Date: 2020-11-13
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Miles today: 0.0

A month has passed since I summited Katahdin, a good time to look back and reflect on the thruhike. Perhaps surprisingly the month has flown by. I was fortunate not to have to dive back into work, but have rather enjoyed the simple pleasures of spending time with my family, taking up running again, and going on three weekend camping trips with the scouts. Not to mention sleeping in a warm bed and having easy access to "town food" almost every day.The dreaded post-trail depression has been fairly mild. It hit harder after my first long section hike a few years back. There are still moments when I feel a bit out of place, or long to be back out there. But there will be time for that again someday. God willing, I have a few more decades of hiking in me. It's hard to imagine this is my last long hike. So while I have no immediate plans, the mere possibility may be helping to tamp down my wanderlust.Having now both thruhiked and section-hiked the AT, I'm in a rare position to compare the experiences. But before I do that, clearly my thruhike was unusual in several ways. I started in June, months later than the bubble. And Covid drove away hikers who would normally have started in late March and April. As a result I could count on two hands the number of thruhikers I met before Vermont. I had to cover twenty miles a day on average, so my meetings with those few thruhikers were always short-lived. I felt like the sweeper, knowing anyone I passed would have to flip up north or come up short. Unfortunatley that came true as one of the folks who didn't flip, Lucky Charms, reached Katahdin just days after me and found it closed for the season. The irony was that I was the slowest of the late starters. At least five others who started in early June - Slingshot, Dunda, Sunshine, Lone Wolf, and Danny - finished in under 100 days, a month before me. But that was not the kind of hike I wanted. I didn't want to feel rushed every day. I kept a steady pace that would get me to Maine on time, but still allow for fun and serendipity along the way. I logged only one day over 30 miles, and very few over 25. The reaction to Covid was another unusual factor. After all the ATC's drama in the spring, every section of trail was open by the time I reached it. The main effect on trail was to reduce the number of section hikers but to increase the number of dayhikers looking to get out of the house. I missed the section hikers. And while I'm always friendly with dayhikers (being one myself most of the time) it's hard to establish a rapport since they often haven't the faintest idea what I'm doing and don't care. In some areas like northern Virginia they would often mask up, step off trail, and turn away from me like I'm a leper. The upshot being that along most of the trail I saw very few hikers, but in popular areas I had to wade through hordes of anxious and sometimes unfriendly people. Hitchhiking didn't seem much affected. The same people who wouldn't pick me up in any other year wouldn't pick me up this year. But almost always a trail angel would come along eventually to help. As far as restaurants and stores, they were all open. In the South businesses were operating normally with the exception of fast food joints, leading to sometimes hilarious results like being told to go sit on the bike rack at the drive-in Dairy King in Waynesboro. In the North and especially New England there was much more street theater. Dartmouth students lying on the Green a hundred feet from anyone were required to mask up while dozens of al fresco diners congregated maskless on sidewalks a block away. Temperature checks at the grocery store in Salisbury. The Chinese takeout in Gorham that pushed our food through a kitty door.While most of the hiker hostels were open and most were business-as-usual and as wonderful as ever, there were a handful that were either paranoid or simply self-righteous. The Notch in NH and the Hostel of Maine get special mention for the latter. Wherever masks were enforced the owners were also clearly political, displaying flags that supported fashionable causes, and would make sure you knew their view was the only acceptable one. Where masks weren't a thing, politics wasn't either. So while town visits were on the whole less pleasant and often surreal, Covid had no real impact on the hike itself. The views were still gorgeous, the humidity was still ungodly, and the long-distance hikers were just as friendly. Many shelters and privies were technically closed, but beyond the occasional sign at a trailhead they were the same as ever. Those who like shelters continued to use them. And everyone used the privies. As the trail maintainers in Massachusetts told me, they were exercising civil disobedience in asking us to use the shelters rather than stealth camp and damage the rare flora. Some portions of the trail were not as well maintained since many trail clubs were under orders from the ATC not to send out crews. But many did anyway, and few sections were in seriously bad shape. The worst was New York, but that was due to a storm not to deferred maintenance. My respect for the trail crews has only grown, having seen the amount of growth and deadfall that accumulates over just a single season.Two other factors made this hike unusual. For one, there was relatively little rain. I got wet almost every day in the first month, but after Damascus rain was rare. From the day I left Connecticut til I reached the Kennebec in Maine it may have rained once. Though when it