Yesterday was a weird day, but anymore I don’t know what a “normal” day on the Appalachain Trail would actually look like. I think I said a week or two back–this trail experience has been like an onion. Sorry to reuse an overused metaphor, but there I am doing it anyways.
It was weird to have a 4-sided shelter (all the shelters on the AT seem to have 3 walls and 1 open side, but this was the second that I’ve seen with 4 walls. And thank god I decided to stay there, because every time I woke in the night it was still raining. I think it rained basically from 10am yesterday until somewhere around 3am today.
It was still sprinkling off and on this morning when I got back to trail. There were 13 of us in the shelter. Maybe 5 of them got to trail early–mostly the older guys. Then I was somewhere in the middle.
Here’s another one of those examples of the trial (or god, or whatever-you-want-to-call-it) creating a beautiful story out of my experience on the trail:
Last night I tossed and turned a lot. I was really struggling with some internal/emotional/spiritual pieces, and in brief, I had a very terrible night. I had nightmares, and every time I woke up there was this strange self-loathing piece that seemed to grow as the night went on. I was dreading getting to trail in that mindset, especially knowing that it was likely to be a long and mostly rainy day.
But then when I stepped onto the trail, there was another hiker who had left just before me but who got turned around. So we basically ended up hiking out from the shelter together, and we stayed together for somewhere around 3 hours this morning. I hadn’t met him before last night, but his trial name is Caboose. He’s with a trail family of probably 5-7 other guys in their mid-twenties.
He’s very well spoke, and clearly educated, and so the conversation was really good between us. So good that it made the miles go by quickly and for my mind to stay completely distracted from the self-loathing bit from this morning.
About an hour into our hiking together I noticed that my thoughts were becoming notably etherial and philosophical and I mentioned to him that I’d taken a gram of mushrooms at camp. Funny, our talking through the entire trip was very nice ultimately. We talked about war, family, work, motivations, hiking, post-trail-depression, and about hiking in general.
I swear that hiking with him completely changed the tone of my day from something that I was dreading into something that was wonderful.
And only now that I’m here writing this at the end of the day, do I see that I started *and* ended the day with other hikers. I started with Caboose, but then when I got 26 miles into my day and I was in the town of Hamburg, PA to resupply, I ran into Stranger and Plinko at the Cabelas. We had dinner together and they let me in on the hotel room that they’d rented across the street. So a day where I thought I was going into a hard one turns out to be good, because of the connection I found with other hikers. How about that… Maybe being solo isn’t the end all be all of hiking…
—
One other big big thing happened today.
When I woke I had a message from Boots telling me that, in spite of the odds against her, she’d managed to find coverage from work next week and had a flight picked out to come up to visit in CT.
It mostly caught me off guard. Even though we’d talked about it over the last week since she left, it didn’t look like it was going to come together. Then, boom–it went through.
I felt a bit overwhelmed by it in the morning–mixed in the emotions from last night and the rain and the mushrooms and all that today. But when I called her this evening, she reaffirmed that I don’t need to worry about anything and that she basically has it all taken care of. She’ll fly in next Friday and back home on Monday. In the meantime she’s arranged with my friend, Hemlock to get transportation for us to and from trail and about the airport. It’s all worked out in such a way that I basically hike, she lands in my arms next friday, and we’ll have a few more days together before the trail’s all said and done.
I’m not stupid… and I know Boots isn’t either. To the contrary, she’s an astonishingly bright girl. I know that she’s felt the distance that has existed between us since our time in Harper’s Ferry. I know that it comes from my needing to be invested in and focused on the trail, but I also know that she’s smart enough to see the importance of our making something of this time we have at the start of what may build into a longer relationship. She wouldnt have bought tickets to fly across the country to see me next week if that weren’t the case. She’s doing what she can to keep this thing alive, and even though it’s new to me and I don’t know what to make of it, I’m treating it the same way that I’ve tried to treat all things on trail, and I’m trying to just go with the flow.
Things feel better that way.
—
On a hotel room floor tonight. Back to trail tomorrow. Might be able to make it to a hostel if there’s open room and it’s still raining. Will see tomorrow.
Next resupply is in 3.5 days at Delaware Water Gap.
