Published May 13, 2026 03:30AM
Kamryn Renae had just taken mushrooms in Brazil when she decided to hike 2,600 miles from Mexico to Canada.
It was late February this year, and Carnival, Brazil’s countrywide party to celebrate Lent, was coming to a close. Renae was weeks away from her 22nd birthday and wondering what she should do next. She’d spent much of the last year living in a Subaru Forester, chasing the sunshine between Florida and Washington. Diagnosed at age 12 with Hashimoto’s Disease, an autoimmune disorder that leads to hypothyroidism and an aversion to cold, Renae was forever on the hunt for somewhere warm but not too hot, so that she could comfortably crash in the back of her car at some roadside pullout or, at worse, a Home Depot parking lot. Did she really want to repeat that?
In her hostel, Renae remembered watching Wild, the 2014 Reese Witherspoon movie that had (along with Cheryl Strayed’s book of the same name) already inspired thousands of people to try the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT). She looked up the trail online, gasped when she saw it took many people five months to finish, and, buoyed by the microdose of psilocybin, decided in an instant that’s exactly what she would do. She searched for permits and found that one of the few that remained was for a March 26—that is, her 22nd birthday.
“A lot of decisions, I just have this intuitive feeling—that’s what I should be doing,” she told me in early May. “I knew this is the year I should be doing that.”
Renae soon flew home to Ohio and told her mom, a former schoolteacher, that she only had one birthday wish this year: she needed a ride to Southern California, to the southern start of the PCT. No one balked. Since she split from small-town Ohio four years earlier, her life had been a series of unplanned adventures, from excursions to Thailand and Brazil to those cross-country car trips.
Still, this one was different—a 2,600-mile hike across three states, through rattlesnake and mountain lion territory, across mountain ranges she truly did not know existed. She’d been on some day hikes but never on a long trail, and had been camping in Ohio but only for a night. Renae barely researched her gear but instead carefully coordinated her outfits—pink and black sports bras and booty shorts, matching pants and jackets whenever possible—and contemplated how best to maintain a skincare routine in the woods.
After a three-day drive, her mother dropped her off the morning she turned 22. She immediately discovered she was a strong hiker, churning out 25-mile days without knowing “ultralight gear” was really a thing, an impressive pace for someone who is just starting. In fact, when we first spoke on a call, Renae was 566 miles into the PCT, taking several days off in Tehachapi, California, so that some snow might melt in the Sierra Nevada before she continued.
“It’s so much more than I thought it would be—a whole different world, a whole culture,” said Renae, whose trail name is Flamingo because of, well, pink. “It feels right, to be waking up every day and finding your water sources. Civilization has separated us from the Earth, which is weird, because we’re part of Earth. This seems very natural, but it’s weird because it’s not how we’ve been civilized.”
Every year, the United States’ long trails produce a handful of micro-celebrities, their status boosted by Instagram stories or TikTok shorts about endurance or mishaps or both. Maybe they’re breaking their bodies by pursuing a Fastest Known Time, trying to complete the country’s three most famous trails in a single year, or hiking alongside kids or a cute dog. This year, Renae is the star.
On April 5, after she’d finished hiking her first 109 miles, she posted an Instagram video where she painted the nails of her bandaged and dirty toes pink, explained the beauty of trail magic, talked about her makeup routine, and pranced around like a dancer. She did so all in a coquettish voice, all in clothes more associated with shopping malls than trail towns.
The Internet bit: in the last two weeks of April alone, she gained 33,000 more Instagram followers, a pace that would put her around 600,000 by the time she reaches Canada. Interview Magazine called her “the princess of the PCT.” Her posts were not only unexpected, funny, stylish, and sexy, but they also sparked conversations about what it meant to be prepared or unprepared for such an adventure, and what it means to be outdoors as a single woman wearing pink, trying to look cute because you like it.
In the comments, some men have accused her of faking the effort; others have levied the fact that she makes money through OnlyFans—a subscription-based video-on-demand service in which creators ranging from adult entertainers to musicians monetize via monthly fees and tips—as evidence she shouldn’t be taken seriously. Her hike is an unintended referendum on what society thinks women should get away with outside, how we expect them to show up to spaces stereotypically associated with grit, tenacity, and masculinity. Why can’t you wear pink, pose nude, and hike for real?
