morvasaaty/AppalachianTrail-LD-Hikers-Blogs-and-Weather-20-years huggingface dataset:
Date: 2017-07-15
From: Monson, ME Shaws Lodging

To: Long Pond Stream Lean-to
Miles today: 15.1
Weather: light rain

I had a great stay at Shaws. The breakfast eggs bacon home fries and all you can eat blueberry pancakes plus orange juice and coffee hit the spot. I had my laundry done and my back fluffed my bag fluffed. I packed up my gear and got out on the second train . I guess I hit the trail around 11 AM. I hiked out to the first shelf there and chatted with some ladies that were there. I know I had to forward some streams and I had to cover 15 miles so I got going. Blue suit caught up with me and we had three River  two Ford. The first one was a easy rock Skip but the second one required me to take my shoes off. I can tell you I had trouble forwarding this river forwarding anyway. I must've slipped off a big rock  and into a deep hole. I almost lost my balance and I certainly reach the other side with very very sore feet. The other thing I've neglected to mention was that my Merrills my third pair how to split that light water in. Poet who owns Shawn  Shaws had another pair that was left there by a sponsored hiker. They were Adidas and I tried them on. They felt good. I decided to wear them and to carry my old ones. Considering I had six or seven days of food and an extra pair of shoes my pack was quite happy  heavy not happy. Anyway after 2 miles of hiking I realize these shoes the Adidas we're going to work well. I met a southbound hiker coming out of the wilderness and he was out of food. I offered him some of my trail mix which was heavy on the Eminem's M  and M's and it he happily took some of it. He also agreed to carry my old Merrills back and trash them at Shaws saving me carrying them for the next 100 miles. It was a little risky but I'm confident it was the right choice. One thing you learn is that you live by your own decisions. Anyway after crossing the Ford blue suit hike to head and I continued coming in around 8:30 PM not having to use my headlamp for a change. Huge milestone! I now have less than 100 miles till I summit Catan Katahdin and complete a northbound through hike the Appalachian Trail! I can't wait to finish!!
Date: 2017-07-16
From: Long Pond Stream Lean-to

To: West Branch Pleasant River Ford
Miles today: 15.2
Weather: clear sky

so I had a lot of trouble hiking today. It took me until after dark to complete my 15 miles. The mountains didn't help but I knew something was wrong. I pitch my tent before the Ford of the river at a campsite and made my dinner even though I wasn't very hungry . After eating dinner I knew something was really wrong my stomach kept churning churning. I didn't sleep well and I woke up and went out to do my morning business and when I came back I lost last nights dinner next to my  tent. We can shaky weak and shaky I proceeded to pack up and I slowly hiked 5 miles to the next shelter where I collapsed and slept for several hours. I woke up not hungry at all knowing that I needed to hike some more miles. I had a mountain chain to finish with four peaks and I got up at around 4 PM and I hiked the mountains finishing at 8:30 and making it to the shelter. What a day!
Date: 2017-07-17
From: West Branch Pleasant River Ford

To: Logan Brook Lean-to
Miles today: 12.8
Weather: clear sky

I woke up knowing that my only chance of summering on Friday was to pull a  23 mile hike today so I got up as always I could and got going as early as I could and got going. Trail was flat and easy and I made good progress. I can just tell you that the trail was flat and I kept moving well even though I was weak and did not eat very much at all . I was done before dark. Thank God they had good water I filled up and made dinner even though I wasn't hungry I ate it and it stayed down. This late in the game I run into this problem. You never know it's going to happen
Date: 2017-07-19
From: Potaywadjo Spring Lean-to

To: Rainbow Stream Lean-to
Miles today: 18.2
Weather: scattered clouds

The goal was 23 miles today. I don't know why but I took a few breaks and before I knew it was getting late and I was coming into the shelter 730 exhausted having done only 18 1/2 miles. An old guy named graybeard was in the shelter . He's trying to set the age through hiker limit at 82. I talk to him and he said I thought I could do the 24.9 into the next shelter the birches I got up early. So I put out my bad bro made my dinner I got myself ready to get up at 4 AM . No dad I was tired and I needed sleep so I crashed with the expectation that I would get up early and get my walking in keep on schedule for Friday so I'm at for a Friday summit.
Date: 2017-07-20
From: Rainbow Stream Lean-to

