Vibe Drinking with the Beans Lady - Maria "Beans" Romfoe (Part I)

Maria "Beans" Romfoe — AT and PCT thru-hiker, CDT finisher-minus-New-Mexico, and the internet's foremost beanfluencer — joins Doc for her first-ever podcast appearance. Beans traces the origin of her trail name from a can of Bush's Beans on an Alaskan summit through a viral sponsorship dare to her current partnership with Eight Trak Foods, the woman-owned organic bean company whose founder sends her hand-drawn care packages on trail ("She's my bean lady"). She defends the engineering of a nine-pound base weight built around canned goods, recalls the three family-sized cans of barbecue baked beans that snapped her pack frame in the Smokies, and reveals the one piece of gear she'd never leave behind: the can opener that has saved more than one trail-magic cooler full of inaccessible food. The Hiking Poll digs into the story that reshaped her Triple Crown: drinking unfiltered "poop water" in Colorado's cattle-grazed San Juans, the giardia that followed, and the most miserable six-mile evacuation of her life — followed by a 46-mile attempt to finish the CDT by Walmart bike that ended in tears at a Superfund site water source. (The bike went back for a full refund. She calls this "renting.") The back half goes deeper: growing up in Cudahy, Wisconsin in a not-especially-outdoorsy family; a year at the University of Alaska Southeast that lit the fuse; trail crew and conservation corps seasons that made a tent feel like home before her first thru-hike; and the things she strategically doesn't tell her mom until long after. Beans also gets refreshingly honest about solo female thru-hiking — the double standards, the "are you out here alone?" conversations, why menstruating through a thru-hike should earn hikers more credit rather than more doubt, and her simple request for the trail community: a woman talking to you is not flirting; let her tell you about the snake she saw like everyone else. Segments include the Trailblazer's Toolkit (Six Moon Designs), the Hiking Poll (Triple Crown Coffee — she scores a 21), the Hiking Hack (O.T.T.R.) featuring two highly specific foot hacks, Off the Beaten Path (Hilltop Packs) with a recommendation for Marty Stouffer's gloriously chaotic 1980s docuseries Wild America, and a Pay It Forward shoutout to the Greenwater Fire Department, local wildland firefighters, and the Pacific Northwest Trail Association's volunteer trail crews. Follow Beans on Instagram at @thebeansbabe. Follow Hiker Trash Radio on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, or write to HikerTrashRadio@gmail.com. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.