pages tagged AT

Hiking Philosophy

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 12:50:44 -0700

Now that I have written an account of my AT hike, I thought I would write down some things that I think are true about hiking before writing about the next hike. The first thing to note is that I subscribe completely to the hike-your-own-hike (HYOH) philosophy, so this should be read as descriptive more than prescriptive.

Leave No Trace

Okay, I lied. This is the one prescription. Read the

Animals

So much of the conversation about hiking with non-hikers or inexperienced hikers is about dangerous animals. I probably saw less than one bear for every month of hiking that I did, and they were all running away from me. I never hiked in grizzy country, and if I ever do, I'll think about maybe carrying bear spray, though I doubt I will in the end. Wilderness is vast and bears and other dangerous animals are sparse. They generally don't want anything to do with us.

The most scared I was of an animal on the AT was the time I saw a skunk on the trail in the Shenandoahs.

Gear

I'm generally not an ultralighter, though I'm moving more in that direction. This is the gear that I used.

Shelter

I love my hammock. It's lighter than many tents, far more comfortable than sleeping on the ground, and you don't need to find a flat spot to set it up. On the other hand, you do need to find suitable trees. This is easy in a pine forest and is probably impossible in the plains.

Shoes

Not boots. I grew to be very happy with the

Pack

I wore the same pack for both of my thru-hikes: the

Clothes

All synthetic. For the AT hike, I wore the same shirt and shorts most of the way. I got a new pair of shorts in Damascus, just because I was getting tired of the pair that I was wearing. I started my AT hike with three pairs of socks and they lasted me the whole way. I would generally change socks only as needed because they were wet or once per week during dry sections. I carried the following:

One short-sleeved shirt
One long-sleeved shirt
Two pairs of underwear
One pair of shorts
One pair of long pants
Three pairs of socks
One fleece
One rain jacket
One down jacket

On sections that I knew would be very cold, I carried a hat and gloves. In the Sierras I carried wool tights as well, and there were nights where I wore everything that I was carrying.

Sleeping Bag

I have a fairly generic down sleeping bag from

Bear canister

It's the law that you must carry one in the Sierras, so I did. They are the worst – heavy and bulky, and they still don't fit as much food as a normal food bag.

Hiking poles

As far as I can tell, simpler is better. A strap is good and telescoping is good so that they fit in cars when hitching. I've never used poles with shock absorbers, but I really don't see how they would help.

Packing

I'm a firm believer that you should always pack in a consistent manner. This saves you time rooting around in your pack. The only tip that I have is that the sleeping bag should go on the bottom. You won't need it all day, and it's nice to have something soft on the bottom of your pack if you put it down quickly or fall down backwards. Other than that, I don't think the order matters too much as long as it's consistent.

People

Both of my long hikes have been solo hikes in the sense that I made no explicit arrangement with anyone else to hike together. In both hikes, I have had periods of being truly alone and periods where I would regularly meet up with the same people nearly every night. I probably enjoyed myself the most when I was in groups of three or four, but I also think that it would be nearly impossible for me to stay with one single group for an entire hike.

The community aspect of hiking is one of its strongest selling-points. You meet all kinds of people who are all doing the same thing as you. So that gives you something to talk about right away. Nothing bonds like shared misery.

There is also a strong sense that everyone is looking out for each other. This was put into the starkest relief for me when I was hiking in the Sierras on the PCT, so I'll go into it in more detail when I get around to writing about that.

Conclusion

I might write another of these more general posts about hiking later. I still haven't touched on things like a daily schedule or what town stops are like. For now, however, I think this post has gotten long enough.

Georgia

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 10:24:58 -0800

I entered Georgia with one goal: get to Springer Mountain by my birthday. It's about 75 miles from the border to Springer, and I had three and a half days, so I thought that I had a pretty good chance of getting there on time.

I needed to make one final stop in town before I got to the end for my last resupply. I got to the highway at about 5:00 and soon got a hitch into Hiawassee. 67.5 miles to go.

Hiawassee to Springer

The next morning, back on the trail with three days of food, I took an early break. I went to put my pack on, and the buckle for the hip belt broke! Some people with ultralight packs can hike without a hip belt, but I am not one of them (though I wish I was). For me, the hip belt is the thing that bears most of the weight of the pack and the shoulder straps are more for stabilization. In short, this almost rose to the level of an emergency. Had it been earlier in the trip, or if I had not set a self-imposed deadline for the end of the hike, I might have turned around and hiked back to the road.

There was no way I was going to do that though. I tried hiking without the hip belt for a little while, but it quickly became obvious that that wouldn't work. It was time for some out-of-the-box thinking. I seriously considered just leaving the pack behind and running the rest of the way to Springer. I know that people run that far in less than 24 hours all the time, and considering the shape I was in, I probably could have done it. However, leaving all my stuff in the back woods of Georgia seemed like something to do only as a last resort, and spending a night without my pack would be too awful to risk. Finally, I realized that I had my rope that I used to hang my bear bag. I cut about a foot from that and tied the straps of my hip belt together.

