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AT Day 135

Miles Today: 25.29

AT Mile: 2152.9

(Mahar Landing [tent])

Still in awe of what unfolded yesterday. I’m sure I succeeded in getting no more than a small fraction of a percent of it down to the page.

I slept soundly last night in the wake. I woke refreshed to the sound of flowing water at sunrise. I slept in and made coffee for the first time in several days, as I’ve mostly been drinking tea.

The trail this morning and throughout the day was stunning in its beauty. I loved it and I loved being in it. Even in the comparative sobriety today. only a half gram at camp this morning.

—

This trail has reduced me in so many ways. Down to the things that I needed, stripping away and degrading the things that didn’t serve me. I’ve said that before. That a trail reduces you. Down to your essence. It’s impossible to carry as much metaphorical bullshit at the end of the trail as it was at the beginning. By the end, all that’s left is mostly who you are.

And in that process, I’ve found that the trail has reduced me down to an ugly mess–a face that only a mother could love.

I exaggerate dramatically, as Boots sends her adoration whenever we speak, but she hasn’t seen me in two months now. The trial has done a lot to me not only on the inside but on the outside too. My beard has grown scraggly, my hair scraggly, matted, and longer than it’s ever been in my life. My skin has lost the tan it had at the beginning, a product of being under the leaves and trees all day. My upper body has shriveled. My legs have broken out in folliculitis.

Whenever I take a photo of myself, my natural reaction lately has been, “goddam you’re getting ugly out here!”

But I feel content in it because I know it’s temporary and that it’s only ugly on the outside. For all the ways that the trail has done that to me, it’s also made me better within. And that exchange has seemed worth trading for. I know myself better now. I feel like I might even understand the world and the people in it a little bit better.

And only at the cost of a pretty face, some hard-earned muscle, and everything else it took to hike 2,200 miles this summer (plus the Long Trail). In the end it’s hard to quantify everything that this trail has been in terms of its reward but just as hard to quantify all of its costs.

One take away from the hike that has resounded loudly for me as the trail draws to a close, is that without having actually hiked the entire trail for themselves, nobody will ever understand how much it takes to walk the entirety of this trail. I thought that I knew what it would take, and to be fair I think that I was as accurate as anyone could have been, but it’s just not possible to understand without putting your feet in the dirt for the full twenty-two hundred miles.

—

Speaking of feet, my feet have been pounding these last couple of days, but tonight especially! God how they ached at the end of the day. It’s a two-fold issue: one, I haven’t been doing this many miles consecutively for a long time, so my feet simply aren’t used to this many daily steps. Then two, my pack weight this afternoon was especially heavy.

I was able to arrange for a food delivery at the half-way point of the One Hundred Mile Wilderness, and that point was today. There were four of us that split the $90 drop off, and I added two N/A beers–one for there so the driver could take my can, and one for the end of the trail.

—

There were more short views of Katahdin today. It’s overwhelming to see it this close. It’s so fucking close.

—

I met a southbound hiker today named Soduck, which apparently stands for something, but we don’t need to go into it. He fit the character of several hikers that I’ve described before. Unable to contain his own story, but completely disinterested in anyone else’s.

He was an older hiker, and right away once he was in shouting distance from me, he started yelling, “I’m Slow and I’m Old. So I don’t hike too fast…”

He was missing several teeth, and his beard was about as full as I imagine mine would become if I let it grow for another five years, which is to say extremely scraggly and not particularly flattering.

In spite of his physical blemishes and weathering, Soduck was at least cheerful and energetic, two qualities that deserve praise in and of themselves. Unfortunately, all of that energy was directed towards telling his story, whether I wanted to hear it or not.

I wasn’t in any kind of rush, so I decided that I wanted to see how this would play out if I just let him go on and on and on and on, prodding him only a little bit with a question here or there, but also leaving open for the opportunity to turn the conversation to anything having to do with anything other than his hike and his story.

It literally went on for at least five minutes, and in that time I can’t believe if I said more than twenty words, most of them reactionary to his ramblings: “Wow, mmhmm, isn’t that something?”

After more time went by and Soduk continued to talk, another hiker finally caught up and drew his attention. I took the opportunity as my chance to bail and I told him I needed to be on my way. I heard him off in the distance, maybe two hundred feet away shouting, “Oh–I forgot to tell you my funny trail joke! Hey! Hey!”

