Barry Adkins was known as the man who was walking. While undertaking a 1,400-mile pilgrimage from his home in Gilbert, Arizona, arriving in 2007 where he had grown up in the Flathead Valley, he was not only walking but also grieving — his backpack carrying the ashes of his son Kevin, who had died two years earlier from alcohol poisoning.   

Adkins started his walk on Feb. 26 on what would have been his son's 20th birthday. Each step he took brought him closer to the Flathead Valley and the second anniversary of his son's death. 

Adkins arrived in Kalispell in July of 2007, bringing Kevin home to rest under the wide Montana skies he had been so captivated by. His body was battered, his soul bruised, and he felt a numb relief that he had finished his journey. 

While painful, the story of Kevin's Last Walk is easy to tell, Adkins said. What's harder to explain is the years since he walked into downtown Kalispell, escorted by police cars and a rolling blockade. He didn't realize at the time that the end of this journey marked the beginning of another, one without any finish line or destination. 

"I thought I was going to walk to Montana, and I was going to be done," Adkins said, nearly 20 years later. He's a little older now than he was in the photographs he shares of himself, walking with a blue backpack along the back roads crisscrossing the spine of the continent. He speaks softly and slowly and makes piercing eye contact.  

Earlier this year, Adkins started another walking challenge, one that reflects what he has come to understand about grieving and about substance abuse in the years since his son died. 

The Million Miles Challenge, as Adkins has named it, is the next step of his journey, but he has no intention of accomplishing this alone. Rather, the challenge is a communal effort to log one million miles, raise awareness for drug and alcohol addiction, and remember the lives claimed by the disease.  

Adkins chose one million miles in large part because he knows he could never walk that far on his own, just as he knows that he could never have endured the loss of his son alone. His own (literal) walk with grief was a family endeavor: his daughters left their jobs to join him on the road while his wife Bev drove the support van.  

And yet, Adkins said, loss from substance abuse is far too often suffered alone.  

"Those things tend to be buried," Adkins said. "If someone dies of cancer, usually family members will at least tell other people what happened, but [with substance abuse], there's a lot of people that just don't ever say anything, and sometimes you don't even know really what happened because no one wants to talk about it." 

Adkins understands why people don't want to talk about it — in many ways, he doesn't either. Every time he tells the story of Kevin's death, he is physically exhausted afterwards, and yet he has continued to do so because he hopes to make something good from what happened.  

"People always say, 'I don't know how you revisit it like that,'" he added. "But I think it's important to share the details so they can get the feeling, the emotion out of it." 

REMEMBERING THE brown chair in the living room in Gilbert, Adkins recalls it as the last place Kevin sat down in July of 2005 to tell his father he was moving out. Framed by the picture window that overlooked the backyard, Kevin, freshly graduated from high school and with the naivete and zeal possessed only by 18-year-olds on the cusp of freedom, he couldn't wait for the rest of his life to begin. 

Adkins wanted to talk him out of it, tell his son that he could stay at home a while longer. Instead, he watched as Kevin loaded a bed and a dresser and a television set into the back of the new pickup truck he had purchased with the loan Adkins cosigned. Kevin told Adkins he would be back the next day for his toothbrush.  

Adkins gave his son a hug, told him he loved him and to be careful. Kevin hopped into the truck and drove off to his new apartment and his new life. 

That was the last time Adkins saw his son alive.  

Kevin's friends threw him a housewarming party that night. They started with beer, but as the night progressed, they started downing shots.  

At 2:30 in the morning, Kevin called his older sister and left her a voicemail. His words slurring together, he told her he'd taken six double shots of Jack Daniel's and that he was having so much fun.  

Sometime later, he passed out. Around 4 a.m., his friends started calling 911 — first to say that Kevin was struggling to breathe, then to say he wasn't breathing at all. Kevin's blood-alcohol level, they later learned, was .36, which is considered extremely high, representing a life-threatening medical emergency.  

"My son died alone in a hospital room while I slept peacefully in my bed," Adkins said 

"The most you can hope for is to try to make something good come from what happened to your child," Adkins repeated as he finished the story. The raw edges of emotion have softened over time, but the pain is still evident.  

