Arizona Trail honeymoon hike packs miles on this new marriage

Zhen Jin and Fang Liu decided to get married after just a single day together, but they slowed things down and really took their time when it came to their honeymoon.

Last month, the newlyweds from Canada wrapped up a 60-day, 800-mile thru-hike on the Arizona Trail to celebrate the start of their marriage.

Such a grueling adventure could have strained or even broken a relatively new relationship like theirs. Instead, they said, the long journey only reinforced their decision to spend the rest of their lives together.

“I confirmed that this guy is the right one,” Fang said. “We established a strong bond.”

The couple recounted their trek during a recent video chat with the Star from their home in Montreal.

The 37-year-old Zhen is an experienced long-distance backpacker, so the honeymoon hike across Arizona was his idea.

“He told me, ‘Oh, it’s just a small piece of cake; it’s 800 miles,’” said Fang, who is 41. “In my heart, I highly doubted if I could finish, but he told me something that really made me move: He said, ‘You must finish it because of me.’”

Zhen said he warned his new bride that her body would ache and her feet would be covered in blisters, but by the end of the trip she wouldn’t want to leave the trail.

“You will fall in love with the desert,” he told her. “You will miss it.”

And that’s exactly what happened, Fang said.

“It’s true, we didn’t want to come back,” she said. “After this honeymoon trip, Arizona is our favorite forever.”

Path to romance

The Arizona Trail crosses the Grand Canyon and loops past Tucson through the Catalinas, the Rincons and the Santa Ritas as it spans the state from north to south.

The trail’s northern terminus is on the Arizona-Utah line just outside Vermilion Cliffs National Monument, about 35 miles northwest of Page. Its southern terminus is the U.S.-Mexico border at Coronado National Memorial, south of Sierra Vista.

Matt Nelson is executive director of the Arizona Trail Association, a Tucson-based nonprofit organization formed 30 years ago to maintain, protect and promote the AZT.

Because there is no permit system, Nelson said it’s impossible to know exactly how many people have completed the entire route. But statistics collected by the association offer a clue.

The current list of self-reported finishers on the group’s website includes 1,877 entries dating back to 1982. Fang and Zhen would bring that unofficial total to 1,879.

An online survey of trekkers indicates that almost three-quarters of them completed the AZT as a thru-hike and over half traveled solo.

More than 91% of finishers have come from the U.S., and more than 25% have come from Arizona. Canadian residents like Fang and Zhen make up just 3.1% of those who have hiked the whole trail.

More than 64% of survey respondents said they traversed the AZT from south to north, while less than 20% went from north to south like our honeymooners did. The remaining 16% are show-offs who have apparently completed the trail in both directions.

There are no statistics on how many couples have chosen the hike for their honeymoon, but “there are many stories of romance along the Arizona Trail,” Nelson said.

He personally knows one former association staff member who celebrated a thru-hike honeymoon and one current staff member who met her husband on the AZT and ended up getting married next to the trail.

“We work hard to protect and maintain this 800-mile pathway so people can make memories to last a lifetime,” Nelson said. “Knowing that folks like (this) celebrated their marriage with a hike along the Arizona Trail provides us with inspiration and motivation to keep doing the work that we do.”

At first sight

Fang and Zhen met at a gun range outside of Montreal in August of 2023. She was working at the range. He took his parents there so they could learn how to shoot.

“He was actually my customer,” Fang said with a laugh. “We had a great time, and I made money from him.”

The spark between them was undeniable, so she looked him up on the internet after their first meeting. That’s when she discovered that Zhen is actually a well-known long-distance hiker in Canada’s Chinese community, with several YouTube channels dedicated to his accomplishments.

“He got really famous,” she said.

“Not really,” he replied, “because I don’t have many fans.”

Once Fang tracked down Zhen’s contact information, she sent him a text inviting him to join her for a free ski lesson at the resort where she works winters as an instructor and a member of the ski patrol. He happily agreed, but they never made it to the slopes.

