AT Day 134
Miles Today: 23.78
AT Mile: 2127.1
(Logan Brook Lean-to [tent])
You don’t ever come down from LSD. Instead, you eventually come to accept that this is the world now.
I don’t remember when I said that the first time; it was several years ago. And it doesn’t always ring true within all of my experiences with acid over the years, but the times that it does ring, it rings loudly! Those words came to me late in the day, after most of it had concluded, but then it never does conclude. You just come to accept that this is the world now.
—
The thought had been in the back of my head for more than a month that I hadn’t had acid since that day with Serendipidy at McAfee’s Knob. That was almost a hundred days ago! And it had played such an important role in the first 50 days of my trail that I have felt some imbalance between the extremely challenging miles since Vermont and the desire to delve back into that psychedelic experience.
I don’t remember when it was exactly that I first thought that today might be a good day to have one last trip before the trail is over, but it must have been in the last couple of days.
Then, when I woke up this morning, I became certain that I *wasn’t* going to do it today. Something grumbled in my stomach before I even woke to a 5:30 alarm. My mouth started to salivate heavily, and I could tell that the next step in this sequence of events was vomiting. Flashbacks of my bout with Norovirus in Hot Springs, North Carolina. I unzipped my tent, stepped out, had a brief moment’s thought of all the other hikers who were camped close enough that the sound of my puking out my tent would defiantly wake them, and then… that was it. I spat, then spat, then spat, but then the wave of nausea just left.
I stepped down to the lake that was close to where I was camped. It was to get water, but it was hard not to stand and marvel at the glass-flat water at sunrise. Maybe that’s what made me think that today would be a good day for it. Maybe I had already made up my mind. Maybe it was supposed to be today and I’m only fooling myself to think that there is such a thing as free-will.
—
The first two hours this morning were intense and beautiful. The trail was mostly in the dense pine forest, and I was glad to have started early, as the temperature rose quickly after sunrise. But like this drug always does, it made perception of time and space very flimsy, and so the time went by quickly, and the space felt like an inch and ten thousand miles at the same time.
The trail was colorful like nothing I’ve ever seen either in a hike or in a trip before. Radiantly colored pine needles all about the ground. Mosses, lichen, leaves, and the textures of the tree barks.
The visual part of the experience this morning was absolutely profound and even for someone who has been through it many times before this, it was mind-blowing. Several times in the first two hours I had the thought that this was the exact image of what people imagine an acid trip to be, in terms of the visual perception. The forest danced and breathed. The separation that I felt from that breathing forest became blurred and identifying the boundary between myself and the forest seized to be a simple task.
People ask me sometimes, how I hike under the influence of a psychedelic, and I try to explain to them that there is a certain state that psychedelics can bring me to, and it’s almost overwhelming, but the one thing that keeps everything together is the rhythmic stepping, and the knowledge that all I have to do is put one foot in front of the other. Mind you that there are movements, even in today, where the prospect of accomplishing that simple task–one foot in front of the other–appears to be potentially impossible, but there’s something poetic and beautiful in watching the steps still fall in line, one after the next. It’s like a dance in itself.
—
Early this morning, within those first two hours, I stumbled across something that I was not expecting. It wasn’t marked on the maps, and caught me completely off guard. It was the remnants of an old plane crash, right next to the trail. Later in the day I got service and learned that it was a two-seater that crashed in 1984 with father and son on board, as they were heading out on an ice fishing trip. Both survived, but there was something about being there, especially under the influence of acid, that hit me heavily. It was like I could literally feel the fear that the two of them must have gone through in the crash. Even if I didn’t know whether or not they’d survived at that time or how old it was, I felt like there was an energetic presence of fear around that site.
For the next several miles I found myself wondering if a place can hold onto a feeling. And after today, I’m fully convinced that it can. I’m not even being hyperbolic or metaphoric. I mean in a literal sense, after what I experienced today, I believe that there was some kind of energetic resonance at that crash site, and that I was feeling it still to this day. It doesn’t matter that that plane went down more than 40 years ago. I still felt it in that stretch of the trail today.
By contrast, so much of the rest of the day today was stunning in its beauty! The trail traversed ridge lines and mountain peaks. And I got my first view of Katahdin!
Holy shit… I’ve seen the end of the trail!
I hiked almost totally alone for most of the day and even had the thought that the one hundred mile wilderness is especially desolate compared to my expectations, but just towards the end of the day two hikers showed up. I know both of them well, thought I’ve never written about either of them. “Conq” I met back in Virginia, but we never talked much until maybe a month ago when we started crossing paths more. And Ninja, who I only met about two weeks ago, but who has hiked with Conq a good bit. It’s likely that the three of us will summit together on the 26th. We’re also all splitting our food drop tomorrow.
Anyways, I bring them up because I was hiking alone for almost the whole day, but then just as I stopped at the top of White Cap Mountain, I heard them coming up the trail behind me. Then, together the three of us crested the ridge and caught our first view of Mount Katahdin.
I was told to expect it to be a powerful moment.
It was.
We sat there together for several minutes before continuing back to trail.