In the weeks and months following Kevin's death, Adkins kept returning to a scene from Kevin's favorite movie, "Lonesome Dove." Larry McMurtry's Western epic is set on the sprawling frontier from Texas to Montana. The story's two central characters, retired Texas Rangers, have returned to an idyllic orchard in Texas after driving a herd of stolen cattle north of the Yellowstone River. But only one of the Rangers survived the daring journey and looking to grant his fellow Ranger's dying wish to return to Texas, he makes the harrowing journey in reverse to bury his friend.   

A cowboy at heart, Kevin joined FFA and competed in rodeos, seldom appearing in photographs without a cowboy hat perched on his head. He dreamed of moving to Montana, where Adkins had grown up, and owning a ranch one day. 

As Adkins turned the images over in his mind, the idea for Kevin's Last Walk was born: Adkins would walk roughly 1,400 miles from his home in Arizona to Kalispell, carrying his son's ashes with him and bringing him to rest in the place where he had felt happiest.  

The family processed their loss together during a four-month pilgrimage along a piecemeal route stitched together with MapQuest. 

THE STORY of Kevin's Last Walk became about a man who had suffered tremendous loss but was doing something about as he began speaking in high school gymnasiums about the dangers of binge drinking, trying in his own way to prevent something like this from happening to someone else's child. 

Mostly, he just shared Kevin's story. 

"I can safely say that stories matter because I've been in auditoriums where there's 1,400 students in a room, and you can hear a pin drop," Adkins said. "A lot of students have said that those stories are what help them understand that life is fragile." 

Adkins later heard about a party thrown by some teenagers at one of the schools he visited. Someone drank too much and passed out, and the students who heard Kevin's story insisted on calling 911. When the other partiers refused, scared to get in trouble, one of the students loaded his inebriated classmate into his car and drove him to urgent care.  

"Their act in that moment saved that kid's life," Adkins said.  "That's what keeps me going. It really is. I had not imagined I would still be doing this 20 years later, I can tell you." 

It is estimated that around 4,000 underage Americans dies from excessive alcohol use each year, according to figures from the National Institutes of Health. While the Foundation for Advancing Alcohol Responsibility reports that underage drinking has decreased significantly since the pandemic, Adkins looks at any of these deaths and sees a child, sibling and friend lost to a preventable accident.  

Meanwhile, the rate of alcohol-induced deaths for all ages in the United States has increased nearly 90% in the 25-year span between 1999 and 2024. Annual fatalities peaked in 2021 with 54,258 deaths, according to a study published by the scientific journal PLOS Global Public Health.  

From Adkins's perspective, the best way to prevent this from happening to another child like his son is to continue sharing his story, through the book "Pain into Purpose" and speaking engagements and podcast interviews. 

It’s also why he started the Million Mile Challenge, to create a space for people to share the stories of those they've lost. As part of the challenge, people can sign up individually or as a team and share the story of the person they’re walking for.  

The challenge is still in its infancy — since it was launched in July, more than 3,000 miles have been logged, which Adkins acknowledges is only a small percentage of the seven-digit goal. He knows it might take years to reach that number, but, as he’s learned from more than 20 years of mourning his own son, the walk through grief is a lifelong journey.  

"Again, the most you can hope for is to try to make something good come from what happened to your child," he said. "Don't let that story go away. Tell that story. We can't do anything about yesterday, but maybe we can change tomorrow for somebody, and that's really the goal." 

For more information and to participate in the challenge, visit millionmilechallenge.net 

Reporter Elsa Ericksen can be reached at 406-758-4459 or [email protected]. If you value local journalism, pledge your support at dailyinterlake.com/support 

    Barry Adkins and his son Kevin, who died of alcohol poisoning in 2005. Adkins has since become an advocate against binge drinking and launched the Million Mile Challenge earlier this year to raise awareness for substance abuse. (Courtesy Barry Adkins)
  

    Barry Adkins and the first sign of Kalispell since he started walking from his home in Gilbert, Ariz. (Courtesy Barry Adkins)