Date: 2013-03-24
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Miles today: 0.0

Why? (Are you nuts?)Why would you want to walk from nearly one end of the country to the other end?Why are you planning to live out of a backpack for six months and eat awful meals of dehydrated food; what about bears; you¢re taking a gun aren¢t you; a week or two between showers and laundry? You really are nuts!Well, you get the idea. The second most asked question I have tried to answer is ¢why¢, which soon devolves into a range of riffs on the theme of my sanity. I¢ve become more or less adept at avoiding a perhaps impossible defense of my mental status by twisting an answer of how I arrived at this decision rather than the whys of my inner mind. The easy answer would be to quote the Mt. Everest climber, George Mallory, when he said ¢Because it¢s there¢ to the ¢why¢ question. But that would be way too concise an answer for me, especially when I have a whole blank computer screen that I can fill with words. So let me start back when I was a junior in high school.My friend Ronne and I joined our local ski club for a camping and skiing weekend at Tuckerman¢s Ravine over Memorial Day weekend. Tuckerman¢s is a glacial cirque on the face of Mt. Washington in New Hampshire. It collects large amounts of snow during the winter which provides wonderful spring skiing conditions from early April into July. Generally access to the ravine is by the lower Tuckerman Ravine Trail which starts in Pinkham Notch. In our case the members of our club stayed in a campground in the notch and hiked to the ravine on Saturday and Sunday. Now I was pretty active in sports during high school and thought I was reasonably fit. I found out I wasn¢t as fit as I thought as I carried skis, boots and poles strapped to a backpack which was loaded with warm clothes and lunch. On the first day as I struggled up the trail, which was marked as being two and a half miles long but which I swore I had already walked for ten miles, I was passed by a mirage. A hiker dressed in shorts sped by me and the other things that impressed me besides his speed were his calves the size of fire hydrants and the pack board strapped to his back which was loaded with cardboard cartons stacked well over the hikers head. Recently a friend who did this while he was a college student told me those packs often exceeded one hundred pounds.I asked my friend Ronne the ¢why¢ question. His answer, not very specific, was that there was a hut at the base of the ravine where people could pay to stay. The hut was operated by the Appalachian Mountain Club and the hiker was carrying food supplies to feed the guests. As an afterthought he threw in an un-factual factoid, ¢Yeah, they have a trail that goes from Georgia to Maine.¢ Without knowing it, the seed of my thru-hike was planted.Over the years articles in National Geographic Magazine and newspapers and outdoor magazines as well as sign posts for the AT at road crossings kept an undercurrent of awareness alive in me. In 1974 I joined other members of the department I worked for at a Paramedic class in Miami. One of the instructors, Jim Healy (Did I get his name right JDE?), was a Lieutenant on a Rescue truck for Miami Beach Fire Department and an RN in the Emergency Department of a local hospital as well as an instructor for the community college we were attending. Jim was due to retire from the Department right after the class finished and he mentioned during a class that he was going to start walking the Appalachian Trail as soon as he retired. I was hooked.Without being conscious of it, the awareness I had about the AT became a goal to thru-hike the trail. A goal which I will fulfill fourteen years after I retired.Fortunately by the time I get this far in my narrative the listener has become glassy eyed, has forgotten the original ¢why¢ question and my sanity remains unchallenged.I want to thank those folks who have left kind words in my guest book. Once I get on the trail I know that reading these entries will be the most anticipated part of my day. Especially pleasant was the comment by my brother. Are you feeling OK HB? ?I¢ll bet it¢s a beautiful day on the mountain. They had nine inches of snow over the past few days. But, it¢s just as beautiful today for hiking. Where¢s my lumbar pack.ole slo