Mary is a photographer, writer, and long-distance hiker. Originally from south Louisiana, she is a self-taught photographer who has traveled and hiked extensively with a camera and journal close at hand. She paced her life with the tidy, decisive script of a southern woman from a small town: a young marriage, a career in education, then marketing, all while living in a little house 20 minutes from the place she was born… but felt unsettled in it. Her musings about the ways she was living, and how it could change, came to a head during the Covid lockdown. Alone in the world for the first time, she had a chance opportunity to interrogate that feeling and step into the unknown.
In 2022, she sold most of her worldly belongings, went to Springer Mountain, Georgia, stepped onto a thin ribbon of trail that stretched 2,200 miles north to Maine, and began walking. As the Appalachian Trail unspooled before her during her 6-month walk, she documented the unfolding that was happening before and within her. When she reached the northern terminus of the trail, she had more questions than answers, but felt centered within a life of curiosity and constant seeking.
My photography is an invitation to pause. I lived most of my life ranging outward in order to seek a different way of being. During my thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail, where your steps are guided by white blazes, but your mind is free to wander, I discovered that my “home” isn’t found across state lines, in the heart of another human, or around the next switchback: but instead carried within me. I see the unknown as a force of co-creation, not something to extinguish with answers. These images of a small sliver of the path I walked are intended to draw you in, and allow time and space for you to co-exist with your own questions.
I live here, in the mountains I once walked across, with my husband and a rotating cast of foster dogs. Since thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail, I’ve owned and operated a thru-hiker hostel in Franklin, North Carolina, where we’ve welcomed hundreds of hikers into our home, and walked over 600 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail. These days, you can find me driving down dirt roads, camera in tow, writing my in-progress memoir, or planning my next long walk.