The text message pinged my phone while I was waiting for them to call my number: 746. There were so many other noises and distractions from the back-of-the-house that I almost missed noticing the buzz on my wrist when it came through.
I turned my watch to read the first part of the text message notification, but it was too small and I misread it at first.
I thought that it said “This is your father…”
The next text read “Img. 024.” My Garmin doesn’t show photo texts. But when I opened my phone to see who it was from, I literally started leaping up and down in excitement, not even caring that I was standing amidst a crowd in a busy McDonalds…
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Last night I paid $10 for a tent site at the Sawata hostel (or whatever it was called; it’s hard for me to keep track with all the place names along this trail). And I wore earplugs, this time because the front yard camping area is immediately adjacent to a highway and there’s traffic zipping by at all hours.
Apparently the ear plugs worked, because I didn’t even wake to the sound of rain until it must have been falling down for some time already. My bag was fortunately under the tent vestibule, but my shoes got more wet than they already had been.
Oh well. Add it to a long list of small discomforts and troubles that you get to deal with along a thru trail. I’ll probably still live.
The rain gave me an excuse to sleep in, but I was still on trail before 8am. It was a 12 mile walk to the HWY501 road crossing where I’d catch a ride into Pine Grove. There were notes that the 501 has historically been a difficult hitch, so I arranged with a shuttle driver in town to get picked up at noon today.
It ended up raining the whole f*cking way today. From the hostel where I camped to the 501. Once again however, I’m grateful to have the full rain setup that I’ve carried this far. The Patagonia rain jacket and umbrella make a pretty unbeatable combo. I even had my rain pants on for a bit this morning, as it was so cold when I left back to trail, but they shed within the first 5 miles.
Ride into town.
Post office for new shoes.
Shipped old shoes back home to a friend–yes, I collect all my old shoes after I’ve worn them out. I’ll do something with them someday. For now I have somewhere around 35 pairs collected from all the trails. Always the same shoe–Solomon XA Pro 3D.
—
I was at the McDonalds, about to get my food and take my ride back to trail, when the text from an unknown number came through.
It didn’t say “This is your father…” though.
Nor did it say “This is your Farther?”
It said “Is this your *feather*?”
Attached was a picture of the owl feather that I carried with me for the first thousand miles of trail, then lost a week ago.
She was a southbound hiker whom I’d met the evening that I lost my feather. It was an hour after I realized I’d dropped it. Then another half hour before I met the SOBO. She was going to camp there for the night, but I introduced myself and had her take a picture of my business card. I told her the story about carrying the feather for so 62 days, and asked that if she finds it tomorrow that she reach out to me by text.
Well… today she texted me while I was standing in line at a McDonalds.
She’s sending the feather up trail!
I was so excited that I leapt up and down. But stranger scenes have surely been seen inside of that McDonald’s.
—
The rain was enough that when I got back to trail I was quick to get up to the first shelter, which isn’t much of a shelter at all. On the contrary, it’s more of a cabin, with 12 wooden bunks.
It was barely 100 yards up trail from the 501.
Unlike the last time I got a ride into town, with Stranger, this guy was chipper and a joy to ride along with. I told him about the last Uber ride who was all bad news and refused to see any good in life.
I’ve been here at the shelter for the last couple of hours, listening to the rain on the roof as more hikers arrive and take refuge from the rain.
I may stay here for the night or I may go on if the rain clears. If I stay it’s a short day–only 12 miles. But I have no real reason to hurry along. I’ll get to Maine when I get to Maine. But I don’t want to get there and miss out on enjoying myself in the process.
I was poking around in the rocks, looking for rattlesnakes, when the man in the blue shirt with the orange juice caught my attention. I had been so distracted by the prospect of finding snakes, that I completely missed his blue shirt, just on the other side of a shrub when I walked up to the point.
This morning I had messages from Boots who had looked at the miles and notes up trail on the FarOut app, and she’d found a spot where everyone was leaving comments about a den of rattlesnakes. Having not seen any rattlesnakes yet on trail, and being at least a little bit curious to see if I could find them, I wandered off trail at Twinkler Ledge to the place where they’ve been reported last week.
