Jessica 'Dixie' Mills | Triple Crowner - AT, PCT, CDT Thru-Hiking | Tom Rowland Podcast Ep. 32

Yesterday I sat down with Jessica "Dixie" Mills in Opelika, Alabama for Episode 32 of the podcast, and I went in honestly humbled. Across the table from me was a woman who, in roughly four years, had walked almost 8,000 miles. The AT in 2015. The PCT in 2017. The CDT in 2018. A Triple Crown of long-distance backpacking — one of the smaller clubs in outdoor recreation.

The thing that hit me hardest is the starting point. Before she stepped onto the Appalachian Trail, Dixie had never slept a single night in a tent on a backpacking trip. Her first three backpacking trips of her life were the AT, the PCT, and the CDT. I've thought about that for the last 24 hours.

From Auburn Engineer to the Appalachian Trail

Dixie's path to the Triple Crown doesn't start at a trailhead. It starts in Northwest Alabama, on a childhood trip to Newfound Gap on the North Carolina-Tennessee border, when she pointed at a sign and asked her mom what it said. Her mom told her, "Well, that's the Appalachian Trail, and that's where people walk from Georgia to Maine." Dixie's response: "I wanna do that. Let's go right now."

Her mom said one day, when she was grown. Dixie filed it. The next phase looked like every recipe she'd been handed — Auburn for a biosystems engineering degree, a job with the Alabama Department of Agriculture, a move to Denver to work in the oil field because she wanted to be near the Colorado mountains. A friend got her the position and told her, "Are you an engineer? Then you're gonna figure it out."

She figured it out. Then one morning, on the exact recipe everyone tells you to follow, she didn't feel anything she was supposed to feel. The line she said in our conversation that I keep coming back to: "I woke up one day playing house with two dogs in Denver, Colorado working in the oil field, and I was like, why am I not happy? I've done the exact recipe that you're supposed to do to find success supposedly, but I didn't feel happy or really successful."

What she did next is the move most people skip. She ran her life backwards. "I started kinda going back to the roots of life and going, when I was, like, young and innocent and before I was told I was supposed to do all these certain things in life, what did I wanna do then?" The first answer was the sign at Newfound Gap. The pivot was fast — she knew around August she was going to quit, quit in November, was on trail by March. Less than a year of prep. She cashed in the small retirement she'd built, with the penalty, and went.

The Triple Crown, and the First Backpacking Trip of Her Life

For anyone new to this world, here's the frame I had to learn from Dixie. The Triple Crown is the unofficial distinction of completing all three U.S. long-distance scenic trails — the AT (Georgia to Maine, ~2,190 miles), the PCT (Mexico to Canada, ~2,650 miles), and the CDT (Mexico to Canada along the spine of the Rockies, ~3,100 miles). Around 8,000 miles, broken across three thru-hikes. Dixie corrected me in real time on her AT mileage: "Two thousand five hundred one hundred and eighty nine point two miles." She knows it to the decimal.

Her strategy was to ease in. The AT first, the PCT next, then the hardest. In her words: "I'd always heard that the Continental Divide Trail was the hardest of the three, because it's the least traveled and easier to get lost and grizzly bears." She built up to it.

Most thru-hikers spend a year shaking out gear on weekend trips. Dixie didn't. "I had been on day hikes and stuff like that, but I had never put everything in my pack and walked with it. The first night I was cooking my dinner, I hadn't used my stove until that moment." Her prep was reading — a lot — and good reviews. The thing she said that applies to a lot more than backpacking: "I think a lot of through hikes end on the couch while people are planning them because they get analysis paralysis. If I ask you right now, what do you want to eat for dinner a week and three days from now? You don't have any clue."

The other couch-killer, in her telling, is needing a partner. Nobody she asked actually came. She went alone — the move that infuriated her dad — and within a week she had a tramily of ten hikers, ages 18 to 40s. The lesson she landed on: you're alone in the sense that you carry your own pack and pick your own pace. You are surrounded the whole time by a moving population of strangers heading the same direction.

That AT thru-hike ran about six and a half months. Plantar fasciitis in Pennsylvania. A trip home for a sibling's graduation. Then, while she was on trail, her dog back home in Alabama got sick. Dixie came home. "She actually passed away, like, two hours before I made it home." What she said about the days that followed won't compress: "I can make this as an excuse to be like, oh, well, it kinda derailed things. She's gonna be gone whether I'm here or whether I'm there. Nature in general is a great place to deal with things like that. A great place to beat yourself up and then get over it."

She went back. She summited Katahdin in October on a snowy, icy peak without microspikes because she didn't yet know what those were. Stepping off that mountain, she said she'd have told anyone she was done with long trails. Two months later, she was itching to start the next one.

