Tenny Ostrem and Claire Wernstedt-Lynch have a shared passion: walking.

They met while thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail in 2013, and in the years since, they’ve both racked up quite a few miles on long-distance treks all across the county.

“Both of us are long-distance hikers,” Ostrem said. “It’s always been kind of a transformative way to deal with ourselves and the world.”

Ostrem, a Campton native, said their most challenging trip began in Nov. 19, 2017. They met in San Diego and began following the border wall east.

Ostrem, who currently lives in Colorado, will speak about her trip along the US-Mexico border at 6:30 p.m. May 7 at the Clark County Public Library.

Ostrem and Wernstedt-Lynch will share their experience, along with pictures, as well as a 30-minute documentary, which Osprey backpacks funded and filmed. This program is free and open to the public.

Ostrem said long distance walking usually disconnects the walker from the world, but with this trip, she wanted to be intentional about how she could stay connected. They started planning in late 2016.

“We were interested in being more intentional of having a conscientious adventure where we were learning and not just indulging in personal growth and love of outdoors,” Ostrem said.

With the border being a major focal point in recent years, Ostrem said the trek seemed like the perfect way to dissect not only her own views and preconceived notions about the border but also a way to dissect her own past and views about her old Kentucky home.

Ostrem said she has always had a tense relationship with Kentucky; she had a good childhood, she said, but she always struggled with Kentucky, especially eastern Kentucky, “stereotypes:” lack of access to quality education, poverty and more. Ostrem said she had been flooded with negativity about Kentucky.

Ostrem said her resentment for the state eventually led her to leave. She moved to Boston for college, but brought her pains and frustrations with her.

Ostrem said she wanted to conquer something she had been told she could not do: embarking on a long trek alone as a woman.

“I’d had a feeling it would be journey or experience that would help give me confidence, and just a sense of who I was,” Ostrem said.

She took a semester off and then filled her time with walking. Her long distance walks turned into a long distance hike in Colorado to the Appalachian Trail to the U.S.-Mexican border.

During the border trip, Ostrem and Wernstedt-Lynch hiked about 10 to 15 miles a day, stopping to camp in washes, canyons and other backcountry terrain. They also spent nights in various towns along the border.

Ostrem said they only heard footsteps twice throughout the whole trip while out camping.

“If I’m being really honest I probably thought there were way more crossings than what I realized, but we had three encounters the whole time,” Ostrem said.

Also, before embarking on the trip, Ostrem said she had been oblivious to the deaths that occurred at the border.

“It felt insensitive in some ways,” she said. “We were on this adventure and looking at landscapes where there were deaths of children, adults who were crossing for reasons … valid reasons … being a victim to your own country and wanting to escape it … It’s a very human thing.”

It was dry, hot and nothing at all like she had imagined.

During a 100-mile section in Texas, Ostrem said border patrol warned them the land was off-limits, but they kept trekking anyway, with the fear staying constant at the back of their minds. At the end of the section, Ostrem said she felt overwhelmingly relieved.

She and Wernstedt-Lynch celebrated with a local rancher, sharing good drinks, stories and jokes.

Along the way, Ostrem said they endured weeks of heat, hundreds of miles of roadside trudging and no shortage of brutal bushwhacking.

Encounters with border patrol, which were typically brief and courteous, were a near-daily occurrence, and Ostrem said they felt on edge both in the remote desert backcountry and while hiking across sprawling border cities like El Paso.

But, Ostrem said, she can credit their safety and success, in part, to their privilege: being white Americans.

“This trip helped awaken me to how privileged Claire and I am to even think about a trip like this,” Ostrem said. “The reason we were safe the entire way was because we were white women and had an American passport.”

Six months and 2,000 miles later, they waded into the Gulf of Mexico, having become some of the first people to hike the length of the U.S.-Mexico border. At the end of it, Ostrem said she realized how misconstrued her view about the border before the trip was just as many other’s are.

“I did not realize the amount of fear and resentment that was in my own life, I wanted to view this as a political issue,” she said. “And it was not political; it is personal.”

Ostrem said she hopes sharing her experience can show others a side of the border they might not have seen nor heard, but even more so, she hopes people will learn to look inside themselves every now and then to evaluate who they are, what they think and why.

The trip, she said, rekindled her love for Kentucky. She now looks forward to returning.

“I had just been unwilling to see the good in it because there was so much resentment,” Ostrem said. “ … Looking at the border area helped my understanding of Kentucky change and rearrange and it gave me a whole new perspective on it based on what I saw at the border … and how many parallels there were.”