Date: 2017-10-15
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Miles today: 0.0
Weather: overcast clouds

I have a couple drafts started, but I¢m starting another one for this journal entry to try to get out some thoughts that may be important for hiking safety. We¢ll save phony interviews with myself for another day. What I¢m bringing up are important safety tips I learned that somehow weren¢t addressed in detail in my personal pre-hike research.GPS Locators: A solid fraction of hikers will carry one of these. I never met a hiker who admitted to actually wanting to carry one, but these were generally a condition of the hike imposed by loved ones back home. I never heard of anyone utilizing the emergency beacon feature, and they probably caused more distress to loved ones when hikers would forget to send a signal to indicate they were ok. I accomplished almost the same thing with a smartphone and Verizon service. Verizon had the best service in 2016, although occasionally AT&T had a better signal, and there was the isolated time or two in six months that T-Mobile had service and no one else did. I simply sent a text message from the top of a mountain that everything was fine and I listed my milepost. I was able to send at least a simple one line text at some point of the day during all but a handful of days on the hike. Recommendation: Don¢t use the GPS locators.Determining if you¢re lost: I embrace technology reluctantly, and am hesitant to utilize apps if I have to agree to distribute all of my personal information to an infinite number of third party vendors. By simply typing in maps.google.com into the google search browser, you can zoom in on your position and if you zoom in far enough, you can see the Appalachian Trail. If your dot is not on the line, you are off the trail. I used this several times to confirm my suspicions that I had left the trail. It¢s hard to say if I might have assumed I was on the trail and gotten myself much more off the trail than I was. I thought this was universal knowledge, but talked to several hikers who were not aware, so there¢s your technology minute, perhaps seven years behind the times. It might just save your life.Cell Phone Battery: On a related note, don¢t run out of battery for your cell phone. You can accomplish this by either only turning on your phone to make calls and perhaps take the occasional photo, or by bringing along a heavy reserve battery, or both. I recommend both, but I¢m not an ultralighter. I will say I utilized my reserve battery the entire hike, so let that speak for itself. On a related note to the related note, I started out always using a waterproof plastic case for my phone because I was sure I was going to fall into every trickling creek. After the first five hundred miles, I only put my phone in the case if it was starting to rain or if I was crossing a river. But keep your phone dry. A lot of people put their phone in something waterproof in their backpack. I had my phone in my pocket, ready to use when I saw a good photo op. I think it¢s important to be able to access your phone quickly, but to each their own.Cooking: I touched on this before, but it bears repeating. Keep your legs out from under the picnic table if possible. I didn¢t follow this myself but definitely should have. When you¢re not hiking, most of your waking moments will be spent gathered around a picnic table boiling water. Because of the extremely flimsy nature of the tripods that support the pots, the unpredictable stability of the picnic tables, the beginner pyromaniacs pretending they know how to use their alcohol stoves, and the exhausted nature of the hikers doing the cooking, minimize the threat of boiling water spilling on your legs or burning pools of alcohol spilling onto your nylon hiking pants by sitting with your legs to the side or stand while doing your cooking.Forest Fires: This is probably the greatest threat that you have a real chance to mitigate. For those urban and suburban dwellers who are used to fires being routinely responded to by fire departments and extinguished or at least contained promptly, there is some surprise that dry and windy conditions can result in forest fires rapidly going out of control, even jumping fire lines. Several days in front of me, a forest fire nearly killed about 20 thru-hikers. I wasn¢t there, but they were reportedly within sight of flames and were running to avoid being burned alive. And they were being guided by a forest service person to get to a safe crossroad. I never met a forest service or park service representative who wasn¢t well intentioned, but information flows slowly in the mountains, and fire moves quickly. What could have been a foolproof hiker evacuation plan an hour ago could be a march into inescapable fire an hour later. And thru-hiking confuses your brain to the point where being burned alive doesn¢t seem nearly as much of a threat as falling behind your friends who have all decided to have an adventure and disregard warnings. My advice is if there is a forest fire in the area, and trails are being closed, take a break. Hitch a ride to the nearest town and hang out for a few days. The trail will still be there when you get back, and everyone will have a better idea of what¢s going on and where it¢s safe to hike.Serial Killers: I never encountered any of these on my hike (to my knowledge), so my tips are purely theoretical. I did fairly extensive research on violence