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In this episode of Quo Vadis, I speak with Tim Voors about the Continental Divide Trail — the most remote, demanding, and psychologically challenging of the great American thru-hikes.

Tim has completed the Pacific Crest Trail, Te Araroa in New Zealand, and the CDT. He is also the author of The Great Divide, a book that approaches the trail not as an achievement, but as an encounter with fear, humility, and awe.

Our conversation explores what draws people toward something they know will test them deeply. We talk about fear — not as something to be eliminated, but as something to be transformed into respect. About solitude, uncertainty, navigation, wildlife, and the mental strategies required to keep moving forward when comfort and certainty disappear.

This episode is a conversation about the threshold: the moment where longing outweighs fear and you choose exposure over safety, and about what the Continental Divide Trail gives back to those who dare to walk it.

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Welcome to Quo Vadis — a podcast about following your calling into a magical hero’s journey, in order to find your way home.

This is the first episode in a new English cycle. In my earlier Danish series, I told the story of thruhiking the Pacific Crest Trail through the lens of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. Now a new threshold is approaching: the Continental Divide Trail — a 5,000-kilometre remote route from Mexico to Canada, high, exposed, lonely, and often not a trail at all.

In this episode, I explore a paradox:
Why are we sometimes drawn toward something that genuinely scares us? Why does the call to adventure so often arrive wrapped in fear?

To answer that, I move through two stories.

The first is Tarjei Vesaas’ The Ice Palace — a Nordic classic in which a child walks alone into a frozen labyrinth of dangerous beauty, as if compelled by a secret inner pull.

The second is my own childhood story from a Greenlandic village in the 1970s: The Fish Crate — a memory of stepping into a fragile little vessel and drifting toward the pack ice, seduced by its glittering promise, until the moment the ice moves and the world shifts into terror.

Together, these stories point to the same experience: the mixture of fear and longing that philosophers call the Sublime — the confrontation with something overwhelmingly vast, powerful, and real.

This episode is the beginning of my new journey toward the CDT — and an attempt to name the feeling at its root: the dangerous longing.

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In this final episode of the first Quo Vadis cycle, I speak with mythologist and storyteller Dr. Catherine Svehla, host of the podcast Myth Matters, about the most overlooked and difficult stage of the Hero's Journey: the return.

Inspired by Joseph Campbell's idea of "the return with the elixir," we explore what it means to come home after deep transformation - and how to live with what you have learned.

After five months on the Pacific Crest Trail, I walked around Nuuk with a secret inside my body - the knowledge that I could carry far more than I believed. But how do you share what you've discovered without sounding like someone who had a revelation on a mountain ridge? How do you find a new way to live in the world—not as the old self, but as the transformed one?

This is where the hero must learn that the journey never truly ends, but continues in another way.

This episode closes the first Quo Vadis cycle. The journey continues, though -now in English - as the path leads toward a new call: Continental Divide Trail. I'm hiking this brutal 3.000 mile trail next year, though it truly scares me, but at the same time draws me, so I gotta go ..

For as T.S. Eliot wrote: "Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far they can go."