Date: 2015-09-08
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Lucky's Thru-HikePart IIIsee the video of this part of this presentation in CharlotteQ&As and followed by the best story I heardQ. Did you hike alone?Yes. Except for the two weeks or so I hiked with J and California I hike alone almost all the time. Most thru-hikers hike alone, even those who have a partner, because they can go faster.They meet back up with their friends at night. When you see three or four hikers together they are almost always day hikers or section hikers.Why?Because day and section hikers visit with each other and talk as they hike. They may only be hiking 8 or 10 miles a day, 12 maybe. Through hikers, at least those at the front of the pack, are trying to do 16 or 18 miles -- and often a lot more. They don't have time to stop every time someone in the group wants to take off clothes because they're hot, or put on clothes because, now, they're cold; adjust their pack straps; get a drink of water; get something to eat; take a picture; check out the view; tie their shoe; scratch; pee.Q. Just how serious are hikers about pack weight?Pretty serious after they've been on the trail a while. Some hikers sent their stove and cooking pot home, ditched their fuel at a hostel, and begin eating cold meals. And sent their tents home, too. In one shelter where we stayed the Vikings and I found several hundred pennies that had been abandoned by hikers. We left them there because we didn't want to carry them either.Q. I know the trail runs through the Appalachian mountains but just how much climbing do you have to do?No matter where you are on the trail it won't be long before you're hiking up a mountain and then down the other side. Then up another mountain, and down.Up-down. Up-down.It's not always up, down, of course. Sometimes it's up, up, up, up. Down. According to the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, the total elevation gain is the equivalent of climbing Mt. Everest 16 times.In The Wilderness, in Maine, the trail went up and over so many mountains they apparently ran out of names. One was called ¢Third Mountain,¢ Another one was called ¢Mt. Three And A Half.¢ And another, ¢Fourth Mountain.¢   Q. What do hikers talk about when they get together in shelters at night?It's easier to say what they do not talk about: politics, religion, the stock market, the big news story of the day. They don't know the big story of the day is and don't care. Another thing they don't talk about might surprise you -- they don't talk their injuries or their aches and pains.   Almost all of them are hurting somewhere almost all the time. Their feet are swollen and, often, blistered. [Hikers wear boots that are a size or size and a half larger than their street shoes because their feet are so swolen.] They lose feeling in their toes. Their toenails turn black and fall off. They've been skinned up and bruised from falls. They get shin splints. Their knees are the biggest problem, sore from too much downhill hiking.But they don't talk about it. In fact, they rarely complain about anything.Mostly they talk about that day and, maybe, the next. Sometimes they tell stories. Nate Harrington, one of the Hiking Vikings, told me this story about his Dad, Richard, who is a farmer.On winter mornings Richard and some of his farmer friends meet at a local diner, have breakfast, and talk, Nate said. One morning Nate's Dad told the other men that he had shot a porcupine, prompting a friend to tell him, "Richard, porcupines are protected."Richard replied, "This one wasn't."Q. Did you carry a weapon, a pistol?No. And I don't know anyone who did. The AT is, relatively speaking, safe. Safer than walking down a city street. A hiker who was armed would be ostracized -- other hikers would be afraid of him or her and avoid them. Q. How is your health?Good.I hiked the entire trail with a hernia that I didn't know I had when I started. I had that surgically repaired on Aug. 10. I have to take it easy for a few more weeks, but I'm OK. The frostbite sores on one of my hands and ears healed up months ago and the feeling has returned to my fingers.Little by little the feeling is beginning to return to my toes. Trail lore has it that by Christmas they'll be OK too.I lost about 25 pounds and by the end of the hike I was worn down a little, tired. But six weeks of good food and rest has cured that. Q. How much did your pack weigh?Less than 20 pounds to almost 40, depending on the time of year and how much food and water I was carrying.In cold weather you have to carry a warmer, heavier, sleeping bag and, perhaps, a sleeping bag liner; micro-spikes or some equivalent; and extra clothing -- a fleece jacket, insulated underwear, and so forth. Depending on the distance to the next resupply point, I carried up to five days of food. Food weighs about two pounds a day. If water was scarce I would start the day with two liters and that added another four and a half pounds.Q. How do you stay clean on the trail?Most people don't.On several occasions I went a week or more without a shower. Hikers brush their teeth regularly but I never saw anyone wash their hands. Drinking water was so hard to come by ¢ sometime you had to walk a quarter of a mile or more, there and back, to a creek or spring ¢ that I sometimes drank my dishwater. That way I got the calories suspended in the water, and I didn't waste precious water.Q.   