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AT Day 120

Miles Today: 16.43

AT Mile: 1916.9

(Carlo Col Shelter [Tent])

There are many songs of praise that I could sing about the Appalachian Trail, and I’d like to believe that I’ve recited many of them over the unfoldment of these trail journals and the last 119 days. And I want to start with that–with the good.

Much of what I love about this trail has interestingly been about things other than the trail itself. It’s been about the people, the towns, the shelters, the culture, the exploration of the Eastern United States.

I’ve now been laying here for some time, my fingers rested on the keyboard, and trying to think of things that I like about the Appalachian Trail. I want to list them more extensively before going on with what I have to say tonight. But I’ll just admit mental fatigue and move on to the next thing–the real reason that I’ve started the journal today with love and praise for the trail.

Because now that that’s out of the way, I just want to say this:

Fuck the Appalachian Trail!

There you go. I f*cking said it.

I said it. I mean it. And I don’t regret it.

I’m sorry if that’s a shift from the normal tone of these journals, and I’m sorry if it’s not what you came here to read about. The truth is that I want to be the guy who is all about singing the songs of praise for the trail. I want to be about being cheerful in the midst of adversity. I want to be the last one smiling, a grin of insanity if that’s how it has to be, when the rains fall heavily and the trail gets hard.

But everyone has their limits. And maybe that’s something that I started to encounter today–a limit for what I have the patience for in regards to a hiking trail.

It occurred to me as I climbed up and down and up and down these steep miles, that basically everything that I’ve enjoyed about hiking the Appalachian Trail hasn’t actually been about the trail. It’s been about things around the trail, but almost never the trail. To be frank, the trail itself mostly fucking sucks.

I didn’t realize it until today, but one of the things that I so dearly love about hiking is the forward progress and momentum as you move forward. That’s all but gone from these miles of the AT though. There is no steady movement or momentum. The trail is just too steep for that. It really really sucks! It’s climbing up onto a step. Full stop. Climbing up to the next ledge. Full stop. Climbing up again. Full stop.

Then on the way down it’s just as bad. It’s fighting the gravity and momentum of a four-foot high step down. Full stop. Step down. Full stop. Down. Full stop. There’s no movement to it at all other than the jolting of the bones.

It isn’t fun. And I’m not having any fun with it.

I’m sorry, but that’s the truth.

I told several other hikers today that I’m at a point where I feel done with this hike. I don’t like being on the Appalachian Trial anymore. I want to finish this f*cking trail so that I can go somewhere that hiking is fun again. This trail is so awful that most of the day when I look at my GPS tracking it shows a current speed of 0.0 miles per hour. That’s not because I’m just standing still, but because the climbs and descents are so steep that forward progression is slower than can be tracked by even the highest end GPS technology.

It’s incredibly discouraging.

And to add insult to injury, it’s the most difficult hiking that I’ve ever been through, in terms of the trail itself. It is indeed steeper than most of what I found on the Vermont Long Trail. So I’m completely soaked through, dripping sweat, back to wiping, wringing, wiping, wringing, wiping, wringing my sweat towel.

This kind of “hiking” just isn’t fun.

This part of the trail isn’t fun.

I am not having fun.

It’s reached a point where this feels more like a chore than something that I have any interest in.

The Appalachian Trail has taken the enjoyment out of hiking. And I think that’s saying a lot.

—

There was a point today where I had not seen another hiker in at least an hour. The climb was steep enough that it was more like rock climbing and there was almost no forward progress. It was just directly up and up and up. I was drenched through with sweat. It was extremely hot. Did I mention that the temperatures are miserable again?

I don’t reach this point often, but I screamed out in agony, trying to lift myself and my pack up one more step before collapsing. I fucking hate being at this point. Drenched through, overheated, dirty, thirsty, pissed off, and not having fun.

I shouted, almost reflexively, “Fuck the Appalachian Trail!”

Two minutes later a SOBO hiker came into view.

I appologized to him and honestly felt bad for my outburst. Like I said, I don’t really get to that point very often or easily, and today was comparable to many of my lowest points on trail. I was in a place that felt like hell.

