On an early summer day in 2023, Justine Murray and Matt Connery sat across from each other at a wooden table in the tiny diner at the Bonaparte Lake Resort, nestled off Highway 20  in Washington’s forested Okanogan County. The couple from Sandpoint, Idaho, were a few days into their thru-hike of the Pacific Northwest Trail (PNT), which spans 1,200 miles from the Continental Divide in Montana to the Pacific Ocean on Washington’s Olympic Coast. In hopes of avoiding a potentially serious wildfire season in Montana, treacherous river crossings, and snowy passes, they planned to “flip-flop.” They began in Oroville, Washington, heading east until they reached the trail’s terminus in Glacier National Park. Then they would catch a flight back to Oroville to hike the westbound section to Cape Alava.

The sole waitress, noticing the backpacks, trekking poles, and the look of ravenous hunger on Matt and Justine’s faces, asked if they were hiking the PNT. They told her that they were thru-hiking as a fundraiser for mental health resources in their community—their second thru-hike of this nature. As the words came out, Justine and Matt watched the waitress’s face change. Immediately, she teared up and asked if she could give them a hug. Her son was on the streets, she told them. She didn’t know where he was.

Justine and Matt have heard similar stories too many times: On and off the trail, they’ve met people whose loved ones are living with severe mental illness, often unhoused and with few resources to turn to. It’s a topic that’s close to home for the couple. In 2019, Justine’s son, Ethan, was shot and killed by a sheriff’s deputy while in the midst of a mental health crisis. Ethan, 25, had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and was experiencing homelessness at the time of his death. In 2021, Justine and Matt started the Ethan Murray Fund (EMF) in an effort to create more access to mental health services in their community, and completed their first thru-hiking fundraiser on the Idaho Centennial Trail (ICT).

When Ethan passed away, Justine and Matt were in the early stages of dating. She had been fighting to obtain resources for Ethan for years, and now more than ever she needed hope that things in her community could change. Talking about the realities of mental health was where she would start.

Justine was unfamiliar with the term “mental health” until Ethan was in high school, when he started to show signs of developing a mental illness. At first there were episodes of paranoia. Not long after, he had his first psychotic break. Convinced Justine’s then-partner was building bombs, he lit a small fire under a bed in their house. Justine took him to their local hospital, but doctors there told her she needed to take him to Coeur d’Alene, a town one hour away, where medical personnel might be better equipped to handle the situation.

“I remember thinking, OK, [it’s] good he’s here, they’re going to fix this,” said Justine. “I’ll never forget the psychiatrist saying, ‘This is just the beginning. It’s going to get way worse.’”

The facts of Ethan’s death are hard to stomach. According to police reports, the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office had been called to an apartment complex for a call about a male, potentially under the influence of drugs, running near children outside on May 4, 2019. Upon arriving and seeing Ethan walking a short distance away, one of two responding deputies began pursuing him, and Ethan started running toward a wooded area. The two then ran into a hilly, rocky landscape. In an official police statement, the reporting deputy wrote that he believed Ethan was going to attack him with a knife. The deputy shot Ethan five times and he died on the scene. Investigators never found any weapons on or near Ethan’s body.

According to a report by Russ Hicks, a criminal justice and civil rights consultant who was hired by Justine’s lawyer in a lawsuit against Spokane County, Ethan was sober, unarmed, and committed no crime. He had had several contacts with local law enforcement in the prior 48 hours for loitering, and those police reports clearly documented that he was experiencing mental illness.

“I feel like we need more help in advocating for our mentally ill,” Justine said in a video that she posted online two days after Ethan’s death. “I want to see things change for our kids and our future.”

Over the last few years of Ethan’s life, Justine had become an active member of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) Far North. It was there she started to understand the basics of mental health terminology and how our emergency response, healthcare, and criminal justice systems respond to persons struggling with mental illness. When he was still alive, Justine had the idea to thru-hike as a pledge-per-mile fundraiser for resources for Ethan and people in her community in similar situations. She had read about the 996-mile ICT in the Idaho Statesman newspaper.

When Ethan and his sister were little, Justine took them outside often on camping, canoeing, and hiking trips. “Ethan just had so much energy and it felt like the outdoors was a great big playground,” Justine said.

Even in later years, as Ethan’s schizophrenia progressed and his ability to experience joy diminished, he would ask his mom to go on hikes that led to epic views or alpine lakes. When he was unhoused, he often made his home in the woods, instead of on a street or under a bridge. It was toward the sheltering pine trees, moss-covered rock outcroppings, and a rolling field of balsamroot blooms that he was running in his final moments.

