Date: 2016-12-18
To: View Entry
Miles today: 0.0

All is well. In case you were wondering, I made it safely back to the Chicago area, and have completed a move to northwest Indiana. I have enjoyed reading all the comments on this journal page, and wanted to write something earlier, but I have written draft after draft in my mind and I never seem to be able to write the epic conclusion that I want to. But, there comes a point when you¢ve got to say a few things, even if it¢s not written as well as you hoped.Firstly, thank you to everyone who contributed to my successful thru-hike. My wife could not have shown more support as I walked off into the woods leaving her to fend for herself (and me) for six months. My Mom and Dad set up a mission command post, coordinated morale boosting letters of support, and monitored my progress hour by hour from Oregon. Geezer and Lee were pillars of support. Their generosity and hospitality made the hike so much better for my first thousand miles. Countless others contributed in big and small ways. I tried to acknowledge some of it in my journal. Thank you to you all!One thing I did to help myself verbalize my thoughts was to ask myself typical questions and then answer those specific questions. I would use a terrible British accent (with hints of Australian, Irish, Scottish, and perhaps some Bostonian) and ask myself probing questions about my hiking experience. So try to imagine the questions being asked with an accent on a British talk show with a studio audience:¢Congratulations, Spaghetti Legs. What adventure is next?¢Well, this is it for a long time. While I enjoyed the experience, normal life can be more than enough adventure, and I¢m looking forward to it.¢Well said. What was your favourite part of the hike?¢        Choosing any one part is difficult. I loved the feeling of freedom as I headed out for a three or four day segment. I loved how much joy I felt from simple things like a shower and clean clothes. I loved zero days, camp fires, hearing thunder storms rage from the comfort of a shelter, the views, the kindness of complete strangers, and the sense of community with fellow thru-hikers. I loved being able to eat whatever I wanted for six months and losing weight anyway. I loved feeling like God was personally watching out for me and wanted me to succeed.¢And your least favourite?¢        Category 4 and 5 bowel emergencies have to be somewhere near the top of this list. Waking up to mice crawling on me, packing up a wet tent and hiking in the rain, and the pure physical pain of it would be close contenders. Intense heat, lack of water, bone-chilling cold, mosquitoes, deer flies, gnats that insisted on flying into eyeballs¢¦¢Whoa, that¢s a lot of least favourites. Didn¢t you enjoy your hike?¢        I enjoyed parts of it and didn¢t enjoy others. But I didn¢t hike with the intention of enjoying myself all of the time, so I wasn¢t disappointed. If you begin this hike without an expectation of significant hardships, the trail will disappoint you greatly. The experience is meaningful because of its difficulty and dangerousness.¢Would you recommend other people attempt a thru-hike?¢        I wouldn¢t encourage anyone to do it if they were only half-heartedly interested in the attempt. I would recommend it to anyone who feels the unexplainable urge to do it. The likelihood of dying in the attempt is low, but the likelihood of being injured is high. Some injuries are permanent and some require surgery to correct. Some require weeks of rest and recovery. It has to be worth taking that chance.¢Did you ever get sick or injured?¢Not to any significant degree. There were periods where I felt I had very little energy and was struggling over flat terrain to do 12 or 13 miles. It¢s possible I was a little under the weather at those times. In the first five days, I think I was getting heat exhaustion. It was 70 degrees or so and I wasn¢t used to the intense Southern sun. I made the mistake of laying down in my tent in the afternoon which raised the temperature another 20 degrees or so. I never got a blister my entire trip. When my feet got soaked in Shenandoah National Park, some skin rubbed off and my feet got this weird rash. I think my toenail gouged the adjacent toe a couple times and I had to separate them with a band-aid. My feet would occasionally get shooting pain, which I was told was associated with the tendons and the skin being stretched as the feet grew. It was bearable. I had the most trouble with water from wells. I don¢t know if it was the high iron and sulfur content or if the wells were more prone to contamination.¢I know that you did extensive amounts of research prior to beginning your hike. After all that, what surprised you most?¢        I think initially it was the feeling. The photos and videos don¢t accurately portray the 360 degree panorama around you, especially in the beginning before the trees get their leaves. Also, the effort to hike even ten to twelve miles initially in the Georgia and North Carolina mountains was significantly greater than I imagined.