It’s been raining the last few days though, and temperatures are strikingly cooler than they were last week. Last week apparently everyone saw rattlesnakes there. There were reports of people finding anywhere between 5-7 of them!
Not that I wanted to get too tangled up with snakes after the relationship that I had with a girl names Sparkler some 2 or 3 years ago, but I still wanted to poke around and see if there was anything worth finding. Some people aren’t so quick to learn their lessons I guess.
“Hey!” Shouted the man with the orange juice. “Do you want some orange juice?” He asked, holding up a container of orange juice.
I hesitated for a moment, first to make sure I didn’t accidentally step on a rattlesnake, but then to think about his proposal.
“I don’t know,” I finally said. “If I drink it, are you going to carry the container out for me?”
When he told me he would, I accepted the offer and gladly took the his container of juice.
I hadn’t had orange juice in a long time. It reminded me that I used to really like orange juice after a day on trail. It also reminded me that it’s been a long time since I’ve had any psychedelics on trail.
It’s been 14 days since I started my break from mushrooms and (L)ove. I had Molly with Boots in Harper’s Ferry a week ago. So in the grand scheme of things, it’s not that I’ve lost my familiarity with psychedelic medicines. But it has been a minute. And the offer of orange juice from the man with the orange juice reminded me of that simple fact. It also reminded me of how important those medicines were to the first 50 days of my hike of the Appalachian Trail.
The man with the orange juice told me that his name was Dave and I told him that my name is Wormwood. He commented that he hadn’t gotten himself a cool trail name yet, but proposed that maybe “OJ” could be his name. I told him not to worry about it; it had taken 1600 trail miles before I found Wormwood.
So I never did find any snakes there, but Dave reminded me that it had been some time since I’d had any mushrooms. As such, when I got back to trail after my detour to find snakes, I dropped pack and ate a gram of psilocybin mushrooms.
It was an hour later that I stopped and stood still, looking down the trail, and I said, “This was a profoundly good idea.”
The trip today stood as proof that there was a tollerance that had built during the 50 days that I’d been using mushrooms before taking my break. The impact of a gram was significantly greater than what I had been getting when I’d been doing my 50 consecutive trips.
—
I spent some hours today deep in thought about what it means to be alone and the role that being alone has played in my life… moreover, how I feel about being alone right now in my life.
It’s obviously all spawned out of reflecting back on what happened between my ex-fiance and I in 2023. That relationship ended in a tremendously bad way. There were some awful things that were said. There were days that I didn’t think that I was going to make it to see 2024. But I must have been wrong; somehow I made it all the way to 2025… and to the AT… in spite of the odds.
We were 11 days short of our wedding when she called the relationship to a close. That then led the next 18 months of my life into a spiral of disaster and self destruction.
I’ve had a lot of time on trail to think about it. To think about the prospect of being alone.
In short, I’ve spent the last 18 months trying to find companionship and a ticket out of this feeling of lonesomeness and pain. Only now that I’m on trail–literally just this week–do I now start to realize that a lot of what I was doing was grasping for the thing that I had lost when I lost my fiance. I was trying to get it back in another form.
Then–long story made short–a girl finally opened up to the prospect of joining me, and now I’m here… in this place of deep irony, where I have to wonder if what I wanted all along was what I had before all of this began–the very thing that I already have and have had all along–to be alone.
Before meeting the girl named Sparkler who I almost dedicated my life to, I had reached a point where I was in acceptance that I’d spend the rest of my life alone. And I was authentically and fully okay with that.
I haven’t felt that kind of peace with the prospect of being alone since before meeting her. It’s been more than 6 years since I’ve been okay with being alone. And it’s been more than 18 months that I’ve been trying to fill that hole with another partner.
I don’t want for my weekend with Boots to have only been that… a means to realizing that what I’ve really needed all along has been this thing that was right at my fingertips–to be by myself again. I don’t want for her to be only that and nothing more. She is more than that. But in addition to all those things she is to me and has done for me in the short time we’ve known one another, she also is the person to let me feel okay with being alone again. And in that there has been incredible value.