But I acted like I couldn’t hear him anymore. It saved us both the time, although I had to wonder how he expected things to play out there. Did he really expect me to hear him shouting at me, well after we’d gone on our ways and both put space between us, and for me to want to hear his joke? Did he think I was going to turn around and walk back? Was he going to shout the whole joke?

Some people are really strange.

In the entire exchange, he never so much as asked my name.

—

I’m camped alone tonight, not far from the beach of a lake. I could have covered a few more miles and reached the next campsite or shelter, but I wanted to be by a lake. I passed up too many swimming opportunities today with the thought that I was going to camp at a lake, so there was no way that I was going to let this one get by.

I arrived at 6:40, set my tent, did laundry in the lake, then swam and bathed. It felt good to be in the cool water, and the lake dropped off alarmingly fast. It felt like I’d barely back-stroked out far at all, and as I tried to stand it shocked me to find that I could no longer find the bottom and had to swim to shore.

For dinner I had Chicken Alfredo by Peak Meals, which is one of those fancy dehydrated meals with a load of protein and an equally impressive price tag. But again with the idea of enjoying myself for the last stretch. I did short myself on food just a little bit these last three days, and I’ve got another three ahead, but there is apparently a small shop that sells bars and small things as you enter Baxter, so I’ll have that as a fall back on my second to last day.

—

Holy shit… My second to last day… it’s so f*cking close.

It’s impossible to not feel overwhelmed by it.

I honestly don’t know what I feel or how I’m supposed to feel. If I look deep and try to find a name for this thing that is growing as the trail draws towards a close, I cannot find a word for it. It’s something unique unto itself.

The one thing that I can find to compare, perhaps not surprisingly, was my ending of the Continental Divide Trail. The PCT didn’t fee this way though. That one was too violent. Those are stories for another day though.

—

I swam and bathed in the lake, cooked dinner and walked down to the water, plopped my ass down in the soggy grass next to the beach, and ate my extravagant dinner overlooking the ripples on the water.

After dinner I walked back down one more time to smoke a joint–my second to last of the trail.

—

Tomorrow may be a longer day. The terrain is mellow, just like it was today but maybe easier. I’d like to get as close as I can to the ranger station for the following morning, because it’s first come first serve for permits to the Birches campsite within Baxter State Park, and that’s where I’m hoping to stay for my final night. There are limited spaces though. So the closer I get to that tomorrow, the better.

—

At the end of the trail Boots will be meeting me at the base of Katahdin with a ride back to Shaw’s. We’ll have the better part of a couple weeks together after that.

—

It’s happening again. The night is taking over and I’m falling asleep as I write.

I’m going to miss these journals.

I’ve really enjoyed having the readership and support from all of you out there who have reached out over the course of this trek.

For that matter, I’m going to miss you too.

Wormwood.

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.

AT Day 133

Miles Today: 19.41

AT Mile: 2102.9

(Cloud Pond Lean-to [tent])

There had been high praises of Shaw’s Hiker Hostel for a long ways down trail, but that could be said for several other places as well, and few of them lived up to the hype. Shaw’s was a standout exception. The only place that I’ve found as nice was the Om Dome, which was interestingly also in the northern miles of Maine. The two hostels were very different from one another in a lot of ways, but in the things that mattered, they were the same–they both felt authentic, they both provided food and rest, they were both simple, they were both experienced, and they both felt professional.

An added benefit to Shaw’s was the outdoor gear shop, Poet’s Gear Emporium, which is connected to the hostel. I spent more than I would have liked for the last hundred miles of the trail, but I’m unwilling to suffer if I don’t have to at this point. I’m willing to carry a bit extra weight for a week if it means staying warmer at night (new quilt liner at just over a hundred smakaroos) and not having to stress about whether my battery bank was going to work or not (new battery bank at sixty). The thought on everything that I added to my gear however is that this will not be my last trip; it’s just my last trip of the Appalachian Trail.

Breakfast at the hostel was fun. The mood at Shaw’s is electric! Everyone’s so close to the end that there’s a palpable vibration in the air. We still had just over a hundred miles to hike as of this morning, and that feels like such a far distance to cover over mountains and forest on foot, but in the context of a twenty-two hundred mile trail, the miles remaining feel minuscule.

