I have to keep this entry much more brief than I’d like. It is late, we are tired, and on top of it all my keyboard is no longer functional so I’m left typing on a screen with my thumbs. Needless to say, it takes me a lot longer to get ideas onto the page like this. And after 1800 miles with that little keyboard, I feel sort of like I’m working with my hands tied behind my back. A thousand ideas I want to get on the page every night, and with that little keyboard I can sometimes get a half dozen of them; without that I’m not sure how to even get by.
But we still try…
I wasn’t able to get enough signal today to be able to order a new keyboard, but getting that replaced is a high priority. So when I found one bar of service, I reached out to Boots to see if she’d be willing to help. And she was on it like white on rice (not sure why I chose that descriptor, of everything f else in the English language I could have worked with, but here we are).
I know I don’t mention her as much in my journals anymore, but we are still in regular contact and she’s going to meet me in Maine for a week after I finish the trail.
—
The Long Trail… so much to say about the Long Trail…
Holy shit, this trail is a lot more difficult than the Appalachian Trail!
It’s not that we’re going through anything that’s inherently dangerous, but the condition of the trail itself makes progress incredibly difficult compared to what we’ve grown used to on the last 1700 miles of the AT. And that’s saying quite a lot; the AT is a hard hike up to this point! But the Long Trail is even more.
This is likely the most difficult thru hiking trail that I’ve attempted. Both Plinko and I had complete falls today, and I had a couple yesterday. The trail drew blood from both of us, though we’re fortunate that it hasn’t been much. But Plinko also broke both of his hiking poles today within one mile of one another. He also lost his headlamp in one of his falls, although he didn’t realize that until this evening when we went to set camp.
All to say that Plinko has been getting it even rougher than I have, and I already said this is probably my most difficult thru hike that I’ve attempted.
The trail is much quieter than we’ve become used to over the last 3 months. We almost see nobody except one another. We’ve both remarked that this could be a tough one to do alone, especially after having been on the AT Super Highway for the last 3 months. We saw one guy who was doing trail work, and we saw two hikers at each of the last two shelters. Other than that, the LT has been quiet.
Oh, and some day hikers at the little lake where I went swimming this afternoon. But we didn’t really engage with them.
—
The Long Trail has been bad enough that I did take a moment to ask heart-to-heart if Plinko wanted to continue on. There was an opportunity ahead where we could have hitched back to Rutland, and I told Plinko that if he wanted we could finish the Long Trail after the AT. But he said absolutely not and that he wants to carry on. And I respect him for that. Part of me may have wanted for him to be the one to pull the trigger. But a bigger part wanted to stay. And I’m glad that we have.
—
The humidity in parts of the day is so thick that you can literally see the air when the sun shines through the forest just right.
—
This evening I met two hikers at a shelter. One of them was named Stick and he’d hiked the full AT in 2013. We all three talked for a bit, and I felt like I would get along with Stick if we had the chance to hike together. But he is solo and only hiking a long portion of the LT this time.
I asked if he wanted a coyote tooth and he was happy to accept. The other guy, Andy, said that he thought a coyote tooth must have meant some kind of psychedelic drug, and that’s why he declined.
I told him no, it’s just a real baggie of coyote teeth.
And I didn’t realize that fact until the afternoon hours, when it struck me that I’ve felt this way before.
Today isn’t the first time I’ve been torn away from the things that I love on the 14th of July. At this point, looking back at the last three years, it would be hard not to feel like there’s something cosmic at play with this date.
I’ve been here, in this same feeling, on the 14th of July.
—
Two years ago, in 2023, I was engaged to be married to the woman I hoped to spend the rest of my life with. We’d met on the CDT, hiked 1500 miles together, and lived our lives together for the following four years.
I thought I was on top of the world. But I lost it.
On July 14th, she texted me to say that she was calling off our wedding and that she didn’t want to get married anymore. She said that she’d “had a spiritual awakening” and didn’t want to get married anymore. Not long afterwords, we permanently ended our relationship.
It destroyed me for some time. It led to a downturned spiral for the next 18 months, leading up to my departure for the Appalachian Trail.