Do most thru-hikers use hiking poles?Yes. Without poles, I would have fallen a dozen times on some days. They also help you climb, and descend, taking pressure off your knees.Q. How many steps did you take a day? More than 40,000 on some days, according to my iPhone, which keeps up with such things. The Conservancy estimates that a thru-hiker will take a total of 4,000,000 to 5,000,000 steps.Q. How many pairs of boots did wear out? Two. Q. What did you typically have for breakfast? Lunch? Supper?For breakfast, two pop tarts, two Carnation instant breakfasts, and two cup of hot chocolate.For lunch, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a hiker steak --spam -- sandwich, a handful of nuts, and lemonade.For supper, mashed potatoes and summer sausage or hiker steak and cheese, if I had some. Or potatoes and dehydrated corn. And lemonade.Q. Did you see a bear? A moose?No, and I would not have seen one unless they had laid down in the trail in front of me and wiggled. I was far more concerned with rattlesnakes, and kept my eyes glued to the trail, looking for them. I saw 19 snakes but no rattlers. [I didn't see a bear on Bear Mountain. I didn't even see a bear at the Trailside Museum in New York where the trail went right by two caged bears.]Q. What animals did you see, besides snakes?I saw a one porcupine. One ground hog. I saw, or heard, numerous turkeys. And I saw three or four dozen deer. Q. How about mice in the shelters? Except for one cold night back in February they weren't much of a problem. That night we all jumped into our sleeping bags as soon as we got to the shelter. We had hiked 16.2 miles in awful weather. Most of us didn't hang our food bags, including me. Once everything got quiet the mice were all over us, literally, munching down. I used my food bag like a pillow that night, thinking, hoping, that would keep the mice away. I was wrong ¢ one ran across my head.Q. Did you ever consider quitting?No.I guess that's one of the things I did right. I made up my mind about that long before I left home and quitting was never an issue.Q. Did you have fun?Define fun. I met a lot of terrific people; I made some good memories; I'm glad I went. But the AT is not, as humorist Bill Bryson might have you believe, "A Walk in the Woods."   That's what Bryson called his best-selling book, which has been made into a movie by the same name.   Hiking the AT is hard work, at least it was for me.Q. Define "hard work."When the days started getting longer, I usually hiked from 6:30 in the morning until 5 or 6 at night and, sometimes, 7 or 8. Most days I was tired and ready to hang it up by 2 or 3 in the afternoon, but you can't get to Maine by knocking off ship's work in the middle of the afternoon."Hungry" and "tired," at least in the evening, are a thru-hiker's everyday companions. When my friends and I finally got to Maine we began running into more and more southbound hikers. Because of winter weather on Mt. Katahdin, SoBos, as they are called, have to start a lot later in the year than we did. When we met them, most of them had hiked less than 200 miles; we had hiked 2,000.I was hiking briefly one day with Sharon McCray, one of the Vikings, when a SoBo stopped to talk and said to us, "I am so tired."Sharon said something pleasant in response and we moved on.   But when we were out of earshot she said to me:"I wanted to tell him, 'Not as tired as you're going to be. Do you mind if I take a bite out of your arm?'"Q. What did you worry about the most?I was concerned most about an injury that might end my hike. As careful as I tried to be, I usually fell down once or twice a day. One day I fell six times. All total, I estimate that I fell more than 200 times.Once time I banged by head hard against a tree. Another time I fell face first on a rock. Lucky for me it was flush with the ground and I just got skinned up a little. Once when I fell across a log the pain was so sharp I thought I might have broken my thigh, but it was only bruised.Once, when I fell down in a cow pasture, I bruised my pride.It happened because I was looking around, not watching where I was going, looking for a post with a white blaze marking the trail. Maybe the blaze was on that lone tree standing by itself way over there. Anyway, I wasn't looking down, and I stepped in the middle of enormous, wet, cow paddy and fell. Q. Did you get it on you?Is fresh cow poop slick?Q. Why did you fall so much? Old age?That's part of it.But everybody fell some, including all those young people.   They just didn't fall as much.Going downhill on dry leaves is treacherous, for anyone. Rocks too, when they were wet. Sometimes a rock about the size and shape of a golf ball would be hidden under leaves and when I stepped on it, it rolled and I fell. But the roots were the worst, especially went they were wet. Q. What was the biggest surprise?How much time I had to spend on logistics. When and where could I resupply, get my clothes washed, get a shower? It was difficult to plan ahead because you didn't know how many miles you would be able to hike each day, because you didn't know how difficult the trail would be. You didn't know what the weather was going to be like either, and rain slows you down.   