The journey requires a destination

It’s a widespread idea you’ve probably repeated once or twice: the journey is more important than the destination. It is on commercials, integrated into company’s missions, and even taught in some of my college classes. You may have heard “It is better to travel well than to arrive,” but I would like to say that I disagree.

On first glance, you may look at the pictures in this blog and think I’m backwards - that the journey is more important than destination. But having lived it, I would say you can’t have one without the other. Taryn and I had this conversation many times along our journey. 

There are many things I appreciate about our completion of the JMT. For one, it was humbling to see the sights that we did. One of the most common questions I get asked is “How were the sunsets?” and to tell you the truth, we only saw one the entire trip. I didn’t realize this until we were at 12- 13- and 14,000 ft, but you can’t see the horizon because of the other mountaintops. Considering how far we live from real mountains, we were okay with the trade-off. Besides the views, there were the people. We learned to appreciate a good conversation. There were days where we didn’t see many people and were often starved to just have a few words with someone. These are the things I remember the most, and I don’t know that I would have set them in my memory so fully if I hadn’t experienced the finality of reaching Mt. Whitney.

Maybe that’s the difference between traveling and wandering. I think goals and ends are important to trips because that is when ideas and memories take a full hold in our minds. Traveling is not complete without a destination - an end. There needs to be a time and place to recollect and to gather yourself for the next adventure. 

It’s important to let memories sink in and for me the only way that happens is through rest. It feels so good to have hiked so far. We finished it!




This is the final post in our blogging series reflecting on the John Muir Trail. We hiked the entire 220-mile trail in July 2012 - it took us 15 days. We met new people, experienced difficulty, and took a lot of pictures. To read the entire series, just click the image.