First Woman to Walk the Length of the Americas with Lucy Barnard

0:00Lisa McGreevy:The best advice was moms. Be bold, be adventurous, and face the unknown. My name's Lucy Barnard and I'm making an attempt to be the first woman to walk the length of the earth.

0:17Lucy Barnard:In 2017, Lucy Barnard stood at the southernmost point of South America with a massive task ahead of her. She would walk north until she reached Alaska. Nine years later, Lucy is still walking. By May of 2026, she had made it to Prince George, Canada, roughly 500 miles north of Vancouver. So far, Lucy has crossed deserts, mountains, jungles, and plains. She spent time in local communities, camped in wild landscapes, ate a lot of empanadas, and even learned Spanish. In Chile, she adopted a blue heeler pup named Wombat, who's walked alongside her ever since. Lucy hopes to reach Alaska in the summer of 2027.

1:00Lucy Barnard:And when she does, she will make history as the first woman to walk the length of the Americas. I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-op Studios production brought to you by Capital One and the REI Co-op MasterCard.

1:21Lucy Barnard:Lucy Barnard, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living. you're walking across the earth this is unheard of no female has done it which is so cool

1:32Lisa McGreevy:yeah I do I've got to um tell you that there are other women who have done similar things just not that they have done the hike consecutively without any missing steps I spoke to some women at the very beginning who were a really good guide for me but their goal and their rule was that they were going to walk the whole way except when they weren't having fun and then they'd skip forward. So that was really good for them. And then there was another set of girls who did predominantly walking, but then switched to bikes and kayaked every so often as well. And I have to tell you, it's great to try and be the first, but it's a pretty lonely road.

2:07Lisa McGreevy:And also the rules itself is a form of prison because sometimes when I've been miserable and haven't wanted to be doing what I'm doing anymore, there's been no way to extract myself other than from just enduring it.

2:23Lucy Barnard:Okay, that was deep for like the first sentence. Okay, let's backtrack. When did you decide I'm going to be the first woman to walk from Argentina to Alaska?

2:34Lisa McGreevy:That was just purely a moment of impulsiveness. I was traveling through Argentina through an area that's just open land. Nothing is happening. It felt like the bus trip was really stretched out in time. and because of that, I started thinking about if I could walk faster than the bus, which of course you can't, and then it led to googling about if people had walked through Argentina, if they'd walked the length of South America, can you walk through Central America, and in all of that, I discovered George Megan, who was the first man to walk the length of the Americas, and he has a Guinness record for the longest known walk, where he did what I'm doing exactly, except that he then deviated from Mexico over to New York and then went along the Canadian trail and then up.

3:25Lisa McGreevy:And I thought, oh, well, that happened pretty much the year after I was born. Where are the ladies at? And there were none. And it just, the frustration that we're growing up being told that girls can do the same as boys, but not seeing the evidence in real life, I wanted to contribute to making that lack of evidence as small as possible.

3:53Lucy Barnard:Lucy returned from the Argentina trip in 2015. At the time, she was in her early 30s, working in PR at a job she wasn't thrilled about in Darwin, Australia. Life continued as normal, but Lucy couldn't get the image of George Megan's walk out of the back of her mind. She craved an adventure that would challenge her and broaden her horizons. so when you told your family hey i'm gonna go walk the length of the americas starting at tierra del fuego and you told your friends this in australia what did they say oh it was like

4:28Lisa McGreevy:crickets no one wanted to breathe they were just like if we don't acknowledge this maybe the idea will just go away because they know that anything discouraging will put me on the path and they were scared. You know, like this is something that just sound, there's just so many unknowns and there is so much fear mongering in modern media that it really just seemed like if I left, I wouldn't come back. So it was a real journey for them as much as for me. And even to this day, it's a real struggle to be so absent from family members in spite of all of the things that we have to enable us to stay connected.

5:09Lisa McGreevy:How many brothers and sisters do you have? I've got two older sisters.