—
There were some hours this morning where I felt a sort of resentment about these trail journals. I know that might be a strange thing for me to be writing here… 66 days into daily journals about my hike and sharing it with the world and some 400-600 people who have been following along (according to the stats that I get from WordPress). But as I dug deeper into it, I suspect that it’s from the uncertainty that I’m feeling in regard to things after spending the weekend in Harpers Ferry with Boots. I don’t feel like it was the wrong thing to do. Like I wrote yesterday–I felt recharged and reaffirmed after the time we spent together.
But it also made me feel weak to seemingly *need* that kind of external validation… to need someone who can come into my life as a form of proof that I’m worthy of being loved. This morning I was feeling guilt, or maybe something that bordered on resentment for having to be so human. It made me wish in a strange way that I didn’t have to write these journals and share them with the world. Which is so strange to me because I’ve actually become so fond of writing every day. Maybe it’s just that I become disdainful about the simple fact that my story can’t just be simple, happy, and straight-forward. Sometimes it’s going to have to be a story about being lost and confused… in the midst of trying to stay oriented and on trail.
I’m sure there’s a beautiful metaphor in there somewhere, worth digging out another day.
—
It’s been raining the last couple of days, and the rocks of Pennsylvania have become slippery.
Over the first 1,100 miles I only fell one time, somewhere around mile 500. Then last night I fell twice on my way down the side trail to get water, and this morning I took a hard fall that left me completely splayed out on the rocks. I’m fortunate in all three falls that I didn’t get hurt any worse.
—
I’m noticing something about the other hikers I meet on trail. It came to my attention last night and this morning, when I thought back on the people who were at Peter’s Mountain Shelter with me. None of them seemed weak or unweathered. The hikers I meet on trail now are the same *people* I met earlier on in the trail, but they’ve become different in themselves. Even a hiker who started the AT with no trail experience is now pretty damn experienced by most standards, if they’ve managed to make it 1,100 miles on the Appalachain Trial. I remember in the beginning it seemed like the trail brought a lot of fairly inexperienced and somewhat “soft” hikers compared to what I’ve met on Western trails. But they don’t feel that way anymore. We’ve all been through hard weather and bad days by now. A lot of people have left the trail and ended their thru hike by now. But those who are still here are much different than the selection of people who were here at the beginning.
Anymore I don’t feel like a strong hiker amongst the others. At best, I feel like just another one of them. More often than not I find myself as the somewhat slower guy on trail. A lot of hikers are moving a lot faster or pushing a lot more miles than I am anymore.
That said, I’ve also slowed. But I can make excuses all day if you wanted me to.
—
I have in my notes from today, a one-word bullet point that says “swamp.”
Not sure what to say on that one except that I hiked through a swamp today for around 100 yards. If nothing else, it was at least a unique section of trail compared to the otherwise all-encompassing forest.
—
Tomorrow I’ll hike 11 miles to a road crossing where I’ll hitch a ride into Pine Grove, PA. My friend back home sent my next pair of trail shoes there to the post office, and the ones that are on my feet right now are in desperate need of replacement. I aim to get around 500 miles out of a pair. I think that I’m looking close to 575 on these ones. The few extra miles might not seem like much, but I have found that with trail shoes, they go downhill fast after around 450 miles. And that might have contributed to why I’ve been falling so often too–because the tread on my shoes is worn down.
—
I’ve stopped for the night at a hostel called Stay-AT-Swatara. I’m going to stay in my tent for $10, but they had Whoopie-Pies for sale, made by the Amish folks down the road from here. They were divine. Oops… did I just admit that I had more than one of them right off the bat? Yes… I did.
But they also have showers, and I’m in no rush. I made nearly 25 miles today, and that puts me close enough to be able to get to Pine Grove comfortably tomorrow.
I’ll also add this–I have come to realize that writing these journals from seat and table is so many times easier than writing them in my tent. My hands and wrists cramp with how I have to do it in my tent. So I’ve been drawn to shelters and hostels and restaurants not only because I’m a lazy human being, but also because I’m liking being able to write from a more comfortable position.
God… I wish I could have another one of those Whoopie pies without getting a belly ache. Instead, I think that I’m going to bring this to a close and step over to get a shower. I’d like to be to trail early tomorrow, but I also don’t give a damn. I’ll likely still have some mushrooms. Not going to be doing the every day thing anymore, but am going to use them as feels right.
Appalachian Trail Journal 2025 