Date: 2011-04-28
From: Kincora Hostel

To: Iron Mountain Shelter
Miles today: 24.2
Weather: overcast clouds

(In which I contemplate hikers' motivations and get fed up with bear bags)Back at the hostel, Bob Peoples sits with us after we've finished dinner, listening to our stories and talking quietly. It becomes clear that this interaction with the hikers is not part of a job for Bob, but his own time that he wouldn't want to spend any other way. He tells stories of organizing trail maintenance, and is a better than average listener. I ask him if he'd ever consider writing down his stories, and he confesses that he's thought of it. It'd be called "I, Kincora", he says, and would be written in the first person from the perspective of the hostel. I encourage him to do it. I ask about a bumper sticker on his car, "Well Behaved Women Rarely Make History", and he pauses before explaining that it was his late wife's, who died last year, and his smile is so sad as to break your heart.The long overdue rain finally arrives late at night, and from my bunk I silently thank the clouds for waiting until I am safe and snug in the hostel.* * *I hike with 'Blazes for most of the morning, and learn more of his life story. He was a professional musician for a decade, started his own mountain guiding company and played guitar for 20 minutes alone on the summit of Denali. (I ask him how he kept the guitar in tune and he chuckles. "You have to understand," he says, "it was just a cheap, used backpacker guitar, so it was never exactly in tune." But songs were still recognizable, he claims, mostly.)He tells me about a distinction he started making on his '06 thru-hike attempt between "backpacking" and "long distance hiking". Backpacking, as he describes it, involves hiking to somewhere remote so that you can stop and enjoy a location. Long distance hiking, by contrast, involves more hiking than resting, and is more about the journey than the destination. I consider the distinction and how it help explain some people's initial misconceptions of the AT, which they expect to be more like backpacking.I tell 'Blazes about a book I read that separated thru-hikers' motivations for hiking into four main categories, which any individual hiker might have all of, to varying degrees. The first motivation is the personal challenge of hiking the entire trail. These are the hikers who, having set an ambitious goal for themselves and started implicitly comparing their progress against other hikers, are most likely to be offended by practices like blue blazing (hiking around difficult sections) or yellow blazing (hitching ahead). The second motivation is a love of nature. By contrast, these are the people most likely to find arbitrary rules governing how one should hike the trail particularly absurd. The third motivation is to have a social experience. These are the people for whom the AT holds a special value compared with less traveled long distance trails like the Pacific Crest Trail and the Continental Divide Trail. Finally, the last motivation is to hike as a result of and catalyst for larger life change. These are the people for whom hiking this year, as opposed to any other year, is important, and who often expect to lead substantially different lives after the trail than they had before it.Like most hikers, I have all four of these motivations to at least some degree, but perhaps for me more than most the AT is a result of and catalyst for change, having recently quit my job and not yet decided what to do next.'Blazes and I hike together on and off, meeting and separating between breaks. He catches up to me at the shelter before the one I plan to stop at, and is unsure how far he wants to go. Sleeptight and Scraps have already stopped there, deliberately hiking a short day so that they can attempt a 30 mile day into Damascus tomorrow. Damascus is a popular destination for personal hiking challenges, and in the shelter register we learn that Lemur stopped by a few days earlier, 17.5 miles into his 50 mile day attempt. 'Blazes is more motivated by the knowledge that his fiancee is waiting for him at Damascus, and would like to reach her tomorrow if he can. I cheer him on, and after I have hiked ahead of him I scratch encouraging messages for him in the dirt of the trail.I reach the shelter shortly after sunset, and already more than a dozen tents have been set up near the full shelter. Having already eaten a full lunch and several snacks on the trail, I limit dinner to a few more snacks so that I can set up my tent and hang my bear bag in the remaining twilight.My tent sets up easily, but the bear bag, despite my practice, remains a challenge. I struggle as usual to throw my rope over a sufficiently high limb. I have previously done this (with difficulty) by tying one end of the rope around a rock and throwing the rock over the limb. Recently I've switched to using short, heavy broken sticks from the ground in place of the rock, which I find give me more leverage and are less likely to detach from the rope in the air. The problem, I discover tonight, is that they are also more likely to become stuck in the wrong branches.Twenty or thirty minutes into my bear hanging excursion, I am attempting to free my rope and its throwing stick from a collection of small limbs in which it is tangled. Failing to dislodge it, I attempt to break the throwing stick by force, and gain leverage by wrapping the dangling portion of the rope around an even thicker stick and pulling it like I'm trying to control a kite in a wind storm. The stick I'm pulling on, while thicker than the stick that is tangled in the tree, is apparently not as strong and breaks first, sending wood particles toward my face and letting the extremely taut rope slide against my finger, cutting shallowly in to my right index finger.Swearing profusely but quietly to avoid disturbing the nearby shelter and tents, where most hikers have already started to go to bed, I clutch my finger, which is numb from the shock, and suck off the blood. My rope is still stuck so I take my knife and cut it at the highest accessible point, losing perhaps 15 of its original 50 feet. My food is in an odor proof bag, so I decide to keep it my backpack with me in my tent. The most likely danger here is that a mouse will chew through my tent, pack and food bag, damaging my gear in search of its snack. I have had good luck with the OPSak's effectiveness in the past, however, when a mouse in my car ignored two day's worth of food in plain sight (but in a sealed OPSak), while finding the single sealed chocolate buried elsewhere in the car. I triple check the seal on my bag and hope that its integrity still holds after nearly a month of daily use.Feeling has returned to my finger, and I am relieved to see that the wound is not as severe as I had feared. Now I shall sleep, and hope that my gear is still unchewed in the morning.