Minneapolis mailman retires after years of walking route, heads out on 2,650-mile mountain hike

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.”

Early in the journey, a group of fellow hikers complained after a tough few days at mile 100, when freezing cold and driving rain swept through the mountains of Southern California.

“I said, ‘You guys, just shut up,’” McLaughlin recalled. “‘We are living in and walking through a postcard.’ And then they found out that I worked for a post office.”

The hikers joked that if McLaughlin continued being annoyed, they were going to call him “postal,” as in “going postal.” No thanks, he said, but how about “postcard.” McLaughlin already had a habit of picking up a stack of postcards every time he resupplied in town, handing the cards out to hikers along the way.

“It was a good icebreaker for me to get to know people,” McLaughlin said.

Other meetings with hikers were more dramatic. One day in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, McLaughlin said, he had to rescue a woman who fell into a river caused by snowmelt.

As expected, the trip was harder than YouTube videos make it look. Messages from home and friends on the trail helped him continue.

McLaughlin joined up with three young hikers, also from the Midwest; they called themselves “the Midwest contingent.” The four made a pact to finish the trail.

McLaughlin got encouragement from his two daughters. They made him freeze-dried meals for his trip as a Christmas present, and stuck notes into each bag.

It’s not unusual to hike the trail at 60 years old, but the demographics skew younger. In a survey of 764 PCT hikers, McLaughlin was one of about 11% who were 60 or older, according to the hiking website Halfway Anywhere.

When he was 6, McLaughlin lost an eye in an injury; he has worn a glass eye ever since. Having vision only in one eye made it harder to hike only at night, McLaughlin said, which is significant because many hikers try to start when it’s still dark to avoid the hottest times of the day.

“You curse the sun after a while,” McLaughlin said.

He paused his hike for a few days in May to attend his sister’s funeral in Wyoming. Otherwise he was out at the trail, and in nearby small towns, the entire time.

While there were difficulties, McLaughlin said the trip had more highs than lows, and helped him achieve the “rewiring” that he sought at the end of his career. He said he’s already feeling the urge for another long hike.

“Right when you finish, you think ‘No, I’m done with these,‘” he said. “But it’s hard to not get the itch again.”