His job wasn’t difficult, but it wore on him all the same. He craved adventure. He had to do something. That something, it turned out, was hiking the venerable Appalachian Trail in an unbroken streak from Georgia to Maine and, that not being enough, paddling a green canoe from the headwaters of the Mississippi River all the way to Baton Rouge, La.
Jared McCallum hadn’t even backpacked before. The 28-year-old spent much of his high school life like any other kid in suburban America, hanging around with friends, whiling away the hours. Yet there he was, out in the wild, for 200 days.
“What I was looking for was to see who I was, and figure out what I wanted,” McCallum said recently, back in Florida after the long journey, sporting a wiry beard. “How else am I supposed to take care of other people if I don’t even know myself?”
After graduating from River Ridge High School in 2004, McCallum joined the Marine Corps and served two tours as a helicopter crew chief and door gunner in the Baghdad area of Iraq. Once home in 2009, he began to study horticulture science at the University of Tennessee.
There, a chance encounter planted a seed in his mind.
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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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