. They became close friends and hiked together for over a month, off and on, for years afterward. This is the kind of thing you learn in Part 1 of this conversation, along with a defense of carrying 50 pounds of gear, a briefi
Monday · 23 min
Appalachian Trail Correspondent Dana Wolf - Check-in from the Trail #1
Triple Crowner and HTR AT Trail Correspondent Dana "Sniper" Wolf checks in with Doc from the trail on her yo-yo hike of the trail. Settle in and buckle up as Sniper shares how it's going, the biggest surprises, and what has changed since her 2007 thru hike of the AT.
Saturday · 32 min
Trail Stories - The Old World with SlowFoot
In 1996, Dave was hiking the Appalachian Trail when Earl Shaffer — the man who made the first recorded thru-hike in 1948 — came up behind him, noted that he moved at his pace, and named him SlowFoot on the spot. They became close friends for years afterward. That is the caliber of credential this guest carries, and he carries it without fanfare, the same way he carries his 50-pound pack: because that's just what he does, and he doesn't see a reason to do it differently. With 30,000 miles across
Friday · 23 min
The Big Year: Episode 3 - The Record
At some point, finishing isn't enough. Episode 3 follows two men who came for the number: one who chased a ghost record by starting in May and hiking south toward home, and brought a camera that slowed him down by several days and maybe kept him from quitting; and another who lost a year to a helicopter evacuation, came back, and crossed the same spot in the wilderness 12 months later with new ground ahead of him for the first time. "You can always make more money," he says. "You can't make more
July 29 · 36 min
Vibe Drinking with the Beans Lady - Maria "Beans" Romfoe (Part II)
Maria "Beans" Romfoe has thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail, the Pacific Crest Trail, and all but New Mexico of the Continental Divide Trail, carrying cans of beans the entire way. Known to her Instagram followers as The Beans Babe, Beans joins Hiker Trash Radio to explain how a broke-college-kid joke in Alaska turned into an actual bean sponsorship, why her base weight is nine pounds including the can, and how "vibe drinking" unfiltered water in the San Juans ended her CDT with a giardia evacuati
July 29 · 39 min
Vibe Drinking with the Beans Lady - Maria "Beans" Romfoe (Part I)
Maria "Beans" Romfoe has thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail, the Pacific Crest Trail, and all but New Mexico of the Continental Divide Trail, carrying cans of beans the entire way. Known to her Instagram followers as The Beans Babe, Beans joins Hiker Trash Radio to explain how a broke-college-kid joke in Alaska turned into an actual bean sponsorship, why her base weight is nine pounds including the can, and how "vibe drinking" unfiltered water in the San Juans ended her CDT with a giardia evacuati
July 25 · 28 min
Trail Stories - "She Just Wants to Exist" with Maria "Beans" Romfoe
Maria Romfoe has been carrying cans of beans up mountains since she was a broke college kid in Alaska who posted a summit photo with the caption #bushsbeanssponsorme as a joke, and the joke has not stopped paying off since. She is now an ABNM Triple Crown hiker — All But New Mexico — after a case of giardia acquired by trusting the vibes of cattle-adjacent water in the San Juans ended her CDT, led to what she describes as the most miserable night of her life at a backcountry hot springs, and the
July 24 · 34 min
The Big Year: Episode 2 - The Year
The plan looks clean on paper. Then you start hiking. Episode 2 lives inside a CYTC year: the spreadsheets that go out the window three days in, the wildfire that sends one hiker sprinting downhill while his partner waits at a trailhead not knowing if he's alive, two months of snowshoeing that leave a hiker with frostbite and no feeling in his toes, and a Katahdin sunrise that feels like relief because it means the worst of the year might be behind them. It isn't. They're only halfway done.
