“We were hiking over mountain ranges to get away from all the war,” Pol says. “We were running over mountain ranges while we were being shot at. Landmines were everywhere. We were hiking for our lives, pretty much.”
His family had managed to survive the late 1970s under the Khmer Rouge, the brutal Communist regime that killed more than a quarter of Cambodia’s population. But when war broke out between Cambodia and Vietnam, the Pol family fled on foot to Thailand. Hiking was something you did out of fear and desperation, not for fun.
After nearly a decade shuttling between refugee camps near the Thai border, the family was finally sponsored to come to the United States. They resettled as refugees in Lowell, Massachusetts, which has one of the largest populations of Cambodians outside of Cambodia.
As soon as he finished high school and got his driver’s license, he had the “freedom to go hiking every weekend.” He got his routine down to a science so he could spend every minute of his weekends on Mt. Monadnock and other peaks in New Hampshire and Maine.
“After work on a Friday, I would drive up to the trailhead of the mountain that night,” he says. “I would either sleep in my car at the trailhead, or I would park the car and pitch my tent by the trailhead, so when I woke up that Saturday morning I was just ready to climb that mountain, first thing.”
The mountains have become a cure-all for Pol: “To me, the mountain is my vacation, my doctor, my therapist,” he says. “When I’m happy I go hiking. When I’m sad I go hiking.”
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I am Jeff Clark, founder of Internet Brothers, producer of this blog, and passionate about hiking. I live in Western NC near the Blue Ridge and Great Smoky Mountains. Pisgah and Nantahala National Forests are just out my door, so the content will focus on these areas, but let me know what you would like to see on the site. 
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