After spinal fusion, University of Iowa Health Care patient tackles the Pacific Crest Trail

As a teenager in Des Moines in 2015, Owen Trampe found himself in a metaphorical wilderness characterized by solitude, pain and fear. And then, without warning, he found himself in a literal wilderness — more than a thousand miles from home in the rugged Utah backcountry.

Earlier that year, a 15-year-old Trampe had been diagnosed with severe and advancing idiopathic scoliosis — or an unexplained sideways curve of his spine — during a routine physical for the 2015 baseball season.

“They had me bend down and touch my toes with my shirt off,” he said. “And my mother was sitting across the room, and she gasped after seeing it. It was just like a very sudden and pronounced curve. And it kept getting worse.”

Doctors had him fitted for a Rosenberger brace — which the National Institutes of Health cites as the only non-operative “potentially effective” method for halting curve progression in adolescent idiopathic scoliosis.

“I hated that thing,” said Trampe, now 24. It was painful — the plastic corset laced with Velcro straps and his back, plagued by contortion that was straining and displacing muscles.

“Even my shoulders were sort of skewed to the left,” he said. “Like my left shoulder was dropped a little bit lower than my right shoulder with me just trying to stand up normally.”

It was a lot — both physically and emotionally.

It got to the point where his mom opted for wilderness therapy in Utah — hiking, yoga, meditation and then two years of “therapeutic aftercare” where he finished high school.

And along the way, doctors monitoring his spine determined the brace wasn’t helping enough. “My curve of the spine was still progressing,” he said. “It was over 60 degrees.”

Given the severity of his situation, Trampe found his way to University of Iowa Health Care, where a team worried about implications for the long-term function of his lungs and heart.

“I thank my mother for finding the physician,” he said. “Of course, I was involved with that whole process of finding a surgeon, going and meeting them, and asking them about the operation and the alternatives and getting second opinions. And the decision was left up to me, ultimately, of whether or not to get surgery.”

He decided to go through with it.

“I graduated high school and then a week later I was on the operating table,” Trampe said, recounting the fear he felt in making that call. “I was terrified.”

‘A risk of paralysis’

As part of Trampe’s decision-making, he weighed the potential for success against the risks.

“I was really thinking, ‘Oh man, I’m going to be completely different after this. I’m not going to be able to bend and lift as much as I used to’.” he said. “And there was always a risk of paralysis.”

To mitigate the risks, Trampe said he found a “very experienced surgeon” in Stuart Weinstein — a UIHC orthopedic surgeon with the UI Stead Family Children’s Hospital who’s done more than 5,000 spinal fusions and conducted research over four decades focused on the long-term outcomes of pediatric orthopedic conditions.

His work “established the evidence base for the treatment of children with these conditions used around the world,” according to UIHC, reporting his contributions to more than 220 publications including the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association.

“Upon first meeting Dr. Weinstein, my surgeon, I felt a lot better,” Trampe said. “He seemed like a kind man. He had strong, steady hands. But they were very cold.”

The night before the procedure, Trampe remembers staying in a hotel and looking at his crooked back in the mirror. “Thinking, that’s going to be the incision line,” he said. “There’s going to be where the scar is going to go for the rest of my life.”

The next morning, doctors cut him open, removed some nonessential discs from his spine and then attached metal rods with screws to straighten his back.

“That hardware is still in my spine,” he said. “It’s going to remain there for the rest of my life.”

When Trampe woke up, he was an inch and a half taller.

“And as soon as I came around from the anesthesia, they had me up and moving,” he said. “That’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. Just to take that first step.”

Going under the knife in pain and waking up feeling worse was a challenge that Trampe said he overcame with hope.

“The pain taught me a lot about myself, about how I deal with adversary and challenge and the different ways to move past it,” he said. “Through distraction or rationalization. There’s a lot of different ways that you can surmount something seemingly impossible.”

‘I don’t want it to be never’

Although Trampe spent much of his formative years in Iowa with his mom, he was born in Seattle in 2001 and gravitated back there three months after surgery — starting his college endeavors at Seattle University. That came with challenges for a 18-year-old spinal-fusion patient.

Given that his laptop accounted for most of the weight allowance he was allotted to carry during recovery, Trampe’s textbooks were all electronic. His roommate helped with laundry and other tasks before an all-clear freed up Trampe to leap back into everyday life — and then the pandemic hit.

“My new blossoming social life in college was cut short,” he said.

Trampe waited out the pandemic with his dad, who also lived in Seattle, taking online courses and “really not doing much of anything at all.”

“So once that ended and I came back to college, I was ecstatic,” he said. “And I sort of overloaded on things.”

He joined the Ultimate Frisbee team, played water polo, started going to the gym and expanded his exploration of the world — including through a study abroad program in Iceland. Once he graduated with a degree in environmental science, Trampe landed a job in oceanography with the University of Washington.

“But I wasn’t convinced that I wanted science to be my career,” he said. “I decided that I wanted a big challenge.”

He found it in the nearby Cascade Mountains.

“I had always dreamed about doing the Pacific Crest Trail,” Trampe said. “And I didn’t have any commitments. No full-time job. No car. No lease. No animals. No girlfriend. None of that. I was like, ‘It’s either now or never. And I don’t want it to be never’.”

‘It opened my eyes’

On May 1, 2024, Trampe stepped back into the wilderness under very different circumstances — both physically and emotionally — as he started the 2,653-mile trek stretching from the Mexico-U.S. border, through 25 national forests and seven national parks in the Sierra and Cascade mountains, to the U.S.-Canada border near British Columbia.

“Having had scoliosis and those problems with my spine … I gave myself a lot of permission to not push myself as hard,” Trampe said. “But I discovered pretty soon after starting that I was capable of a lot more than I thought I was.”

So he tackled a lot of the challenges set up along the trail — including the “24-hour challenge” to see how far he could travel over that full day’s span. “I ended up doing 53 miles,” he said. “Was absolutely delirious.”

Although his pack’s base weight was about 20 pounds, some days it crept up to over 50 — like when he needed eight liters of water through dry and hot desert terrain. He also had with him an ice ax, micro spikes, a bear canister and eight days of food.

“I ran into town every five to eight days to resupply, get a shower maybe, do some laundry and eat a burger, drink a beer,” Trampe said.

While he did the trek solo, “I met just a ton of people.”

“And when I crossed I-80, I looked down that really long road and I thought somewhere on that end is my mother,” he said.

Once he hit the Canadian border, the official end of the trail, Trampe turned around and headed for home.

“I thought it would be such a fun and special way to end the hike by turning around and doing a victory lap,” he said. “And I actually hiked south for the first time.”

Integrating back into the “real world” began after the sleep ended.

“I was exhausted,” he said. “I pushed myself really hard while I was out on the trail and, surprisingly, my spine was able to keep up.”

Although he missed some aspects of the trail, Trampe also said he was tired of Ramen noodles and Snicker bars and tuna fish packets and peanut M & M’s. He missed having a change of clothes and warm socks and a bed.

“So I spent about two months not really doing much of anything at all,” he said. “Just sleeping in and reflecting on the trail and eating as much as I possibly could.”

Trampe found his next adventure not far from his last — landing a job as a ski instructor at a resort the Pacific Crest Trail intersects.

“I realized I can do difficult things,” he said of his lessons from the trail and from the spinal fusion that got him there. “I walked away with a newfound sense of confidence. And, more than that, it opened my eyes to the different ways I can live a rich and fulfilling life.”

Vanessa Miller covers higher education for The Gazette.

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