How Tyler Wood came to be living in a tiny house in the tiny town of Mesa is a wide and curving adventure that jumps continents.
He is writing a book about those adventures, specifically the year and a half he spent on a mostly self-propelled trip from Indiana down through South America that began in October of 2018 and ended in a pandemic.
His goal is to have the book written by the end of April or by his 30th birthday, which is June 27, and then he’ll move on to live the sequel.
For now, though, Wood can be found running in the canyons near Mesa or snowboarding at Powderhorn Mountain Resort. The rest of his time he spends writing, thinking and planning adventures.
“I kind of want to be away from social pressure,” he said while taking some time for an interview on a day he was in Grand Junction to get groceries.
Mesa is perfect for him right now, he said. It’s a situation he happened upon when his snowboard instructor job at Copper Mountain fell through, and a friend of a buddy knew of a tiny house available in Mesa. “It could be a good place to write a book,” Wood was told.
TRAGEDY TO INSPIRATION
Wood may be writing his book in Mesa, but his story has its beginnings in West Lafayette, Indiana, where he grew up, and in Outward Bound where he interned in Australia after high school.
The latter resulted in jobs as a guide: camping road trip guide, rafting guide, zipline guide and so on.
In 2014, he was living the “freakin’ dream life of a 22-year-old” as a rafting guide in New Zealand.
Then he got drunk, drove, crashed his car horrifically and put himself in a coma with a traumatic brain injury, Wood explained with blunt honesty.
With his injury, statistics were against him. He should not have recovered, Wood admitted.
But he did, and about a year after the accident he went on what he called the Hike for Heads. It was a through-hike of the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada. It doubled as a fundraiser for the South California-based High Hopes Head Injury Program and resulted in more than $10,000 in donations, he said.
“Beautiful things can spring from disappointment or things that aren’t so good,” Wood said.
It was while he was on the Pacific Crest Trail that the idea for his self-propelled journey was born.
Having a good amount of previous adventure travel and overwhelmed by “trail magic,” aka the kindness and help extended to hikers, “I felt like a princess,” Wood said.
So, he dreamed up a tougher expedition for himself from the North Pole to the South Pole.
Then the Pacific Crest became harder and he got to know himself better. He realized something: “I’m not epic.”
He scaled back his exhibition and planned a self-propelled trip that would start two miles from his mom and stepdad’s front door on the Wabash River in Indiana.
STARTING THE JOURNEY
When Wood first shared his trip idea with his stepfather, John Huggins, “I kind of thought he was crazy. Neat idea, but, wow,” Huggins said.
“We knew he had it in him,” Huggins said, adding that so did Wood’s mother, Leslie Sharp. “He had really kind of thought it through. And once he sets his mind to something he does not turn back. He is very determined when it comes to things like that.”
Wood spent more than a year preparing for the adventure, including a stint as a volcano hiking guide in Guatemala that gave him some Spanish language practice.
On Oct. 8, 2018, when Wood put his kayak in the water of the Wabash River and paddled away, “It was pretty wild,” Huggins said.
Those first few days after Wood started were stressful for Sharp, recalling all her son had been through because of his accident and brain injury and knowing the Wabash was at a flood stage. She even had to quit following him on social media for a while. “I couldn’t cope with the danger,” she said.
FROM RIVER TO OCEAN
For Wood, being vulnerable was part of what his trip was about. He had about $12,000 to his name. He was dependent on the kindness of the people he met along the way, and fortunately that kindness materialized frequently, he said.
As he paddled from the Wabash into the Ohio River and then into the Mississippi River on his way to New Orleans, he was given meals or invited into homes or given places to camp for the night. Just as there is “trail magic,” there are “river angels,” he said.
When he reached New Orleans, he decided to take the Intracoastal Waterway toward Houston. The ships in that area were huge, and “I was an alien on that waterway,” he said.
He made it to Houston in January 2019, after kayaking more than 1,700 miles. Near Houston he found a job as a night watchman on a sailboat headed to Cancun, Mexico. He sold his kayak and found a spot onboard for his mountain bike.
Once underway, the sailing leg of the trip was a fiasco. They ran aground, then hit choppy seas and were blown way off course, Wood said.
Sails ripped, the engine went out and the power steering and autopilot quit working. They nearly ran out of drinkable water. They discovered the boat’s rudder was wrapped up in a tarp.
Fortunately, one of the crew members was a guy who had just finished an around-the-world sailing race. It was because of him that they made it to Isla Mujeres, Mexico, Wood said.
“That was the most treacherous part of the whole trip,” he said.
EYE-OPENING RIDE
When Wood began the biking leg of his journey in Mexico it was February of 2019. His goal was to bike to Santiago, Chile, by November when he was due to start his hike on the Greater Patagonia Trail.