Thankfully, it worked. I soon got just as good at tying the hip belt together as I had been at buckling it. It looked a little funny, like a person with a rope for a belt, but in the woods there's really no one to judge that sort of thing.

The terrain was hilly that day, and between that and my hip-belt disaster, I didn't make it that far. I ended up on the top of Rocky Mountain with 52.2 miles to go and two full days of hiking left.

Fortunately, the hills were less steep the next day, the weather was great, and I was on a roll. With each mile that I got closer to the end of my journey, the better I felt.

Near the end of the day, I came to Katahdin. I am willing to stipulate that much. Some will say that makes finishing a southbound AT hike anticlimactic, and that is one step too far for me. I had walked nearly 2200 miles in the wilderness to get there; it was pretty damn climactic.

I finished on my birthday, just as I had hoped. It really was a great way to spend it.

Coda

The terminus of the trail is the top of a mountain. There is no road up to there – to get home you must take another trail. I walked about a mile down that after finishing the AT, and camped one last time. I was out of fuel, so I made my only campfire of the entire hike and made supper over that.

I hiked out the next day past

Next time

That's it for the AT, but it's less than half of my long hikes. Depending on my mood, I might start right in on the PCT, or I might go a little deeper into the gear I used and other more general thoughts that I have about hiking.

Tennessee and North Carolina

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 13:19:25 -0800

Damascus to Erwin

I had a great time in Damascus with the little crew that I had met up with a few days earlier, but they wanted to stay in town a little longer than I did, so I went on without them. The first day out of town, I had a certain shelter in mind to end at, but it got dark before I got there and, having no desire to night-hike, I simply stopped in the middle of a hill and set up my hammock. I'm fairly sure that was one of my most random campsites. I didn't think it looked any good as a campsite, but I was tired and wanted to stop.

Laurel Fork Falls

Maybe my thinking was skewed by the fact that I knew that if I could hike 25 miles per day for the next four days, I could stay at a hostel for each of them. The first of these days took me to the Kincora hostel, home of Bob Peoples. Bob is a trail maintainer in addition to being a hostel-keeper, and is a trail fixture. Most of the graffiti in the shelters leading to his hostel consists of Chuck Norris-style jokes about him (all complimentary of course). He has been running the hostel for over 20 years and still only charges $4 per night. While I was there, we sat and chatted a bit. He told me about his previous hike in Europe and his plan for the next summer to work on the International AT in Canada, adding cairns so people can find their way in Newfoundland. For an older guy (he must be nearly 70), he sure gets his kicks on the trail.

The leaves by this point had all turned, and most of them were brown. There were a few patches of color left, though. For the most part, I was still in the "tunnel" of trees and branches, but the falling leaves gave some more opportunities to see outside it.

The next night I made it to the next hostel. This was the Mountain Harbour Hostel. They have a room above a barn that is really nice, but unfortunately it was booked by the time that I got there. I did use it to shower in and watched City Slickers (a great trail movie by the way) before going to bed in an RV. It was comfortable, but not as neat as the barn.

The next day started with a big climb up Hump Mountain. It is the first of the "balds" that a southbound hiker hits.

As you can see, there are no trees – it is just long grass. After nearly 1800 miles of nearly consistent tree cover (and alpine terrain on the tops of mountains), this is a welcome change.

Eventually the trail goes over 6000 feet elevation at Roan High Knob. There is a shelter at the top, where I am sure it gets quite cold at night, but I wouldn't know because I wanted to get to the next hostel.

The next hostel was not a hostel but a "friendly" (get it? hostel… hostile… friendly (it's not a great joke)). The proprietress, who was quirky but nice, wasn't there when I arrived, but she left a key so that I could get situated and watch a little TV. She cooked me a great breakfast the next morning and I was on my way to the next one.

The weather that day was rainy, and I got to use the rain jacket that I had purchased in Virginia for the first time. Going up some rather high mountains in a thunderstorm wasn't so fun, but I was on a mission.

Luckily, the rain didn't last long, and soon it was a mere memory. I kept pushing on and made it to Erwin, TN by mid-afternoon. The hostel in Erwin had a bunch of old guys just hanging around. I might have found them amusing under other circumstances, but as it was I just found them (and Erwin by extension) a little sad. I got a resupply that evening and was out early the next morning.

Sad.

Erwin to Gatlinburg

Out of Erwin, there is some significant climbing, and that combined with the threat of rain conspired to stop me after only 16 miles. I was glad to have stopped, because it did rain that evening and some the next morning as well. Once again, the rain cleared up by the afternoon, and by the end of the day I was happy to be walking down the trail. At the end of the day I came upon Hot Springs, NC. It was dark by the time I found the hostel that I had heard about. It is run by a Buddhist monk who makes gourmet vegetarian food. Naturally, I took a zero there.