I think that several of us also got new gear and were willing to shell out a few more bones for better food for this final stretch. After eating macaroni for dinner at least a hundred and ten out of the last hundred and thirty nights, I want to eat nicely for the end. So I paid about twelve bucks per dinner, and I observed several others did too. I think this also lent a feeling of excitement for the miles ahead. They won’t have to be like some of the drudgery that we’ve gone to up to here. There’s a potential, by golly, that this could actually be fun!

—

Got to trail at nine thirty this morning after a shuttle back to trail from Poet, the owner at Shaw’s Hostel. He was incredibly supportive as well. One of the most genuine dudes I’ve ever met. So many of the people who want to give advice to hikers seem to be out of touch, but Poet has thru hiked, and seems to have been around long enough that he actually has something worth hearing.

He gave a little lecture about the last stretch of the AT and recommending that we embrace it and enjoy it because two weeks after the end we’re all going to be dreaming about being back out here again. It landed well. It came from a good place and didn’t feel soppy. I appreciated it.

I was the last of the group to start to trail from the parking lot, as I dropped pack and fished through to find two half gram mushroom capsules. Then, for the next three hours proceeded up trail into some of the most gorgeous forest that the trail has offered so far. In all the ways that I hated Maine in her southern miles, the central and northern parts of the Maine AT have been truly incredible. And the trail isn’t so bad here either. There’s still decent climbing and decent over the day, but it’s nothing like New Hampshire and Southern Maine!

Did something today that I haven’t done in too long. I put in one headphone, and I danced down the trail. I’ve danced a time or two here and there over the last five hundred miles. But today felt like the energy I had at the start of the trail–all the way back in Georgia when it was all still new and I still felt strong.

In so many ways I feel reduced down to something physically weaker than I was at the start of the trail. I’ve lost a lot of upper body muscle. But today that burden didn’t seem to bother me in the same way that it had been over the last month. For this morning at least, I danced down trail and didn’t care about anything else in the world. I thought of past friends and lovers. I thought about some of the people who have hurt me… some of them being past friends and lovers. I thought about some of the people who have loved me and whom I have loved.

Human connection is a damn complicated thing!

I don’t hate it for that. But sometimes it is hard to be alive, in this life, and on this ride.

—

This afternoon I passed the 2,100 mile marker. One of the other hikers who are camped at this shelter reminded me that means we are down to double digit miles! Less than a hundred remaining…

It’s hard to wrap my mind around.

Less than a hundred miles to go…

Along with the passage of days these last two weeks, it’s felt like there’s been something building. I thought about it this morning on trail in the trip. It’s hard to describe, but it feels like this thing that is all around and everywhere. It’s quiet but massive, and it’s been building now for some time; I think that I’ve been aware of it for a week or so.

It’s this unnamable thing that will be the end of the trail. It will be the end of something important to me. I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating that there’s an irony in finishing a long trail. In the moment you finish the hike, you go from being within the electricity that is “doing it” to something very different which is “to have done it.” We hike all this way so that at the end we can say we’ve hiked the AT, but the moment that we reach the top and can make that claim, we lose this thing that is so precious and so magical–the experience of the hike itself.

God… there’s so much more to dig into within that can of worms. But it’s growing late and I need to sleep soon, so I’ll leave it be.

—

Tomorrow will likely be my longest day for the remainder of the trial. Weather is looking good, the vertical profile is challenging but not intimidating, and I have the food for it. I’ll either cover 24 or 28 miles. There are camping options at either mile point.

Then, the following day at 2pm I and three other hikers have a food drop being delivered from Shaw’s Hostel at the half way point of the Hundred Mile Wilderness. Some hikers opt to carry all their supplies through this full stretch, but again, I wanted to pamper myself for the end, and so I’m eating well and will have even more food delivered in two days. That also means that I need to plan my miles accordingly to arrive at that road crossing at the designated time that the drop is scheduled.

Anyways, those are issues for another day. For now, I’m going to go to sleep listening to crickets and frogs beside this lake. I’ve been told to expect loons as well. I haven’t heard them out yet tonight, but several other lakes have had them.

I’m going to miss it out here. Even for all the hell it’s been along the way, I’m going to miss it once it’s gone.

Wormwood.