Date: 2017-11-12
To: View Entry
Miles today: 0.0
Weather: overcast clouds

The cold rain that was lashing Amicalola Falls Lodge when we woke up today is reason enough to think the timing of our hike has been extraordinarily fortunate. Yesterday's surreal and epic hiker trash wedding and the bacchanalian reception that followed wouldn't have been the same today. We felt for Boss, Sweets and Bangles, who are scheduled to reach Springer Mountain a day behind us but in conditions best described as an exercise in suffering. In its way, that's a handy metaphor for the trail as a whole.The others in Team KRT became accustomed to the tone of my, er, observations about the AT and particularly its habit of choosing routes that added unnecessary and pointless difficulty."Don't mind him," they'd say to others we met, "he hates the AT."Can I say in my defence I really tried to like it? When it was taking a toll on my body early on, I slowed down in the hope of making hiking the AT more enjoyable. Whenever I had the chance to make the hike easier, I tried to take it up in the hope of engendering a more positive impression of it. But...Maybe the best description I heard came from Crispi, a hiker from Texas who did an seven-month nobo thru-hike on the AT last year that involved a lot of partying. I met her this year while I was trail angelling at Scout and Frodo's place in San Diego before she set off on the PCT, less than six months after reaching Katahdin. I met her again a month later while I was trail angelling at the Andersons, at mile 478, at which time she was able to more meaningfully compare the two experiences. "Oh man, it's been different -- this is so much more enjoyable," she explained. "But [the AT and the PCT] are different animals. The AT will always be my first love, but you're not always meant to be with your first love."(A slightly fuller version of her take can be found on my Humans of the PCT17 page here: www.facebook.com/Humans.of.PCT... )As the motto of my journal says, I expected the AT would involve having to "embrace the civility", a play on the unofficial CDT motto of embrace the brutality. I'd thought the frequent towns and hostels and the whole hiker-support ecosystem on the AT would make it a more civilised affair, despite its notorious reputation for PUDs -- pointless ups and downs.But that meant-in-jest slogan came back to haunt me because the AT felt like the most consistently brutal of the three trails, although in terms of short-term arduousness, nothing will beat doing the Sierra in the high-snow year of 2006. And as Crispi rightly observed, they are different beasts. And the AT doesn't have that special place of being my first love. That's the PCT for a whole range of reasons, only some of which are to do with the trail.The triple crown is not something to which I ascribe any importance, although I admire those who have done it. If the CDT in New Mexico had proved to be as meritless as its dire reputation had it, I'd planned to get off the trail. (Like most trail tales, the "boring jeep roads and skanky water" rep was vastly overblown and it ended up being my favourite state.) And if the AT had truly sucked, I'd have got off it too.It never reached that stage. But equally, there was no moment -- unlike on the PCT and the CDT -- when I felt like I wanted this experience to go on and on. I'm writing this five months to the day after heading back from Amicalola Falls Lodge to the real world. As I'd said when I decided to hike the AT, any thru-hike has to be good. And this one was.Life is good.