She had faced down death.
Now she was ready to change her life forever.
When Edie Littlefield Sundby was diagnosed with metastatic cancer and given only three months to live, she vowed to fight. She sought out the best care the medical community could offer, and she relied on the faith she had inherited from her cotton-farmer parents. But Edie also found healing through movement. She knew that if she was still walking, she was still alive.
Though she had never hiked more than a few miles at a time, Edie decided to walk the entire eight-hundred-mile Historic California Mission Trail—the northern segment of El Camino Real—which links twenty-one missions from San Diego to north of San Francisco. Undeterred by physical and emotional pain, she searched for restoration and hope.
And then, two years later, her cancer returned. With no time to lose, she set out to walk the remaining eight hundred miles of El Camino Real, from its origin in Loreto, Mexico, north to the US border. If she succeeded, she would be the first person to complete the journey since the Franciscan father Junipero Serra walked the sixteen-hundred-mile mission trail in the 1770s.
The Mission Walker is both an adventure story and a reflection on the universal experience of confronting our own mortality. A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. Edie's story shows that the sum of a million steps is a life forever changed.