By this time, I had done the math and determined that I could finish on my birthday if I kept a decent pace. The zero set me back a little bit, so from then on I needed to really push: the only thing in my way was the Great Smoky Mountain National Park.

I met up with Skittles again the day after I left Hot Springs. He had a bit of a falling-out with the rest of the group (as I understood it) and had hiked ahead of them. It was nice to be around someone that I knew again, but we had such radically different paces during the day that we were never around each other for very long.

The next day ended just inside the national park at a shelter that had a chain-link fence enclosing it to keep the bears out. There was a group there, and after a while it became clear to me that they were a church group. Skittles showed up late and he never got the memo. The next morning, he went with them to the top of a mountain off-trail (there were a couple of pretty young ladies in the group, and he thought he had a chance) and only found out then. As he told me, he was pretty mad when he found out and spent a couple of hours arguing with them about the existence of God.

I, on the other hand, went to a shelter half a mile off the trail and spent the night alone at a mile high. There were bear warnings all over, but I didn't see one.

I love views where the mountains seem to be stacked one behind the other. The Smokies had that in abundance, and the haze in these photos really shows where they got their name.

I was only about 10 miles from the road Gatlinburg, and got there easily by noon. Despite the throngs of tourists, I wasn't able to get a hitch for over an hour (and even that was in the back of a pickup truck – not fun for 15 miles at 60 miles per hour).

Gatlinburg is a strange place. It's now overshadowed by Dollywood, but it was once the premier tourist destination in the area. As such, it has everything you wouldn't expect: a Ripley's Believe it or Not, cable cars, a wax museum. The only thing that isn't accessible in town is a grocery store. I had to wait for a bus to take me out of town and back in order to resupply. By the time I had gotten everything that I needed, it was getting pretty late, so I decided to stay in town. The one advantage of it being such a touristy town is that there are many motels, and they're all pretty cheap.

Gatlinburg to the border

I got picked up by a guy going back to the trail to do some trail maintenance the next day. Soon after getting dropped off, I hit the highest point on the trail – Clingman's Dome. For some reason unknown to man, there is a completely ugly structure on top.

The hike was all relatively downhill from there

The next day was even snowier.

The snow didn't slow me down too much, because I was on a mission to get to the Nantahala Outdoor Center. I hit a shelter full of people at about 5 pm with about 7 miles left to go before I got there. I didn't even hesitate about staying at the shelter. I knew that if I was going to make it to the end by my birthday, I would have to do the miles that night.

I eventually did make it to the outdoor center, after a little bit of night-hiking. I am almost always against the idea of night-hiking, but it really is magical in the snow: everywhere that your headlamp hits just sparkles. I was really glad to be inside that night – it snowed more and got quite cold outside and I was snug inside.

The next morning was still cold, so I went and bought a cap at the outfitter. It was a good thing that I did too, because I was cold almost all of that day. That night it got the coldest that it ever was on the trail. My sleeping bag, rated at 0 C (meaning that I should be comfortable all the way down to that temperature) was really not warm enough. I slept in all my clothes and had just my nose poking out the top. It was cold.

Thankfully, that was the coldest night that I spent on the trail. The sun came out the next day and never went away again. I passed the point where I only had 100 miles left and at that point I was pretty certain that I would make it. I had 4 days left until my birthday, and I was also pretty certain that I would make it by then. Thinking back to the beginning of my hike, that would have been hubris, but now that I had gotten near the end, it really was justified confidence. That said, there were some tests to come, but no more in North Carolina, because I was almost out of there.

The final state line

Next Time

Georgia. The last state on the trail, containing the final challenge for my hike.

Central and Southern Virginia

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 11:10:24 -0800

Waynesboro to Daleville

In my previous post, I mentioned what a hard time I had in the Shenandoah National Park because of the rain. In Waynesboro, I decided to do something about that. I mailed my rain jacket home and went to an outfitters to get a new one. I got a nice compact down jacket while I was at it.

There is a diner in town that has all-you-can-eat pancakes, so breakfast and lunch were taken care of. I couldn't walk very fast with so much food in my stomach, though, so I didn't go far past Waynesboro. At the shelter, I met Farm-a-sea, whose trail name had a double meaning. He was training to become a fish farmer when he wasn't hiking, and he also had a sizable cache of medicinal herbs. He was an interesting guy though. He would pack a dozen eggs and a large hunk of bacon out of town. He had a skillet for frying them in, and would build a fire at every shelter and cook his supper in the skillet. Really old-school stuff.

The terrain in Virginia became hilly once again. After the flatness of Pennsylvania, this took some getting used to. Also, since Southern Pennsylvania, the leaves had been falling, and by Central Virginia, they were falling in earnest.