—
Last year, on the 14th of July, the woman I’d been dating for the preceeding months called an end to that relationship as well. It was the only companionship I’d found since my engagement ended the year before. A year to the day from my wedding getting canceled, that relationship ended too.
July fucking 14th…
—
I didn’t even realize it was July 14th until later this afternoon. Up until connecting the dots and remembering the preceding years.
The morning started pleasant. We had breakfast at the Yellow Deli, and spent time lounging around at the hostel. I talked to some of the people from the 12 Tribes and told them that we hope to return after reaching Canada on the Long Trail. Plinko and I both liked it at the Yellow Deli hiker hostel. They treated us well. And yes, there’s lots of talk about their being a cult, which may or may not be true (probably is), but they weren’t too weird to us. They did serve rice with cheddar cheese melted over it for breakfast and insisted on watching us while we ate, but that only seemed weird in retrospect. Otherwise they were very hospitable and made for a nice stay in a donation basis.
We caught the bus back to trail at noon, but saying goodbye to Yama was hard. It was really hard…
I think I may have downplayed how much of a role he’s played in both my hike and Plinko’s hike. He literally started the AT on the same day as me, and as things have been going, we could have even finished together, the three of us.
Last night we stepped out to smoke together and talked with one another over Google Translate for the better part of a half an hour.
He’s become a really good friend over this trail, and I feel myself chocking up as I write this, knowing that he’ll be going back to Japan after the trail and it will be hard to see him again.
I’m crying now.
I haven’t had tears on my face like this in many weeks. I’m going to miss him.
He was with us at the bus station when we said goodbye.
Fuck. I’m really emotional over it.
Tears on my lap, sitting in the shelter table writing this.
My keyboard stopped working tonight so I’m having to write with my thumbs. It’s so much slower. What a scene this has become… crying all over myself in a musty shelter. Mosquitos flying about.
Plinko said the same. That he’s going to miss Yama, and I think only after saying goodbye did we realize how much he’s meant to us and how big a role he’s played in our thru hike.
I really hope we get to see him again in Japan!
—
We had one more mile of the AT today before reaching the “Maine Junction” where the AT departs the LT. And we turned left–to follow the Long Trail.
I knew Plinko was behind me, but I didn’t see him for around an hour after I left the AT. I wasn’t expecting it to be so emotionally challenging. But I felt it all over my body. It was only after leaving the AT that I realized how much comfort it’s brought me and how lost I felt immediately after leaving it.
Right away the LT felt quieter and more isolated. After a half hour I started to feel alone without Plinko, even thought I knew he was only right behind me. But I hadn’t seen him since the Maine Junction. And then I started to wonder if maybe he’d changed his mind. I started getting lost in my own thoughts and worries, wondering if following the Long Trail was a bad idea, whether I should turn back, wondering if Plinko was far behind, whether I’d still do this if I were alone.
I hadn’t felt alone like that in more than a thousand miles. I hadn’t even realized how important Plinko had become to me over the time we’ve been together on trail. But when he did show up at my first water stop, I told him how I’d been going crazy out here alone today. That I was playing through abandonment narratives and worrying that he may have stayed on the AT leaving me to fend for myself for the rest of the trail.
I knew it was all crazy thinking, but it’s where my mind lost itself today.
And then it hit me… Today’s July 14th. My body is literally primed for abandonment on this date! And somehow the story lines itself up in such a way that I end up having to say goodbye to my good friend Yama, goodbye to the Appalachian Trail that’s brought me so much security for 1700 miles now, and *thought* it was going to have to say goodbye to Plinko.
July 14th man…
The day of broken hearts, abandonment, and goodbyes.
Plinko smiled and told me he understood, but also that he wasn’t leaving me. The smile was at how silly a thought it had to be in the first place–that he’d just change his mind and stay on the AT after we’ve hiked together for so long and planned this out like we have… but then again… that’s happened to me before. And it’s happened on the 14th of July.
—
We’re now on the Long Trail and no longer following the AT for the next 160 miles. At the end of the LT we will reach Canada, then meet Plinko’s thru hiking friend, whose name is “Alaska.” They hiked the CDT together and she works up here in Vermont. She’ll be our ride back to Rutland where we’ll reconnect with the Appalacahin Trail at the same place we picked it up today. And from there it’ll be around 500 miles to the end in Maine.