rained it poured - there were 3 or 4 days when I walked through the Appalachian Stream for hours. The lack of rain led to many water sources drying up in the mid-Atlantic and even in New England. Fortunately I'm a camel and can hike, absent extreme heat, 10-20 miles on a liter of water so this wasn't a major hurdle. The last unusual factor was a paucity of insects. The first night at Springer Mountain Shelter was the worst as far as bugs. After that I was rarely bothered. No gnats buzzing constantly around me, no skeeters waiting to attack the second I stopped for a break, no nasty flies biting me. Of course there were a few here and there, but not even close to the usual clouds of attackers that can drive one mad. The lack of rain and bugs meant that once I got past the humidity the hiking was as pleasant as could be. The autumn colors in Maine were the icing on the cake. There was a cold snap a couple weeks before the end that scared me, but the mercury soon rose and it was milder than I expected. So it was a lonely, dry, pleasant, and occasionally surreal hike. Contrast that to my section hikes which were often crowded, wet, and challenging. But putting aside the factors that made my thruhike unusual, how was it different than section-hiking over several years? Some section hikers complain it takes too long to get their hiker legs. I've not had that problem. Yes, I gained speed later in the thruhike, but I found the biggest determinant of speed was energy. If I wasn't eating, drinking, or sleeping enough I would feel sluggish. If the heat or humidity was too much, likewise. In any case, most of my sections were done within months of another, and I ran regularly in between so physically I was always ready to tackle the next section.  Motivation was a big differentiator. My sections typically ranged from a week to 3 weeks. I rarely took a zero. I would have a definite destination and time frame and fairly firm schedule. If I was behind I had to catch up to finish on time. Motivation wasn't a concern since the end was always relatively close. I hypothesized that motivation would be the biggest challenge on a thruhike. In the end I think loneliness was the bigger psychological challenge, but motivation certainly loomed large at times. I addressed it by not thinking too directly about the enormity of the task ahead. It was enough to calculate the pace necessary to finish on time, then apply that pace to a near-term goal like the next town or state. But if all I did was follow a series of short-term distance goals I would have burned out. The true motivation was simply to appreciate being out there at all. How many of us get to do this, and how often in my life will that be the case? This was a rare opportunity, and I reminded myself everyday how lucky I was to be there at all. Getting to Katahdin wasn't the focus. It was finding joy somewhere in that day. So even if it was pouring on me, I could still find humor in the absurdity of sloshing 24 miles through a stream, and appreciate when the trees stopping dripping on me late in the day. And always on even the most challenging days I knew I would look back and remember and smile at it. How many bad days do we have at work or home where we can say that? On sections I would push myself hard, and I could sustain that for a week or two. But that doesn't work on a thruhike. Soon you start questioning what you're pushing for. You lose the joy and it becomes a job. Yes, I could have done an extra five miles many days, and physically I would have been fine. But I would have lost many opportunities to enjoy the experience along the way, and the emotional energy that they bring. If I could do it again I would slow down even more. Take an hour or two to sit by a stream or at a viewpoint. Take more long lunches and more naps. Four months is still too fast, but it's better than three.I had hoped to fall into a loose-knit group of hikers going roughly my pace for most of the hike. Not a tramily that has to be together every night, but hikers I would regularly see. That didn't happen until Maine. In its absence I looked to Instagram to follow hikers I had met but would likely never see again. This wasn't something I ever attempted during a section, where I often did see at least a few hikers regularly. Aside from keeping in touch with a good friend I don't think I would rely on it again. The electronic medium seems completely out of place on trail. Face-to-face interactions are natural and more fitting. It also pulls you away from the present and your surroundings into someone else's reality, perhaps somewhere you were at weeks ago or will be at in the future. Part of the joy of hiking is being immersed in the immediacy of the present and the proximate. I embraced the title of thruhiker after all those sections because it meant that I belonged in this place, that I was not just a visitor. My life, for those few months, was walking from town to town over mountain ranges to the point it became the natural thing to do. Not second nature, just nature. Which is why it was mildly jarring to so easily return to the "real world" and slip back into my old life. But perhaps that's a good thing. Learning to be comfortable in different worlds, to adapt to new circumstances, isn't that a big part of why we travel in the first place? This was an epic hike, but it won't be my last visit to a long trail. For many it's a once and done deal, a bucket list item to check off. For me, it's become a part of who I am. You can take the hiker out of the mountains, but you can't take the mountains out of the hiker.