It was in this section that I realized that I had not packed enough food for the number of days that I would need if I was going to continue at the same average speed. Thus, I needed to pick up my average mileage considerably. I did two 30-mile days and two 25-mile days into Daleville. There was some interesting scenery on the way, including this rock formation, rather ominously named "The Guillotine":

By the time I got to Daleville, I was in a pretty serious calorie deficit. I went and had a big supper at a crappy Mexican restaurant, followed by two beers from the store in my motel room. I could tell midway through the second beer that it wasn't a good idea.

Daleville to Damascus

I was hung over all the next day. However, following my experience from the previous week, I tried to make miles and not allow it to slow me down. I didn't want to be stuck without food once again. Hiking with a hangover is really terrible, though, and it seemed like every 10 minutes I needed to sit down or bend over and try to vomit. I didn't get anything out all day, but I didn't eat anything either, so by the end of the day I was getting hungry. I took this as a good sign and ate some Teriyaki Noodles. I couldn't keep them down through the night, but after I had gone into the woods to deposit them on the ground, I finally felt better. However, the memory of that day has been enough to keep me from drinking alcohol ever since.

The next days were better, though marred by bad trail maintenance and ragweed. One highlight was the second-largest oak tree on the trail:

The day after that picture was taken, I ended up at The Captain's place, a small hostel with tenting in the yard. The really interesting feature of it was that you needed to take a cable car across the creek to get there.

The following day, I ended up at Pearisburg. It is another spread-out town, and I had to walk a couple of miles to get to the store. However, I had had a sleeping bag sent there because mine had been leaking feathers for quite a while, and I was able to pick it up, so that was nice.

I went to the Woods Hole hostel the next day, which was a greatly relaxing day. One of the hostel-keepers teaches yoga and the other is a masseur (though the massages weren't free, and I didn't feel like getting one).

After Woods Hole, I really started rolling. I did a 20-mile day the next day and a 34-mile day the day after that. This took me to the Chestnut Knob shelter, which is a completely enclosed shelter on the top of a mountain. It was windy all night, but I slept fairly comfortably after my long day.

The next two days weren't too special. I stayed in a motel near the interstate and a shelter that was reportedly haunted (though I saw no evidence of a haunting). The day after that, though I entered the Grayson Highlands State Park. This is a park that is famous for the wild ponies that roam it.

I got a picture with me near them that shows how small they really are.

I had heard that they will come up to you and lick or chew your pack in order to get the salt from your sweat, but that didn't happen to me.

Just before I got to the Grayson Highlands, I met up with another group of hikers: Skittles, Flora, Abear, and Coyote. I had been following most of them in the shelter logs for months, so it was like meeting old friends. Flora in particular signed her name with a large flower (her hiking partner Fauna had left near Washington, DC), so her entries were hard to miss. We hiked together off and on for a few days, and it was nice to be hiking with people once again.

We all stopped together in Damascus, VA and found cheap accommodation in a building run by a local church. It was empty, but it had strict rules (no cooking in the rooms was the one they seemed most concerned with) and a person came during the night to make sure that we were following them. I found a new pair of shoes on sale in Damascus, so I got them and got rid of my previous pair which were falling apart. They had only lasted about 500 miles.

I left Damascus early the next day, leaving the group behind. Skittles would catch up with me and we would hike together a bit longer, but I didn't see the rest again. Just past Damascus, I left Virginia for Tennessee.

Next Time

Tennessee and North Carolina. A run of four straight hostels, and the weather finally turning cold.

4-State and Northern Virginia

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 19:08:36 -0800

4-State Challenge

The challenges long-distance hikers create for themselves are essentially stupid. You generally don't get anything for completing them, and they have a tendency to make you feel bad. For example, on the PCT, there is a challenge that involves hiking from a town to a hostel while drinking a beer every mile. Since the distance between the places is 24 miles, it seems remarkably foolhardy to me.

With that out of the way, let me tell you about the challenge that I did. It involves hiking in 4 states in under 24 hours. I started in Pennsylvania, hiked most of the day in Maryland, went through Harpers Ferry in West Virginia, and ended the day in Virginia.

I started the day just after midnight, and wished Picker and Grinner a silent "good luck". Even though there was a nearly-full moon, the night was pretty dark, and I needed my head lamp all night. Shortly into Maryland, I tweaked my ankle pretty badly, and so I was slowed a bit for the rest of the night.

By 4 in the morning, I had not gone very far, and I decided to take a nap. I found a reasonably flat rock and laid down right beside the trail. I slept until about 6, by which time the sun was coming up.

I had gone around 20 miles by lunch time, so I took it at the Washington Monument:

This is clearly not the and started to look for a place to get some food. It took me a while to get my bearings, and by the time I found a street with bars and restaurants, they were all closed. It seems that Harpers Ferry is completely a tourist town, and no restaurants are open after about 8:00. Finally, I found a restaurant with open doors and went in, despite a sign saying that the restaurant was closed. I practically begged the waitress to get me some food, and in the end I overpaid quite a lot for a mediocre sandwich.

