Minneapolis mail carrier Scott McLaughlin walked the same 5 miles every day for years in the Lowry Hill neighborhood. So what was his dream for retirement?

Turns out it was to keep walking. McLaughlin left his U.S. Postal Service job in January 2024. By that March, he had embarked on a six-month hike along the West Coast’s Pacific Crest Trail (PCT). The 2,650-mile-long path connects Mexico to Canada via a long series of mountain ranges.

“For me, it was just a good challenge — one where I don’t know if I’m going to make it,” McLaughlin, 61, said during a recent interview at his home in the Bryn Mawr neighborhood. “Sometimes, something is presented in your life where you’re like, ‘I just have to do this.’”

Inspired by movies like “Wild,” based on Minnesota native Cheryl Strayed’s hike along the PCT, McLaughlin said the craving to do it himself grew in his mind in his last few months of delivering letters. In the years leading up to retirement, he would go on 50-mile hikes that only left him with a desire to keep going farther, he said.

McLaughlin chuckled when asked about the obvious irony of ending a career of walking only to continue doing so. Long hikes can actually get boring, he said, but nothing prepares you for that better than the mind-numbing qualities of a daily mail route.

Although walking a mail route and navigating the icy sidewalks of Minneapolis got him in shape, it still took a few weeks to get his “mountain legs.”

“You fall down a lot on a mail route on the ice, and you do have to go up stairs, but five steps isn’t the same as the 4,000-foot elevation change like you sometimes had in one day,” he said.

McLaughlin’s mailman past fed both his trail persona and what he called his “trail name.”