After Ethan’s death, the pull of the trail became even stronger for Justine. She needed time in the wild to heal as much as she needed to do something to help others like her son. Before setting out on the ICT, which is notorious for rugged terrain, overgrown trail, and difficult route-finding, with Matt in the summer of 2021, Justine had only backpacked a handful of local trails. The first night on the ICT, she collapsed into her tent, her body throbbing from the weight of the pack. She told Matt she wasn’t sure she could complete the trail. But after a night’s sleep, almost all of her aches and pains disappeared. So she kept on. That became the pattern: Each day, new pains popped up, but they eased with every sunrise.

Thru-hiking, Justine realized, was unlike anything she’d ever experienced. “The only thing I can compare it to … is grief. Because you have these extreme highs and lows, and nobody understands,” she said. “You can tell somebody who has never thru-hiked as much as you want, but … like grief, it’s hard to explain.”

As they continued on the trail, Justine’s mental fortitude grew. Though living outside was a voluntary refuge for Justine, it made her feel closer to Ethan and what he may have felt living on the streets. Every day, she and Matt were dirty, and they were painfully aware of the looks they got when asking a shop or restaurant if they could use their restroom. On top of that, the ICT is rife with unique obstacles that challenge even experienced thru-hikers. Every day, she wondered where their water was going to come from, whether their food rations would last, and where they were going to sleep. They spent hours walking along long roads with vehicles racing by at an uncomfortable distance. Some evenings, they would arrive to where they thought they might find camp, only to discover that the spot was completely overgrown, suffocated with mosquitos, or heavily tracked by large animals. So they would continue hiking into the dark, in search of home.

Forgoing “those little things that make us feel safe and clean,” was a humbling experience, Justine said. And while it was only a taste of Ethan’s experience, it was a reminder to her of the depth of challenges he and other people living without housing faced every day.

Something that Justine didn’t anticipate was how positive interactions with other hikers, and various people they came in contact with, would oftentimes make her physical pain or discomfort subside entirely. It was often during her and Matt’s rawest moments that trail magic found them, like when a stranger pulled over in 100°F weather on a road stretch to offer them a cold beverage or homegrown peach.

“Justine always goes, ‘This is the best trail magic ever!’” said Matt. “You meet people and if someone helps you a little bit or a lot, at that moment, no matter how small, it is the best trail magic ever, because you are always in need of a kind hand and it always means something.”

Over the course of three months walking from the ICT’s high desert southern terminus to the dense evergreen forests of the northern terminus, Matt and Justine fundraised roughly $70,000. Justine wanted to use the money to build a crisis center, something that would have helped Ethan immensely. But upon returning to Sandpoint, the enormity of the task hit them. There were many parties to coordinate with, and it was difficult to direct funds into concrete action.

“I had dreams to change the whole world when Ethan died,” said Justine, “but where do you even start?”

According to NAMI’s 2022 report, one in 20 adults in the United States experience serious mental illness (any disorder that causes substantial functional impairment) each year. Compounding the issue, many communities lack crisis intervention teams or other specialized response personnel to mental health calls, and psychosocial rehabilitation and psychiatric resources are scarce. In North Idaho, the population is increasing, but mental health resources aren’t keeping pace.

Schizophrenia is a chronic disorder of the brain, but society doesn’t often treat it like diseases such as cancer or epilepsy. According to the Treatment Advocacy Center, molecular changes in the brain may begin as early as a decade before the symptoms appear and progress to psychosis, in which reality surrenders to disordered forms of thinking, delusions, paranoia, and hallucinations. With each psychotic break, the brain has a harder time recovering. Ethan had at least three.

At times when Ethan was in crisis, Justine would try contacting his doctor to get his medication or local law enforcement for help. Often, their response was that unless Ethan was an immediate threat to himself or others, their hands were tied. To refill his medication, he usually would need to come in for an evaluation, which felt like a near-impossible ask when he was in crisis. When law enforcement or paramedics did pick Ethan up, it usually led to time in either jail or the hospital, where he could wait for a psychiatric evaluation. With few resources, medical personnel often end up sedating patients long enough to de-escalate the situation before releasing them.