The SOBO hiker told me that he completely understands. He asked me if I’d hiked other trails and in between breaths I said, “Yes. Fucking all of them. But this trail fucking sucks.”

The other hiker just said one word: “Same.”

We stood there only for a short time, as there was no breeze, and it was right in the middle of my steep climb and his steep descent. He told me that he wished that he could report that things would get better from here, but that honestly it’s just a lot more like this for along time still.

—

There was an injured hiker at the hostel I stayed at last night. His name doesn’t matter.

He asked me my name and if I was military. When I told him no he asked if I was police force. I told him no. Then quickly the discussion turned to trail and we talked about his injury as well as some of my other trails.

He told me, “congratulations man,” when he learned that this would be my third of the Triple Crown trails. I’ve been getting that a lot on the AT, even in the early miles when I still had such a long way to go still. Then he told me that he’s planning to complete the Triple Crown too.

“Yeah, I’m just… you know… kind of like you man. The Triple Crown is just such a massive physical challenge, and I just know that I want to have that experience. You know?”

“No,” I said. “Honestly, I never had any plans to complete the Triple Crown at all. Until coming out to start the AT, of course.”

He’s an example of this things that I’ve seen play out a lot out here. It has been a long time since I’d heard it though. So long that when I saw it in this injured SOBO hiker, it made me see it for what it was. As if I almost hadn’t even noticed it before being reminded today.

But this thing that I’ve noticed is that there is a tendency for new thru hikers to spout out aspirations to complete the AT, PCT, and CDT, all long before coming even close to finishing their first thru trail. It’s like they have this image of what thru hiking is early on, and that image is dramatically wrong. It’s not at all what thru hiking is about. It is far from what it looks like on the outside. But since all they have is the view from the outside, having never done it for themselves, they decide early on that they’re not only going to do the AT, but that they’re going to finish the AT, then go on to hike the two longer trails as well.

It leads me to believe that unless someone has walked a couple thousand miles of a thru trail, they really have no fucking clue what thru hiking is about. Pardon my French. Or don’t. I just don’t know how else to say it. Maybe that’s the mark of a bad writer, or maybe it’s just my honest soul.

You don’t hear that kind of rhetoric about wanting to complete the Triple Crown after people have a thousand or two thousand miles underfoot. You hear it when they have 30-300 miles.

It’s easy to imagine spending the rest of your life with her that first night you sleep together. Ask me how I know.

But that’s a different thing than spending seasons with a partner and discovering what a relationship is really about.

Anyways, this guy at the hostel was not only fresh into the trail, having only made it about 300 miles in his SOBO journey, but he was also injured. His pack was overloaded, he didn’t have hiking poles, and a lot of the questions I asked led me to believe that his chances of completing a multi-thousand mile hike are approximately zero. Sorry to be blunt. But it’s the truth. He’d be better off spending this time, energy, and money on some other endeavor, but that wasn’t my business to tell him that. What I did tell him was what a doctor already had–that his injury wasn’t the kind that he was going to be back on trail with any time soon, and that it might be time to start planning next year’s trail rather than dreaming that an LCL tear is going to be better by the weekend.

He was visibly upset about having to get off trail, but I promise you, it was for the best. His chance is zero. I just don’t know if he knows that.

All the want in the world, but if you’re going to go into something difficult without intilegence, you probably aren’t going to go far. This guy hadn’t trained for a thru hike, didn’t have the right gear, didn’t know some of the important basics. He might have had the desire, and that can get you far, but it’s not going to get you through a torn LCL.

—

I guess that I want to end today by saying that it’s not hiking that I’m hating out here. It’s specifically this trail that’s called the AT. I do not enjoy this trail specifically. I miss the grades that climb gradually and views of more than just tree stumps and rocks.

Thru hiking is something that may always be important to me, or at least will remain that way for some years to come, I know. But there are some trails that suck, and the Appalachian Trail is probably one that I’m going to remember as such.

I have a memory from the CDT, of another hiker named Dirty Bowl. She had hiked the AT and the PCT before we met, and I remember asking her about the Appalachian Trail specifically. Her response was this: “Life’s too short to waste it on the Appalachian Trail.”

