The Pacific Northwest Trail
A Sense of Direction: a 1,200 Mile Walk on the Pacific Northwest Trail
When Alex Maier graduated college he had a dream to become an outdoor filmmaker but no idea how to make it a reality. So he embarked on one of the toughest and most remote long-distance hikes he could find, the Pacific Northwest Trail. The idea was to make a movie about the hike and see if he had what it takes to follow his dream. It didn't take long before he realized that the 1,200 mile hike was about much more than just pursuing a certain career path. That much time in the wilderness forced him to confront himself and all his strengths and weaknesses. It totally changed his perception of life and how he wanted to live it. The PNT gave him a foundation that he would follow for the rest of his life.
The Pacific Northwest Trail is a 1,200-mile-long route from Glacier National Park in Montana to the western-most point of the contiguous United States in Olympic National Park, Washington. It is a patchwork of a primary route and many alternate routes, giving the hiker a choose your own adventure feel. Almost no one hikes the same route, especially because there isn't even a trail in some parts. The PNT offers true wilderness adventure and real solitude.
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A SENSE OF DIRECTION: ON THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST TRAIL is a 58 minute documentary
The Feature length film is available on these platforms
A Hiker’s Philosophy is more than a coffee table book. It tells the story of hiking the Pacific Northwest Trail and the philosophy I discovered on the hike. A Hiker’s Philosophy is a photobook that can serve as a nice coffee table book to flip through, or you can spend more time on the stories to go in depth into the philosophy that long-distance hiking provides.
It has been years since I hiked the Pacific Northwest Trail (PNT), and I’m still trying to figure out how to talk about it. People say things like, “Wow that must have been fun.” Or “I wish I had time to do that.” They look confused when I can’t give them a simple explanation of what it was like. After all it was just a three month long hike. I wish I could parse it down into a small conversation but a lot can happen in three months. I designed this book to try and answer that question in a small coffee table book. A Hiker’s Philosophy is a book that can be flipped through quickly or slowly contemplated. It took two years to process the events of those three months in 2015.
I have begun to extract the meaning from it all, and made it accessible for anyone interested in learning some of the lessons I did without actually hiking 1,200 miles. There’s a lot of metaphors to be found in the wilderness, because that was our original home. I’ve found that what works out there, works in modern society. Things are just more complicated in regular life compared to trail life but the rules are the same. That’s when I realized the hiker’s philosophy could be applied to things off the trail. To navigate regular life successfully, you need something much more abstract than a map. You need a properly calibrated perspective, and that’s what I found on the PNT.
