Hitched in Her Hiking Boots: How one UTC grad met and married her soulmate on a hiking trip

Three years ago, from her downtown office window, Claire Henley Miller watched the mockingbirds flit among the willow oaks. She longed to be outside, too, hiking the steep trails of Lookout Mountain or backpacking through the Great Smoky Mountains.

At age 23, after graduating from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga followed by a year-long move to Colorado, Miller had recently returned to Chattanooga. But instead of climbing trails, she found herself climbing the corporate ladder.

“I felt imprisoned,” says Miller, whose dream was to be an adventure writer. “I wanted to break free of the societal expectations I’d put on myself. I’ve always been a structured person – that’s why office hours worked for me for a while. But the thing is, you also have to be a structured person to thru-hike, too.”

Miller had first learned about the Pacific Crest Trail, a 2,650-mile hiking trail stretching from the Mexican to the Canadian border, while in Colorado. Over the next couple years, the idea kept reappearing, like a mirage floating beyond her office window.

In January 2015, when Miller turned 25, she told herself, “Something has to change.” That April she quit her job and bought a one-way plane ticket to the PCT’s southern terminus in California.

“I wasn’t trying to find myself. I wasn’t trying to get over anything,” Miller says. She says she wanted only to have an adventure. She hoped to rewrite her life like a good book, featuring unexpected plot twists and a new cast of characters.

“On the trail, they say one day equals a month. You connect with people so quickly because you are so raw. You stink; your hair is greasy; you’re not wearing makeup. There is no hiding,” Miller says.

Still, not in her wildest dreams could she have imagined that all within 30 days of beginning the trek, she would meet her soul mate, Caleb “Big Spoon” Miller, that she would marry him on the trail and then continue to thru-hike the PCT with her new husband – a story she recounts in her newly published memoir Mile 445: Hitched in Her Hiking Boots.

Miller admits, at times, she felt uneasy about how it all happened. Not just about marrying an essential stranger, but rather, she remembers thinking, “Surely I’m not doing this for the story. There was no doubt in my mind that I loved him, but then I thought, ‘Am I exploiting our love and our marriage?’ I just couldn’t believe this was a story I got to tell. It was too good to be true.”

Miller was not alone in her apprehension. She had been keeping a blog chronicling her journey. Her posts had amassed many followers, many of whom championed Miller for being a strong, independent female adventurist. But when she introduced her love interest to the narrative, Miller recalls that some of her ardent supporters stopped leaving comments.

Moreover, prior to her marriage, Miller had been hiking with two women, Saltlick and Pandora, whom she’d met on the trial. The trio called themselves the “Tally-Hos.”

“These people had become my family,” Miller says, but her relationship with Big Spoon soon caused a rift among the women. Following the wedding, Saltlick and Pandora went their own way.

“Everything changed after the marriage,” says Miller, whose nuptials come not at the end of her book, but right in the middle. The second half of Miller’s book recounts the emotional highs and lows which followed – and which were rivaled in intensity only by the 14,000-foot peaks and desert storms the newlyweds endured.

“We were like, what have we done?” Miller remembers.

One year after completing the trail, Miller says she has only one big regret, though, she admits, “I got way more from this than I ever thought I would. I went in as a solo adventurist and I came out with a husband.” Besides, she adds, her adventure-blog-turned-love-story attracted a new audience. Ultimately, she adapted those blog entries into her self-published memoir, which was released in August 2016 and has already sold over 2,000 copies.

But back to that regret.

“I wish I’d bought hiking shoes one size bigger,” Miller says.

Postscript: Miller and Big Spoon (aka Caleb) now reside in Bend, Oregon. They are expecting their first child (aka Tiny Spoon) in April 2017.