The PCT, a River That Almost Made Her an Obituary, and How She Funds the Trail Life

The PCT is where Dixie's game changed. The trail is longer than the AT, less crowded, more exposed, with a 700-mile desert section. 2017 was one of the highest snow years recorded — "like a 200% snow year or something in the Sierra Nevada." The issue isn't the snow underfoot. It's what the snow turns into when it melts. In her words: "When snow melts, it turns into raging rivers where it used to be like a cute little trickle of a stream." She literally swam two of them. One of them, she was alone.

The morning her group went up and over one of the high Sierra passes, the Australian guy she'd waited up for looked down into the next valley and bailed — turned back 12 miles to the road. She pushed on, by herself, into a river crossing she'd convinced herself she could handle. She couldn't. "I made it halfway, and I ended up turning back. I was very glad to get back. It used to make me nauseous to think about it. I was like, well, this is where I become an obituary in the paper. Like, this is where I become a mystery."

She got back to the bank "and I just laid there and cried like a little girl for a while." The part I keep thinking about: she camped right there. Inside thirty minutes, four other hikers showed up, considered the crossing, and made the same call. They waited until morning, when the water level dropped because the snow upstream had refrozen overnight. Those four guys became her Sierra tramily — "they were like my brothers." I named it out loud on the show: "It is funny how the worst days sometimes can turn into really good ones."

Dixie could afford the PCT because the YouTube channel was finally paying. She'd worked four jobs through 2016 to bank the runway. Her rule of thumb for trail spend is the cleanest budget benchmark I've heard from anyone who has done all three: "I wanted to know that I would have $1,000 per month. That's kind of the rule of thumb on the AT and potentially even the PCT."

For gear, what worked for her is something I'd never heard of. Backpacking-gear companies started reaching out, offering free gear in exchange for reviews. Dixie didn't want the obligation. What worked for her was putting exactly the gear she wanted on a public Amazon wish list, and letting viewers — "private donors or private sponsors" — purchase the items. Honest reviews. Funded gear. Layered with affiliate links, Patreon, and the Homemade Wanderlust Facebook group of 25,000 to 30,000 members. What I said out loud, because it really did land for me: "You're basically a professional backpacker. That did not exist. Now it's like, you could be a professional anything."

The CDT: a Mountain Lion, Lightning at 13,000 Feet, and What She Tells People Who Want to Go

Dixie finished the PCT in October and was on the CDT by April. The two encounters she gets asked about most both happened on the CDT.

The mountain lion. New Mexico desert, cattle country, early in the trip. She was moving downhill into some trees when something jumped up off the dirt near the trail. "I'm like, is that a calf? Is that a big dog? Then I realized, that is a mountain lion." About 20 feet away. She was alone. She tried to look big and sound like her grandfather. The cat stared. Flicked its tail. Then she remembered the harmonica in her shoulder-strap pocket — she'd been teaching herself Mary Had a Little Lamb. She pulled it out and blew on it, on the theory that something the cat had never heard might scare it off. The encounter ran a minute and a half. She filmed it on her phone. The lion ran off. Her response, walking on: "I was like, oh, this is setting the tone for how the trip's gonna go."

The lightning. Colorado, above 13,000 feet, two or three miles from the nearest treeline. Dixie heard something buzzing and thought it was an insect. Then she realized it was the tips of her trekking poles. Her hair was standing up. Distant thunder. In her words: "I was like, this is not funny. He's like, it'll be funny later. I'm like, if we live." They ran for the trees. I've seen the same physics on a flats skiff — a graphite rod in a lightning environment buzzes when you lift it. Boats that get struck routinely take the hit through the rod tips. She had two graphite trekking poles raised slightly above her head. Identical mechanism.

She finished the CDT in 2018. Three trails. Roughly 8,000 miles. A Triple Crown.

The question every reader is wondering — what do you tell people who want to do what you did — landed late in our conversation. Her answer is two parts. The first is about energy: "You don't have all the energy in the world. Learning to focus on things that you can actually influence or change in your life. I can be mad because it's raining while I'm hiking, but that's not gonna change." The trail gives you a thousand things you don't control. Fighting them is the fastest way to end up off it. I think that applies to a lot more than the trail.

The second is the analysis-paralysis fix. Take one small step. "With backpacking, go out and buy a water filter. It's about $40. That's your first piece of gear. If you're wanting to start some other business — get that first piece of equipment. Show yourself, like, I am committed to this thing." The line she said twice — once early, once at the end — is the one I've been quoting since the mics came down: "If you don't design your life how you want it to be, somebody else will. You have to take control of it, and you have to drive it. If you don't, then it'll be driven for you."