To: The Birches
Miles today: 24.9
Weather: broken clouds

so it wasn't my plan to have to walk 25 miles the day before I saw my dad but here I was. I woke up at 4 AM got my coffee actually green tea on and made my oatmeal I was going to need a lot of energy. A quick ate my food pack my things up and started walking. I was rewarded with my early morning  Adventure by saying the most crashing through the woods and also I saw to Autre playing in the lake. It was the first time I had seen Autre in the wild. Then I found myself making excellent time I was hiking well I felt good. I reached a point called rainbow ledges where you hadn't  where you had an excellent view of Catan Katahdin. So I came incentive to hike on and before I knew it I was coming out of the hundred mile wilderness and crossing a bridge called able bridge. Able bridge a while. Abol bridge there we got it. It was very cool spot where they were ran river rafting and they had a camp store and I made the mistake of going into the restaurant where I ate a huge bowl of clam chowder and a sausage sandwich totally destroyed my guts guts. I also saw purge with you who I hadn't seen since Harpers Ferry ! It was great to see him and I also ran into Turk. It was clear that we were coming to the end of this long long journey. Everyone had eaten too much just laying around trying to get themselves together to hike on the 9 miles to the purchase because basically the base camp for Katahdin summit.  I hiked out with my stomach way too full because I also had a ice cream before I left something I rarely do unfortunately my stomach was so upset that I depleted my toilet paper supply on the way to the next shelter. Yes I was pretty sick.  I signed in for the birches Adelaide little kiosk that they had and I was number 11 of 12. I got there at seven made my bed roll in the shelter and got to sleep knowing I had only one more day of hiking . She's getting pretty exciting.
Date: 2017-07-21
From: The Birches

To: Kathadin Summit at Baxter Peak
Miles today: 5.2
Weather: scattered clouds

I got up and got my breakfast excited that this was the last day of hiking. Excited that I would be summer and Catan. Katahdin summit.  I left the camp noticing that everyone else had already left and it was 7 AM I went to the ranger station and got rid of the extra food I had in my bag in the ranger station was for perch was there with his group karaoke chocolate rain in the squash and I got the OK to proceed so I started hiking  from Catan Springs Campground Katahdin spring campground to summit. I got only a little while before it started getting very steep. Let me just say that the hike to the top of Katahdin what's the toughest climb I've had on this whole hike. I was passing a lot of people but eventually purging his group caught up to me and they passed me on what I consider a blue blaze but it was very steep and difficult to follow the places and we all perceive it up towards what is known as the gate which is where the steep incline of the mountain face finally gives way to a flatter plateau. I don't know how long it took. It was a tough climb and they were places where you were totally exposed hanging onto rebar with Cliff faces below you. The views work incredible the views were incredible. I was enjoying myself however I was the only one caring a four pack  carrying a four pack for pack for FULL pack and the others were carrying a slack pack slack pack more on that later. Anyway before I knew it I was at the gate where it flattened out and you  could see the summit. Then it was a nice walk over boulders which took some time passed throw spring and or a mile from the summit. Scaling rocks coming up towards the summit I could see the celebrations going on. Before I knew it I was up there  and it was my turn! I got up on the platform after giving parch my phone purge my phone I need to collect some pictures of me while I was up top clicked some pictures. What can I say ex?  It was an awesome experience. The whole thing. I will write more in the next few days but I wanted to get this posted up. Thank you for supporting me please stick around for a few days while I write a few closing remarks which I'm sure you will all enjoy or at least some of you well. I can only tell you that I follow I followed through and I had my beard and my ponytail cut off at the summit! That's right no more big beard. Wildebeest is gone. It's time to become gentleman William.
Date: 2017-07-28
To: Home
Miles today: 0.0