on the Appalachian Trail because I had a disproportionate fear of violence on the trail. I was surprised that many hikers were surprised to find out they were sleeping at shelters where murders had occurred and/or where there were rumors of shelters being haunted. I advise learning a basic history of violence on the trail and avoiding lingering at these places if you find yourself either alone or in the presence of creepy people. Grouping up in groups of three or more increases safety. Hike with the bubble, and keep an eye on the shelter logs. If there¢s a guy in a red jacket who comes around sharpening his knife and talking about how his wife just left him, that¢s something that¢s useful to read in a shelter log before he shows up. It will also be important to assess people¢s threat level. Men traveling by themselves should raise the threat level one notch (I was one of them, so I can say that). Men who don¢t seem to be able to or don¢t want to engage others socially are higher up the threat list. Watch for any sign of instability including but not limited to drug problems, anger issues, job loss, no money, relationship trouble, etc¢¦ Put a special red flag on anyone who claims to be a thru-hiker but is obviously not like if they¢re in Virginia and don¢t know how to put up their tent yet, anybody who has stolen any of their gear, anyone compulsively lying to impress people, or any hikers with no particular ambition to hike forward (excluding SOBO¢s ¢ You may want to red flag them, but they¢re going the wrong way on purpose. HA!). You will find a dozen hikers that check off most of these boxes for every one that is actually a threat, but it¢s ok to be a little judgmental when your life is on the line. I never encountered a suspicious SOBO. The White Mountains weeded them all out. Guns: I only saw one hiker with a gun, although I heard other hikers had them at the start of their hike. Any gun with the power to stop a bear is way too heavy to carry. Even if you could navigate the sea of permits and licenses to legally carry a firearm on a thru-hike, I would strongly advise against it. When everyone is shaving off ounces you will be willingly adding the weight of a child¢s bowling ball to your backpack and lugging it up and down mountains. Lightning: Of all the obscure threats, lightning was one of the few things that actually injured hikers in the 2016 hiking season. I didn¢t hear of any direct hits, but I heard accounts of people who were shocked by lightning as it hit a nearby tree and traveled through the ground. It¢s not to be taken lightly. For weather forecasts, I typed in weather underground into my phone, and then whatever town was closest to me. If I had a cell signal, I could get hour by hour forecasts of temperature and precipitation and any thunderstorm or other severe weather warnings. Subtract three degrees for every thousand feet you are above that town. I avoided being out in thunderstorms by planning zero days for bad weather and making sure I was in a shelter before thunderstorms were forecast to start if at all possible. There was another weather service that claimed to give weather forecasts for each shelter on the trail, but I found the forecasts to be frustratingly vague. Just about every forecast ranged from a 30% to 70% chance of precipitation with a 20 degree temperature range. The hourly forecasts from Weather Underground definitely helped me to stay dry on several occasions.Bears: Bears follow the vegetation, so in mid-March, when there is naught a blade of grass near the trail, there will be no bears. If they do wake up, they will be down at lower elevations near lakes and streams, not on the mountain ridges. Generally, the bears do not want any trouble. If you leave them alone they will leave you alone. Instances where that was not true: A hiker¢s small dog who was off leash barked at a bear and that bear chased the dog (They use dogs to hunt bears in some areas of the trail). I never heard of a bear approaching a shelter at night when it was full of hikers, despite a guarantee of seven or eight food bags hung up within easy reach. The bear attacks that I did hear of were related to hikers keeping food in their tents, or smothering themselves in coconut oil (possibly a myth). They frequently happened in low lying areas that were frequented by locals ¢ Think campground around a lake that the trail passes by. A couple bears figured out that hikers carried food and exhibited some crafty stalking type behavior. That¢s probably the biggest threat- the smart bears, and the ones accustomed to dayhikers dropping their packs and running. But even the smart bears seem to realize it¢s bad news if they attack humans. That being said, don¢t get between a mother and her cubs, particularly the really young ones. The ones that are one or two years old hang out within visual range of their mom but she gives them a bit of latitude to figure things out on their own. Avoid a situation where it looks like you¢ve backed the cub into a corner. Weird things happen. I found myself directly under a mama bear above me in a tree who growled at me with her cubs nearby who just looked at me like ¢Oooooh, she¢s mad now¢¦ You¢re gonna get it¢¦¢Snakes: There are poisonous snakes on the trail, mainly rattlesnakes and copperheads. For the sheer quantity of hikers that encountered these snakes, there should have been at least one snake bite, but I never heard of a single bite, which means that they truly are not looking to start a fight. Be alert and don¢t step on one. They could misinterpret that. I heard of more dog bites (1) than snake bites.  