A Brief History

My name is Sibley, and I am an ESL teacher and outdoor enthusiast. After graduating from the University of Central Florida in 2014, I spent the summer teaching English to newly signed baseball players in the Dominican Republic at the New York Mets Academy. I loved this internship, so I moved to Madrid to pursue my M.A. in International Education at the Universidad de Alcala de Henares. As a practicum for the Master's, I worked full-time as an ESL teacher in a preschool and primary school.

After graduating in 2015, I completed the 790 km French route of the Camino de Santiago. My obsession with long distance hiking had begun. A few days after arriving in Santiago, I moved back to Virginia to teach high school Spanish but soon realized I was not ready to settle down. After section hiking more than 200 miles of the Appalachian Trail in the spring and summer of 2016, I moved to Casablanca, Morocco, to teach English once again.

Morocco was amazing. I enjoyed my job teaching general and business English to adults, and I substituted surfing for my old hiking habit. But eventually, city life began to wear me down, and I could hear the Appalachian Trail calling my name. So, in December 2017, I moved back to the United States.

On April 13th of 2018, I embarked on a Northbound thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail. After a long, beautiful, challenging journey, I stood on top of Katahdin on October 5th. After the trail, I spent January and February of 2019 teaching at a short-term English camp for Korean children in Malaysia. Next, I accepted a job as the ESOL teacher and coordinator for a rural school district in Northern New Hampshire, where I can see Mount Washington from the parking lot when I leave work every day.

I fell out of the habit of blogging after the trail, partly because I journaled much less after the first 600 miles, and partly because my 2019 was consumed by the looming prospect of major surgery, and after 9 months of testing, I was fortunate enough to be able to donate a kidney to my father in December of 2019. Now, as I recover, I have some free time on my hands, and I’m finally going back to finish the account of my 2018 AT NOBO thru-hike. You can also follow along here or on facebook, and you can see photos from the entire hike and my 2019 NH 48 hikes by checking out my instagram @tefltrekker.

Going forward, I have a lot of decisions to make, but I’m hoping to tackle the Wonderland Trail in 2020 and maybe, just maybe, the PCT in 2021.

Thanks for reading and happy hiking!