The Shore Looked Easier

Eighteen miles in, with 3,800 metres of climbing already in her legs and a storm forecast for the evening, Kit Birks comes down into a valley in the far north of Sweden and finds a lake. The hut she wants is on the far side of it. Her map says go up and over the mountain to reach it. The shoreline says otherwise.

"I'm looking at the shoreline on the other side of the lake and I'm like, that looks so nice. Why don't I just walk around?"

Anyone who has ever walked anywhere knows what happens next, at least in outline. The rocks on the shore get bigger. Then they get bigger again. Soon she is throwing her rucksack over boulders and climbing after it, and then she reaches the point where she can't go back and can't go on. So she goes up. The green ledges above her turn out to be moss stuck to rock. She is now climbing a cliff with 23 kilograms on her back, testing every hold with a trekking pole before she trusts it.

I'll come back to what happened on that cliff. It's worth knowing first how she got there.

A month earlier she had walked for eight or nine days without seeing a town, and when she finally reached one it was tiny. A man at the campsite greeted her. Welcome to northern Sweden, he said. She had assumed she was somewhere near halfway down the country. He put her right. Most Swedes never come this far up. This wasn't even the north yet.

"That's when the penny dropped. It's a long way to Greece."

Kit set off from Nordkapp, at the top of Norway, in the summer of 2025, intending to walk to Greece. She is not, by her own description, a hiker. She's a runner. She chose to walk the length of Europe because she had no money, and running it would have needed a support team she couldn't afford. She trained as much as she could. For the first ten days she cried in her tent every night.

Over 343 days she covered more than 5,000 miles, 308 of those days alone, to raise money and make noise for suicide prevention. Tens of thousands of people followed her. I'll come to why she was walking. But listening to her, what struck me first was the ordinariness of it all, the way she describes a day at minus twelve in the Harz mountains, asking a stranger if she can pitch her tent in their garden, as if it were a Tuesday.

Because there was a routine. Up at seven, coffee straight on, her favourite part of the day. Pack the tent, stretch, walk. A snack bar after two hours. Cheap ramen for lunch. Twenty miles, twenty-one. Find somewhere to pitch, or better, one of the Swedish STF huts where a volunteer warden sits out a four-week shift with no electricity and no phone signal. Wash in a lake. Cook. Stretch. Sleep. Repeat.

"And that's without things going wrong. Something went wrong most days."

In the first fortnight the thing that went wrong was the mosquitoes. People had warned her. She wasn't ready. Her clothes weren't bug-proof and there was a heatwave, so she couldn't sit outside the tent in the evenings, and inside the tent was an oven. Her solution was to wear her waterproofs back to front, so the pale lining faced the sun, and to walk fully clothed into every lake she passed. She refused to use DEET because she was washing in the rivers. A Sami family at a campsite took one look at her neck and handed her a bottle. She took it.

She tells this story with something close to fondness. I ask whether solving that sort of problem ever felt like the point. She doesn't hesitate. "It's just so fun. I really miss it."

Kit is thirty. She has been open online for several years about her mental health, her recovery from addiction, and the two occasions on which she tried to end her life. She got well, she says, and then she got tired of hearing herself talk about it. The walk was a way of turning advocacy into something bigger. She carried a flag with the names of people lost to suicide, and she talks about them as companions rather than a cause. She chatted to them over morning coffee. She cried with them when she saw mountains.

Messages came in through the whole year, thousands of them, some from people who said she was the reason they were still here. I ask whether that ever felt like a weight.

"It was never a burden. If I was doing this for myself I would have given up weeks in."

Back on the cliff

Her foot goes. She slides down the rock on her stomach with the pack still on. One pole goes. She is scrabbling at anything with both arms, digging her feet in, and nothing holds. Then she's holding a boulder, and thinking that was close, and she pushes up with her feet and there is nothing under them. She is hanging off the edge.

Her Garmin inReach is on her chest strap and she can't reach it. Even if she could, a helicopter would be hours away. What she thinks about is the tracking page. Her family will look at it tonight and see a dot beside a lake and think how nice, she's camping by the water.

"What was the last thing I said to my brother? What was the last thing I said to my mother?"

She pulls herself and the 23 kilograms back over the rock. The whole thing took perhaps a minute. She drinks some water, eats a handful of nuts, and carries on climbing, because up is the only way. She reaches a real plateau, finds the trail, sees the hut at eleven at night, and then crosses the seven rivers of the delta in front of it by torchlight. The warden is standing on his porch. He asks if she's okay. She says absolutely not, and goes into shock.

In the morning he asks to see her map. It's a Norwegian one, bought two days earlier before she crossed the border. He fetches the Swedish map of the same area. It is very different. She wouldn't have tried the shore if she'd had it. She doesn't blame the map, though.

"I made a judgement with no knowledge. I think that was my biggest error."

The one time she nearly stopped wasn't on a cliff. It was in spring, after a winter in which she says she didn't get warm for months, when in the space of a day two different men followed her for a long time on the road through Hungary. She turned round, walked back into Austria, and stayed three weeks in Graz. Her mum came out. And then Kit, who had done every mile solo and unsupported, asked for help.

"That is one of the bravest things you can do. It's not defeat."

They were the same words, she tells me, she'd used years earlier when she asked for help with her addiction.

Help, in the end, was a German couple with four dogs who drove to Graz and walked her into Croatia. It was a videographer in a van for the last few months. And it was two retired Swedes, Sven and Sören, an ex-PE teacher and a pastor, whom she met on day seventeen near Kilpisjärvi and who turned up in the next valley on the morning her phone died with all her maps on it. They gave her paper ones. They said they'd be her dads. They washed her tent when she reached southern Sweden. And almost a year after the man at the campsite had welcomed her to the north, they walked the last days through Crete with her, to a finish line she describes as deeply underwhelming.

Maybe nothing, but give it a go. The worst thing that can happen is that you hate it and you have to go back in.

Kit Birks

Kit Birks is a runner turned long-distance walker who covered the length of Europe solo in 2025, raising money and awareness for suicide prevention. She is the founder of Stride Beyond Silence, now a community interest company.