July 22 · 21 min
Dark Miles - If I Slow Down with Casey "Vegas" Huffman
Casey “Vegas the Pied Piper” Huffman, 2023 Appalachian Trail and 2025 Pacific Crest Trail thru-hiker, broke both ankles in a climbing gym fall on December 15, 2025, and the injury took more than his mobility. In this Dark Miles episode, Vegas tells the whole story: the childhood he escaped, the thru-hike he called a Hail Mary, the winter that caught up with him in Florida (including a psychiatric hold under the Baker Act) and the climb back that ran through the exact stretch of Maryland trail wh
July 18 · 46 min
When the Wand Breaks - Casey "Vegas" Huffman
When we last left Casey "Vegas" Huffman in November, he was riding high after completing the PCT and the Long Trail in a single season, boldly promising that "over his dead body" would he miss the CDT. Six weeks later, the universe apparently took that as a personal challenge. In this incredibly raw, funny, and deeply authentic episode, Vegas joins Doc from the floor of a floral-scented coworker's room in Montana to share his ultimate comeback story. Following a devastating climbing gym fall
July 17 · 20 min
The Big Year: Episode 1 - The Call
What makes a person decide to hike three of the longest trails in America back to back, in a single year? Episode 1 traces the idea from a bar sign in a Pennsylvania trail town to a January shelter where two friends named themselves after cartoon characters because there was no one else around to do it for them. Billy Meredith calls it the hardest and most amazing thing he'd ever done, simultaneously, and then spends four years unable to stop thinking about doing something even bigger. Carson Ol
July 15 · 40 min
The Full Traverse - Mr. Fabulous is Everyone
In 2012, the most metrosexual Black man in New York City packed a razor blade, 42 pounds of gear he didn't know how to use, and zero experience — and got on a train to Georgia to hike the Appalachian Trail. His first overnight hike ever was a thru-hike. He shaved every three days for six months. And somewhere in the first week, a woman older than the trail itself kissed him on the cheek and made him keep a trail name he never wanted. Drawn from four years of conversations on Hiker Trash Radio,
July 13 · 28 min
The Full Traverse - Mountains Don't Care with Ben "Ginger Ballz" Vaughan
He spent 22 years in the Navy knowing exactly what came next. Then he retired, chased the money for a while in government contracting, and eventually stood at the top of a ridge in New Hampshire realizing that the smelly guys with the tiny packs who had just hiked from Georgia were living something he had read about on deployment and never forgotten. That was 2018. He was 49. He showed up to the Appalachian Trail with a 40-pound pack containing three of everything, met a 19-year-old who had alre
July 11 · 24 min
The Full Traverse - Thoughts on a Zero Day with Eddie "Bard" Janicki
Most people who hike the Pacific Crest Trail ditch the heavy stuff after the first week. Eddie "Bard" Janicki ditched the harmonica and the neck stand and most of his 40-pound starting load — but the guitar stayed. It stayed for four months, through every pass and desert section and Sierra snow year, because some things earn their weight differently. He got his trail name two days in from a fellow hiker who first tried One Man Band (too long), then landed on Bard (good enough to stick). What fol
July 10 · 1 hr
The Source Material: Episode 6 - Barkley's Mad Genius
The sixth and final episode of The Source Material, and the last word on The Barkley: A Love Story. The documentary opened with 11 words: 'I gotta clarify one thing. I did not create the Barkley. I discovered it.' Everything since then - three documentary episodes, five bonus episodes, 30+ interviews, 40 years of history - has been an attempt to understand what those 11 words mean. This is the conversation between Doc and Laz, uncut, in full. The man who found the gate in the woods and decided
July 8 · 41 min
Walking Away From a Life That Worked - Jeff "Bluey" Lewis (Part II)
In which Bluey reveals that the actual hero of this story might be his wife, who responded to "I'm thru-hiking the AT" with the emotional equivalent of a shrug, then quietly bought him the nicest base layer money can buy and never said a word about it. We learn that a knife-wielding trail angel in Pennsylvania was just trying to make a fork, that grown men have tantrums exactly like toddlers in a cereal aisle, and that the actual hardest part of writing a memoir is "trusting the reader," which i
July 8 · 41 min
Walking Away From a Life That Worked - Jeff "Bluey" Lewis (Part I)
A man walks away from 16 years of nonprofit leadership because he saw his future self check into a conference in Orlando and decided he'd rather smell like a swamp. Jeff "Bluey" Lewis lost a rock-paper-scissors tournament to an eight-year-old and has worn the consequences (a trail name he originally hated) with more grace than most people show their actual achievements. He hiked 340 miles before admitting trekking poles might be useful, leaked two separate types of bladders in the first fifteen
July 6 · 32 min
The Full Traverse - Hike or Die with Wesley "Megaman" Tils
He quit a promising boxing career to become a Mormon missionary, quit the missionary thing nine months later to go live in the woods, fled a posse of 10 pursuing missionaries on a stolen midnight bicycle ride, survived on a diet of almonds until he got arsenic poisoning, lay down to die on the side of a road three separate times (foiled, on each occasion, by an advancing army of caterpillars), and somehow that's just the origin story. In this Full Traverse episode, Doc pulls from four years and
July 4 · 28 min
Trail Stories - What Would Your Dead Self Say?
At 40 years old, 16 years into a nonprofit career he was good at, Jeff Lewis stood by a hotel pool in Orlando and watched his future arrive — a parade of men who all looked the same, dressed the same, and carried themselves like they'd long since stopped asking questions. He decided he didn't want to be one of them. Within a year he'd resigned and started walking from Georgia to Maine. This episode traces that decision back to its real origin: a friend named Eric, gone in three weeks from a canc