Their first and only pre-engagement date took place on Feb. 5, when they spent 10 hours together at her house in the mountains outside of Montreal, talking, laughing and getting to know each other over several bottles of her homemade beer and icewine.

The next day, though, Zhen went back to his job as a truck driver in North Carolina, and Fang went back to giving ski lessons in Quebec.

“We missed each other so much that we couldn’t wait to meet again,” she said. “So, you know, we had a video chat, and immediately we decided to get married and be together forever.”

They applied for a marriage license as soon as Zhen returned from North Carolina a few weeks later. They officially tied the knot at a notary’s office in Montreal on March 18.

“(After) just one day, yeah, one day of knowing each other,” Fang said. “It was such a dramatic and sudden decision, because the feeling was so strong.”

Down the trail

The newlyweds began their honeymoon on Oct. 7 in Phoenix, where they spent a few days relaxing and driving around the city in a rented convertible while they picked up supplies for the hike. Then they flew to Page and caught a ride to the north end of the AZT to begin their trek on Oct. 10.

They are both athletic and experienced in the outdoors — she is a marathon runner and a former professional freestyle skier, and he has worked as a snowboarding instructor in addition to his backpacking achievements — but Fang had never attempted anything like this before. The farthest she’d gone in a single trip was about 50 miles.

“I was just a little section hiker from time to time with my friend,” she said.

She knew she would have to lean heavily on her husband’s experience.

Fang said one of the hardest things to get used to was “sweating like hell and getting so stinky,” with no access to a shower for up to a week at a time. At one point early in the trip, she tried to hide in the stall of a public restroom and bathe herself with her water bottle. Eventually, though, she grew accustomed to not feeling clean.

Her biggest physical test came in the Grand Canyon, where her heart rate soared, and she nearly passed out during the final mile of their hot, all-day climb to the South Rim.

She said Zhen got her an apple from a passing tourist and sat with her until she felt well enough to finish the ascent. There was never any talk about quitting.

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“I deeply felt that I could rely on this man, because he was always sacrificing himself for me, trying to protect me and trying to make me comfortable,” Fang said.

They averaged about 20 miles a day and slept together in a small tent or side by side in sleeping bags under the stars.

They carried enough supplies to last them five to seven days at a time — namely water, freeze-dried meals and lightweight energy snacks. Then, when the trail would cross a highway, they would hitch a ride to a nearby town to stock up again.

Fang said the only arguments they had during their trek were about him constantly trying to lighten her load by carrying all of their water.

Their only moment of heartbreak came on a night in early November, when they camped on a hilltop with enough cell reception to track the election results as they came in. (Suffice it to say, these Canadian residents who hope to live in the U.S. someday were not rooting for a second Trump presidency.)

Fang said Zhen did all he could to pamper her along the way. He took care of all the cooking, and he set up and took down their campsite almost every time they stopped for the night.

When she grew tired of eating the same old pre-packaged backpacking meals, he began loading up on heavier, less practical snacks like fresh fruit and sausages during their resupply stops.

“He carried a lot of yummy food for me,” Fang said. “I ate like a day hiker.”

He also bought her a bouquet of roses whenever they passed through a town that sold them, so sometimes they hiked with flowers sticking out of their packs or tucked behind their ears.

The only other luxury goods they carried were a bridal veil Fang would wear for photos along the trail and a ukulele they used to entertain themselves while they walked or camped.

“We decided to take something useless with us to be romantic,” Zhen said.

A mile and a half

Thru-hikers often use nicknames while they’re on the trail, and these two were no exception. Zhen went by Halfmile, and Fang went by Onemile.

He said he got his trail name years ago, when he attended a wilderness leadership school and his classmates heard him snore. “They would say (to) always camp a half-mile away from me,” Zhen said with a grin. “And my wife snores even louder.”

It wasn’t all freeze-dried food and sleeping on the ground. This was a honeymoon, after all.

At each of the AZT gateway communities where they stopped to resupply, they would rent a room for a couple of nights so they could take showers, eat in restaurants, drink cold beer and sleep in an actual bed.

