Ideas in the Wild: How Ben Crawford Brought His Family Together in the Unlikeliest of Places

As his six children slept on the dirty floor of a women’s restroom while a blizzard howled outside, Ben Crawford had one thought: Have I gone too far? The next morning, Child Protective Services, along with an armed sheriff, arrived to ask the same question.

2,000 Miles Together is the story of the largest family ever to complete a thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail. On the trail, Ben battled not only the many dangers and obstacles presented by the wilderness — snowstorms, record-breaking heat, Lyme disease, overflowing rivers, toothaches, rattlesnakes, forest fires, and spending the night with a cult — but also his own self-doubt. In an effort to bring his family closer together, was he jeopardizing his future relationship with his kids? When the hike was done, would any of them speak to him again?

The Crawford family’s self-discovery over five months, thousands of miles, and countless gummy bears proves that there’s more than one way to experience life to the fullest. I recently caught up with Ben to learn more about his family’s journey and this remarkable book.

What happened that made you decide to write the book? What was the exact moment when you realized these ideas needed to get out there?

We made more than 100 videos of our hike on trail and thought that was going to be enough to tell the story and that there would be nothing else to talk about. But while we were hiking the trail, a couple dozen people encouraged us, saying, “You need to write a book about this.”

When we finished the trail, we realized because of how much our family had changed, that there were so many deeper experiences and lessons to share. Lessons that illustrate the radically different things that we believe that led us to even doing the AT.

We felt like we needed to get our story out there for all the people who said, “Oh, this is just your family. We could never do that. You guys are so special and different.” We wanted them to know that some of the things that we got on the AT are possible for them to get also.

What’s the biggest lesson you learned during your family’s journey on the AT?

You need to hike your own hike. That’s a phrase they say out on the trail that basically means: you need to go your own pace and be comfortable with your own gear and your own style of hiking. There’s no one exact way to hike or approach the trail.

This is really important because the hiking community is international, multicultural, multigenerational, and approaches the trail with different philosophies to life and hiking. Each person enjoys the AT in their own way. Instead of trying to meet other people’s expectations, you have to get comfortable with your own individuality and find fulfillment there.

This was really ramped up because having six kids on the hike meant we had extra concessions that needed to be made to look out for our kids’ safety and comfort, and for our family’s unique priorities. This meant saying no to a lot of things, whether it was hiking with friends or even satisfying people on the internet with popular opinion.

In the end, hiking and our own hike at our own pace made the experience so much more fulfilling. We also found that we made friends that we had traveled with for close to five months, that we were able to discover a friendship and compatibility that actually existed instead of forcing one, by trying to join other people on their own hike.

How will you apply this lesson in your life?

Moving forward, I’ll look at “hike your own hike” as a metaphor not just for the trail, but for all of life. Due to certain religious communities and models of parenting, at some points we’ve all felt pressure to raise our kids with one absolutely correct belief system that claims to trump all others. That led to us being judgmental to other people’s parenting methods, judgmental to past versions of ourselves, and judgmental even to our kids.

So hiking our own hike has led to us being able to accept change in our own life and not worry about the people from our past, whether they accept us or not. It has allowed us to open our lifestyle, to meet new people from the future that are more compatible with where we want to go and the pace and style that we want to hike (i.e. live life) with for the future.

Finally, this lesson has also made us less judgmental about our own kids and helped us encourage them to find their preferences and values and their own journey, and to ask the question of how we can support and understand them instead of judge them.