Date: 2011-07-07
From: Silver Hill Campsite

To: Mark and Pat's House
Miles today: 12.7

(In which I spend the night at a trail angel's house and offer my advice to those planning a thru-hike)I get another late start, though I am slowly returning to the thru-hiker schedule, and leave the campsite at 9am, after all of the other nine hikers are gone. I take advantage of my continued solo hiking to listen to music, mostly my new favorite podcast, All Songs Considered. As usual I keep one ear free, and pause the music and remove the earbud when I pass other hikers. I pass one hiker heading south, who acknowledges without my asking that he is not a thru-hiker. "Everyone keeps asking me if I am a thru-hiker," he says somewhat chagrined, "they can't wait for the first southbounders to arrive." His comment reminds me of the coming wave of southbounders, and makes me second guess my plan to take several days off in Massachusetts, lest I miss part of the wave.My experience triple zeroing in NYC has also made me reconsider several days off trail. Unlike zeroing in a trail town, where I see all of the hikers as they pass by, taking one or more zero days off trail is a good way to miss meeting hikers I haven't seen in months and might not see again. Several zeros is also enough to put me significantly downstream from whatever loose bubble of hikers I had been in, and ever since taking three zeros I've felt more disconnected from the trail social scene than I have since my earlier speedy days.A reader of my trail journal has offered to pick me up and take me back to his and his wife's house for a shower, food, laundry and bed, so I take a break at the first shelter, planning a short day to the pre-arranged road crossing. I chat with House and Scholar, two German brothers I meet for the first time at the shelter, and when they leave I plug my speaker into my iPod, lay down on the shelter floor and listen to some music. It's as close to a nap as I've come on the AT, and on a hot and humid day the afternoon siesta feels wonderful. While changing songs I double check the mileage on the iPod's AT Guide pdf, only to realize that I have twice as far left to hike as I had thought.With more than six miles left to hike in less than two hours a relaxed pace is now no longer feasible. I drink as much of my water as I can and then dump out all but a few swallows to lose weight and gain speed. I put my earbud in, cue up a techno-based Tiesto podcast and start power-hiking. I've hiked faster for longer, but never in humid, 90 degree weather, and sweat drips down my face and around my headphones as I plow up hills and over rocks and streams. I arrive at the road with minutes to spare, and am holding a cold can of rootbeer from the nearby vending machine to my brow when the trail angel, Mark, arrives in his silver Prius.Mark is planning a 2012 thru-hike and has been following and hosting hikers from trail journals to get some of the inside scoop. Listening to his dedicated years of preparation reminds me of my own months of gear research and trail journal reading, and how surprised I was when I realized just how little research most beginning thru-hikers had done. My conversation with Mark also makes me reflect on what advice I would give to prospective thru-hikers. I will list the advice here, aware that it will mostly be read by only that small subset of hikers who have already done a great deal of research.Advice number one: Carrying less weight is more fun than carrying more weight, and the way to carry less weight is to use a spreadsheet and a scale, preferably before you buy most of your gear. Those doing any sort of research will have read this many times before, but it's worth reminding that extra ounces add up fast, and it's a lot easier to see where those ounces can be saved looking at a spreadsheet than it is carrying a pack. Few people heft their pack and say, "Man, my ground cloth feels two ounces heavier than it could be," but it doesn't take very many ounces for a pack to feel noticably lighter, and for you to be noticably happier carrying it.Advice number two: Less weight equals more speed for less work, but just because you can go fast doesn't mean you should. If you take advice number one to heart, you will almost certainly carry less weight than 95 to 98% of the rest of the thru-hikers you meet starting out, and as a result, it will be very easy to outhike this entire crowd. But hiking with familiar faces is a lot more enjoyable than seeing a continuous blur of new faces, and this is but one of many benefits of a more relaxed hike. Everyone has to figure out their own speed and their own hike, but at least remember to consider this: at any given point it's entirely possible that you could be having way, way more fun by slowing down, even if you are already having fun and gaining satisfaction from going fast.Advice number three: If you can afford it, a smartphone is the way to go (preferably Verizon), but if not a Kindle 3G with its free celular internet is the best deal to stay connected on the trail.Advice number four: Hike your own hike. Which means so very many things, but not least that you should question any and all conventional notions about how you should hike. Who's to say that hiking white blazes is any better than blue ones, or that hikes that span multiple years are in anyway less than hikes in one year? Beware of the value judgements contained in conventional terminology, for example the lumping of those whose hike of the entire AT spans multiple years in the same "section hiker" bucket as those who only intend to hike a short section. The people who created the AT had little respect for those who would try to rush through it in a single year, and to believe in purist notions of thru-hiking is to accept other, more recent people's ideas of what it means to be pure. There are many adventures to be had out in the Appalachian woods, and don't limit your imagination to only those adventures whose rules have already been carefully defined by other people.