For better or worse, police officers are often the first responders to persons with mental illness, and departments rarely provide them with adequate training or resources for either themselves or the individuals they are called to help. The Treatment Advocacy Center’s 2015 report, Overlooked in the Undercounted: The Role of Mental Illness in Fatal Law Enforcement Encounters, stated that by “conservative estimates, at least one in four fatal law enforcement encounters involves an individual with a serious mental illness.”

It was toward the sheltering pine trees, moss-covered rock outcroppings, and a rolling field of balsamroot blooms that Ethan was running in his final moments.

After getting off the ICT, Justine spent two years pouring herself into a civil lawsuit against Spokane County, a case that ended with a settlement. Though the deputy who shot Ethan didn’t face criminal charges, Justine hoped that this case would force the county to change their approach to mental illness. The lawsuit left Justine feeling drained and depleted. For a while she shut herself away, having a hard time making the effort to connect with her community or get outside.

After some time, she approached the Ethan Murray Fund’s board ready to take action. She knew she didn’t have enough resources to build the crisis center right away, but this time she would focus on the smaller steps she could take. Matt had the idea to use the money they fundraised to cover the costs of counseling sessions for locals in crisis. They also collected socks and put together backpack kits for the unhoused.

Calls started coming into the nonprofit from other people with struggling family members. One woman asked for advice to help her daughter, who was going through her first mental health crisis, scared and handcuffed to a hospital bed. Others asked how to set up Supplemental Security Income, or hire a lawyer. Each phone call was confirmation to Justine that she was on the right path.

Back in 2021, Justine had sworn she’d never do a thru-hike again, but a couple of years after her ICT hike and with EMF’s momentum picking up, she felt ready to plan another pledge-per-mile hike. She had come to see hiking as a way to take care of herself, to honor Ethan, and to raise money and visibility for her cause.

Justine and Matt chose the PNT for their next thru-hike because of its remoteness and closeness to home, with the trail and forest roads passing through Idaho and mountain ranges to the east and west, from the Rockies in Montana to Washington’s Wilderness Coast. It is a difficult trail, not well-marked or well-traveled, with similar elevation changes to the Pacific Crest Trail in about half the distance.

The elevation profile wasn’t the only obstacle. Wildfires closed the North Cascades Highway and left ash raining from the sky. Inclement weather led them to do a major reroute, avoiding a high ridge and instead doing an 8-mile, 12-hour bushwhack on legs swollen from an encounter with an underground hive of yellowjackets. Thorny blackberry bushes left cuts that scarred, and beach walks involved ascending cliffs with ropes and ladders, all while paying close attention to the changing tides.

Fortunately, the highs were as memorable as the lows. In the waters of Caribou Creek where the ICT and PNT intersect, Matt and Justine exchanged wedding vows in their hiking clothes. Through a clearing hemmed in cedars and firs, with ripe huckleberries and flower petals blanketing the forest floor, a few of their closest friends and family gathered around to celebrate Justine and Matt’s love, strength, and perseverance, both on and off the trail.

A few months later, they were hiking along the Elwha River in Olympic National Park, a couple weeks out from the western terminus. This section of the Elwha River was the site of the largest and most complex dam removal in the history of the world. It took nearly two decades for the dam to start coming down after the project received congressional approval in 1992. Ecologists hoped that the removal would allow native fish to return to their spawning grounds and restore the balance of the ecosystem, but no one knew what effect a dam removal this large would actually have.

With each step, Justine, Matt, and a hiking buddy from home passed through an ecosystem in flux, following a meandering turquoise ribbon. Sunlight hit every shade of green imaginable.  The land was recovering.

Some people who had heard news of Ethan’s death tried to get Justine to be angry at law enforcement. They encouraged her to go in with a wrecking ball, demanding justice. But Justine knows that there’s no amount of justice that can bring Ethan back.

“What if the sheriff had his own PTSD?” she questioned. “What if he was scared at that moment?” She believes one day, a conversation with him might make more of a crack in the dam wall than a wrecking ball ever could.

These days, it is rare to look at something and have hope that it is going to be better 50 years from now. But with every step, there’s the potential for forward momentum, to change the way we as a culture and individuals talk about and support mental health. Today, the banks of the Elwha have filled in with dense alder arms reaching down into the glacial waters, and fish populations have been returning for many years. There is more positive change to come.

“Every day there’s going to be Ethans. Every single day. That’s not going to change,” said Justine. “So the biggest thing we can do is have and give hope—hope that we’re moving forward and we are going to make a difference. If we can save or change just one life, we’ve done our job.”