SALT LAKE CITY — A Utah man set out to hike 800 miles and raise $8,000 in support of the transgender community.

Plenty of Utahns find their calling in the mountains. For Kyle Ricco, they’ve become like a second home since the pandemic got him thinking.

“What are my true passions? What am I missing out on?” he asked.

His first foray into backpacking came a couple years ago through an LGBTQ group called Venture Out.

“We actually did part of the Appalachian Trail, 20 miles or so,” said Ricco, who now lives in Millcreek.

Twenty miles turned into one hundred miles, then two hundred fifty on the John Muir Trail. But what he planned this spring dwarfed all the rest.

“Hey I’m Kyle, I’m hiking 800 miles from Mexico to Utah on the Arizona Trail,” Ricco said in a video on his Instagram page, @k

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