morvasaaty/AppalachianTrail-LD-Hikers-Blogs-and-Weather-20-years huggingface dataset:
Date: 2017-06-12
From: Fourth Mountain

To: Bear Pond Ledges
Miles today: 16.8

I think my hiker hunger has finally kicked in, based on the scarily small amount of food I have left and just over a day from the end of the famed 100 mile wilderness.Because last night was a dry camp, I hadn't cooked and the consequence was I was feeling a little flat today due to the cumulative effects of several tough days and the lack of a reinvigorating big meal. Instead I'd made do last night with my stash of gummy bears.It didn't help that I pushed back the first food break for three hours, until I'd climbed and then descended Barren Mountain and reached Long Pond Stream lean to. The good news was the view from the ruined fire observation tower just before the descent showed far smaller peaks ahead. The bad news was I was equally sure Gollum would rise to the challenge and find a painful path through the terrain ahead.The decision to go slower rather than trying to get to Monson was certainly vindicated because I felt like I was running on fumes for most of the day, even though the trail seemed, thankfully, to be far more often designed by Smeagol than Gollum.Part of it too was the lack of others on my vicinity. Apart from two nobo section hikers, who were going from Monson to Katahdin, I found myself in a hiker bubble where there were people ahead of me and behind me but our paces meant I walked alone virtually all day.This trend wasn't broken until after crossing the railroad line (see: 100 mile "wilderness") at which point I met a sobo couple, Rachel and Travis, who'd taken nine days to get through from Katahdin Stream camp ground. Almost everyone around me takes of their shoes for steam crossings, either to keep their socks dry or to use the aqua sandals they've been carrying.As I did today's third unavoidable ford, I couldn't help thinking it was better to use the kiwi method of just getting used to wet feet and wading straight through any crossing.Once again, I used the "first decent campsite after 7.30pm" rule and, as with the previous evening, it took until nearly 8pm for one to present itself.I'm now almost exactly five miles out from the road and I can hear a mix of car noise and whining mosquitoes as I'm falling asleep. I'm nearly done, in many senses of the word.AT fact of the day: AT sobo is tough! As I was clambering straight up yet another pile of steep rocks and roots, I remember thinking that if the Appalachian Trail featured PCT switchbacks, it would be 4,000 miles long.
Date: 2017-06-13
From: Bear Pond Ledges

To: Monson
Miles today: 5.0
Weather: few clouds

In California's Sierra mountains, there's a place called Vermilion Valley Resort that's used as a resupply point by thru-hikers on the 212-mile John Muir Trail and also by those on the 2650-mile Pacific Crest Trail.After years of observing hikers, VVR's owner, Jim, said he'd found a foolproof way to tell them apart."JMT hikers will wash and then eat when they arrive," he explained. "But PCT hikers will eat and then wash."After getting going today at an ungodly hour of 5.40am and crushing the five miles to the road, I reached Monson and immediately went to eat rather than wash.Part of the reason was that my hitch hike down from the pass -- with a kindly retired couple from Maine, to whom I apologised profusely and repeatedly for my rank aroma -- dropped me of at Pete's Place, an awesome old school diner, rather than Shaw's hiker hostel.By that point my food bag was down to three energy bars and about half a dinner -- far less of a buffer than I'd normally like.At Pete's, I ordered a huge breakfast then used the WiFi to catch up with seven days of the being wholly off the grid in terms of the outside world. Amid the usual buzzes and beeps of updating message systems of various kinds, I was grateful to learn that while I was pleasantly incommunicado, no new dramas had befallen those I care about .As I slowly waddled my way up to Shaw's afterwards, it was nice to reacquaint myself with the familiar faces of those I'd seen in the wilderness and also go through the always slightly unsettling process of meeting in person those whose names I'd been following in the lean to registers for more than 100 miles.Scout was there too, having boogied to get in the previous evening. A somewhat inevitable conversation followed acknowledging the incompatibility of our respective hiking aspirations for this trail. It was nice to have it out in the open.Now, it must be time for lunch...AT fact of the day: Hike your own hike
Date: 2017-06-15
From: Monson