¢What did you do differently than other thru-hikers?¢         I wore heavy Asolo leather boots while most hikers wore semi-disposable hiking shoes. I wore long pants for all except two days in mid-March when I got hot and then couldn¢t get my zip-off pants to zip back together. I started out with a Camelbak 3 liter bladder and a Katadyn Pro pump water filter, before switching to a Sawyer Squeeze water filter in Waynesboro, Virginia and filling two bottles. My pack was definitely larger (and heavier) than average (Osprey Atmos 65L). The standard pack seemed to be the Osprey Exos 58L I think. I used a 30 degree sleeping bag the entire time whereas most people used a winter bag and some sort of summer system. I ate freeze-dried food almost every dinner outside of towns whereas everyone else survived on tortilla shells, peanut butter, tuna packets, ramen noodles, and instant mashed potatoes. I lost more weight than just about every hiker. I was closer to a ¢purist¢ than most hikers, and ended up hiking the entire thing according to that standard. I carried a bear canister (the big one) the entire way, which almost no one else did. I didn¢t carry a lighter and never started a campfire, although I did assist other people starting a fire. I never used the postal system, aside from receiving letters at two locations while staying with friends and family. The reason I was able to do that was that my wife visited me about six times and hand delivered things during those visits. I also kept a journal and posted entries for each day to Trail Journals.¢It sounds like you really marched to the beat of your own drum. Did you intend to do everything your own way?¢        Actually, in most of my preparation, I intended to copy everyone else and be a clone of the standard thru-hiker, but I obviously did not succeed. The boots were a compromise between family members who were concerned about rattlesnake bites, and they ended up saving me a lot of money because I wore the same pair the entire hike. I was more concerned about tick bites and mosquito bites than overheating, so that explains the pants. I wish I had started with the Sawyer Squeeze (standard, not mini). I thought the pump would be more practical for puddles of water, but there wasn¢t a situation that the Sawyer Squeeze couldn¢t handle eventually. Most of the time it was much faster and much less effort and allowed you to get out of the way of a queue of people at a good water spot. I got the larger pack to fit my bear canister, which was overkill for the Appalachian Trail, but would be necessary on other trails around the United States, and proved resistant to mice and other critters as well. It wasn¢t a bad choice, but if I wanted to cut weight I¢d start there. I stopped using the Camelbak bladder around 600 miles in. It was just such a production to fill it, close it tight, and get it in and out of the pack. Once I was confident I could survive on two liters of water, I used a Nalgene bottle and a Mountain Dew bottle, and that system worked fine for me. Some people screwed the filter directly to their water bottle and sucked through the filter. The Nalgene was extra weight, and it probably makes more sense to use two disposable bottles, but I didn¢t. I used the Sawyer bag to haul an additional three liters through dry sections occasionally. The sleeping bag probably caused me the most discomfort per dollar saved of all of my gear choices. I would absolutely spend the money on a high quality 10 degree bag until mid May and then perhaps a 40 degree bag until switching back for the White Mountains. I¢m pretty sure I shivered off at least 15 pounds the first month. The freeze-dried food was a budget buster, but it was such a streamlined system, and allowed me to carry just a 1 pint cup for boiling water. My cooking setup was ultralight, and I looked forward to dinner every night. I also bought as I went along, so I didn¢t have to worry about Post Office hours, although many towns had only limited quantities of freeze-dried food.¢Please tell me you¢re going to go into more detail with your gear selections.¢        Yes, I intend to go a little more in depth for some of the more major gear items. I want to provide a point of view for next year¢s thru-hikers.¢Obviously future thru-hikers are going to gain something from reading your journal, but who was your primary target audience?¢        I did write the journal and post it with the intention of paying forward the help I received online by helping future thru-hikers. I also wanted to give family and friends who were interested a way of finding out how my hike was going. But I think my target audience was someone who just enjoys reading about an adventure. Not everyone is in a position to quit their job and head to the mountains for six months. I wanted to give those people a means to vicariously experience an Appalachian Trail thru-hike.¢Well, unfortunately we¢re running out of time. Promise me we¢ll talk again.¢        I would like that very much.