As for the Long Trail so far, it is as promised–a different and more challenging trail. The trail is more overgrown and harder to follow. The climbs are steeper. And overall it’s just a more remote trail than the AT. It is clear that the Long Trail does not see the traffic that the AT does. And in a way that was part of what felt so scary to me; departing from the well-beaten path that’s become so familiar to me over the last 95 days.
It’s also occurred to me that my 100th day of this hike will not be spent on the Appalacahin Trail. I feel somewhat heavy about that, but I’m also accepting of it. There were great costs involved in deciding to hike the Appalacahin Teail this summer, so it shouldn’t be something new to me–accepting that there are also costs in leaving the AT to hike the Long Trail. But like the costs of the AT, Plinko and I both believe that it’s worth putting into this what we’re putting into it.
We look forward to experiencing the Long Trail in its entirety. We look forward to reaching Canada and being able to say we truly walked from Georgia to Canada. There is a lot of good that comes from this.
But… one more loss tonight had been my keyboard, and without that, writing this journal is quite challenging compared to what it normally is.
So on that note, I’m going to call it a night.
Sleeping in a shelter tonight with one other LT hiker named Sparrow. Wish I had time to write about her story–losing her husband, hiking the AT last year, and so on. But only so much time and I need to get to sleep.
It was insanely humid today, and tomorrow will be even hotter. So we will be to trail early and I need to get to sleep.
I got a bad feeling about Cobra yesterday, when we met him at the Stonethrow Farmstead in the mid afternoon. We’d been in the heat all day without any reprieve, and had set Stonethrow to be our resting spot for the day, as the maps we follow listed the place as having ice cream, cheeses, bread, and a few other goods. Not to mention, it also provided shade, and the heat yesterday was horrendous.
Plinko remarked that he thought he remembered meeting the guy as we walked up, but said he was mistaken as we got closer and could see the guy a bit more clearly. We hadn’t met him before.
And we’d quickly learn that we wouldn’t really get the chance to meet him this time either.
As we walked over, the hiker introduced himself as Cobra, and there were question marks all over him. Not that he asked a bunch of questions, but that there was a bunch of stuff that didn’t add up about him.
I mentioned it to Plinko when he left. I told Plinko what I wrote above, that he had a lot of question marks around him.
“What do you mean?” Plinko asked.
That caught me off guard. I thought that Plinko would have sensed it too. He’s a pretty good sense of character from what I’ve been able to tell, but he didn’t pick anything up from Cobra, and that led me to wonder if maybe I read too much into him.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I was wrong. But it seemed weird that he says he’s doing the same thing we are (AT and LT), but then he just bolted out of here when we arrived. Seemed like he would have wanted to hang and talk. That, and the first thing he said about his last attempt at a Long Trail hike was a bunch of excuses for why he couldn’t finish it.” I hesitated, because I felt like maybe I’d judged too deeply and read into something that wasn’t there. “I don’t know man… he just seemed sketchy to me. Maybe I read him wrong.”
…
This morning we realized that we had not read him wrong.
It was unfortunate that he had camped at the same site as we had. We didn’t see him last night, but this morning I woke up and it started raining as we were breaking down camp. So I threw everything into my pack as quickly as I could, and then brought it over to the shelter to finish my coffee and pack more properly.
When I arrived at the shelter, Cobra was already there, chatting it up with a girl who was hiking with her dog. The shelter had a big long roof and went way deep back into the space where the bunks were, so it was dark when I got in there and hard to make out detail from the lack of light. And it was raining, so very little light made it back there. As I sat and made pleasant small talk with the gal, I asked the guy’s name who was sitting there, and he turned to me.
“Dude, I already met you yesterday,” he said, and he turned with a discouraged look on his face.
That’s when I realized it was Cobra again. Right from the get go I had a bad feeling about him. But I tried to be pleasant and join into the conversation. Quickly it became clear that wasn’t going to go well though.
Cobra was going on and on about how experienced he was and delving out all his great knowledge of the trail, which seemed weird, since when I asked him about his trails yestrday he just said that he’d attempted a Long Trail hike a few years ago but got flooded out by rain.