For all the effort I’ve put into trying to fall in love with the AT and make it so I didn’t agree with DirtyBowl at the end of this hike, I think that she’s probably right. After this summer, I will look at people who have hiked or who want to hike the AT very differently than I did before. I think that if you actually want to hike this trail, then you’re either stubborn, dumb, or ill-informed. I may be all of the above. But that’s how I feel about it. If you’re going to put this much time, energy, and financial resources into a thru hike, then why the f*ck would you waste it on the Appalachian Trail, knowing full and well that there are better built, more scenic, and more enjoyable trails out there?

I don’t know man. It’ll be over soon, and that may destroy me. I know that I will cry.

But at my core, I’m ready for this trail to be over.

I want to move on to what’s next.

Wormwood.

AT Day 119

Miles Today: 7.56

AT Mile: 1900.0

(The Barn Hostel; Gorham, NH)

Down down down.

Down down down down down.

Down down.

Down down down down down down down down down.

Down.

Down down down down down.

Flat.

Down down.

Down down down down.

Down.

Down down down.

Are you getting tired of it yet? Be honest. Have we approached the point where it’s about all you can take and you feel like all we’re going to do in this journal is repeat that word over and over again?

Well then we might be approaching the point.

Today was a lot of downhill hiking.

A lot a lot.

It was enough downhill that all I could think about with every step was just that: down down down down down. It felt like it would never end.

I thought to myself several times that it would be strange that I’d be bothered with all this downhill hiking after all the hundreds or thousands of miles that I’ve put into descending the Grand Canyon. But this is a different kind of downhill. When you’re fully enveloped in the forest and can’t see more than ten or fifteen feet through the foliage it feels like you’re going downhill without actually going anywhere at all. It doesn’t change. It’s just more down down down down down.

At least descending the Grand Canyon or the alpine mountains from the last few days there is a view to take in and some change along the way as you go down. Today it was just down and then more down. After that, you guessed it, more down.

You might be thinking to yourself as you read this–Isn’t all that downhill better than just as much uphill. And honestly, I don’t know that it is. Either way it’s challenging. The grade of the AT is unlike any of the other long distance hiking trails that I’ve walked (the Long Trail possibly standing as an exception). And so on the uphill it’s sometimes so steep that you have to use your hands to scramble up over roots and boulders. But then on the downhill it’s so steep that it hurts the knees and it feels like lowering yourself down a mountain, one bolder at a time… actually, that is exactly what it is.

The climbs and descents have become so much over the last hundred miles that I no longer follow the distance or GPS tracking on my Garmin watch. Instead, I watch the elevation profile as I climb up or descend down. Because I swear to god, if I watch the distance, I can spend an entire hour without crossing a whole mile sometimes! It’s incredibly discouraging. So the solution that I’ve found when there are big climbs or descents is to check what the top and bottom elevations are, then set my watch to display current elevation, and track the change, 100ft at a time.

—

All this is to say that the last 75 miles of the White Mountains have completely changed my expectation of milage. I remember being at Hikers Hostel last week and thinking that it’s “only 75 miles” to get to Gorham, which basically represents the end of New Hampshire. I even asked one of the staff at the hostel if I was resting the maps correctly. They said yes, but gave me that raised eyebrow look that indicated that I was missing something. That something that I was missing was how aggressive the climbs and descents of the White Mountains would be. I know I’d been warned about it since before even starting the AT in Georgia. But to be warned is a very different thing than to have those climbs and those miles underfoot.

Throughout every day on trail I’ll take little voice memos, to remind myself things to write about at the end of the day.

One of my notes for today just says “The climbs and descents are fucking brutal.”

Seri always reads the reminders back to me after I’ve added them to my list, and it was funny to hear her curse, adding emphasis to the description of agony.

—

This morning I was sipping coffee on the front deck of the shelter that I shared with three other thru hikers last night. Technically I was supposed to be doing that at the “Cooking Area” which was about 25 yards away, but I was feeling rebellious this morning and decided to boil my water on the porch. I even told the other hikers that they could report me to the Appalachain Mountain Club if they felt the need. They told me they’d get right on that and I watched one of the others light his stove on the porch as well.

