Emily's PCT honor run

Eugene woman who lost her mom sets 460-mile record to remember her 'North Star'

Emily at sunrise on her first morning after starting at the Oregon-California border

EMILY HALNON AND I have 460 things in common — each of the miles on the Oregon portion of the Pacific Crest Trail.

Beyond that, we couldn’t be more different. I’m an old man; she’s a young woman. I’m a native Oregonian; she’s a transplant from Vermont. I hiked Oregon; she ran it. And I took essentially a month; she took a few hours more than a week.

When the Eugene woman reached the Bridge of the Gods on Aug. 8, 2020, she set the world record for the Fastest Known Time for that stretch of trail: Seven days, 19 hours and 23 minutes.

But if that’s impressive, what’s more impressive is this: she did it with a broken heart.

Halnon’s 2024 book, To the Gorge: Running, Grief, Resilience & 460 Miles on the Pacific Crest Trail is a tribute to the strength of one woman’s spirit. She did the run after losing a mother to cancer and watching her brother’s wife, 35, slide toward a similar end. And somewhere in this tangle of trauma, she lost her dog, Brutus, to the disease, too.

The book released May 2024.

I can’t begin to relate to the pain Emily went through. I was 42 when my father died at 72 of congestive heart failure, 66 when my mother died at 93 after experiencing arterial fibrillation. But Emily’s effervescent mother, a teacher, seemed cut from the same cloth as my own mother. And when she wrote of her last PCT “pit stop,” at Wahtum Lake, just south of the Columbia River, I envisioned a teenage Warren Welch fishing it with his buddies, having hitchhiked to the trailhead from Portland, a pack of Lucky Strikes wrapped in his shirtsleeve.

Even if our relationship with parents hasn’t been perfect, death makes all things new, including our reverence and regrets for those who raised us.

To be honest, that, as much as the trail, grabbed me about Emily’s book. Yes, this is a story about an amazing physical feat. And as someone who’s hiked that stretch, I enjoyed having “I-can-see-that” context. But, really, this is a book about grief and how to endure our greatest losses.

“Dealing with two life-threatening, and ultimately life-ending, cancer diagnoses in our family definitely felt like one of those things that should be against the laws of the universe,” she told me as we sat outside the Hideaway Bakery. “It was too much. But that’s, of course, not how life actually works, and it was our reality. It made me appreciate why we need the word ‘senseless’ in our vocabulary.”