Zhen jokingly accused his wife of getting herself injured just before they would reach the towns so they would have to extend their stays there.

Fang smiled and admitted that she did seem to get clumsier the closer they got to civilization.

“We would have been able to finish the trail a lot earlier, but we were actually taking our time,” she said.

And their pace slowed even more the closer they got to the end.

“The last few days we said, ‘OK, what can we do to extend our honeymoon? Just hike slowly,’” Zhen said.

When they finally reached the end of the trail on Dec. 10, they posed for pictures at the border monument that marks the southern terminus of the AZT. In one picture, the couple shares a kiss in front of the monument. In another, Fang leans against the silver obelisk and grins beneath her wedding veil.

They also clowned around in front of a remote security camera along that stretch of the border, waving hello and drawing hearts in the air with their fingers. A Border Patrol agent arrived on scene almost immediately, Fang said.

Luckily, he turned out to be a friendly guy with a sense of humor. They even managed to talk him into posing for a photo next to his truck while pretending to take them into custody.

Zhen said the couple encountered a fair share of “trail magic” throughout their journey. That’s a thru-hiking term for when something you need suddenly and inexplicably appears, like a ride into town for supplies or a cache of water left along a dry stretch of the route by a so-called “trail angel,” he said.

The Arizona Trail Association maintains a list on its website of several dozen such volunteer angels. They offer a wide range of free help to hikers, including shuttle services, water drops, lodging, food, showers and laundry facilities.

After their hike, Fang said she and Zhen didn’t have time to stop in at the trail association’s office in Tucson to express their gratitude and leave a donation for all resources the group provided. The couple is planning to return to Arizona in May to reconnect with some of the angels who helped them and perform some angelic acts of their own for other AZT hikers.

“I told my husband that we’re gonna definitely come back and do a lot of water magic,” Fang said. “It’s so essential on the trail.”

Their return trip to Arizona will kick off a leisurely, year-long tour of the West, during which the couple plans to live out of a trailer and drive from place to place.

After that, they’re plotting another grand, long-distance hiking adventure: a six-month trek across Europe from Spain to Sweden, where Fang grew up.

“My husband kept telling me that thru-hiking is not a sport, it’s a lifestyle,” Fang said. “And I really fell in love with it. I miss every single second that I spent on the trail, and I can’t wait to go back.”

A brand new view

Fang’s favorite part of the trip came a couple of days past the halfway point, when the trail dropped down into the Sonoran Desert near Roosevelt Lake.

“I grew up in Europe, so I had never been in the desert before. Can you imagine how amazing I felt when I got close to a saguaro for the first time?” she said. “I was crying. I couldn’t believe my eyes.”

Zhen couldn’t name a favorite moment on the trail. He said he loved every minute of it because Fang was there, and it was their honeymoon, and the experience completely changed his perspective on what used to be his greatest passion.

In 2021, Zhen backpacked solo along the entire length of the Pacific Crest Trail, which runs for 2,650 miles through California, Oregon and Washington.

Then, the following year, he hiked alone again from Mexico to Canada on the even-longer Continental Divide Trail through the Rocky Mountains. Only this time, he didn’t stop when he reached the Canadian border; he kept marching north on the Great Divide Trail, which traces the spine of the Rockies for another 700 miles between Alberta and British Columbia.

Zhen said he pushed himself to cover at least 25 miles a day, then slept among the startlingly large footprints of Canadian wolves and grizzly bears. When he awoke some mornings, his boots were so stiff with ice he had to soak them in a nearby creek just so he could put them on.

“Then I’d do the water crossings again. Hundreds of water crossings,” he said. “It was suffering.”

The trip covered roughly 3,800 miles and took him more than 6 months to complete.

Zhen said he used to think solo hiking was the coolest thing he could ever do. Now he just feels like “an idiot” for thinking that.

“I always hiked alone and camped alone. I enjoyed the loneliness. But after this? I think I will never do that again,” he said. “I will always camp with my wife, hike with my wife, do anything with her. I will never (go) solo again.”