Barefoot in Stone Mountain State Park

What’s worse than hiking with the wrong shoes?

Hiking WITHOUT shoes.

Back in the day I was a big fan of the TV show Dual Survival. One of the outdoor enthusiasts on the program, Cody Lundin, trekked through all sorts of desolate landscapes…barefoot.

Deserts, forests, mountains, snowdrifts, but no shoes.

“Woo boy, that is some kind of badass,” I told myself. “I’m gonna have to try that!”

So on a blistering hot June day in 2013, I drove up to Stone Mountain State Park in the western part of NC, and started hiking barefoot.

If Cody Lundin could do it, then by God I could too!

I was feeling pretty macho for the first ten minutes or so. Strutting down the trail with not a shred of fabric between my feet and the ground.

A couple of hikers passed by with bewildered looks on their faces.

“It’s cool,” I told myself. Only it was not cool, it was about 90 degrees in the shade.

The further I hiked, the more my feet started to ache. The more my feet started to ache, the more I told myself that I was an idiot for hiking without shoes.

The problem when you’re hiking without shoes is that you can’t exactly just stop and put your shoes back on (duh!)

Needless to say, it was a looooooooooooooooooong walk back to the car. I couldn’t put my foot on the gas pedal for at least an hour, so there I sat in my Toyota Corolla, laughing and wincing until I got my strength back to the point where I could actually drive home.

Then I finally remembered that Lundin had told viewers that he had been living his life without shoes for 20 years.

Lesson learned. 😫