To: Bald Mountain Stream
Miles today: 14.0

Rapunzel looked perplexed as we exited Poet's car after the short drive from Monson: "Where's the trail go?""This is the AT," I replied, gesturing towards where the trail went directly up the embankment. "It goes straight up. Or straight down."And sure enough, contrary beast that the AT is, the trail then immediately disproved my theory by going along for the rest of the day rather than up or down.Today's short tally of miles turned out to be among the least typically AT we'd seen for some time. Quite the opposite: by choosing a pragmatic route that traversed a series of gentle hills and then following a river upstream, with a series of short climbs to get around where the water bluffed up against our side of the valley, the day had a very kiwi feel to it.The series of ankle- to knee-deep fords helped accentuate that impression too, although I noticed that I still seem to be in a tiny minority of those who simply plunge in rather than using the convoluted process of changing into either aqua sandals or taking one's socks off for the crossing.The prosect of cruisy trail made it a little easier to escape the vortex of comfort that Poet and Hippy Chick had created at Shaw's Hiker Hostel. Our pace also reflected the way we'd been fortified with a breakfast that involved coffee, bacon, eggs, awesome home fries and with all-you-can-eat blueberry pancakes to finish. And hikers who have just done the 100 mile wilderness can eat a lot.Chef, for example, had based his food on doing the wilderness in three days of 25, 25 then 50 miles. For him to not start before 10am was clearly putting him behind schedule.Us lazy sobos had an easier schedule, since we only had 37 miles to get across in three days, although we also knew some bad weather was coming in.That forecast prompted me to head on past the Horseshoe Canyon lean to at 10 miles and also continue past the exemplary campsite Pan, Tink, Boss and Sweets chose on the far side of a ford three miles on.I banked two more easy miles and camped on a slightly manky site where a logging road crossed the steam and intersected with the AT.With an eye on the incoming storm, I sited my tent out of the obvious dad drainage channels in case there ended up being a lot of rain. I was in my sleeping bag by 5pm and had a short snooze -- I've now crossed that hiker threshold where I sleep better in the woods than in town, even in my own room -- before the usual evening chores of cooking.AT fact of the day: This trail can be pleasant when it chooses to be. But the hand of Gollum could still be seen in the way the blazes stopped 100m or so before the second ford and couldn't be seen on the far side until you were into the forest. I knew from the map and the topography that this is where the trail went, but for the solid percentage of who don't use maps or anything other than the elevation profile, it must have been confusing.
Date: 2017-06-23
From: Piazza Rock lean to

To: Rangeley
Miles today: 1.9

Even by the benchmark of grizzled faces, small packs and skinny physiques of most nobos, the one we met this morning on the short hop from Piazza Rock lean to and the road stood out. His pack for the next 100 miles probably weighed less than my food bag for the last 32.Indeed, he admitted he'd done the PCT and hinted at indeterminate other long distance hikes, so we figured we'd ask him exactly what the Whites would be like."I've done a lot of hiking, man, but..." at which point he paused, shook his head and then looked us in the eye and simply added: "Fuck!"Hmmm. I guess we'll find out once we get to it but this was a little unsettling.The forecast that had prompted me to cross the Saddlebacks yesterday was for rain by mid morning but the rain actually arrived soon after dawn, sometime short of 5am. I'd uncharacteristically slept in the shelter instead of my tent and was truly grateful for that as we dozed and listened to the steady drum of rain on the roof for the next few hours.Just as we finally gained the energy to head out, the rain eased off and stopped, although we got dripped on by the trees for the short and easy walk to the road.Because Piazza Rock is a very popular area, the trail was PCT style rather than the masochistic AT version.Nobo the Sobo, who has been enduring my PCT comparisons for the last 100 miles, asked: "So the PCT is like this? I could get used to this!"The three of us arrived at the road with a short period of time and after the derisory attempt at hitch hiking, we walked the 0.3 of a mile to the Hiker Hut, a former meditation retreat which had morphed into an off-the-grid AT hiker hostel. The woman running it was happy to shuttle us into Rangeley for $20, which included allowing me to dump my pack at The Farmhouse, where I'd booked a room, and then gave us the nickel tour of town: restaurants, outfitters, banks and the library.Now I'm fed and caught up this journal. There's an All Blacks game tonight against the British and Irish Lions at 3.30am -- I didn't even try to find somewhere streaming it -- but at least I'll be a Schroedinger's rugby fan for only a few hours overnight before learning the result rather than being in ignorance for a week.Life is good.AT fact of the day: All you need to know about Maine is that the local weather forecast includes a mosquito forecast.
Date: 2017-06-24
From: Rangeley

To: Rangeley
Miles today: 0.0
Weather: light rain

The All Blacks won, I found a cafe that serves food capable of raising my cholesterol levels from half a mile away, there are more than a dozen hikers I know in town and I'm now settled in a queen-sized bed with windows overlooking the lake while Pearl the pot-bellied pig snuffles around outside.Life is good.AT fact of the day: AT towns like this one are the only time that civility has so far been a factor on the trail.
Date: 2017-06-25
From: Rangeley