5:14Lucy Barnard:I'm the youngest of three girls and I'm also an auntie. And there's something about these youngest children. They're a little bit more adventurous.

5:23Lisa McGreevy:We're uncompliant.

5:24Lucy Barnard:Yes. And I get the sense that if your parents had told you not to date someone when you were younger, that was the person you were going to go date.

5:32Lisa McGreevy:Yeah, except I hated boys. So they had no real worry about that.

5:36Lucy Barnard:Okay, so I get where this personality comes from. And it's starting to make a little bit more sense of why you would do this. So it's crickets from your family. It's crickets from your friends. You go do it anyway.

5:46Lisa McGreevy:But let me tell you something, because there is always one champion that really will help you if you're starting a project that you're nervous about. So I had been on this trip to Argentina and I came back to work in this job that I had thought I'd leave. And her name's Margaret. And Margaret came to me to have a chat about it when I got back to work to ask me if I loved it and the things that I saw. and I was just like, did you know that a man walked the length of the Americas 30 years ago and no woman has been able to do it since? And I said to her, you know, I think I could do that. And she just looked at me with absolute assurity and said, you have to.

6:26Lisa McGreevy:You have to do that.

6:31Lucy Barnard:Margaret became Lucy's biggest cheerleader. And with her support, Lucy started to believe this wild idea might actually be possible. Like so many big dreams, the biggest obstacle was money. So Lucy stripped her life down, cut her expenses as much as she could, and started saving for the trip. Then came the logistics, mapping the route, gathering equipment, and preparing herself for a solo journey that would stretch across two continents. This was a huge trip. What did you need to learn? And what sort of gear did you need to get in the very beginning?

7:09Lisa McGreevy:Okay, well, the most obvious thing is that when I started, I didn't speak Spanish. So getting at least a grasp of the language was helpful right up until I really didn't spend any time in Spanish speaking areas because I was always remote. And I don't know if you know this, but through Latin America, there are consistently indigenous populations for who Spanish is their second or third language. And so trying to communicate with two sets of broken Spanish, I have to say it was easier than talking to just native Spanish speakers because at least we understood our logic in trying to reach for the language.

7:46Lisa McGreevy:Like we met in that broken format much better than if someone has an expectation on how to communicate. So that was good. But that was definitely the scariest hurdle because I can't mitigate risk if I don't have awareness of my environment.

8:03Lucy Barnard:So language, number one. Language. What about wilderness survival skills? Oh, yeah.

8:08Lisa McGreevy:Yep. But I had that already in my toolbox, I guess you could say.

8:13Lucy Barnard:What did that look like? Not everybody has that.

8:16Lisa McGreevy:Okay. First of all, I have a self-rescue plan. So I have a beacon. If I need to be removed from a remote area, that can happen swiftly. And there's a lot of comfort and confidence building in knowing that you have a lifeline. So that's probably the most helpful thing for fortitude. Then I meet with my doctor frequently and we update my first aid kit, which isn't like a typical hiker's first aid kit because remembering that I'm in remote areas where things like, well, just different illnesses are present. And so I need to be prepared on how to recognize, mitigate and prevent preferably, but address as well if I become sick and to know those symptoms so that I can advocate for my own health.

9:01Lisa McGreevy:I also am quite realistic about if I was to break a leg, what that would look like. And I have the responsibility of a dog. So it means I've also got a first aid kit for him and knowledge on how to deal with almost everything that he could possibly have happen. And a vet on call as well, who I can access through my beacon. And then I carry super strong pain medication and I'm very careful that if I ever need to use that to walk myself out of a problem, that I only take enough so that I still have my wits about me, that I'm not making the injury worse. Stuff like that.