“It just shows how men don’t take women and femininity seriously. They don’t think women can just, like, go and do something,” Renae said, the baby-voice affectation of her viral videos gone. “Men are very insecure and can’t handle the fact that a girl can be cute and feminine and go do stuff that’s hard, in the woods.”
Four years ago, not long after Renae turned 18, she knew she needed to get out of Granville, Ohio.
She was the oldest of four kids, the rest boys. She and her twin brother had been held back in first grade, and, as her family bounced around Ohio, she grew increasingly restless. She disliked the confinement of the classroom, and the escalating sense that her value was based only on her grades and what college they’d get her into. Sports offered an outlet for those expectations and concomitant social anxiety. She played basketball and tennis, rode horses, and ran the first leg in a winning 4×400 relay team. Her parents sometimes coached her teams.
“I’m a very energized person,” she said, “but when I was in school, I could barely stay awake.”
Renae wondered if maybe small-town Ohio was just stifling, so she put in the work to graduate high school early, long before her twin. She searched online for “peaceful places” to live and settled on Bellingham, Washington, a small city on the edge of the ocean, the Cascades, and Canada. She moved in with a random guy, got a job at Wendy’s, and dyed her hair blond, ready to exit what she called her dark red “emo phase” of Ohio. Her hair fell out because of the competing dye jobs, so here she was, a hairless teenager in a new city, walking to Wendy’s every day.
That did not last, in part because she got in trouble every time she slipped on a jacket, trying to fend off the fast-food air-conditioning that Hashimoto’s could make feel like a blizzard. She tried a half-dozen different jobs: health coach, YMCA after-school counselor, tea shop employee. She even tried college but found herself missing class simply because she kept meandering through campus. None of it stuck.
When she went to cosmetology school, toting hairless mannequins through the city as her own hair finally began growing out, she began to understand why. This work was supposed to be creative, but she was required to dress in black, as if this were a school for a funeral home, not a beauty salon. She wanted an outlet that felt unfettered, so she started a YouTube channel.
“I had moved into an apartment and decorated it all cute. I’ve always been shy, but, at the same time, I like to express myself and feel social in that sense,” she told me. “I wanted to make these videos to document myself. It just kind of became my art form.”
The videos were candid and disarming life updates, where anything seemed to be fair game. She talked about period remedies and chlamydia medication, marathon-training regimens and her love of pickles. She sewed outfits and adopted a hamster, trounced around in her underwear, and read on her bed in next to nothing. As the viewership started to rise, she noticed something: “The audience I attracted was a lot of men, a lot of middle-aged men,” she said. “Why not start an OnlyFans, both as an outlet and as an income stream?”
She announced her OnlyFans channel in June 2024, contrasting herself with her hometown’s mores. “I am a little bit more liberal, a little more liberated,” she explained on a YouTube video she recorded in her bathroom. “I enjoy making that type of content, but I also know myself, too. Just because I make that type of content doesn’t mean that I can’t be good at other things as well. Like, I’m a multifaceted person.”
At one point in our series of conversations, I asked Renae if she had yet encountered pink-blazing on trail. “Pink what?” she responded, laughing. “No, what is that? That sounds interesting.”
I offered a quick primer on thru-hiking jargon: how silk-blazers were the early birds on trail each morning who ran headfirst into spiderwebs spun overnight, how yellow-blazers would catch car rides around strenuous sections of trail, and how pink-blazers were often dudes who would be so smitten by a woman on trail that they would follow her around like a puppy follows an owner with pockets of treats. It could be sweet and lead to actual romance; it could also be creepy and lead to stalkers.
She laughed again and told me about how a trail angel who had recently offered her a ride into town seemed suspicious, but this was only an aberration. “Some of the safest I’ve ever felt is hiking the PCT, versus traveling to different countries or just being in cities,” she told me. “I feel safer when I’m just alone in the wilderness, because there are less people, less chances of encountering some random person who wants to hurt you.”
This is, as Renae admitted, naïve. America’s long trails have a long and well-documented history of murder, kidnapping, sexual assault, and disappearance, despite how infrequently those things may happen. And Renae has brandished her silver knife—studded with pink hearts, the clip spelling out “LOVE”—in videos. (“If someone tries to mess with me, I have a very strong will to live,” she told me about the knife. “I love my life, and if anybody tries to get in the way of that, oh my god.”)
