Into the woods
The fanfare along the roadside near Etna Summit, in Northern California, was minimal. No cheering crowd, no news crews, no breaking of finish-line tape. Just a small family celebration. And that’s how Jackson Parell ’18 wanted it.
A lanky 20-year-old with a wide smile and blond mop of hair, Parell had put foot to ground more than 10 million times over the past 10 months and in doing so had quietly become the youngest person to complete one of the rarest feats in distance hiking, the Calendar-Year Triple Crown. It’s a challenge that requires hikers to walk the entirety of the Appalachian Trail, the Continental Divide Trail and the Pacific Crest Trail between New Year’s Day and New Year’s Eve of a given year. That’s roughly 8,000 miles of trail across 22 states with an elevation gain equivalent to hiking to the summit of Mount Everest 100 times.
Parell documented his final day hiking with an Instagram post. The caption read: “It’s good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end,” a quote by writer Ursula K. Le Guin. Remarkable as the end of an experience, he says, the day itself held no more significance than the 294 days that preceded it. Each day started and ended in a sleeping bag with thousands of steps in between and provided fulfillment. The title Parell now carries, simply a byproduct of committing to something that provided clarity in uncertain times both for himself and the world at large.
The ambitious plan to complete the Triple Crown was born in the early stages of the pandemic. After contracting COVID-19 in 2020, Parell and a group of his Stanford classmates, including Sammy Potter, were sent off campus to quarantine. While in isolation in Jackson, Wyoming, the two sparked a friendship. Later that year, as Potter was back home in Maine and Parell was vacationing at his family’s cottage in New Hampshire, they reconnected, spending a day together hiking in the White Mountains. On that trip, Potter floated the idea of devoting a year to doing little else but hiking. Within weeks, Parell and Potter had committed to it, and for the next seven months they trained, planned their routes and researched every facet of what the journey would entail. On Jan. 1, 2021, Parell and Potter set off, eventually hiking through fatigue, bouts of giardia, blisters, boredom and even wildfires to become just the 11th and 12th people ever to complete the Calendar-Year Triple Crown.
We caught up with Parell, now back at Stanford, to hear about his adventure and how he might never have taken the first step without his Exeter experience.
By the time we got to a connector road, the temperature had dropped another 10 to 15 degrees and it was snowing, so we decided to sleep in a public restroom. It’s funny. Earlier that day I had been in this incredibly euphoric state watching the most beautiful sunset; then I’m sleep-ing on the floor of a public restroom. I think that kind of captures what the experience was like. In the same day you can have both of those things happen.
Was it difficult reassimilating to life as a student? I would be lying if I said it wasn’t a really tough adjustment. The way I was able to approach life out there is so much different than when I’m at school. [At Stanford,]
I feel pulled in every which direction, much like I did at Exeter. It was nice to have a single goal and a very clear way to accomplish that goal, which was just to get up every morning and walk.