9:46Lucy Barnard:By the time Lucy left for South America, she had saved$50 ,000 Australian dollars and landed a few gear sponsors. She'd done the research, built up her wilderness survival skills, and planned as much as a person can for something this big. The only thing left was to start walking. At first, Lucy made some rookie mistakes. Her pack was massive. It weighed nearly 70 pounds. but pretty quickly she learned to lighten her load. From when you started, like that first week,

10:21Lisa McGreevy:what was that like? Do you remember? Terrifying. It was terrifying. I can't even, I just can't. I was scared because the most fragile moment of a hike is anything that happens beforehand. If you can get yourself to the start, you are destined for success, but you do need support. or luck on your side or like an inflated ego. Not a fragile ego, I guess. I landed in Ushuaia and the first thing that happened is I got from the airport to couch surfing. And this guy became a real ally because he had to help me with a border crossing that I was not allowed to do the way that I had hoped. And he had to drive me into the middle of the wilderness.

11:13Lisa McGreevy:So basically, he was abandoning me in the middle of a really dense, undeveloped national park to go across mountain crossings with fast flowing streams and a bunch of untested brand new gear like just the whole nightmare and as we were driving into this gray toned landscape where there's really rich green mossy ground and lots of trees and dense scrub with a lot of cloud cover and you know that gray glacial water I could feel my heart and anxiety just wanting to kill me. Like it felt like I was dying on that descent into this area.

12:15Lisa McGreevy:And right at that moment of fearfulness, some music came on the radio, which was played at my dad's funeral.

12:25Lucy Barnard:Wow. You're going to make me cry, Lucy.

12:29Lisa McGreevy:Yeah, I think you can see coincidences in what happens or you can lean into the miraculousness of it to really give you that push to start something that's really hard. And for you, I feel like, oh, my God.

12:50Lucy Barnard:I've talked about this so much and every time it happens, this happens. Right.

12:57Lisa McGreevy:But every time something like this happens, I bank it. And I remember that there was a lot of stuff that had to go right for me to get to where I am today. And so when I have a hard day now, I know that it is nothing in comparison to the exponential hardship that I've gone through to get to where I am today.

13:19Lucy Barnard:I love that story. I'm sorry your dad passed. Mine passed when I was 11. It sucks. It does suck. There's nothing like losing your dad. There's really not.

13:33Lucy Barnard:Hearing that song felt like a good omen. And it gave Lucy a little burst of confidence that she had made the right decision to chase this wild idea. But that didn't mean the journey was easy. Those first couple of weeks, Lucy was completely alone, trying to navigate through the vast terrain of Patagonia. After her first border crossing, she was supposed to meet back up with a support team at a nearby bay. But things didn't go according to plan.

14:05Lisa McGreevy:What's really humorous is that I'd lost a bag of food and I was rationing 450 calories a day to get myself to that point. And when I was nearly there, the team messaged me and said, hey, we're going to be there early. and we're bringing lots of food for you. So don't worry about the food. And I was like, perfect. So I start binge eating all of my food that I had left. And then later that day, they're like, hey, we got a flat tire. We're going to be a day late. And I was like, I was so, so thin, so hungry. My lips were all cracked. And I got to this area where we were meant to meet and a bunch of people were there fly fishing and catching all this food.

14:53Lisa McGreevy:And they were like, hey, do you want something to eat? And I was so happy. And it had been 10 days since I'd seen an actual human that all I could think of was, Lucy, don't lose your mind. You need to not scare these people away. And I was just like, I'm so hungry. Yes, I would love some food. And so I talked about how hungry I was. and then I ate half a sausage and my stomach couldn't fit any more food. And it was like torture because in my head I just knew that I needed to eat.

15:41Lucy Barnard:The sunshine is back and I'm planning to spend the next few months outside. catching waves, camping, and hiking the trails all around San Diego. If your summer plans also involve spending as much time outside as possible, the REI Co-op MasterCard offers rewards and benefits that support your love of the outdoors. It's just for REI Co-op members and earns card rewards on every purchase at REI and everywhere else MasterCard is accepted. What I love is that rewards are available in one to two days, So all of those stops on the way to the adventure, from fuel for the drive to last-minute gear runs, it all adds up.