The gal with the dog was having some concerns about the upcoming climb, but instead of offering any practical advice, Cobra just told her that “you’ll probably be fine.” Which I thought was a dickhead thing to say, so I asked more, and he reapeated himself. “She doesn’t need to worry about it. The dog will probably be okay on the rock scramble.”
The asshole was straight up fear mongering. Making it sound like the upcoming miles were somethign to be worried about, and it always gets under my skin when people say stuff like that.
I made comment about needing to go back down to the river to get some water before starting into the climb, and he remarked, “Oh, you’ll be fine.”
I turned to him and said that he doesn’t have a clue how much water I have or how much I normally carry. “You’re either irresponsible or arrogant man. I don’t have as much confidence as you seem to.”
He shrugged, and said something to the effect of “you’ll figure it out.”
It went quiet for a second before I finally said what was on my mind. “Didn’t you tell us yesterday that you’ve never finished a thru hike?”
Cobra turned to me aggressively with scorn in his eyes. “What the fuck are you talking about!? I’ve hiked this trail twice! And the Long Trail I *would* have finished, but I got fucking flooded out by a 100 year flood!”
“Wow…” I hesitated, as I didn’t quite know what to say. “I don’t think you told us that yesterday. I mean… you just said that you got flooded out of the Long Trail, and it seemed like you have a lot of confidence in your hiking…”
He almost cut me off again and said something like, “Yeah, well you should maybe listen better.”
It was about that point where I decided that I was done engaging with the bellend cock wad. But he continued on with more garbage, telling us about how much he loved getting drunk on trail, and how “some of my best days on trail are when I’m hung over. I just love being angry and pissed off to keep me going through the day!”
I told him that I don’t really like alcohol, because it makes me act like and asshole and say stupid things.
“Yeah, well I can handle my alcohol better I guess.”
I told him I don’t have that ability. “Maybe it’s the little bit of Native American in me,” I said.
“Fuck that! I’m Native American and Irish. I know how to handle my liquor.” He said.
I told him that I prefer to use psychedelics these days, and he said that he loves psychedelics, but that he can’t find them on trail, so he sticks to alcohol.
It was about that time that I decided I needed to leave. I looked to Plinko and he said the same thing without saying anything at all. It was just in the way he looked at me.
So I quickly finished packing, threw on my bag, and trudged out of the shelter, neither Plinko nor I saying goodby on our exit. We just left and walked out into the rain.
…
After a quarter mile, I stopped and turned back to Plinko. “There’s a reason that guy’s named after a fucking snake!” I said.
Plinko agreed. “Fuck that guy.”
It was reassuring to know we both felt the same about him.
I went on, “You remember what I said about him yesterday; about him having a lot of question marks around him.”
Plinko agreed. “I see it now too.”
…
I was honestly flustered by it for a long time this morning. I have a deep disdain for people who peddle fear on the trail, people who act like they’re hot shit when they’re not, people who feign away when they meet people with more experience than them, people who make excuses for why they didn’t finish a trail, people who make claims that clearly aren’t true, and generally people who don’t have respect for others.
I was all fired up. I told Plinko that I felt upset that I let it bother me that much, and he told me not to let it get under my skin.
Maybe it caught me more by surprise this morning because I hadn’t seen that kind of asshat in a while. Most of them seem to have dropped out by this point.
But he’d only started into the trail recently; Cobra hadn’t started in Georgia. He’d started a couple weeks back, was claiming to be doing a Long Trail thru hike, and that he was going to do the rest of the AT after he finished the LT.
Since this morning we’ve seen him another three times. I’ve avoided him every time, and he seems to get the message.
…
Later in the morning, we met another hiker who had also been at the shelter last night. His name is Apothecary, and he’s a really good dude.
We chatted him up for a bit, and as I stepped away I told Plinko that it was nice to have a positive interaction with another person after this morning at the shelter. That I had been worrying that I’d just been in a shitty mood during that conversation with Cobra and that I was blowing things out of proportion. Meeting Apothecary was reinforcement that it hadn’t all been in my head after all. That there were still other good people on the trail, and in Cobra had in fact been an asshole.