climb every mountain search high and low follow every byway every path you know climb every mountain ford every stream follow every rainbow till you find your dream a dream that will need all the love you can give every day of your life for as long as you live climb every mountain ford every Stream follow every rainbow till you find your dream.Look at my pictures. My hair is cut. My beard is gone. I bought 50 lobsters in Rockport Harbor ME and we cooked them and ate them. I went to the Reading Phillies with 2 of my sons and my 3 grandchildren. II had peaches and watermelon today. I'm back on the couch.Please go to the high school musical this year. Check out a state park that is more than an hour away. Walk to the bank. Walk by a creek on a hot day. Look in the water. Look at what God has made.Write down your dreams. Look at them in a year. Ask God to help you.  This isn't a dress rehearsal. This is it. Take a shot.  Live more by moving. Food does not give us energy. If food gave us energy people that eat the most would do the most. This is not the case. Moving gives you energy. Move around! And do you know what? Carrie your pack. I don't like slack packing. I don't want to be a slacker. And do something nice for someone who can't repay you and tell no one about it. If you tell someone you have received your reward. Don't let your right hand know what your left hand is doing and your father who sees in secret will repay you in secret. Abide in the secret place of the most high. Rest in the shadow of his wings. Remember Moses climbed mountains. Jesus climbed mountains. Go climb a mountain!
Date: 2017-01-11
To: Staying in Shape
Miles today: 0.0

Yesterday I took a brief hike on the Mattatuck Trail near Wolcott, CT. The route took me alongside the Mad River, on lightly packed snow, under hemlocks. It was very pleasant, which is why I chose it. The temperature was in the low 20's, but soon warmed up to the low 30's. I started out wearing a normal winter jacket, but soon took it off and was quite comfortable in a lightweight down jacket from LL Bean, 850 fill. My wife gave me my first one last year, but it was silver colored and after I had done over 600 miles carrying or wearing it, grease became an issue as far as appearance. The new one is black.On my way back, I met an old man, out walking his dogs. Like any other hiker, he was concerned about trail conditions, in this case, whether it was slippery enough to make falls an issue. I told him, I'm 69 and there was one place where I held onto the trees a bit, but otherwise it's OK. We do the best we can.I spent much of my hike musing about what I've learned about human nature as the sorry spectacle of the Trump candidacy and transition has unfolded. The whole thing brings out the worst in everybody, and for me it has been a serious threat to serenity. Hence the walk in the woods.We have all these on-line forums, where trolls enjoy the privilege of anonymity and pseudonimity and vent their destructive and anti-social attitudes to the fullest. Ideologues strut their stuff: it's considered hip to be bigoted, opinionated, intransigent and aggressively stupid. A former hiking companion emailed me several items that I found offensive. We hiked together several days late last summer, and mutually agreed to leave his particular version of conservatism and my liberal convictions aside and concentrate on enjoying the hike. It was a very pleasant experience and we had agreed to hike together again this year, but apparently Trump's victory emboldened him to take the attitude he would send me this garbage just to see if he could aggravate me. Trump's victory has done that: it's now legitimate, somehow, to flaunt prejudice and bigotry. The first email, I changed the subject. The second, I replied with a link to something constructive I had posted. He never clicked on it. The third, I informed him I had had enough of his dog-whistle conservatism and severed the relationship. We should be getting together in small groups and talking about our visions for this country, hammering out an understanding of what we want to provide each other as citizens and how it is to be paid for. Instead think tanks grind out comfort food for ideologues, who email it back and forth to each other and vow to impose their will on the country by any means possible. Soon enough we will have the lunatics in charge of the asylum. Meanwhile the country is becoming an oligarchy.As for me, I have a journey to complete.
Date: 2017-01-12
To: Applying Technology
Miles today: 0.0
Weather: overcast clouds

