Published April 2023
★★★
Lively travelogue of the author's time on the Pacific Crest Trail. I enjoyed this more than I expected—I'd thought from the subtitle that this might be largely focused on weight loss, but though Viken does talk about that (it was one of the reasons she decided to hike the PCT in the first place), it's treated in the book as more of an "I did all this walking and met these people and ate a ton of food and occasionally checked the scales and was satisfied with the trends and then got back to hiking".
Viken took a fairly relaxed approach to the PCT itself, which is nice to see. I've read more than my fair share of thru-hike memoirs in which the authors worry about whether or not to accept lifts, whether they should feel guilty about skipping sections, etc., but even if Viken had planned to hike straight from A to B, it didn't work out that way, and she ended up having a pretty flexible hike that sometimes took her off trail...or off onto another trail. She had the hiking experience already (with no specific evidence to support this, I like to think that that is the norm in Norway), so she was less learning the ins and outs of long walks and more learning what this long walk would look like for her, which is satisfying.
The downside of the relaxed approach is that the book gets a little more scattered in the back half—when it's unclear whether Viken will reach Canada or go off on a different adventure—but that's not so huge a quibble. A nice addition to the PCT thru-hike subgenre.
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