Date: 2009-07-20
From: Great Barrington, MA 

To: Blue Hill Road aka Stony Brook Road, MA 
Miles today: 9.6

Cell good(OG notes are beneath C6's notes today.)C6 notesWhat a difference a day makes. We started off after getting our resupply box today and were doing okay, but 2 miles short of the shelter we were planning to go to tonight I slipped off the edge of a plank of wood and fell face first...AGAIN. This is the third such fall. The first was on the rocks in PA. The second was a few days ago in the mud. This time I landed face first on moss. I have a scrape on my forehead and my upper lip. I take this one as God's message that I need to stop. I can't afford to take the risk of another face first fall and potential brain injury! I have been trying to be so careful. These falls are so unexpected, and terrifying.We were close to a road when I fell, so we came up to the road and sat on a rock for a while. After sitting at the road, and bawling for about 45 minutes, we called a friend of OG's and asked if he would come get us. "Diehard" is a guy OG hiked with for about 700 miles during his 2006 thru-hike. He lives not far from here. We had talked with him last evening; he was going to slack pack us two days from now for a 20 mile section. The biggest trauma about this for me right now is the fact that I'm quitting. 1520 miles is nothing to be ashamed of, but I really thought I would succeed and do the entire AT. We are so close, and yet so far. Stopping now is SO HARD to accept. Yet I know I cannot take the risk of falling face first again. My health takes priority over finishing the Appalachian Trail.I feel so badly about this. I know a lot of people are following our journey, so I feel I'm letting them/you down. I'm letting myself down, too. It will take me quite a while to get over the feeling of failure over this. I truly expected to be able to do the whole AT. I'm not feeling weak, the falls have been from something I've tripped or slipped on. All the rain has made for a lot of mud and slippery rocks. The fall in the mud was because of a wet, slippery rock that I misjudged (I didn't expect it to be slippery). The fall today was because I put my foot too close to the edge of the board and my foot slipped off the edge. I'm thankful it wasn't a board a foot above the swamp and a lot of water...it was the last board in a row of boards and I didn't feel steady on the single board. I didn't catch myself before I went down face first.It will take me a while to accept that we aren't finishing this journey right now. Maybe we'll do the rest another time, but I don't know. OG notesOne thousand, five hundred and twenty miles we have hiked during this adventure and we will be going home. We had planned a different outcome than this but that was not to be.We came to a fork in the road and we have to take a different route than originally planned. We have been blessed to have experienced the things we did on our journey and now we must move them to the back seat in our lives. We are not quitting our adventure, we are merely reprioritizing what is important in our lives. Our health and safety comes first.We don't know if or when we will return to the AT, but our hearts will always out here. God has given us the good fortune of health and resources to have come this far. We feel He is telling us now to rethink what is important in our lives and we must listen. As C6 mentioned, she has asked God for a sign on whether we should continue or stop. We feel that the falls she has taken are the signs. We ignored the first two and can not ignore this one. As I write this I thought of another one that I didn't consider as a sign but may well be one. I have a huge lump on my leg from a fall I took. The area around it is all black and blue. Now that I think about it this may also be a sign to me, too.We will continue to write in this journal what we are going through as we take the new road in this journey. I have discovered as a long time Trailjournals reader that after the hiker leaves the trail they tend to drop out of sight. I don't want to do that. I believe that part of our journey will be to decompress and reenter our lives once again. The hiking is one aspect of the journey, returning to our lives as we know it is another. It is the journey that counts, not the destination! Old Goat & Check Six