I went to the headquarters of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, which was also closed, and looked around, trying to find a hose. Someone must have thought that I looked suspicious, because one of the workers eventually showed up and showed me where the hose was. I filled my water bottles, thanked the employee, and went on my way.

It seems cruel, but the trail climbs a hill for about two miles from Harpers Ferry to the Virginia border. I had walked 43 miles by the time I made it to the border, and I was completely beat. I hung my hammock just past the border sign and settled into bed at about 10:30 PM.

I awoke the next morning later than usual, and hung most of my gear in a tree. I wanted to go back to Harpers Ferry, since it is customary for thru-hikers to visit the ATC and have their picture taken. So I went back with a mostly-empty pack. I had my picture taken and hung around until nearly noon. During the time that I was there, some section-hikers also came in. We talked for a while about the differences between the thru-hiking experience and the section-hiking experience, and they gave me some of their freeze-dried meals, which were of a much higher quality than the meals I generally ate.

Harpers Ferry to Waynesboro, VA

Eventually, I left the ATC. I climbed the hill again, got the rest of my gear, and hiked about 7 miles further down the trail. The next day I did 10 miles by lunch time and called it a day at a really nice hostel: the Bear's Den. If you are ever in the Washington, DC area and would like a hostel experience, this is the place for you.

I lounged and let my legs recuperate. The Bear's Den has a nice deal where you can stay at the hostel, get a frozen pizza and a pint of Ben & Jerry's ice cream for pretty cheap. Even though I had recently completed the half-gallon challenge, I was certainly ready for some Ben & Jerry's.

After the Bear's Den, there is a section of trail called "The Roller Coaster". This is primarily meant to scare northbounders who haven't seen any real mountains yet. The terrain is a bit bumpy, but there was really nothing to worry about.

The following day I stopped in at Front Royal, VA for a resupply. I had to wait a very long time for a hitch (the famed Southern hospitality had apparently not yet kicked in). I noticed that my pocket knife was missing, so I called the Bear's Den, and they had found it. They very generously sent it on to me at a town that was down the trail. I left Front Royal, and camped just a couple of miles before boundary of Shenandoah National Park.

My experience in "The Shennies" was not great. It rained nearly the whole time that I was there, and there is a road that the trail crosses something like 20 times in the park. By the last day, I had determined that the rain jacket that I had was not really waterproof, and when it got really wet it just made me colder. I had rain pants, but they were not breathable at all, so my legs would get nearly as wet from sweat as they would from rain. On the last day, I procrastinated in the shelter as long as I could (I finished the book I was reading), and then went back out into the rain.

I walked 20 miles that day without stopping on trails that were more like creeks. I left Shenandoah and was very glad to do so. Just past the boundary is another road, and I somewhat forced myself on a motorist to take me into Waynesboro, VA. When I got to Waynesboro, the sun was coming out, and I was able to camp in town rather than paying for a hotel. I took a shower at the YMCA, had a meal in a restaurant, and finally felt better.

Next time

Central Virginia. If I'm feeling ambitious, also Southern Virginia. Once I get there, the trail's almost done.

Pennsylvania

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 17:58:19 -0800

As I mentioned in my last entry, Pennsylvania is many hikers' least-favorite state on the trail. This comes down to one thing: rocks. All the states have some rocks, but in Pennsylvania, they are relentless. They tend to be small, firmly stuck into the earth, and just the right shape for turning your ankle or at least moving your foot in your shoe. Since we were regularly doing 20-mile days by this point in the trail, we saw a lot of rocks every day.

Delaware Water Gap to Palmerton

Delaware Water Gap is named because it is a gap in the ridge caused by the Delaware River. It has a quaint little town, and we stopped in to get some pie and do a little shopping (I needed to replace my water bag, which had sprung a leak in New York). We didn't stay in town for the night, though, and went to a shelter with a nice view from the ridge.

The next day, we walked along the flat ridge all the way to the next gap, called Wind Gap, where we hitched into town for the night. Watching CNN, we learned that there were forest fires in Colorado, right near where Just Jill lived. Since only about 90 houses were burned down, I thought the probability of her being affected was pretty small, but I hoped that she wasn't nonetheless.

Wind Gap was one of the least hiker-friendly towns that we stayed in. As a hiker, you pretty much have to walk everywhere, so it is good if the town is very small and compact. Wind Gap was not compact, and it also had no sidewalks. When we went to get groceries, we had to cross a very large road, and people were honking their horns at us as if the lack of proper signals in the town was our fault. All in all, it wasn't a great town, and I wouldn't recommend that other hikers stay there.