Getting ready to start serious hiking in the Spring, I've been working on applying technology to improve fitness. MapMyHike is a GPS program that provides useful data to track distance hiked, elevation gained, pace, etc. It has the ability, as shown,to combine a GPS track with a Topographic map. The route shown is in Connecticut, near Lake Compounce, the site of an amusement park. Exporting the track as a csv file, the program includes accumulated distance, elevation gain and loss. On this particular hike, as an out and back it was half uphill, and half downhill. Dividing accumulated elevation gain by half of the total distance, the average uphill grade works out to 11%. Or it could be stated as a ratio, 9:1, nine feet sideways for every foot up. Subjectively, the route is steep in places.I have this tendency to prefer softer, easier hikes, which can be overcome by developing a statistic of this type for various local routes and then selecting enough of the more difficult ones to give myself a workout. I got a Fitbit for Christmas, and was able to pair it with my phone. As such, it has access to GPS, so that I can get a track with heartrate data included. Again, this is about assessing the difficulty of a hike, and the expected effect on fitness. The included software estimates resting and maximum heartrates, and divides the distance between them into zones. So far I find that I spend very little time at the "cardio" level and almost none at the "peak". Mostly "fat burn". There's a certain amount of guidance out there on the internet, about how much time at what heart rate is beneficial, but as far as I'm concerned we're all an experiment of one on this type of stuff. What has worked for me in the past is to select routes that have a long grade, steep enough to get me into the cardio zone, and then keep my pace, expressed in min/mile, under 20. It's also possible to estimate VO2 max, a statistic aimed at how much oxygen the system can process, which is a measure of fitness. The easiest way is to walk a mile as fast as you can and then take your pulse, easy to do if you have Fitbit. From there online there are estimators that will give you your VO2 max. Mine works out to 30.3, average for a man my age.This type of stuff can be dangerous, lure you into a bunch of naval gazing around fitness topics. It can also get you into open-ended self-improvement and personal bests, which will lead you to injury. I don't plan to take my Fitbit with me on the AT. The last thing I need to do is stop in the middle of some steep climb, check my pulse, discover it's over the max, and panic about over-exertion. Simple common sense will do, to pause and rest when you need it.What I do is, when I start to huff and puff like an old hit or miss engine, is I stop and do 7/11 breathing, inhale for a count of 7 and exhale for 11. Then when my breathing calms down, I continue my hike. It's going to rain today, so I plan to stay close to home, do a few miles with a rain jacket on, then spend some time on the internet, blogging and checking my stocks.
Date: 2017-01-20
To: Hiking the Former Route of the AT
Miles today: 0.0
Weather: light rain

Today's hike was a tough one, with over 2,000 feet total ascent and one section that has been described as treacherous. The AT formerly ran through Macedonia Brook State Park, before it was rerouted, and the Topographic Map labels it at several points. So going over Cobble Mountain I was on the old AT for a little while. The last time I did this hike was in the Fall of 2012, while training for an attempted through hike in 2013. At the time, I wasn't in that good shape and at about mile 4.5 (of 6.6) I bailed out. I reached a point where the trail ahead of me was very steep, and a beautiful leaf covered gravel road beckoned me down off the trail. I yielded to temptation. This time I planned on doing better, and went past the bailout point and on up a very steep section. A young couple passed me going the other way, obviously enjoying their hike. Soon I hit a place where I couldn't figure out how to climb it. I can't do a chin-up anymore, and it looked like I would have to lift myself by the strength of my arms. Finally I noticed a foothold that was barely adequate, and got up and over the obstacle. I had to put my knee down on some rock, painful, and finally crawled a few feet before I could stand back up. Then there was another spot, where it was fingers don't fail me now. There were two sections that MapMyHike classifies as category 4 and 5, meaning they are difficult enough to talk about. This route is a good one for training purposes, and has views that make it enjoyable in its own right. Noting the 2,000 feet total ascent, doing it twice in one day would verify that I can do Katahdin, which has about 4,500. I drove past the current AT twice, on the road that leads past Kent School and down into the town. Kent has a reputation of not being hiker-friendly, partly because of a woman in the laundromat, who didn't like to have hikers in the place. The area is well-to-do, and while the houses aren't pretentious, there is a lot of old New England charm, stone walls all over the place, babbling brooks, old dams, etc. Very pleasant.
Date: 2017-01-31
To: View Entry
Miles today: 0.0
Weather: scattered clouds