Q. Do many woman hike alone?Yes, most of ones I met did.Scout, Griswold, Red Feather, Temper; Storm, Cashmere, Smiles, and Eddy hiked alone. Mother Nature hiked with her son; Sharon of the Hiking Vikings hiked with Nate, her finance, now her husband. But no one is really alone, women or men. Other hikers look out for you. Q. Did you see much trash on the AT?A. No. Almost none, except at the shelters. It's amazing. Sometimes I walked for miles without seeing the tiniest scrap of paper.Q. Did you pick it up?A. Sometimes, not always.Q. How much does it cost to hike the AT?How much does it cost to buy a car? It depends. But I think a good rule of thumb for most people is $2 a mile, not counting equipment.        Q. You hiked a lot with Hiking Vikings. Were you together at the end?No. The Vikings climbed Mt. Kathadin on July 12. I finished two days later, on the 14th , with Mother Nature and Between. The Vikings got ahead of me on June 27, when one of my knees began coming unglued.   I only hiked 12.8 miles that day. The next morning I got off the trail, in the vicinity of Rangeley, MA after hiking only 4.5 miles. I stayed at a hostel in Rangeley, the Farmhouse Inn, and took a I took a zero on the 29th, to rest my knee. That put the Vikings two full days ahead of me and I never saw them again.But let me tell you what happened the day before I left the trail.The Vikings went into Andover, ME, that morning, June 27th, to resupply and eat a big breakfast. I wanted to go but that was out of the question. The trip to town and back to the trailhead would have taken two and a half to three hours and I couldn¢t make up that much time even if my knee had not been hurting. So they went to town and I limped on. They caught me just before I reached the shelter where I had planned to stay that night.   Nate enjoyed telling me all about the breakfast I had missed: three pieces of French toast; three eggs; hash browns; link sausage; home-made toast; coffee; and one more thing I can¢t remember.I asked them if they had brought me anything. Yes, they said, a candy bar. But they had eaten it.   Styles, Hulk, Krumbs, and Bruin were at the shelter when we arrived and I told them that the Vikings had been to Andover, and didn't even bring me a piece of bubble gum. At that moment Nate pulled out a Hiker Breakfast, identical to the one he had eaten that morning, and gave it to me.I was floored. What a sweet surprise.Did I reheat it?Nah. I gobbled it down, cold, every crumb. It was delicious. They left while I was eating and I never caught up.Q. On average, how long does it take to complete a thru-hike of the AT?From five to seven months, according to the Appalachian Trail Conservancy. The average is slightly under six months. I like to say I hiked it in four months and some few odd days. The actual length of my hike was 4 months and 29 days. Q. Would you like to thru-hike the AT again?Part of me would like to have another shot at it -- I'd like to profit from some of the things l learned.But, no, there are too many other things I want to do.Q. What did you learn that you think is so important?Attitude is so important.Over the past several years, after I retired from the newspaper business, I had sectioned hiked almost 500 miles of the trail south of Pen Mar, PA, just across the state line from Maryland. So I thought I knew what the trail was like. I was wrong. I knew what the trail was like in the South not in the North, which is considerably more difficult.Pennsylvania, also known to hikers as Rocksylvania, bothered me but not as much as it would have if I had not heard so much about the rocks up there. I don't mean I liked them -- I didn't -- but Rocksylvania did not throw me completely off stride.New Hampshire did.The mud, and there's lots of it, reminded me of Vermont; the steep climbs, North Carolina; the rock hops, Pennsylvania; and the rock climbs and scrambles, New York. The difference was that New Hampshire had it all ¢ and very little good trail to go with it.Did you ever see the movie "Private Benjamin"? I thought about a line from that movie pretty often when I got north of Pennsylvania. In the movie, during a training exercise in which Goldie Hawn is forced to crawl under barbed ware, through mud, she said: "This is not the Army I joined. I joined the Army with condos and swimming pools." For a while I felt that way: I joined the Let's-go-for-a-hike Army, not the Let's-go-for-a-rock-climb Army. New Hampshire was the most difficult, by far, of the 14 states on the trail. And it's not just the terrain. The trail is not well maintain there or well marked.   In one matter of speaking, there is no AT in New Hampshire. In the other 13 states, other trails piggyback on the AT. In New Hampshire the reverse is true, the AT is doing the piggybacking. And if you're not careful, you can get lost.One day we started out on a trail called Crawford Path, then switch to the Trinity Heights Connector, the Gulf Side Trail, the Osgood Trail, the Osgood Cutoff, the Great Gulf Trail, the Madison Gulf Trail, and, finally, the Old Jackson Road where we tent camped in a nearby woods. Yes, I had heard the old adage, "When you get to New Hampshire you've done 80 percent of the miles and 20 percent of the work." Still, I was not prepared mentally for the near vertical rock walls I encountered and the endless rocks, roots, and mud deep enough to drown a giraffe. Sometimes the "trail" went almost straight up causing me to start talking to myself: "They have got to be kidding!" But they weren't kidding. One day the trail was so bad the whole thing got to be funny, thanks to the Vikings, who were an hour or two ahead of me. I was hiking by myself when the trail made a right hand turn into a stream.   