We climbed up from the gap the next day and found Just Jill in a clearing at the top, putting away her tent. Her house had indeed burned down in the fires. Unfortunately, that meant the end of the trail for her. Most importantly, her boyfriend and dog were okay, and she was flying out to Colorado to meet them.

There was really nothing that we could do, so we kept on walking. Near the end of the day, we came to one of the most environmentally degraded areas of the trail: the Palmerton White Mountains. I was glad to get to the bottom of the descent, but it just meant that we had to up to the next ridge. We saw two snakes at the shelter that we stayed at that night – mice are attracted by the crumbs hikers leave behind and snakes are attracted by the mice – so it was a bit hard to get to sleep, and I checked my shoes pretty carefully when I got out of my hammock the next night.

Palmerton to Duncannon

The hiking in this section was honestly not that interesting. The ridges were flat and rocky, and we simply tried to pass the time and make miles.

After Wind Gap, we stayed in Port Clinton, where we went to the world's largest

Midpoint to Border

Late the next day, we hit Pine Grove Furnace State Park. It's a really nice State Park, but it has the feature of having the nearest convenience store to the midpoint of the trail. There's a tradition known as the Half-Gallon Challenge that occurs there. Since you've come halfway, you must eat a half-gallon of ice cream in under an hour.

As you can see, I left a little bit in my beard, but I finished it with plenty of time to spare. Picker finished his half-gallon a bit faster than me, but Grinner didn't quite make it – she left about three bites.

None of us felt wonderful after consuming that much ice cream, so we didn't go much farther that night. The next morning, however, we hit the midpoint of the trail.

Around this time, the oak trees were shedding their acorns, so as we walked, we would hear the acorns hitting the ground. Occasionally someone would get hit by one. They were pretty big acorns, so they would hurt and leave a bruise. At our campsite for that night, there was a large group of birds in the trees above us. They shook the branches even more than usual, so we had a veritable hailstorm of acorns.

We went into Waynesboro, PA the next day and I bought new shoes (my previous pair lasting nearly 800 miles). We also had a Chinese buffet. Somewhere in the previous few days I had lost my trowel, so I went to a garden store and got a new one. (I never used a trowel all that much because I usually stayed near a shelter and most shelters have privies, but it is important to have one for emergencies.) We resupplied in town and walked on for a couple of miles to a campsite just before the border.

I had a plan for a crazy amount of miles the next day, so it was to be my last day with Picker and Grinner. We had walked with each other for nearly 1000 miles, so I was sorry to leave them. I took a picture of our campsite, with them doing a fairly typical activity: playing rummy.

Next time

The day with the crazy mileage, taking me into Virginia. Since Virginia is the longest state on the trail (nearly a third of the miles), I'm sure I won't be able to write the whole thing in one entry.

New Jersey

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 10:46:16 -0800

New Jersey, or Joisey as the TV would have you say it, isn't really a place that you think of when you think about hiking. The stereotype is one of chemical factories and Guidos on the Jersey Shore. However, it's called the Garden State for a reason. There is a lot of beauty in New Jersey, and I found it far away from the beach.

On our first full day in New Jersey, we hiked 17 miles by lunch time. It was a town day, so our packs were light and we were looking forward to sleeping in a hostel. The trail was also incredibly easy, with a one-mile stretch of boardwalk at one point. The last two miles were also on a former railroad bed. Since trains can only go up the most gentle of hills, it is always nice to walk where they once were.

As I was saying, we reached town by lunch time. We had to go back into New York to get to town, but it was worth it. There was a small pizzeria with great food (for once I could only eat half of a pizza), and we made our way to the "Mayor's House" (aka the "Outhouse").

The Mayor (who wasn't really the mayor, but who had run at one point) was a charming older guy with the gift of gab. This is a guy who can really talk. One interesting feature of the house is that he had requested that people mail him stones from every state of the trail, and he had made a walkway from them in the back yard. Since the trail is government property for the most part, this had received the attention of the authorities, who had sent the chief ranger to inspect it. One strange thing about this particular hostel is that one requirement of hikers is that they must watch a motivational video in order to stay there. There was some eye-rolling about this at first, but it was not a bad video. It was about a Susan-Boyle-type singer on the X Factor TV show, who had overcome looking plain to sing opera well. The message that the Mayor was trying to impart with the video was encapsulated by the line that the singer sang: "Vincero, Vincero, Vincero", from Turandot. (I will win, I will make it, I will finish this hike.) It sounds cheesy, but the story was nice, and it gave you something to think about if you got down during the hike.

After a great breakfast, we headed out again. We didn't go far, and stopped at a shelter. Every shelter in New Jersey has a bear box, which is essentially a locker with a complicated handle that bears can't figure out to store food in. This is much more convenient than hanging food from a tree branch, and it keeps the bears (which are all over New Jersey) from getting too comfortable around shelters.

The next day, we passed by the highest point in New Jersey, which has its own monument:

Going down the hill from the high point, we saw our first bears of the trip.

