Tales From The Travels

Sherry picked me up Tuesday evening. She brought the RV instead of the car so we stayed in comfort in a nearby KOA. Much nicer than a hotel - and a lot cheaper, especially with a pet. I'm going back this morning (4/24). In the five days since she dropped me off at the McAfee Knob trailhead I've done 67 miles. That's a 5-day average if 13.2 miles per day. Including the zero, that's a 6-day average of 11 miles per day. The trail is easier here, but I'm also getting better trail legs. I don't wake up in the morning dreading the thought if hiking all day. At this pace, my end date calculator (a spread sheet I wrote on my phone) says we'll reach Katahdin the first half of August. I have a couple milestones. I went over 300 miles on this trip, making it one if my longest hikes. And today, two miles will put me over 3000 total miles on long trails. On this last keg I passed McAfee Knob, the most photographed spot on the AT. I hiked with the Easter weekend crowd, wh...

I'm finding I don't really care to be hiking in the NOBO bubble. There are sometimes over 100 people starting a northbound hike per day this time of year. This makes the trail crowded at the shelters and campsites and towns are filled to capacity. I don't find it unbearable, but it certainly detracts from the reasons I'm out here. If I wanted to be in a crowd I could do that back home. I'm here to enjoy the wilderness and everything it brings. I enjoy meeting like-minded people but masses of them is more than I'm interested in doing. Having said that, there is something coming up that I really want to avoid - Trail Days in Damascus, VA. This is a celebration of the trail and hikers that takes place every year, May 16 - 18 this year. Damascus is a little town of about 650. The festival will bring about 25,000 people there. No, that is not a typo. This started small but has grown into something akin to Burning Man for the AT. There is just too much excess and way ...

I hit mile 290 at Allen Gap, NC the other day and Sherry picked me up in the RV. We were in serious hillbilly country and there was no cell service so we just went down the road. As long as we were going east in North Carolina we felt we'd find our way eventually. Yeah, we did, but it was an adventure. It was like we went back in time a couple hundred years. We saw a place where they had cocks in pens, waiting for the cock fights. A couple miles down the road was a place that had dozens of dogs chained up outside. The roads were steep with sharp turns and we barely made it around a couple of them. A very interesting trip.We did this so we could visit Sherry's brother outside Greensboro and my daughter Twyla outside Baltimore. All told, I'll spend about a week off the trail before going back.   One of the things I haven't written about is the devastation we've seen from Helene. It has been an incredible sight to see. When we first arrived in the RV resort Sherry stay...

I managed to do 67 miles in five days to get here from Newfound Gap. That's better than 13 miles per day, twice what I was doing earlier. I'm up to mile marker 275. I'm not about miles, but if you want to finish this thing you have to put in the miles at some point. Still, it was a demanding stretch and I took a zero day here to rest up. Along with the miles, I also did another 9200 feet of ascent and 10700 feet of descent, bringing me to 105,000 feet of total ascent and 109,000 feet of total descent. Sherry and her friend Dana dropped me off at Newfound Gap Friday morning and I hiked 30 miles in two days to finish the national park, spending the last night in this weird shelter that had caging across the front. Wasn't even comfortable. I did all that so I could get to I-40 in the morning and meet my friend Restless. We met when we were both doing the Long Trail in Vermont in 2021 and we've stayed in touch since. She did a thru-hike last year and decided to join me ...

Everyone talks about the 2200 mile length of the AT but you rarely hear people talking about the really important figure. There is a total of over 520,000 feet in ascents (and descents) over that length. That's enough to climb Mt Everest 18 times. I think that is the main reason most people (over 80%) who set out to do a thru hike fail (injury being another major cause). They don't understand when they start just how much work it will be.The day I started I met a guy sitting at the first trail head who was already quitting. Statistically, 5% of NOBO hikers quit before getting out of Amicalola State Park where the southern terminus is located. Twenty percent quit before reaching North Carolina. The trail in Georgia isn't even all that demanding. I have to wonder where does it reach the point where at least 50% of the people who reach that point go on to succeed.  I had an advantage from past experience - I at least knew I'd be doing some serious climbing (with an equal a...