The Oneida Daily Dispatch (Oneida, NY)
Woman preps for 5-year trek across Americas
others to pursue their own audacious goals,” she said, twirling in her fingers a small silver pendant of a woman hiking.
“Our world is only as big as the information that we allow to come into it,” Hughes continued, “so I believe being able to share what’s going on to the opposite side of the world, and that they’re not so different than us, we’re going tomake it a lot further.”
Hughes traces her wandering spirit to her parents, Nazarene missionaries who spent time in Chile, Ecuador and the Dominican Republic during her childhood. Along with spreading the gospel, they instilled in her a passion for the outdoors. Hughes remembers her father going on hikes in the mountains, and she would hide in the back of the family car, popping outwhen he was far enough that there was no other recourse but to take her along.
Later, she lived in Spain and studied abroad at Oxford. Six little footprints are tattooed up her foot, one for each country Hughes has lived in.
“My family is very conservative, so me getting a tattoo was like, pushing some boundaries,” she said, smiling. “My dad was like, ‘You have to tell your grandmother.’ And she was like, ‘Oh, if you keep getting one for every country, you’ll have them all the way up your leg!’ ”
What does her father think of her latest endeavor?
“There’s a lot of fear,” admitted Kendall Hughes, a chaplain at the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas.
“Even with financial backing, there’s stuff you can run into — river crossings alone are dangerous. I don’t know how you can fully prepare.”
Hughes understands the risks. She knows winters in the Andes are brutal, summers in the tropics insufferable. The mountains are beautiful but deadly, wildlife always a wildcard.
She fears other people most. Many countries in South and Central America are dangerous, evenmore so for a woman traveling by bicycle or foot.
Hughes has tried to mitigate the risk by taking wilderness survival courses, where she has learned everything from how to forage for food to how to build shelters. She knows a bit of taekwondo. And she’ll have a traveling companion in South America, Lauren Reed, an experienced hiker in her own rightwhom she met on the Pacific Crest Trail.