Author Claire Henley Miller presents t the story of one woman’s daring, deep, beautiful adventure along the Pacific Crest Trail, where she meets-and marries-her husband within thirty days of starting her journey.
Not many people can say they met and married their spouse within thirty days of beginning to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. But that’s exactly what happened to twenty-five-year-old Claire Henley Miller.
Mile 445 is the inspiring—and romantic—true story of how Miller left corporate life behind to embark on a 2,650-mile hike from Mexico to Canada. She is doing it alone, and the only gear she takes to survive the trek in the mountains of California, Oregon, and Washington fits inside her sixty-eight-liter backpack.
At the start of her five-month journey, she meets a handsome young man known on the trail as Big Spoon. Their paths keep crossing. The two quickly see a greater reason for their expedition than to explore the rigorous wilderness. They fall madly in love and get married.
But their adventure is just beginning.
Told with rich vitality, Miller’s quest unfolds in mystical ways through deadly desert storms, 14,000-foot ascents, and decisions that will affect the rest of her life. This bold tale of courage and determination brims with humor and suspense as it reveals life, love and loss in the rawness of the wild.
Mile 445 is the deep, thoughtful, romantic, adventurous and inspirational memoir of a woman who broke away from convention to follow her passion-no matter the risk.
When twenty-five-year-old Claire Henley Miller left her corporate job and its stuffy windowless cubicle to embark-alone-on the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail, she never imagined the uncharted worlds she would discover one step at a time.
Claire spend months planning her epic solo adventure, and now she must face the painful path of compromise as she tackles the demanding trail with Big Spoon. Faced with deadly storms, treacherous winds, and deep uncertainty, her entire dream is at stake.
Claire Henley Miller was born in Tennessee and has since lived in the Loire Valley of France, the Colorado Rockies, and now resides in Bend. In the spring of 2015 she quit her solid corporate job in Chattanooga, Tennessee, to fulfill a dream of backpacking the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga in creative writing and, in 2016, worked as a journalist for www.chattanoogan.com
She believes the world is not a home but a path, and she hopes her stories can help bring others on this great and rugged trail to a higher destination.
Claire is also the author of a children’s story The Land of the Living Sunrise, and a book of poetry, The Infinite.
The book is for sale locally at Dudley’s downtown.