Photo Companion Introduction

Hello friends,

If you’re reading this after making it through the entire desert block of my blog posts (well done, by the way—that’s an awful lot of words from my most amateur stage of writing), the next part of the story is my book, Crunch: A Million Snowy Steps Along the Pacific Crest Trail. (available on Amazon here)

Crunch covers 300 miles of snow from Kennedy Meadows to Sonora Pass, which was the section of trail in 2017 that had been hit the hardest by the winter of 2016/17, and also coincided with the most dangerous river crossings inside North Yosemite.

The Sierra blog posts are going away for now. I wish there was a reasonable way to insert all my photos right into my book for people to enjoy, but the costs to do that as an independent author are astronomical. Even inserting them into an ebook makes the ebook comically expensive, to the point I don’t think many people would be interested. So this Photo Companion was my solution. The blog posts have been converted into a string of captioned pictures and videos that line up with each of the chapters in Crunch, so if you’d prefer reading along with some visuals, you’ll have some way to do so.

You may have noticed there’s nothing for Chapter One through Three, and that’s not a mistake. Those are setup chapters without any real relevant photos to include, so the Photo Companion starts at Chapter Four.

If you’re on the fence about a book purchase, check out what thru-hiking legend Heather “Anish” Anderson had to say about it:

Crunch takes you on an epic traverse of the snowbound High Sierra that you won't soon forget. Winsor shares with incredible detail the drudgery, pain, and aching beauty of immersing oneself in a seemingly impossible adventure solely for adventure's sake. Balanced with wit and punctuated by interludes of life before the trail, Crunch is a strong addition to the adventure book cannon.

Anish is the real deal. In 2018, she was the first female to hike all three of America’s big thru-hikes (PCT, CDT, and AT)—8,000 miles of hiking—between March and November.

Woah.

She’s a great author, she’s been National Geographic’s Adventurer of the Year, she has self-supported (so no help outside her own backpack) fastest known times (FKT’s) on the Pacific Crest Trail, Appalachian Trail, and the Arizona Trail. Her FKT on the PCT was 60 days. It took me 144 at full-throttle.

Now—that’s not to say my book is going to make everyone happy. Just like in my blogs, I make no bones about what I consider a thru-hike, and my general disdain for the soft ethics and raging egotism I saw along my trek to Canada. One figurehead of the PCT I sent my book to started off enthusiastic to review it—and then ended up refusing to endorse it (although, they did compliment my writing as “excellent”), because I was condescending to hikers who—in my humble opinion—deserved much worse than a bit of condescension.

Fair enough.

So much cute. So much poop.

So I hope you enjoyed what you read in my blogs up until this point (maybe even enough to consider a book purchase here??). The next step will be working on an audiobook of Crunch, then converting all of the desert portion into a second book, a “prequel” if you will. One day, I’d like my entire thru-hike to be a series of four or five books sitting on our living room shelf.

That might take a while in between all these diaper changes. She just won’t stop pooping.

I’m blown away by the support I’ve been given this far. If you enjoyed my blogs, or enjoyed Crunch, please share it far and wide. My success as an author depends mostly on word of mouth. Mel says I can’t get naked on social media yet.

I’m not sure she understands how marketing works.

All the love to anyone who’s read a single sentence of my writing, it means the world to me!

-Daniel