I encountered a couple of Japanese dayhikers who were petrified of a big black snake on the trail and turned around and took an entirely different side trail, which is logical only if you don¢t know which snakes are venomous. Bees/Wasps/Hornets: There were more people injured by one hornet¢s nest than all of the other animal related injuries combined. It happened to drop right onto the trail and everyone who walked by encountered a swarm of hornets. Now word travels fast about calamities like this, and notepad messages were left on the trail as warnings, but this could have been a fatality for someone who was allergic.Water filtration: Most things on the trail you can learn over time, but to complete a thru-hike, it¢s best to start out when it¢s a little chilly, which means risking freezing temperatures. So you need to know right away, don¢t let your water filters freeze. Put those filters in your sleeping bag overnight when it¢s anywhere close to freezing. Yes, it¢s uncomfortable to snuggle with a clammy piece of plastic. But, otherwise the water will turn to ice and expand the pores used to filter out the bacteria and whatnot. There¢s no fix and no way of knowing for sure if your filter is broken, so you will take each sip after that not knowing if you have a gut bursting parasite entering your system until you shell out fifty dollars for a new filter. Also, please don¢t wash your dishes at a water source. It¢s nasty to drink someone¢s mashed potato water, even if it¢s filtered. Utilize the rock and leaf technique if one hasn¢t been set up to establish a flow of water up above the pool of water if at all possible. Only dip your sawyer bag if you have to.Lyme Disease: This is perhaps the most consistent threat on the trail. Ticks bite and leave a variety of diseases behind. Lyme disease causes extreme fatigue and can cause permanent harm if not treated with super strong antibiotics that have side effects that are severe enough to prevent hiking themselves. I wore pants most of the hike, even in extreme heat. Mosquitoes and flies are very annoying on exposed skin. Almost every other hiker elected for the short shorts. A Washington D.C. security guard said to one male A.T. hiker touring the Smithsonian Museum, ¢I¢m not even going to search you. I know you¢re not hiding anything¢. The hiker happened to be sporting the shortest of shorts which are more like two fluttering silk handkerchiefs than a pair of shorts. I heard a convincing theory that taking a lot of off-trail trips deep into the brush for a bathroom break increases your odds of a tick bite. I preferred privies and the more standard diseases derived there to the types transmitted by ticks. Since female hikers are exposed more frequently and completely for their trips into nature, it might be worth considering to avoid wading into brushy areas with tall vegetation if at all possible. There are some medical studies regarding differences in the way men and women respond to lyme disease, but empirically, it seemed like a higher proportion of the female hikers at least recognized and sought treatment for the symptoms.   300,000 new cases are diagnosed each year, and most of those people are just going outside to move their sprinkler around, so I imagine the risk is higher by living outside for six months.Meth Labs: Yesterday¢s stills are today¢s meth labs. I didn¢t realize it at the time, but on my first day on the trail, I hiked with a very pleasant couple that was most likely hauling in supplies to cook meth. The guy had to have about 100 pounds of pack weight, and he was hiking like he did it for a living but had the Breaking Bad look including the meth molecule tattoo (I knew college chemistry would pay off). The girlfriend looked like the woods were the last place she wanted to be, but she was being a good sport about it. They were saying something about having to get out of town for awhile due to some bad people. Anyway, it¢s all speculation, but I heard other stories about people going slightly off trail and encountering signs like they were warning of nuclear waste to keep hikers away. The bottom line is, you don¢t want to surprise people doing illegal activities, and if you do, you definitely want to make it seem like you have no idea what they¢re doing. Interestingly, the general hiker consensus was that meth was not a safe drug to dabble in, which was not the way all drugs were viewed. Cults: The term is thrown around loosely, so here¢s what to watch for: If a group has a good enough sales pitch to make you consider performing slave labor for the rest of your life with only a strong sense of community as compensation, you are being conned. Groups prey on young hikers looking for a little direction in life, and then they end up sweeping floors and manning booths at the farmers market for the rest of their lives, fourth wife to Bishop Joshua the Elder. My advice is to stick to the plan and don¢t make any rash life changing decisions mid hike when hiker fatigue is clouding your judgment.There is more to be concerned about, and things that you are concerned about that you should be less concerned about, but life is short, and your time could probably be better spent figuring it out for yourself. ¢Security is a mission, not an intermission.¢-Paul Blart, Paul Blart Mall Cop 2