As a section hiker, I don't have trail legs, except maybe toward the end of last year when I did over 600 miles. I lose ground over the winter, and in the past I would work myself into shape during the first few outings. That isn't going to work this year: all I have left is 100 miles in Virginia and in ME the 100 Mile Wilderness and Katahdin. Katahdin is a climb of 4,200 feet, of which 3,200 are steep. Going back over the various "hardest parts" of the AT, such as the Kinsmans, the Wildcats, Mahoosuc Notch and Arm, and Mount Bigelow, I can form an impression of how much to train for Katahdin. The Wildcats after studying the profile the cumulative climb is about 2,900 feet, allowing about 500 feet for the low points between the peaks. I did that with a 30 lb pack, but it was a struggle. On Katahdin I will just have a day pack, and after adjusting for the lighter weight, the two climbs are roughly equivalent. Later last year I did Mount Bigelow, which is more difficult based on cumulative feet of climb, again carrying a full pack, without excessive fatigue. I went slowly the next day. So I need to be at peak fitness before I do Katahdin.Elevation change is subject to various interpretations. The easiest way is to think of it as the difference between the high and low point of the day. But if you do two mountains a cumulative figure is more useful. Steepness is frequently expressed as a percentage, although degrees would be equally logical. Looking at the ratio of sideways to up, anything over 5:1 or 20% is steep. Katahdin is doesn't have meaningful downhill sections, and is steep before you hit the Tablelands. I found a way to locate the steepest hikes I do in Connecticut. Briefly, the MapMyHike software provides an estimate of calories burned, which can be divided by miles to get a calories/mile figure. It correlates very well with steepness. So I downloaded a spreadsheet containing the data on my hikes, did the calories/mile calculation, and sorted. The data included a link for each hike, so I can look them up as far as where they're located, cumulative feet climbed, etc. I found a schedule for training for a marathon, and adapted it to work by cumulative feet of climb rather than miles. Before going to Katahdin, by this line of thinking, I need to be able to do a 3,200 foot climb as part of a week totaling 5,800 feet. From where I am, I would need to do progressively more feet climbed for about 6 weeks to reach that point. Doing what I have left in VA and then the 100 mile wilderness could be part of the training. So for the rest of the winter I will plan to do about 3,400 feet per week, to stay within striking distance of the level of fitness required to do Katahdin. Just an afterthought, after climbing Katahdin, I will have to get back down.
Date: 2017-04-27
From: Route 55

To: Mt. Algo Shelter
Miles today: 10.9
Weather: overcast clouds

This journal covers two days. I parked at Route 55 and headed north, up and over Ten Mile Hill, to the Ten Mile River Shelter, where I spent the night. It's a nice shelter, with a pump for water, at the junction of the Ten Mile River and the Housatonic. It was as a very short day, about two miles,  my first outing for the year and the first time I've hiked with a full pack. I've done this route several times: it's pleasant but nothing remarkable. In the morning the trail went along beside the Housatonic River for several miles, over a hill, some road-walk, then some rougher terrain. There's a lot of up and down, the profile doesn't look that hard, but I found it tiring. It was drizzling most of the day, cool and good hiking weather. The rocks were slippery and I fell twice, a few scrapes and bruises. There were a few thru hikers, to include a young couple who had started in February and were doing 25 mile days. We chatted for a few minutes, then they vanished down the trail, while I went along at my own pace to complete my 8 miles.  I shared the Mt. Algo Shelter with Edward, a newbie, with the typical overweight pack and cotton clothing. He had exploded his pack, and was in the process of sending everything he didn't need home, from the PO in nearby Kent. He had a bad blister, from leather boots, and was taking a zero to let it heal before continuing his hike. Long distance hiking has a learning curve, and he was talking to people and figuring it out OK. The shelter is close to route 341, which leads to Kent. I thought briefly of heading down to the Fife and Drum for dinner, but stayed put and ate trail food.