blissful hiker ❤︎ inspiring you to hike your own hike
Long-distance backpacker Alison “Blissful Hiker” Young has logged more than 14,000 miles across six continents, tackling iconic routes such as New Zealand’s Te Araroa, Europe’s Pyrenean Haute Route, South Africa’s Drakensberg Traverse, Nepal’s Great Himalayan Trail and the Pacific Crest Trail in the United States.
An award-winning professional musician and syndicated American Public Media host, Alison approaches storytelling through a deeply attuned ear. Her series of intimate personal essays — coupled with field recordings gathered on trail — trace a path of self-discovery as a middle-aged, titanium-reinforced cancer thriver. They reveal the often unglamorous but essential truths of empowerment, inviting listeners to find the courage to blaze their own trails on the journey we call life.
blissful hiker ❤︎ inspiring you to hike your own hike
Art of the State (Parks): Winter at Lake Maria
“It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.” —Charles Dickens
Part four in the series takes us on a late-winter hike through Lake Maria State Park, a meditation on seasonal transition and the quiet resilience of a landscape poised between winter’s hold and spring’s emergence.
1. Late February in Minnesota is often a slippery in-between.
2. Sun, sleet, and shadow trade places on glacial hills shaped by retreating ice.
3. Hawks scold, woodpeckers shriek, and winter quietly gives ground to mud, streams, and the smell of thawing earth.
4. At dusk, the sky burns purple and red at a log camper cabin where a fire catches in the stove, feeling especially good on a winter night in Minnesota.
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Alison Young is a fiscal year 2025 recipient of a Creative Individuals grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature; and by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
