A couple of years back, I guided five hikers along the Laugavegur. All of them were over seventy. All of them had been serious hikers their whole lives, the kind of people who knew what a multi-day trek was supposed to feel like.

By the end of the trail, one of them had been pulled off the route with a bad knee and shuttled back to civilization. Another had picked up COVID somewhere along the way and was crossing rivers with a high fever for the final two days. He pushed through because at that point in the trail there is no real way out. You walk to the end. I more or less held him up at the deeper crossings. He made it.

When we finished, they told me it had been the hardest thing they’d ever done. Wonderful too, they said. But the hardest, by a

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