[Larry (left) and Kermit (right) walked the 71-mile High Line Canal in the summer of 2018 with Walking Movement Leader Chris Englert, who contends that Kermit is the oldest person to have walked the entire way, at age 82!]

Kermit: We walk out of our complex right onto the High Line Canal.

Larry: We live at about mile 48. We’ve been walking and bicycling along the Canal for a long time. I’d always thought about wanting to do the whole thing, and then I saw signs about the walking series. I went online and learned about it, and we decided to do it starting in June.

I’d ridden the Canal a long time before I walked it. I thought I had bicycled clear to the end, but when we walked it, I found out I wasn’t even close – I’d gone the wrong way! My favorite part about walking the High Line was learning the history of the families who had settled here and the things they did. [Our Walking Movement Leader] Chris knew that so well.

Kermit: I really don’t have a background here (I’m from Sacramento, California), so I don’t remember all of the names of the places we saw along the way, but I really enjoyed walking behind Windsor Gardens and the Fairmount Cemetery. I had never been on most of the Canal or even visited the areas it goes through.

Larry: The group we hiked it with is still hiking together on Fridays. We’ve tried to hike every Friday since we finished the High Line in October. The idea of walking and connecting really brought us together.

Kermit: Chris says I’m the oldest person to have walked the whole High Line Canal, at 82. I had never done anything like that before. I had never hiked before at all.

Larry and I met when he was 72 and I was 74. We got together that year and I moved out to Colorado. I had a bicycle in California, but it stayed in the garage. The only thing I did was, after my partner of 30 years died, I got a notification from the American Heart Association asking if I wanted to do a walk in his honor. I had never thought about walking before, but I said yes. I trained and ended up walking two half-marathons. I met Larry about a year later, and I had no idea that he was so active – he has climbed every fourteener in Colorado! When I came out here and learned how active he was, I said, it’ll probably keep me alive, so why not? I didn’t start doing any of this until I was 74.

Larry had a group that would bicycle every Wednesday. I walked right into this group of friends – I was lucky. They were doing bicycling, hiking. Larry had a house in Breckenridge, and we would go up there and hike.  

Larry: I moved to Colorado from Iowa in 1960, after I graduated from college. I grew up on a farm, so we were always outside and doing things. I love the mountains. The minute I got here, I started backpacking. I hiked all over. I had no intention of ever climbing all of the fourteeners until I got to about 45 and I thought, well, maybe I should finish this! I really like hiking and biking and skiing – all of the outdoors stuff. I can’t do what I used to do, but I still like it.

Kermit: If I had come here on my own, I probably wouldn’t have stayed. The older you get, the harder it is to meet people because you don’t do the same things you did when you were 20, 30 or 40. You don’t go to the same places, you don’t put yourself out there to meet people the same way. Sometimes, the older you get, you don’t put yourself out there to meet people at all! So, I was very lucky to walk right into this group of people with whom I just clicked right away. It was wonderful.

[Elizabeth is a Walk2Connect Walking Movement Leader in Boulder, Colorado.]

I have a public health background, and I worked with a terminally ill population in medical research. When I shifted into yoga, I thought it was going to be all candles and incense. It turned out that the yoga population – like all of us – is far more wounded than we realize. We’re not just a fitness-oriented, healthy population. It’s a healthy bunch of people, yes, but we all have a woundedness, and we’re all struggling to find our way in a crazy world. I wrote in an email to my community recently, ‘May we all hold our darkness more tenderly so that it never outshines the light.’ That really is the essence of this work for me: making space for my own limitations, finding other people to feel less alone, empowering and uplifting each other like sisters, and just reminding each other that love is visible and love wins.

[Jonathon Stalls founded Walk2Connect in 2012, after walking 3,030 miles from the Delaware coast to San Francisco, and after completing the 497-mile Camino de Santiago de Compostela in Spain. His story has shaped the Walk2Connect Cooperative from the start. Here, he reflects on walking as a pathway to being more human and more fundamentally connected to all we are.]

Walking takes me into a deep experience of soul: the soul of the natural world, the soul of human experience, and the soul of moving with what lives in our inner dimensions. Since my cross-country walk, I have continued to walk thousands of miles alongside thousands of people all around Colorado and the country, which has so deeply expanded and widened my worldview. Moving in this way keeps me forever open and available to the many unique stories and experiences living in people and their landscapes.

I think of walking as such a sacred and foundational human act. We are made to move this way, and many of us have no choice BUT to walk or roll to get to work, to the bus, or to the store, every day. The physiological experience of walking allows us to better embody a posture of humility. When I walk, my mind is balanced, my heart is more patient, and my body is better processing stress and toxins. It allows for a radical witnessing of where the land hurts, where people hurt, where the environment defeats our purposes. When we walk, and if our environments are suitable and safe for walking, we are made to better cope and adapt with the stress, trauma and chaos of life. When we walk, I believe we love ourselves better. We have the opportunity to slowly and patiently become more attentive to all of the complicated layers within us.