—
Much earlier in the day I reached a river crossing that was far too wide to get across by rock hopping. I looked across and saw another hiker in the shadows of the trees on the other side. It was a hiker named HeyYou, and I shouted to him, asking if I was correct in my assessment and that I was going to need to take off my shoes. He was sitting on the other side, just putting his socks back on from the look of it.
General hiker wisdom says that you don’t walk directly through a river if you can avoid it. Either rock hop or take your shoes off. Because the risk is blisters from walking in wet feet for the rest of the day. I knew that I still had a lot of miles left in the day, but also the idea of taking my shoes off sounded like such a drag. I also hate walking barefoot across stones, and this crossing looked like it was going to be a long one.
So I took a moment, made sure I wasn’t just making a crazy decision on behalf of the LSD, then stepped into the river without removing my shoes. Immediately it became clear that this was the right thing to have done. It felt glorious!
After I made it across I made a bit of small talk with HeyYou, but kept looking back to the river that almost seemed like it was glowing in the direct daylight of late morning. As HeyYou slipped on and started lacing his shoes, I set down my hiking poles, marched back into the river, and just kneeled down in the water, not even caring anymore if I was wet for the rest of the afternoon.
It became one of the best things that I did with myself today.
The last time that I kneeled down in a river on acid was in Sedona, Arizona in July of 2018. I was struck by lightning later that day.
Today I walked away in significantly better condition than the last.
—
Talked to a kid at a shelter this afternoon, after I was mostly down from the morning trip. He gave himself the trail name Radio, and he’s out here for 10 days, hiking the hundred mile wilderness with his dad and his cousin. He was a good dude, for all I could tell. Seemed passionate about life and the world and wasn’t burned out yet.
He was stoked on the AT of course, this being his first time on it, and he said that he wants to come back and hike the whole thing. I asked him if he’d considered hiking any of the others and he responded with affirmation, saying “Oh, I defiantly want to do all three of them for sure, but I think that I’d start with the Appalachian Trail.”
I tried to ignore the observation that this was another example of something that I’d noted a couple weeks ago–that people with less experience often profess to want to hike all three Triple Crown trails, but those who actually do the Triple tend not to start out with those aspirations or talk about it the same way as those who are just starting out.
“Have you looked into the Pacific Crest Trail?” I asked, but it took him a strangely long time to formulate an answer.
“Is that one the PCT?” He asked, “Like the one that is in like, Oregon and Washington and California, and like… all over that whole place?”
I told him yes. That’s the one, and kept it mostly to myself that it’s odd he’s already decided that he’s going to hike all three of the Triple Crown trails in the United States, a feat that has taken me 10 years and ranks as the most difficult undertaking of my life, but he hasn’t figured out what they’re all called yet.
Forgive me if I’m being judgemental. That’s not the intent. And I mean that truthfully. I think what I’m identifying in this is that there exists a massive chasm between what people think thru hiking is and what it actually is. The breadth of this gap in misunderstanding is quite unlikely any underestimate that I can compare it to. People think that hiking the AT means just walking 2,200 miles. Holy shit… even I’ve been fooled into believing that… but it’s something so much bigger than that. A thru hike is like an acid trip. It’s something that you never fully come back from–at least not if you really hiked the whole thing. It’s something that completely alters your world view and your reality, and in the end, you don’t ever come down, but instead, you accept that this is just your new world now.
There was life before your trip and now there’s life after it.
There was life before the trail and now there’s life after it.
If you did either of them right, then hopefully you’ll never be the same.
—-
Today I cried like I haven’t cried the whole trail. At first it came on light, in the way that I always feel an episode like that building. And it stayed soft like that for a minute. But no doubt the acid affected my heart in that moment, because for several minutes I had to stop hiking and sob.
It actually worried me that someone might wonder upon me there, crying to myself in the woods, making no effort whatsoever to hold my composure. But then I remembered that this is the one hundred mile wilderness and that I’d only seen two other hikers all morning. Moreover, I could hear that there were no other hikers near by. So I just let the tears come and I cried.
I cried in the weight and realization that this trail is almost over. That everything that it took to build up to this moment will be done soon, and that I’ll never have this back again. The memory and the affect from the trail will live on, but the electricity and the energy and the magnitism that live in a thru hike will all come to an end when I reach Katahdin. And that end is close.
It will be the death of one thing and the birth of whatever comes after.
Today I cried, some out of sorrow, but also from a place of gratitude. For all the things that I hate about the Appalachain Trail, it has changed me. And I feel like that change has been for the better.
I cried partly for the wounded man I was when I arrived to this trail, and the choices that I get to make moving forward after the trail about what I want to do with that man moving forward.
—
All in all, I think that it’s too much for us to expect that one person could ever make sense of the LSD experience in a single life time. It’s just too much. It’s like seeing back behind the curtain of how reality is constructed. It’s above and beyond what we’re probably supposed to understand.
But then, here we are, swimming in the waters of impossibility every day. And what is too much anyways? There really isn’t such a thing once you discover that the world is all within reach by a long walk.
Wormwood.
Appalachian Trail Journal 2025 
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