There was a mother and her cub, but we were only close enough to get a picture of the cub. It seemed at first as if the cub was going to climb a tree to get away from us, which would have been the worst possible thing to happen. In that case, the mother would have defended the tree and we would have had to go far out of our way to avoid them. We were lucky, though, and the cub just kept going, as did we.

The next day was less exciting, but we saw another bear the day after that. We were walking on a dirt road, and it was right ahead of us. Grinner was so excited to see the bear that she started skipping down the road. Try skipping with twenty or thirty pounds of stuff in a backpack, and you'll see that she must have been really excited.

We spent the night at the Mohican Outdoor Center. We had to pay a little bit to camp, but they had bear boxes, and considering the amount of bears in the area, we thought they would be worth it. It turned out that it was good that the bear boxes were there, because a bear apparently came into the camp and tried to get at food. I'm a sound sleeper, which is why I can only say "apparently".

The next day would be our last in the state. We walked up onto a ridge, from where I was able to take some nice sunrise pictures.

After that, we went past the southernmost glacial lake on the trail, named Sunfish Pond. Finally, we began our descent into

Next Time

Pennsylvania. It's many hikers' least-favorite state, but I had a nice time.

New York State

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 17:50:44 -0800

New York State has the reputation of being one long jaunt from deli to concession stand to food truck, but it seemed that by the time we were there, they had all left. What I remember most about hiking in New York is that we were never very far from a road, and there are plenty of motorcycles to remind you of the fact.

The first two days in New York were largely flat and unmemorable. We did have one small problem when we wanted to get a resupply on our second day. Hitchhiking is illegal in New York, so we eventually had to call a taxi to take us into a little town. To leave town, we were thinking about doing the same thing, until I noticed a pizza-delivery car in the parking lot of the shopping centre that we were in. I went to the pizza place and ordered a delivery. I would only buy the pizza if they delivered it (and us) to the trail. It was a double-score: a great lunch, and a free ride back to the trail.

On the third day, we crossed the Bear Mountain Bridge over the Hudson River. At that point, the Hudson is nearly at sea level, so we were nearly to the lowest point on the trail. The bridge is a few hundred feet above the river and has many signs urging people not to jump. Naturally, these signs make me think of jumping, so I scooted across the bridge as quickly as I could. It's a bit strange to be a hiker that's afraid of heights, but it's an issue that really doesn't come up too much.

After the bridge, we entered a zoo. It's not a great zoo, but the trail goes through it, so in we went. I'm not a big fan of zoos anyway, and when the lowest point on the trail was right next to the bear enclosure, it seemed apt. Past the zoo, we entered

Next Time

It might sound like we were going out of the frying pan and into the fire, but the trail in New Jersey is actually really beautiful. It also has the highest concentration of bears of any state on the trail. Foreshadowing!

Connecticut

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 11:58:58 -0800

Camping permitted only at designated sites

Connecticut begins with a steep uphill, but when you get to the top of that, you are at the highest point of the state. I always like hitting the high-point of a state because it tells me that the net effort that I must expend in the remainder of that state is less than the effort that I've already expended. For my computer-science readers, there's also a nice little problem there: how do you compute the set of points on the trail for which there are no higher points remaining in the state? (It turns out that you can do it with a simple extension of a problem that I had worked on before, but I won't say more than that to let you have the fun of solving it yourself.)

We walked down the mountain and stopped in a the town of Salisbury, CT for lunch and a small resupply. As we were walking into town, a northbound hiker was walking out, and he let us pick through the extra stuff that he had received in the mail. I took some Jolly Ranchers, but they were really sticky.

We walked on and arrived at Limestone Spring Lean-to, which is pretty far off the trail on a steep downhill. It's quite frustrating when this happens, because that means that you have a long uphill first thing in the morning. So Picker and I went down to the spring to gather water. We hiked a mile or so farther that evening and set up a stealth camp. As the picture ending the last post indicates, this is not strictly legal. We made sure to be quite a ways from the trail, but we worried about rangers all evening.

The next day was a bit of a long one. We decided not to camp illegally again, so we had two choices for camp sites – one about 13 miles away and one about 23 miles away. Naturally, we chose to head for the farther campsite. When we got within 3 miles, I decided that I didn't want to walk for more than another hour, so I really pushed hard to get to camp.

The next day had some nice scenery:

after we went over a small mountain, we got to Kent, CT. We were rather early to town, so we got breakfast at one of the posh restaurants. I had a waffle with ice cream.

As we were walking away from Kent, we met a couple walking their dog. In the course of conversation, they mentioned that they had sent their daughter to the prep school that we walked past between the trail and town. Without batting an eye, one of them said that the yearly tuition was $20000! The school had a beautiful campus, so we could now know where the funds for that came from, but it seemed excessive to me.