[Maria Rosa Galter is a core owner of the Walk2Connect Cooperative and the owner of Walking Inspiritus.]

One of the reasons I love to walk or hike is that when I’m walking with someone else, I go into deeper relationship with that person. The conversation is not superficial. Walking has always been a place of deep connection and healing for me. There’s a beauty in walking with another person, but there’s also a beauty in walking by yourself. I love to do walking as a contemplative spiritual practice, and I create walking retreats. I think one of the things we’ve lost is our connection with the sacredness of the earth upon which we walk, the sacredness of the spaces we travel through. We’ve lost the idea that everything around us is sacred, including the air we breathe. I like to think of the sacred as a river that runs through every aspect of life: everything we touch, everything we see, everything we smell. Our body is immersed in a sacred experience. We can reconnect with that by walking in nature and experiencing the holy in everything we see.

[Maria Guadalupe is a Walk2Connect Walking Movement Leader in Boulder, Colorado.]

Sometimes, I feel like a caged bird here in Boulder. It’s hard for me to connect with others because of the language barrier. But I love connecting with nature. I grew up on a farm in Zacatecas, Mexico. I want my kids to love mother nature just as I do. Walking with my children is the foundation of our relationship, and it makes me feel like I have more freedom.

My children attend three different schools. We walk or ride our bikes to school every day. During the walk or ride, we talk about the day together, so I always know what’s going on with their lives. Walking with my children makes me feel happy, especially when I see them  getting excited when they spot a butterfly, a special flower or hummingbirds.

[In July 2018, Tim marked a major milestone: 500 walks with Walk2Connect! Tim is well known in our community for saying, “Mean people don’t walk.” Here’s more of his story.]

Life is full of interesting people with good hearts. I love to walk, but the connecting thing with Walk2Connect works. Funny - mean people won’t walk at 7 a.m. I’ve only met two grumpy people in four and a half years. They were signed up and came to the Park Hill Sunrise Walk, and we treated them well, but they really thought we got together, whined for an hour and went to work. We don’t do whining – it’s unproductive and doesn’t make you feel good.

When I was growing up, my stepfather and I used to walk all over Lansing, Michigan. We’d go on a three-hour walk after dinner in the summer and solve the world’s problems, talk guy talk. It was swell. He was a good parent. I had people telling me, ‘I don’t think your stepdad likes you because he doesn’t play catch.’ But I’d never asked him to - I didn’t like it. Then they found out my dad and I would walk four miles downtown, get a banana split and walk home, and all of a sudden I was the cool guy whose dad would take him downtown walking. I have a good history with walking. I’ve never done the grand stuff like the Camino - I’ve got a bad back, but I’m down 62 pounds since last May, working with a dietician and walking.

[Cherry is a Walk2Connect Walking Movement Leader in Longmont, Colorado.]

Anything with activity, fun, connection with people – I’m up for it! When I first started walking with Walk2Connect, I wanted to get healthier and build my endurance and strength. I suffered from a lot of different health conditions: pre-diabetes, obesity, acid reflux, snoring. They were all weight-related conditions. I decided that if I wanted to live a healthier life, it had to start with me. I had to find something that worked for me.

When I started walking with our group in Longmont, I discovered that I enjoy connecting with nature – something I hadn't really done before. I was so happy to find people to walk with, and to help others. I have a couple of walks now and I’m always inviting people to come walk with me. I listen to the community – some people asked me to do an evening walk during the week, so I added Wednesday at sunset, and we have a great group now. Before you know it, people are asking, ‘Oh, you do a walk? When?’

[Djiby is a Walk2Connect Walking Movement Leader in Denver, Colorado.]

I’m 15, going into 10th grade. I’m from Senegal. My parents left me with my grandma in Africa when I was 2 months old so they could come to Colorado to work. My two sisters were born here, but I was born in Senegal. I just came to stay with them in Colorado three years ago.

I don’t know my siblings very well, and sometimes we argue. It’s hard right now. I miss my grandma, uncles, aunties and cousins in Senegal. One day, my friend and I were leaving the rec center and I was so hungry, but I didn’t want to go home. My friend said, ‘I know a place where you can eat.’ He took me to Street Fraternity. There were so many people there – volunteers, and other kids like me – who helped me. I almost failed out of school, but they motivated me and helped me find a tutor. They said I had to read for an hour or two a day. I didn’t want to read, but they said if I didn’t, I couldn’t come back. I stayed away for a week. I was so sad that I didn’t see them, I went back. They said I still had to read and I was like, OK.