Date: 2003-03-27
To: Springer Mt.
Miles today: 0.0
Weather: clear sky

(March 25)Imagine you¢re hiking in summer. It¢s a hundred degrees with 70 % humidity and when you climb a mountain you have a good feeling of how living in hell must feel. You are sweating waterfalls, on the verge of dehydration, and you are cursing yourself for the millionth time that day for decision to hike the A.T. ¢¦ And then¢¦ You reach a stream and find dozens of cold cans of soda just waiting for you to drink. And while you drink an ice cold coke, you know that never in your life will you enjoy a soda as you are enjoying it now, and you start thinking that maybe hiking the A.T. in summer isn¢t that bad after all...This scene happened to me and happens to many hundreds of other hikers every year. It is called trail magic. It consists of food and drinks placed on the trail so thruhikers can enjoy them. The people who leave this trail magic are called trail angels and are usually, but not always, former thruhikers who want to give back to the trail what they got when they thruhiked. The only problem with this wonderful tradition is that there is no trail magic in fall and winter. Trail angels never think about the handful of late southbounders who hike the trail so much later than the main pack. In the six months of hiking since September I found trail magic only three times. Once it was a well-needed bag of dried tuna, which I enjoyed, but the other two times it was a can of beer left in the stream by a shelter. Although I usually don¢t drink alcohol, a can of cold beer can be great--in summer-- but in winter, when its way below freezing, drinking alcohol is a great way of dying from hypothermia. So I never touched those beers. But now, when I¢m hiking head-on into the main pack of northbounders, I suddenly can enjoy trail magic again. The first trail magic for this year came to me with perfect timing 4 days ago. I reached Fontana Dam after hiking an uncommonly long day, and I was as famished as a shelter mouse is in winter. My main problem was that although a few days earlier I got rid of the stove I¢d been carrying all winter, I miscalculated the amount and kinds food I carried. I should have known better by now, but I was hit so badly by Springer fever, and the thought of the nearby Smokies, that for once I did not meticulously calculate, in the grocery store, every gram of carbohydrate, protein and fat I was buying as I usually do, and so was not carrying enough protein with me. I was not really worried about this mistake. From my experience I¢ve long learned that my body is smarter than me. If I miscalculate the amount of some nutrient I eat, my body signals to me it wants it, and fast. In winter I was only able to quench my fat craving by adding humongous amounts of oil and butter to my dinners. And in summer, just a week or so after I started hiking I had a terrible protein craving, when I was building up my hiking muscles.And now, when I reached the Fontana Hilton, I again had such a strong protein craving, that I decided to hitch the next day 10 miles to a town where they have a MacDonalds, and then eat my way through their cheeseburgers. But I didn¢t have to do it... Luckily two trail angels appeared at the shelter that evening, leaving a container there with probably $50 worth of food. Now usually my doctrine about trail magic is (or at least was in summer) not to pig out, and with admirable self-control, that is totally untypical of me, I usually never took more than one can of coke in summer, even if there were dozens of them. But this occasion was different. I decided that pigging out is only fair this time, as the northbounders will be able to enjoy trail magic for months, while I¢ll have only a couple of weeks of it at most. And they won¢t enjoy it that much, I told myself, as this far south on the trail, only 162 miles and about two weeks of slow hiking from Springer, their thruhiker appetite didn¢t kick up into full blast yet, and in fact most of them were still carrying extra food (so I hoped). But the main reason for me pigging out was that I was really, really hungry... Imagine me going head first into this precious food container, with only my feet dangling out. It wasn¢t exactly like that, but it was pretty close. I quickly zoomed in on the meats and started eating them in what looked like the human parallel of a group of sharks in food frenzy. I wasn¢t actually able to pig out to my full capacity, as the other northbounders, after recuperating from their initial shock of seeing someone eat so much so fast, quickly realized that if they don¢t join the food frenzy quickly enough, they will stay hungry. So they joined the food orgy with a talent that showed that they indeed learned much in their two weeks of thruhiking, and within minutes all that was left from this once full container of food was empty wrappers and trash...Since then I enjoyed trail magic a few more times. Yesterday was the best. Not only was it a wonderful cloudless spring day, but I also enjoyed three different occasions of trail magic which included a coke, a carrot, and a can of vegetables. The only problem with that last item is that although this nice trail angel left a couple of cans, he never left a can opener, and as none of the northbouders I saw yesterday carried one, I found myself forced to carry a pound of canned vegetables that I couldn¢t get at. It is so frustrating... I feel like a starving bear trying unsuccessfully to reach the food it can smell in a bear proof food bag. Actually, that last analogy gives me hope, for the standard bear proof method of storing food at night - by hanging it from a tree - turns out many times as not that bear proof, as bears unfortunately know how to climb trees really well. From what I heard, bear proof techniques work best when there aren¢t any bears around. And if bears are able to get into bear-proof bags, there is no reason why a human being, (even one that¢s so deeply retarded as to think that hiking the A.T. in winter would be cool) can¢t get at the vegetables in a closed can.So if you happen to see, while hiking on the A.T., a hairy frightening looking creature, hitting a can of vegetables violently with a rock, don¢t worry. It¢s just a Israeli winter southbounder trying to prove that all those technology junkies who claim that the iron age tools are so much superior to the stone age ones are wrong. And if you happen to see a battered but still intact can of vegetables left on the trail near a pile of broken pieces of rock, you will know that this crazy southbounder turned out to be wrong once again....Roni