…
Today will be our last day on the AT before departing onto the Long Trail for 10~12 days. We’ve been warned several times over that the northern half of the Long Trail is a completely different kind of hiking than the miles of the LT we’ve hiked so far. But I think that we are ready for and possibly even excited for it. When I think of it adding miles to my AT hike, I don’t like the idea of hiking the Long Trail. But when I think of the LT as a seperate entity, unto itself, I really like the idea of it. So that’s the way I’ve been trying to look at things~~as if we’re taking a break from the Appalacahin Trail to hike something different for a couple of weeks. I’ve also told Plinko that the roughness of the LT will help prepare us for the White Mountains of New Hampshire, which are reputed to be the hardest miles of the Appalachain Trail. I told him we should be strong by the time we get back to Rutland in a week or two.
~~~
Our ride into Rutland was a blast. Her name was Lael, and she was everything that we got from our last somewhat~wild~lady~driver on the July 4th, but maybe a bit more “together.” As soon as we got into the car she asked if either of us was allergic to peppermint, and proceeded to slather us both with peppermint oil on the neck. I wasn’t sure if it was just to cover up the hiker smell or if there was more to it than that, but I appreciated her for it either way.
She ended up touring us around the town for a bit, and at one point made a sharp detour into what looked like an abandoned lot. I told her that if she was bringing us to a crack house, that I was going to be very upset. I meant it jokingly and hoped she heard it as such, and she did. She ended up driving us to the grocery store for resupply, giving us a run down of the town, dropping us off at the Yellow Deli Hiker Hostel, and most importantly, she shared with me a story about a connection she had with a dying raccoon, several years before.
Earlier today I had met a hiker and offered her a coyote tooth while we sat and had lunch together, but her reaction was what you might expect… which is to say that she was confused why I had a bag of coyote teeth in my fanny pack, and she politely declined. Lael didn’t decline though. When I offered it to her she was at first confused, but as we got to know one another a bit better during the ten or fifteen minutes that she drove us around, it was made very clear to me that she understood and appreciated my gesture. When she got home, she messaged me a photo of her alter at home and the coyote tooth atop a piece of amythesit.
It’s moments like these that I’m hiking the Appalachian Trail for.
…
I should mention~~my hyphen and dash key are no longer working as of today. I also have issues with the question mark/slash key; that still works, but it’s wonky. It might be time for a new keyboard. Lord knows I’ve got some miles out of this one though.
…
Last thing before I go to bed… it’s become so late~~two days ago I got a text from Hemlock. It was a picture from his kitchen table of the letter, mailed from Waco, Texas. My feather had arrived! Why it took the better part of an entire month to get there is absolutely beyond me, but it’s arrived no less. He told me that he’s going to send it to Rutland so that I can get it when I come back through on my way back to the Appalachian Trail, but even that scares me a bit. That thing’s been lost and misplaced so many times on this trail that it scares me to think about mailing it again. But I also don’t know how else to get it back to me, so we’re going to give it a go.
As always, I’m growing very tired as I write this and need to bring it to a close, even if I didn’t get everything onto the page that I wanted to. That’s always the case. I maybe get 10% of what I really wish I was capturing.
But we do what we can and try not to get too lost in the things that we can’t.
We’re planning 3 days to get to our next resupply town of the Long Trail. It’s only around 65 miles, but the miles are supposed to be rugged and have a lot of climbing, so we’re trying to not be too confident in ourselves and assume that we’ll be able to hold the same miles on this section of the trail that we had on the last 1700 miles of the AT.
~~~
I had an idea today that, over the course of the enter Long Trail, I want to try and eat a pint of every flavor of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.
I proposed this to Plinko today, and he quickly looked up that there are a total of 98 flavors. I’ve had 3 pints in Vermont so far… so if I have 6~10 pints a day for the rest of the trail, I’ll make my goal. Fat chance…
So instead I’ll just have a different flavor in every trail town. That feels decidant enough without being gratuitous.
~~~
Half day tomorrow, as we still have some town chores to get done. Then back to trail. We split from the AT in 1 mile.
Appalachian Trail Journal 2025 