In just a few days, Barney “Scout” Mann will live out a dream 40 years in the making. Back in the 1980s, he was a law school student who dreamt of writing the next great American novel. It was always going to be called Journeys North, and it was always going to be rooted in humanity. But then, life started to unfold, he had his first kid, and he settled into a career as an attorney.
For decades, Mann kept this dream in the back of his mind, and after retiring, he decided to launch what he calls “Scout 3.0” and make it a reality. In 2020, he released Journeys North: The Pacific Crest Trail. It’s part PCT guidebook and part diary, following a series of 2007 PCT alumni and how the 2,650 miles changed them. That year was his 30-year anniversary with his wife, Sandy “Frodo” Mann, which the couple celebrated with a thru-hike of their own. Journeys North started as regular, in-real-time entries written on trailjournal.com during the hike. He says these journals were a crucial part of his trip: He was compelled to write down each story he heard, comparing forgetting to write to the discomfort that comes from a blister on your foot.
Although publishing a book may have been Scout’s dream, the timing was a bit of a nightmare. He released Journeys North just a few months into COVID, which effectively paused all in-person talks, Q&As, and promotional events with the hiking community. He did 15 Zoom book talks, including some hosted by famous shops like the Harvard Book Store and Powell’s Books.
“I sit here looking at the screen, and I know the vignette I told is moving, but I had to take it on faith,” Scout says. “I know what I just said was funny, but I have to sit there and take it on faith [that people laughed]. Maybe I’ll have a couple of side chat comments if I’m bold enough to look at them.”
Since its release, Journeys North became a 2020 Banff Mountain Book Competition Finalist, and it was featured on NPR’s “Living on Earth” podcast; we published an excerpt of it in our print magazine too. With Scout’s first in-person book talk for Journeys North coming up on December 5, we sat down to talk about the stories behind the story.
Barney Mann’s appreciation for the outdoors began long before his PCT thru-hike in 2007. He jokes that “Scout 1.0” began in 1965 as a director at All Nations Camp, where for $5 each, about 1,100 kids from underserved areas of East Los Angeles could spend a week each summer camping 2 miles off the PCT in the San Gabriel Mountains. The experience was many of the kids’ first time in the woods, he says, and a welcome respite from the realities of city life. When he returned from camp to his home in Culver City, West Los Angeles, he could see plumes of smoke rising off to the east from the Watts riots.
Scout’s early experiences in nature left him humbled, and he’s quick to admit that the ability to recreate peacefully outdoors doesn’t come as easily to everyone.
“I’m privileged. I’m a 72-year-old white male. I fell in love with backpacking because my parents took me to Boy Scout meetings, and I had the opportunity at age 13 to go on a 50-mile backpack in the Sierra Nevada.” Those early experiences taught him two things, he says. The first was to be at home in the outdoors. The second was to like himself, “which is no small thing.”
As a writer and a hiker, Scout is introspective, which seems to have inspired honesty in the people he met on the trail. The thru-hikers he met on the trail shared personal stories, usually prefacing them with a “can I tell you something?” Scout says he often wonders the cause of this openness, whether it came from the freedom of being outdoors or the fact that thru-hikers are usually going through a liminal time of their life.
“We’re all doing this adventure where we’re very vulnerable in a very different way,” Scout says. “Does the population [of thru-hikers] have more and deeper troubles that throw them to the trail? Or is it everyone has the same type of problems, and we put ourselves in the place where we’re willing to talk about them and bring them out in the open to someone else? I don’t have an answer.”
The thru-hikers Scout met on the trail—including Nadine, Tony, Blazer, and Dalton featured in the book—all had their own reasons to spend months walking through the wild. Some were working through trauma; others simply wanted to walk. In particular, Scout had 20 separate interviews with Blazer, who gave him full access to the journals she wrote beginning when she was as young as 8 years old.
“She’s one of these people in my life that her asking a question is like a hug, and I think she feels vice versa,” Scout says. “And there are times when I’m around her, and she’s talking to the people, and she starts telling a story, I find I know it better than she does.”
Deep, vulnerable conversations are a staple of any thru-hike. So, how does one, now well-versed accessing that level of empathy and thoughtfulness, reacclimate into a society where such topics might be taboo or just flat-out not welcome? Scout says it took him a month to settle back into the humdrum of regular life after finishing the PCT.
“Almost every day [on the trail], I’d have a conversation with someone else that I might have once a year with a best friend,” Scout says.
In a way, getting to share his story with other people is the final payoff of Scout’s hike.
“I dreamed for a long time of publishing a book like Journeys North,” he says. “Part of that was standing up in front of a crowd, me being at a podium, sharing it, and holding in my hands.”
The only thing that could top next week’s book talk? Stumbling upon someone in the airport reading Journeys North.
“I hope that person is ready to have someone kneeling in front of them and crying,” he says.
Want to hear from Mann himself? Check out the book talk for Journeys North in Boulder, Colorado’s Carsen Theater December 5 from 7 to 8 p.m. Tickets here.
From 2023