Final Thoughts From Me

I came out of this one with a different idea of what a thru-hike is. Going in, I think I was treating it like an outdoor athletic accomplishment — a mileage thing, a fitness thing. What Dixie laid out was something else entirely. The Triple Crown wasn't the end of a path she'd been training for. It was the path itself, the way you find out what you actually want by walking far enough away from the recipe everybody handed you.

The piece I keep going back to is the engineer-in-Denver morning. The recipe was perfect. Dog. House. Salary. Mountains out the window. The reaction wasn't satisfaction. It was the question she asked herself: why am I not happy? What I respect is that she didn't dress that question up. She quit. Less than a year later she was on the AT with gear she'd never used. The pull is real for a lot of us — and most of us file it under "someday." Dixie put a date on it.

The water-filter line is the one I'm going to be repeating for a while. Take one $40 step today. The decision compounds. The trail itself does the rest.

Key Takeaways

• Triple Crown: AT (2015), PCT (2017), CDT (2018) — roughly 8,000 miles total.
• Zero overnight backpacking experience before the AT. Her first three backpacking trips of her life were the three Triple Crown trails.
• Cost rule of thumb: roughly $1,000 per month on trail to be comfortable on the AT or PCT.
• What worked for her funding-wise: a public Amazon wish list (viewers as "private sponsors"), affiliate links, Patreon, and the Homemade Wanderlust Facebook group.
• The Sierra river crossing in 2017's ~200% snow year almost took her under — she turned back midway, camped on the bank, and waited until morning when the snowmelt slowed.
• The CDT delivered a mountain-lion standoff — a harmonica playing Mary Had a Little Lamb ended it — and a near-lightning-strike at 13,000 feet.
• Her core advice: take one small step today, learn to focus only on the things you can change, and accept that the loudest pushback will often come from the people who love you most.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Jessica "Dixie" Mills?

Long-distance backpacker and creator of the Homemade Wanderlust YouTube channel. From Opelika, Alabama, biosystems-engineering degree from Auburn, previously worked for the Alabama Department of Agriculture and then in the Colorado oil field before leaving engineering to thru-hike full time.

What is the Triple Crown of backpacking?

The unofficial distinction of completing all three major U.S. long-distance scenic trails: the AT (~2,190 miles), the PCT (~2,650 miles), and the CDT (~3,100 miles). Roughly 8,000 miles total. Dixie completed the AT in 2015, the PCT in 2017, and the CDT in 2018.

How much does it cost to thru-hike the AT or PCT?

Dixie's rule of thumb is roughly $1,000 per month on trail to be comfortable on either trail. You can do it for less if you're tight, or significantly more. Pre-trail gear costs are a separate item.

Did Jessica Mills have backpacking experience before the AT?

No. She had done day hikes but had never spent a night on a backpacking trip before the AT. Her first three backpacking trips of her life were the AT, the PCT, and the CDT.

What is Homemade Wanderlust?

Dixie's YouTube channel, website (homemadewanderlust.com), Patreon, and social media presence. She also runs a Homemade Wanderlust Facebook group with roughly 25,000 to 30,000 members.

How did Dixie handle the mountain lion on the CDT?

Alone in the New Mexico desert, she tried to look big, hollered, then pulled out a harmonica and played Mary Had a Little Lamb. The cat stared for a minute and a half, then ran off. She filmed the encounter on her phone.

What happened with the lightning at 13,000 feet?

Above 13,000 feet in Colorado, two or three miles from treeline, Dixie heard her graphite trekking poles humming and felt her hair standing up. She and her hiking partner ran for the trees and missed the strike. Graphite rods do the same thing in a lightning environment on a flats skiff — that's how a lot of boats that get struck take the hit, through the rod tips.

How does Dixie deal with the fear and the loneliness on a long trail?

Her framing is that you carry your own pack and pick your own pace, but you are surrounded by a moving population of other thru-hikers heading the same direction. She had a tramily of ten within a week of starting the AT. After her worst day on the PCT, four hikers walked up to the same river within thirty minutes and became her Sierra tramily.

Did Jessica Mills meet a bear on the AT?

Yes. A bear bluff-charged her on the Appalachian Trail. The full story is on the episode in her words.

What does Dixie tell people who want to thru-hike but haven't started?

Two things. First, focus your energy on the things you can actually influence — fighting the rain or the terrain you didn't choose is the fastest way to end up off trail. Second, take one small step today: buy the water filter. That single $40 piece of gear is the commitment that breaks the analysis paralysis.

Has Jessica Mills been on the Tom Rowland Podcast more than once?

Yes. Episode 32 is her first appearance. She returns later for Episode 123, where we revisit the Homemade Wanderlust story with more trails behind her and the business side of the channel in focus.