That Americans love to paint everything they can with nobility is well known — there are kings of pop, king Trump, kings of animals, royalty everywhere. But at least one crown deserves bows and salutes: the Triple Crown of Long-Distance Trails, which includes routes through the Appalachian Mountains, the Pacific Ridge and the Continental Divide. Together, they cover more than 12,000 kilometers across the United States and attract thousands of hikers every year. Walkers like Jeff Santos, 54, from Divinópolis, who has just completed the third stage of the journey.
Santos, who rejects the label of adventurer and who says he started his life on the trails in 2015, works with event production and put his backpack on for the first time traveling the Caminho da Fé, which has several branches through the Mantiqueira mountain range, crossing the cities of São Paulo and Minas Gerais, all leading to Aparecida do Norte, in the interior of São Paulo.
“I had never been one for traveling, camping, going to the woods,” Santos told Folha, with lots of laughs and still trying to regain the 12 kilos lost in the endeavor. “But I was experiencing a period of depression and decided to try walking.” Four hundred and a few kilometers later, he had taken a liking to the thing and went to Estrada Real, from Diamantina (MG) to Parati (RJ). “Then it was 1,200 kilometers, and I discovered that the trails thing was really cool,” he admits.
For those who had covered 1,200 kilometers, the next logical step was the northern hemisphere, where the most famous of the Triple Crown trails, the Appalachian, offers 3,538 kilometers between Mount Springer, in the state of Georgia, and Mount Katahdin, in Maine, crossing 14 states on the American east coast and traveled by around three million people every year.
“There was a worthy challenge,” says Santos. “But there was one detail: I had never camped in my life, I had never spent a single night in a tent and my first time was precisely in Appalachia”, he says amusingly.
It was talking to people through the forests and mudflats of the Appalachian mountain range, in 2017, that I learned that there were two other trails to complete the Triple Crown. Back in Brazil, he wrote a book about his experience on the east coast and returned to the USA in 2019 to hike the Pacific Crest Trail, 4,260 kilometers long from the Mexican border to Canada, along the Pacific coast.
The pandemic opposed the intention of traveling the third trail, the Continental Divide, in 2021. Only this year did Santos set foot on the road again to complete the challenge.
The Continental Divide, 4,873 kilometers long and considered the most difficult of the three, connects Alberta, on the Canadian-US border, to Chihuahua, in Mexico. With less infrastructure than the others, it was the one that presented the most challenges. It’s no surprise that its motto is “Embrace the brutality”, or embrace brutality, in free translation. Yes, the thing is gross.
“The power of nature is always something that scares,” says Santos. “There were two days of walking along a dry riverbed where there had been a fire years ago and a flood this year, it was total devastation, you have no trail, you don’t know where to go, you don’t see anyone for days on end and you sort of find your way around a rock, a log”, he recalls.
The aridity of the dry river was followed by a long lightning storm in the New Mexico desert. “The weather changed and a rain of lightning fell all morning, something both wonderful and frightening, lightning everywhere, I could feel the earth shaking”, he reports.
But he says he felt a greater tremor when he approached the Mexican border, a priority target for American immigration authorities. “I kept imagining that at any moment an ICE car would appear [a agência de controle de imigração que toca o terror por todo o país] and take me to prison, disappear with me”, he says. Only after completing the journey and far from the border did he have the luxury of celebrating. And what was it like?
“I danced laughing and singing in the middle of nowhere!” he exclaims.
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