I'm not talking about water making its way into the trail, that's commonplace from one end of the AT to the other. I'm talking about the trail making its way into water, and staying there for hundreds of yards.At this point I thought nothing in New Hampshire could surprised me, but this did. I had never seen anything like it. But I turned right and started downstream, down the first of several waterfalls.There were no white blazes to guide me, there rarely are in New Hampshire, but, this time, the absence of blazes gave me pause. Did they really put the trail in a stream? No way. They wouldn't do that, not even in New Hampshire.So I took off my pack, climbed back to the top, and took a another careful look around. The "trail" had to have gone somewhere else. But it didn't. They had indeed turned the trail down that rushing, white water stream.So I returned to my pack, put it on, and began working my way down. In a few more minutes I came to a rock on which Nate Harrington, one of the Vikings, had left a note to me with a question:"Are you mad yet, Lucky?" I finally settled down and actually enjoyed hiking in Maine which, by reputation, is the second hardest state. Parts of it looks a lot like New Hampshire but the trail there is much better maintained and blazed.If I had known just how bad it could get, I think I would have settled down a lot sooner and, who knows, enjoyed kinky New Hampshire. If I had a do over I would:¢¢        Buy micro-spikes and have them with me when I left Springer Mountain. I wasn't able to buy any until I got to Gatlinburg, after the worst of the ice was over.Oh, but I did have fun while the ice lasted. On the first day I had spikes I was walking uphill on ice when I encountered four men trying to figure out how they were going to go down.One of them said to no one in particular, "I'd give $500 for a pair of those." referring to my micro-spikes. Now, understand, he wasn't talking to me, and didn't make me that offer.But he if he had I would have turned him down cold.¢¢        Practice using every piece of equipment in my pack before I left home. I didn't remember how my water purifier worked and used it several times without removing the protective cap. That's embarrassing.¢¢        Carry camp shoes, Crocs probably, which I needed when I had to ford streams and rivers. Without an extra pair of shoes you have to wear your boots, and then walk wet the rest of the day. Next day too. Or go barefoot, which is dangerous if the rocks are slick and the water is moving fast, which is the norm.¢¢        Come up with meal menus at home, not on the trail after I had lost more than 20 pounds.¢¢        Be more careful with my gear. I lost 12 or 14 items, clothing, water filters, food, so many things it got to be downright inconvenient as well as embarrassing. There's a saying among light weight backpackers which my carelessness forced me to adopt:"If you need it and don't have it, you don't need it."Q. Did you have an epiphany?I don't guess so. But I did learn a thing or two and I think the hike changed me, for the better I hope. I guess time will tell. Now I'm a lot more like George Allen, the former coach of the Washington Redskins football team. Allen traded high draft picks for veterans and told anyone who questioned him strategy: "The future is now."   I'm an old man. I can't any longer to do the things I want to do, and I'm not going to -- The future is now.***The RingI want to close with my favorite story from the hike.   When I returned to the trail on March 21, after a surgeon diagnosed the problem in my gut, the Hiking Vikings were long gone. They were six days ahead of me, somewhere around 100 miles. I regretted that. I had hiked through the Smokies with them and enjoyed their company. But Nate got shin splints and they had to slow down.   I don't guess I speeded up, but I did began hiking more miles. I was still several days behind when I got a text from Sharon, asking for a favor. They had lost a ring, they left it hanging on a nail in a shelter. She asked me to check when I got there, and get the ring if it was still there.I said would and, much to my surprise, there it was.Meantime, Nate had asked Sharon to marry him, and she had said Yes! They sent me a video of that moment.Turns out yesterday was a very special day!Posted by To Katahdin on Saturday, April 11, 2015I texted Sharon and asked if the ring I had found was "a ring" or "the ring." She replied that it was "a ring" but, she said, it had a story.I was still two days behind when the trail entered the Shenandoah National Park, in northern Virginia. Compared to the rest of the AT, the Shenandoah is as flat as a kitchen table so I pin my ears back and went all out to catch them. In four days I hiked 105 miles. And after dark on a cold, rainy, night in late April, almost six weeks after I had gone home, I caught them.I returned the ring, and Nate told me the ring story. He said he believed in asking a woman's father for his blessing before asking his daughter for her hand in marriage. But Sharon's father is dead. So, Nate said, he talked to Sharon's father in his thoughts, and asked for his blessing.That's when he found the ring, almost completely covered in dirt, barely visible. It was, to him. her father's answer: Yes.The Vikings were married on July 22, 10 days after they finished their hike.THE ENDsee the video of the Q&A after the presentation in CharlotteFor more video of the trail, see videos by NoBos I hiked with:Hiking Vikings: facebook.com/tokatahdinGator: YouTube - Gator Miller