Just as I was taking my first sip of coffee (yes I’m transitioning to tea, but I still go back and forth between that and coffee, so lay off!) the site host walked up and greeted us with a chipper “good morning.”

Right away and like a knee-jerk reflex, I said “Good morning Zoe.” Even as the words rolled off my tongue, I realized that wasn’t her name though, and I corrected myself immediately. “Neo. Not Zoe. Neo. Not sure where I got Zoe from.”

She looked at me kind of funny, but she’s also used to working with foggy-headed hikers, so it wasn’t an overly surprised look. More of a look to acknowledge the slip of the tongue.

“I don’t even know where Zoe came from,” I said, trying to explain it more to myself than to her. I didn’t feel bad for having called her by the wrong name; I was more curious as to where it came from.

Then it hit me.

“Oh! I know what it was.” I said. “It’s all the same letters,” I explained. “The Z is just an N on its side, and the O and the E are in both names. So I just saw the N sideways and filled in the rest. Sideways Z-O-E instead of NEO.”

She looked at me sort of strange again, maybe even more strangely this time than before. And I noticed that the other three hikers were also listening in as well. One of them said, “Wormowood, I like how your brain works.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ve taken a lot of psychedelics.”

I honestly don’t know how much of it is nature and how much of it is nurture. I don’t know if I would have ended up like I am today were it not for the chance encounter with a mushroom in 2012. I don’t know how much of it comes from those first 50 days of the AT. I don’t know how much of it is a product of being raised by the family that raised me. I don’t know how much of it comes from the books I’ve read and the musings that I’ve written. I don’t know how much of it comes from having studied writing and literature.

I don’t know why I am the way I am.

But I do believe that psychedelics had a lot to do with it. That’s what I choose to believe.

The all of us talked some more, and I’d just like to say that I very much enjoyed the conversations that I’ve had with the site hosts of the White Mountain shelters and campsites. Neo was a really cool person, and I meant every bit of it when I told her that I hope that our paths cross again.

I honestly hope that they do.

—

I went swimming in a river today, and I bathed in a river two days ago as well. I had written about swimming in a lake during the White Mountain stretch and got a message from Boots telling me that I should take those opportunities to swim more often. As silly as a reminder like that might sound, it still stuck with me. And in both instances–today and two days ago–I paused, thought about the time and hassle it takes to go swimming on trail, and the thought of how cold that water was going to be–but ultimately it was her voice in the back of my head that pushed me over the edge.

The river waters around here are so clear that it’s remarkable, especially after seeing the nasty water that some of the mid Atlantic states had. That brown tannic water seems to mostly be a thing of the past. At least I hope it is.

—

Only eight miles today into Gorham, New Hampshire. This is my last trail town of the state, and tomorrow I’ll likely cross into Maine–my last state of the Appalachian Trail!

Tonight I’m staying at the Barn Hostel. It’s supposedly the oldest hiker hostel in the state, and it looks that way. It has a lot of good character, and the owner is nice, but it also feels dingy. Not like the dungeon, but still, it feels a bit stuffy in here.

I got my new-new keyboard, and my last new pair of shoes. The new keyboard is much smaller than the one that I’ve been working with for the last hundred miles, and although it takes some time for my fingers to get used to this key spacing, it saves 100 grams compared to the other.

Lots more that I could write about… but that’s always the gig. One small note that I want to take just for when I’m looking back and working this into a book: the hiker who called himself “Nazi” and his son “Warrier” are both her at this hostel today. More that I could stay about it, but nothing important for the time being. Unless I want to explore it more later on, the main thing that I want to note is that the guy obviously cares about his son. I can see a longing for him to connect more deeply. And for that matter, I see that same longing from the son. Maybe the take away point of it is that we are complex people. Rarely is someone just purely evil or just purely good. We are amalgamations of complicated things. We are both angel and demon, and maybe part of the challenge of this life is to identify the parts in ourself that we see as good and do what we can to bring those good pieces out of us even more fully.