But for Renae, that naiveté seems to be the core of how she lives her entire life, too. She spent the last four years reveling in it as she wandered around the world, being surprised. She went to Brazil because the animated movie Rio made it seem like a fun place. When she told me she got fleas while living in her car, she presented it with an isn’t-that-interesting curiosity. When she said “I haven’t even Googled the Sierra Nevada yet” when she was only 100 miles south of one of this country’s most iconic mountain ranges, she was neither bragging nor dismissive, but simply excited by how much she still had to know.
She sees life, as she puts it, as a way to “learn yourself through it.”
“There is so much information about how you’re supposed to do something right on trail—and even in life, how you’re supposed to be living,” she told me. “And in trying to succeed in life, trying to please all these people, you can really lose yourself. Who you are is your navigation, and that helps you figure out who you are, what you want.”
During her time off in Tehachapi, Renae did something she had done very little of before the trail: she invested in better gear. She was, after all, 200 miles south of the PCT’s highest point, Forester Pass, and she knew that she’d get cold in the Sierra, especially as someone with Hashimoto’s. She bought the sleeping bag a friend recommended—in part because it was supposed to be warm, mostly because it was purple. She didn’t seem alarmed about what was to come. As a kid, she realized she wanted to have what she could call a “beautiful life.” This seems like a point along that path.
“People think I’m ignorantly blissed, but I’m aware that there are things that could happen,” she said. “But you could be someone who lives inside all day, never goes outside, or you could be someone who goes and does the craziest stuff, and things could just happen. Life is very short, and I want to do something that makes me feel excited, fulfilled, alive.”
Renae mostly keeps her phone on airplane mode when she’s on trail. That’s normal for long-distance hikers, of course, aiming to conserve battery when they’re out for days at a time and not in service, anyway. But there’s an added advantage for Renae: she doesn’t obsess over her follower count or the comments, so long as she can’t see them.
“I just want to make stuff that makes me happy. I love to create, to document things,” she said. “This is all a bit scary, because I don’t ever want to get into a mindset where I’m just making stuff for views. There’s no happiness or longevity in that.”
As you might assume for a 22-year-old woman hiking the American wilderness in skin-tight pink, the comments have been a predictably mixed bag. She’s inspiring many people, reaffirming what she told me—that she’s “breaking [society’s] belief that cute girls can’t do hard shit,” as one spectator noted. Another wrote, “A successful OF girlie literally having the time of her life … I love you so much diva.”
But there’s been lots and lots of gatekeeping and rancor: dudes suggesting she’s not actually on the trail, that she’s recording her voiceovers in an echoing building, that there’s a film crew following her, that she’s being performative by bringing a phone and beauty products on trail, that this is just a way to make more money on OnlyFans. Renae insisted that the conversion rate from Instagram follower to OnlyFans subscriber is very low, and that she’s not getting rich, even as she uploads videos in each new town. Regardless, she’s not ashamed of the work.
“There’s this perception, especially with women, that sexuality is precious, and it is, but that once you have sex, you’re a lesser person. So much of your value as a person is based on this human thing,” she said. “I love my job, and it’s the job I’d want to do versus any other job. It gave me the ability to not be working at Wendy’s.”
I’ve heard from hikers that Renae’s outfits and on-trail content may make it less safe for future women on long trails, suggesting these are places of prey. And I’ve heard from others still that anyone who makes these kinds of baby-voiced and flirtatious videos, especially in the wild, is escaping some deep trauma. I don’t know if either of those things is true, but, if they are, most hikers I’ve met in my own seven years on trail are, indeed, walking away from something. And in the process, they leave some trace of themselves, too, changing how those who come after them may experience it. Renae represents a new way of existing on trail; the trail has always been, to my mind, about finding new ways of existing for yourself. She is the tradition of thru-hiking, coded for the economic and technological realities of Gen Z, clad in pink.
I asked Renae about that baby voice at one point. She seemed so self-possessed and strong-willed in conversation, not like the young flirt cooing through videos. She didn’t think her tones were a binary, just as she’d said two years earlier, when she announced that she was starting an OnlyFans.
“When I’m talking about my little outfit or whatever, my voice tends to get higher. I like to keep them light-hearted, because that’s how many days are. But I can also be this way,” she said, her voice dropping to emphasize her seriousness. She laughed. “I’m just letting different parts of myself exist. Both are real.”
Grayson Haver Currin is a thru-hiker, Triple Crowner, and journalist living in the mountains above Colorado. His writing appears regularly in The New York Times, GQ, Outside, and many others. His favorite trail may be the Florida Trail, and you can find him online on Instagram and Substack.
