BELLVUE — Sarah Bailey had one thought in the sterile hospital room where the doctors were going over her daughter’s diagnosis, using words like hemoglobin and neutrophils and allopurinol: We need to get out of here. It was March 2023 and the beginning of a battle she knew she was willing to fight with 5-year-old Bellamy Korn, the youngest of her four kids. She knew she would be there for every step of the treatment that she hoped would wipe out the leukemia sickening her child.
But as she looked through the windows of the hospital, she just wanted to be out there, away from the big, scary words and talk about chemotherapy. The expansive, beautiful trails of Larimer County helped heal her during her divorce. She thought that being outside could do the same for Bellamy.
Hers in an outdoor family and she imagined skiing and hiking, and even the baseball games her sons played, would be as much a part of their life as the disease and the cure. That would not change. “The leukemia wasn’t going to stop us from doing the things we loved,” Bailey said.
She took out her daughter’s IV and walked with her outside. Sitting there, among all the trees and sunshine, even as spring’s frigid air bit at them, she came up with an idea: The treatment would take 21⁄2 years, and during that time, she and Bellamy would do 100 hikes. The rules were loose: They could repeat them, and they didn’t have to make the destination for it to count.
The journey was the point. Their first wal.