Adventure · 7 min
The long walk nobody finishes
Europe has four trails over a thousand kilometres long. Almost everyone who starts one stops, and the ones who plan to stop have a better time than the ones who do not.
The GR20 crosses Corsica in about fifteen days and is routinely called the hardest waymarked trail in Europe. The Kungsleden runs 440 kilometres through Swedish Lapland. The Via Alpina crosses eight countries. The Peaks of the Balkans loops three. Between them they absorb tens of thousands of people a year, and the completion rates are worse than almost anybody admits — the GR20's is somewhere under half.
The reason is not fitness, mostly. It is that a long trail is a commitment made in advance by a person who has not yet met the weather, the blisters, the hut that turned out to be full, or the specific misery of a fourteenth consecutive day of carrying everything. The decision to stop is nearly always right and nearly always feels like failure, which is a bad combination.
The people who enjoy these trails most, in our experience, are the ones who never intended to finish. They pick a section — three days, four, a week — and they treat it as the trip rather than as an aborted attempt at something longer. They book the return leg before they leave. They are not carrying the psychological weight of a target.
This works because the sections are not equivalent. The GR20's northern half is the hard, spectacular one; the southern half is gentler and greener and a fine walk that nobody photographs. The Kungsleden's most-walked stretch is Abisko to Nikkaluokta, which is four days and includes the best of it. The Peaks of the Balkans is designed as a loop but the Valbona-to-Theth crossing is one day and delivers the landscape without the border permits.
There is a practical argument as well as a psychological one. Hut networks, mountain rescue and resupply all thin out the further you go from a road, and the risk profile of day eleven is not the risk profile of day two. A three-day section walked well, with a margin for weather, is a more competent piece of travelling than a fortnight abandoned on day nine.
None of this is an argument against thru-hiking. People who want the whole thing should have the whole thing, and the ones who finish describe something that a section cannot give them. It is an argument against treating the whole thing as the default and everything shorter as a compromise.
The trail does not know how far you meant to go. Only you are keeping score, and you are allowed to stop keeping it.