Date: 2010-02-09
To: Fayetteville, GA
Miles today: 0.0

IntroductionI grew up in the Atlanta area. My father would take us car camping and I went on many short hikes with Boy Scouts and other youth groups. I can remember driving through Helen, GA before it was alpine Helen, then driving up a dirt road to camp on Brasstown Bald. I spent a lot of time in the woods while attending North Georgia College in Dahlonega. After college I didn't get out much until the late 80's. Then I pulled out all my old stuff and went on a few overnighters. Considering the age and quality of this 10-20 year old gear, one night was more than enough and I was lucky I didn't run into any bad weather. I liked my first experiences and started accumulating newer stuff and in the early 90's I started taking at least one weeks vacation a year to section hike the AT. I got as far as Roan Mtn before travel time started impacting hiking time so after that point I stayed in Georgia and southwestern NC. During this time I decided that the first hiking season after I retired I would thru-hike. I retired in April 2005 and started my thru-hike on Feb 19 2006, finishing on July 16. Since then, as you can see from my other journals, I've done the Long Trail in VT in 2007 and the AT from Springer to Damascus in 2008. So why do the whole thing again? Several reasons. First, I started rather early in 2006. Between Springer and Damascus I only met 9 other Thruhikers and 7 of them I never saw again. I didn't sit down in a restaurant with another hiker until PA which is where the faster hikers that started after me began catching up. Even so, the ranger at Baxter State Park in ME said I was the 18th hiker to finish that year. I don't mind hiking alone, but during my section hikes I had seen the comraderie of the thruhikers and had been looking forward to experiencing that. In 2008 I started later and had a lot more fun meeting a lot of great people. And there's a difference in trail friendships and home friendships. When you part ways after meeting a home friend at a party, or church, or even in the grocery store you don't think too much about the next time you will see them, you know it's just a matter of time. But when you part on the trail, there's a good chance that you will never see them again. Somebody takes a few extra days off, or goes home for awhile, somebody speeds up, somebody slows down and you end up days apart. One of the simple pleasures of the trail is to ask fellow hikers "Have you seen so-and-so?" and then to compare notes on the absent friend. And what a great feeling it is to walk up to a shelter at the end of the day and find someone you haven't seen in a month. The more important reason though, to me, is the freedom and independence that I experience while hiking. In 2006, my wife came up for a few days and while we were walking around North Conway, NH I picked up a book called Mountain Man by Vardis Fisher. This was one of the politically incorrect sources of the movie Jeremiah Johnson. I read it after I got home and discovered that for me this was one of those books where you say, "I've always believed this but I've never known that anybody else did and I've never seen it explained in such an easy to understand manner. Fisher tells a story, like the movie, but spends a lot more time explaining why these men were drawn to the Rocky Mtn wilderness. At this time the West was complete wilderness with no law but survival of the fittest. Sam, the hero of the book, says at one point " What fun we'll have, no taxes, no policemen, no government, no neighbors, no preachers." There is a quote in the introduction from a book by W. A. Fertis who says "Strange that people can find so strong a charm in this rude, nomadic, and hazardous way of life, but so it is, the toil, the danger, the loneliness, the deprivation of this condition of being, is, they think, more than compensated by the lawless freedom." I doubt that there is anywhere in the world now that you can experience the freedom that these men experienced, but thruhiking is about as close as you get. You are responsible for what happens to you, good or bad, If you pick good gear you will be reasonably comfortable. If you pick bad you will be miserable. You decide how far to walk each day or whether to walk at all. You decide how long to stay in town, how much money to spend, what to eat, what to drink. And if you follow some one else's advice and it turns out to be wrong, it's still your fault because you chose to listen to them. I think that's what I like most about being on the trail, having the freedom to take personal responsibility for overcoming the challenges of walking over 2000 miles in the woods. And besides, I need some new hiking stories. Everybody has heard all my old ones.