“Emily Ford thought she knew winter. Then she thru-hiked the Ice Age Trail. In February. With only a sled dog, Diggins.”
Post-holing. It’s when you hike through deep snow without skis or snowshoes. Imagine stomping your leg into crusted snow up to your knee, then doing the same with your other leg, then pulling the first leg straight up, then doing it again. And again. And again.
“I thought I knew how to persevere,” Emily Ford ’15 says. Then she post-holed in below zero temps for days, sometimes at a rate of half a mile per hour. “There were times I would just look at Diggins and say, “If you have to pull my body through this forest, don’t let me stop hiking.”
They did not stop. Emily and sled dog Diggins—named for Olympic gold medal skier Jessie Diggins, daughter of Deb (Robinet) Diggins and Clay Diggins, both Class of 1982—persevered through everything the Upper Midwest in February can throw at you. And after approximately 1200 miles and 69 days, including a weeklong cold snap that dropped temps to 30 below, Ford became the first woman, first person of color, and first openly queer person to solo winter thru-hike Wisconsin’s Ice Age Trail. She is only the second person on record to do so.
As the head gardener at Glensheen Mansion in Duluth, she’s as busy as her bees outside from April through October. In winter, she puts gardens and beehives to bed. Last year, when she heard about the Ice Age Trail (which traces glacial retreat), the
geology nerd in her awoke. She packed her gear, fired up her Instagram, borrowed Diggins, and went to meet her winter.
Every day on the trail was a surprise encounter. “I thought I knew winter,” she says. “But there’s a difference between going to your home and putting up your home on a negative 30 degree day. Does nature want you to survive? Honestly, I don’t know.”
A whole community of people did. Many heard about her—through news stories, community groups, trail clubs, schools, and social media. Her Instagram followers blew up. On the trail, friends and strangers offered up food, water, encouraging notes, money, and their homes. A whole class of fourth graders came out to meet her.
She embraced this new community with characteristic gusto. “At Gustavus, I learned what community looks like at an extremely aggressive scale,” she laughs. “I learned how to love on people really well.” Though she solo hikes, “Building a community is important to me. Especially the trail community itself.”
A community of Ford lovers gathered at Interstate State Park on March 6 of last year to watch her take her final steps. As she walked off the Ice Age Trail, “I stumbled onto my purpose,” she says, at least as she understands it today, in this moment in her life. “It’s to tell people that the outdoors are open to you. To say, ‘Yes, and…’ Women, people of color, queer people, everyone really, I want to show everybody that you can go out and do things that are difficult. You can do anything.”