We crossed the border with New York, but we were soon back in Connecticut. We stopped at a campsite just past a bridge and met up with Just Jill once again. I slept with the tarp off of my hammock, which turned out to be a mistake as the weather in the small valley where we camped was extremely cold overnight.

The next morning, we would leave Connecticut for good and enter New York.

Next time

New York. Poorly-maintained trails near big roads. The lowest point on the whole AT right next to caged bears (it couldn't get much more symbolic than that).

Massachusetts

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 18:09:44 -0800

Massachusetts is the first of two short states along the trail that will give me fits when I try to type them. From now on, I will call it MA.

Border to Great Barrington

Just across the border with Vermont, there is a road with two small towns on either side of the intersection with the trail. Williamstown had the larger store, so that is the one we went to. We got a small resupply at the store and a couple of cold sodas.

We went on, with the goal of getting to the top of Mt. Greylock by lunch time. For some reason, I had thought that Mt. Greylock would have a gondola at the top and we could take a ride as we ate our lunch. Unfortunately, this turned out not to be the case (though I think people do use it as a ski hill, so I was not so far off), and it had a couple of interesting structures on top instead.

The picture above is a war memorial, and there was also an old lodge that had some light refreshments as well. Since we had just been to the store, we didn't need the services of the lodge, so we sat outside and dried our shelters.

When we got to the bottom of the mountain, it was getting late, and we got to a town, so we decided to stay there. We heard that a local church would let hikers sleep inside, so we did that. The church did not have any shower facilities, and this led to a rather embarrassing situation at dinner. We went to a pub with some trail-related items on the menu, and after we sat down, the bartender came over and closed the window – saying that she had had complaints about the way we smelled! To be fair, it had been quite a while since we had showers, but there must have been a better way of handling the situation.

The next day, we hiked to the town of Dalton, where we got showers at the YMCA and hung out for a while. Dalton has a hostel or two, but since we had gotten there so early, we decided to go to the shelter a few miles out of town anyway. Since we were walking such a short distance from town, we packed out subs and enjoyed some fresh vegetables at dinner.

The next day was almost completely flat, and I don't really remember anything beyond the fact that it rained a bit. At the end of the day, however, we reached Upper Goose Pond Cabin. This is a quaint cabin on a lake, with a caretaker and bunks upstairs. Effectively, it is a cross between a hostel and a really good trail shelter. There was a mix of northbounders and southbounders that were staying there for the night, but they had plenty of room.

The next morning began with pancakes, and then we set off again. We came across a large group of university students on an orientation hike. I think this particular group was from Yale, but we met groups from other Ivy League schools as well over the next week or so. The really funny thing about these groups is that they would go about 5 miles per day. Considering that we were going 10 miles before lunch, we were in a constant state of bafflement over how they could go so slowly.

At the end of the day, we got to a road and went into the town of Great Barrington (the birthplace of

Great Barrington to the border

Leaving Great Barrington posed a rather thorny ethical question. There are two roads leaving town, and we had come in on the first (northernmost) one. Should we leave town on that road or on the second one, saving 8 miles of walking? Some hikers would have taken the second, but we all considered it cheating, so we took the first.

We got a ride just as we had taken out a camera to get a picture of ourselves hitchhiking, which we took as a sign. I think we tried to repeat that a few times, but it never worked quite as well again.

Our destination for the night was a pair shelters that between them had space for 16 people. We figured that this would be more than enough space, but we were wrong. More groups of Ivy Leaguers were on the trail, and a few had converged on the spot. We found some flattish ground nearby (another advantage of a hammock is that the ground doesn't need to be very flat at all) and set up for the night. The university kids were not too loud, but they did have trouble setting up their bear bag, and finally gave up at two in the morning with the bag suspended only a few feet off the ground.

We were out of camp the next morning before the university kids awoke (one way that they could move so slowly I guess), and headed over a small mountain to the Connecticut border. The border was in a beautiful little ravine with a brook next to it, but I only got a picture of the sign welcoming us to the next state.

Next time

Connecticut. Some crazies hike the whole thing in one day, but we took three.

pages tagged AT

Hiking Philosophy

Leave No Trace

Gear

Shelter

Shoes

Sleeping Bag

Hiking poles

Cooking

Maps

Bear Line

Packing

People

Conclusion

Georgia

Hiawassee to Springer

Coda

Tennessee and North Carolina

Damascus to Erwin

Erwin to Gatlinburg

Gatlinburg to the border

Next Time

Central and Southern Virginia

Waynesboro to Daleville

Daleville to Damascus

Next Time

4-State and Northern Virginia

4-State Challenge

Harpers Ferry to Waynesboro, VA

Next time

Pennsylvania

Delaware Water Gap to Palmerton

Palmerton to Duncannon

Next time

New Jersey

New York State

Connecticut

Camping permitted only at designated sites

Next time

Massachusetts

Border to Great Barrington

Next time