Or maybe I’m just being too heady.

Maybe it’s from the psychedelics.

Wormwood.

AT Day 118

Miles Today: 13.85

AT Mile: 1892.0

(Imp Shelter)

It’s amazing the ways that these journals have deepened my experience of hiking the AT and helped in my understanding of the experience itself. I remember on those first nights in my tent, not really knowing what these were going to come to be and sort of feeling like I had to force myself to write. I remember the early journals feeling more like logs of what happened in the day rather than what they feel like they’ve become–more of a log of what’s happened on the inside while the trail has been going on on the outside.

It’s also been amazing to see what’s resonated with me and what’s resonated with my readers.

This morning I had messages from three different people, commenting on my entry from last night–the one about questioning my own sanity in feeling like I’m sensing something that I hadn’t felt before this trail. That’s seemed to be how most of the most important things have come from these journals–I’ve felt silly in writing about them, but they’ve made more sense after they’ve reached the page.

—

This evening I met the site host for the Imp Camp where I’m staying tonight, and her name is Neo. She’s extremely nice, as has been the case with every one of the site hosts I’ve met in New Hampshire, and talked for quite some time. As I’ve done with the other two site hosts that I’ve met in the White Mountains, I asked if Neo would like a coyote tooth and she gladly said yes.

After we had talked for some time, and it was growing late, I asked her something that I’ve asked one other hike in the last two days–I asked her if she had any wisdom to share.

She thought about it for a bit, and I sort of felt bad, like I had put her on the spot with something that suddenly felt very heavy. But she said that she didn’t mind and that she appreciated the question. Then she said, “Just fucking do it. I don’t mean to be a Nike cliche, but that’s what comes to mind. Just fucking do it.”

I told her that was the same answer that I got from the last guy that I asked, and that this feels like even more confirmation.

It’s impossible for me to not apply that to the thinking around writing a book around this trail. I don’t know if I do justice in these journals with sharing just how much trepidation I feel around that prospect. There is a lot in me that is afraid of falling short or not being able to do it. There’s also a lot of me that is filled with excitement and determination though, and I try to lean into that part more, as I can.

—

I tossed and turned a lot last night. Not sure why, but I haven’t been sleeping well these last few nights. I hope that I’m not coming down with a cold, as one of the kids who was staying in the Dungeon two nights ago did have a cough through the night. But so far no symptoms other than shitty sleep.

At sunrise I put in earplugs and pulled the beanie down over my eyes. I’ve learned that my ideal hiking schedule seems to be waking at 7, on trail by 8, then hiking until 6 or 7pm.

There was a visitor center about a mile and a half into my day and I was astonished to see that they had a freezer full of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. They also had an all you can eat breakfast buffet, but I had already had a meal that I’d Yogi’ed off of hikers in the. White Mountains for breakfast this morning, and so the prospect of a pint of ice cream sounded better.

I sat down in the dining area to eat and recognized two hikers who I’d met in the Tennissee portion of the AT from several months back. I ate my ice cream while they ate their breakfasts and they asked if I still carried bubbles. I was glad to tell them that I do and I have had them out just the other day.

—

The climb up the Wildcat Mountains was intense. It was steep in ways that I’ve never seen from a thru hike. There was one mile that had more than 1,300 feet of elevation gain! That is the most that I’ve ever seen from a mile on trail.

I had hopes of making 22 miles today but only made 13. I’m not at all shocked. The miles are still hard. Even if I’m technically out of the Whites.

So tomorrow I’ll have around 8 miles of downhill hiking to bring me to the road crossing that I’ll use to get to Goram, which is my last trail town of New Hampshire. There is a hostel there, and I’ll also pick up my last pair of trail shoes there. From there it’s into Maine and the last 300 miles of the trail.

—

Camped tonight in the Imp Shelter with three other hikers–one NOBO Long Section hiker, and two SOBO hikers.

I worry that I’ll toss and turn like I did last night, but we’ll see.

To those of you who reached out about my maybe not losing my mind in feeling the things that I talked about yesterday–thank you. Your messages of support go farther than I know how to put to words right now.

Wormwood.