He had more than a continent in front of him and one of the first things he noticed about Central America was the trash. It was everywhere.
He also realized his funds were not going to last through his trip.
While in Guatemala in March, Wood decided to combine those two things and set up a online Patreon account where he could receive financial support from people following his adventure. For each donation he received he committed to picking up a garbage bag of trash.
The more trash he picked up, the more interaction he had with local people. They would hand him a Gatorade or offer to help pick up trash with him, Wood said.
As he made his way south to Panama, he noticed other things, such as the manipulation of people by their governments and the exploitative treatment of young girls and children.
They were things he had known about before, but now they were right in front of him. “It was heartbreaking for me to experience,” he said.
In Panama, he took a flight to Cartagena, Columbia, to avoid a dangerous area known for drug smugglers and bandits, then got back on his bike and continued his journey.
Increasingly, he passed Venezuelan refugees on the road, hundreds of people, he said. There were families, mothers pushing their children in strollers through the mountains.
“I was feeling so much privilege. I got to the point I couldn’t ride past them,” Wood said.
He tried to help some of the families he met with food, and he gave away some of the money he had been given. He felt had to do something. “They needed that love,” he said.
FROM BIKE TO BUS
By August, Wood was in Ecuador. He was sick with parasites, and “I was going insane because of the traffic,” he said.
If he wasn’t trying to avoid being hit by vehicles, he was being chased by dogs.
He also had recently found out that a cyclist from Japan, who he had biked with earlier on his trip, had been hit from behind by a semi and killed.
“I got to Cuenca on edge,” he said. He decided to take a break from biking with a 10-day meditation retreat.
By the end of the retreat, he knew it was time to sell his bike. Besides, there was no way he was going to be able to bike through Peru and into Chile in time to make his November date with the Greater Patagonia Trail.
So after about 4,000 miles of biking, “I started a new adventure: 100% hitchhiking,” he said with a laugh.
That went fairly well for about 1,800 miles until he was picked up in Peru by a car full of guys. They drove an hour and half, then everyone but the driver got out. “It was a taxi,” Wood said. So, he had to pay up.
It was the unintentional beginning of the 4,000-miles of public transportation portion of the trip. This included motorboats, barges and buses.
When he finally arrived in Santiago in November 2019, he immediately found himself surrounded by protests against the government and inequality. “I saw so much passion,” he said.
Among the many things he learned on this trip, “I realized there is inequality on such a deep level,” he said.
FROM TRAIL TO PLANE
For sections of the last leg of Wood’s trip, hiking the Greater Patagonia Trail, he was joined at times by his then girlfriend and other friends.
The trail was “incredible,” he said. There were glaciers and hot springs, lava flows and mountain vistas and the most amazing sunsets he had ever seen in Chile and Argentina.
But the trail also was challenging physically and mentally. Navigated its sections was sometimes stressful and he relied on his background as a guide to get himself and those with him through safely, he said.
In March, they were near Cochrane, Chile, when Wood got a call from his mom. “Argentina has closed its borders,” she said.
The COVID-19 pandemic had caught up with Wood after he had hiked more than 850 miles and was about 100 miles short of his goal.
Again, drawing from his days as a guide, in less than 24 hours he got himself and his girlfriend off the trail and back to Santiago where they boarded a plane to Indianapolis, Indiana.
WRITING INTO THE FUTURE
“He changed a lot after his accident, and the trip has changed him even more,” said Sharp, who was able to join Wood a couple times on his journey.
“He grew up a lot,” Huggins said.
“He used to be pretty happy-go-lucky. He wasn’t a big thinker as to what was going on in the rest of the world,” Sharp said. “Now he is very hyper-aware and sensitive especially to the poverty. And the difference between wealth versus poverty.”
“It was a big awakening,” Wood admitted.
It led to culture shock, the breakup with his girlfriend, many hours of soul searching and a continued effort to help several specific Venezuelan families he had met and has stayed in contact with.
Over past year he has received thousands of dollars in donations that he has passed along to those families, and he is working on setting up a more official way routing that support, he said.
Now he trying to sum things up one way or another in a book. Writing is a challenging journey of a different sort considering his brain injury, he said.
He has plenty of material to work with and adventure books have certainly been written with less, he said.
But as he spends his days writing while in the town of Mesa, he also is planning his next adventure: circumnavigating the United States by bicycle.
Adventure is medicine, Wood said.
It’s one of the reasons, especially after his car accident, that he creates adventures for himself, along with wanting to test himself and inspire others, Wood said.
He’s eager to get back out there, to “make it a way of life,” he said.
Catch up with Tyler Wood:
Wood is active on Facebook (facebook.com/wanderwood18) and Instagram (@wanderwood18).
