Virginia Woman’s 2,300-Mile Journey Ends With a Single Step

With 20 miles to go, then 10, then five, Niki Krause had one thing--and only one thing--on her mind Tuesday afternoon as she shook off the desert heat and began the final leg of her 2,300-mile hike from Virginia to California: faster, go faster.

“I thought about running the whole way” across the flat farmland that lines the Colorado River along the Arizona-California border, the 22-year-old from Fairfax County said in a telephone call from Needles. It was the last stop on her 4 1/2-month solo walk across America.

At 4:15 p.m. Tuesday, as Krause started across the two-lane bridge that spans the deep blue Colorado, she broke into a trot. Waiting at the other end of Veterans Memorial Bridge, their feet firmly planted on California soil, were Needles Mayor Murl Shaver and more than a dozen town notables.

They held a welcome banner chest-high, which Krause ran through like a marathon winner. Then they pieced the banner back together and everybody posed for pictures. The city manager produced a large wooden plaque, its brass plate inscribed: “Congratulations and welcome to California.”

“I never had a plaque before,” Krause said.

Krause set out from Charlottesville last May, the day after her graduation from the University of Virginia, in a burst of youthful now-what-ism. She had never hiked seriously before, and her parents held their breath as she headed out, loaded down with a 50-pound backpack and vague plans of whom and what she might encounter.

She had figured she would sleep under the stars, but in western Kentucky she was taken under the wing of a newspaper advertising woman who became her mother hen from that moment on, contacting friends and friends of friends down the road--and eventually total strangers in states far removed from Kentucky--to put the young hiker up for most of her nights on the road across America.

Krause guesses that she stayed with well over 100 families in 11 states, all the while chronicling her adventures in a handwritten journal she hopes to turn into a book. An apt title, she thinks, would be “A Nation of Friends,” taken from a newspaper headline about her journey. In recent weeks, as word of her trip has spread, her World Wide Web site musings (at www .smartsubmit.com/niki) have had more than 600 readers a day.

“It’s kind of a neat thing,” said Needles Chamber of Commerce volunteer Don Rupe, who drove out to meet Krause in the desert Tuesday to make sure that she was on course to finish her cross-country trek. “Anybody can start out doing that. I could have started out. But having the gumption to finish it, now, that’s tremendous.”

Linda Starr, a City Council member in the town of 6,000 and the last person to host Krause, said she found the young woman “real mature in a lot of ways and real immature in a lot of others.” Still, Starr said, “it was brave of her to set out to do this, and to complete it. . . . I can’t imagine the physical part, walking all day and spending the night by yourself out in the open.”

Krause acknowledges that the journey was grueling at times. “I’m physically exhausted,” she said. “Mentally, I probably could go farther,” she added, noting that her original destination was San Francisco, several hundred miles and one large desert away from Needles. “But I don’t want to test those limits. I really wanted this to be done.”

As for what’s next, Krause boarded a Greyhound bus for a two-hour ride to Las Vegas on Wednesday morning, then hopped a flight to Florida, where her boyfriend was waiting. “Now he wants to hike and go camping,” she said with a sigh. “I just want a pedicure.”