To: Rangeley
Miles today: 0.0
Weather: overcast clouds

Woke up feeling blah, combined with a hint of nausea, feeling lethargic and -- a sure sign something is wrong on Planet Thru-Hiker -- I didn't have any appetite.Time for an extra zero before attempting the next section to Gorham, which is reported to be the sting in the tail of Maine and which will get us, finally, into a new state. (By which I mean New Hampshire, rather than the all-too-familiar states of tired, smelly, hungry and sore. That bit seems unlikely to change.)Life is still good, but not quite as good as before the lurgy struck...AT fact of the day: After starting the AT with the kind of, er, corporeal energy reserves that come from eight years of expat life and then nearly two months of Frodo's cooking and Terrie Anderson's taco salads, the trials of the trail have made me lose weight. This is a good thing, except now my pack hip belt is down to the tightest setting and it's only just snug on my hips so I've had to order a smaller one.
Date: 2017-07-01
From: Gentian Pond lean to

To: Gorham
Miles today: 11.8
Weather: few clouds

The day hiker gave me a serious look and warned me in grave terms that there was "a rocky stretch" ahead."It's all rocky," I quipped back, probably a little too glibly after the previous day's travails."You'll see," he responded, using the tone of voice reserved to address those who are about to experience a fall, either metaphorically or, in this case, literally.It was enough to make me ponder whether I was being cockily overconfident, but the rocky patch he was referring to was no worse than the hazardous jumbles I'd scrambled over at least 50 times on the previous day and on a multi-daily basis since the start of the trail more than a month ago.Just as the difficulties of the trail had eased after Mt Success last night, today I encountered nothing even remotely approaching the impediments of yesterday.Instead the main echo of the previous day's trail was seeing two more moose -- the trip's sixth and seventh -- in a bog just before Success Pond.My inherently pessimistic prediction was to get into Gorham by 4pm but the ease of the trail allowed that to beat that by an hour and a half, which proved to be fortunate when the skies opened.I paid for a worker at the White Mountains Lodge, sited next to the trailhead, to shuttle me the five miles into town. In my usual way, I was going to eat first and then shower but the driver said he was "going to do a good deed for the other people at the restaurant" by taking me first to The Barn, which specialised in hosting AT hikers.And it had to be said, after six mostly wet and entirely sweaty days on the trail since Rangely, he was probably right. This in turn meant I was in my lodgings when what was initially just another rainstorm became a Fiordland-style deluge that prompted warnings of flash flooding and even a tornado. Sometimes the universe can look out for cocky hikers, rather than always giving them lessons in benchmarking and hubris...Life is good.AT fact of the day: This is not so much to do with the AT, but once again a rugby test was played in New Zealand overnight but this time Schroedinger's All Blacks supporter had to wait about 12 hours to find out what happened, which was the second thing I checked once I connected with the outside world: the British and Irish Lions scraped in, 24-21 after one of our players was sent off in the first half. It'll mean an epic decider next week -- when I'll once again probably be on the trail and in results limbo once more...
Date: 2017-07-02
To: Gorham
Miles today: 0.0
Weather: overcast clouds

It feels wrong to take a zero day when the Whites are basking under clear blue skies.But my body -- and particularly my right knee -- are reminding me of the need to do nothing. The rational part of my brain seconds that.Life is good.AT fact of the day: For the last month, everyone has been building up the Whites as being the toughest part of the trail. So far every forecast difficult section had proved to be far less nasty than promised. Tomorrow we'll begin to see whether that trend continues.
Date: 2017-07-08
From: Gorham

To: Gorham
Miles today: 0.0
Weather: clear sky

One of the boring but necessary parts of self-funded retirement is the need to occasionally do a few admin days in a town big enough to offer the right facilities.Today was such a day.I probably didn't strictly need another zero day, but since my over-arching goal is to ensure I get through to the end of the White Mountains with my joints and enthusiasm intact, a zero day definitely helps. The fact that thunderstorms are forecast is just a bonus.Life is good.AT fact of the day: When I walked 2km to the bus station at Gorham's Circle K gas station, I encountered Squeaky, who was suffering from tendon problems with his hip that were keeping him, at least temporarily, off the trail. To get a cortisone injection under his health insurance required for him to fly back home to Kentucky to see his doctor. Every time I think I've seen the depths of dysfunction in the American health sector, a new benchmark is set. Others on the trail have no health cover whatever, which in the US is the scariest thing I can imagine.
Date: 2017-07-15
From: Hanover

To: Hingham, Massachusetts
Miles today: 0.0
Weather: overcast clouds

One of the enticing and enjoyable parts of having worked in the Middle East is that you'll later have friends to visit all over the world. Jen, Yas and I had all met in Abu Dhabi, although their meeting was rather more momentous than their one with me: they were now married and had a young son, Tommy. And it became even more momentous in light of recent political events in the US, since Jen is a US citizen and Yas is Syrian. After a tortuous process, he received a green card during the final year of the Obama administration and he moved to the US a few months before Trump was elected. Had their timing been a year later, they might still have been stuck in Abu Dhabi.But out of these difficult circumstances, they'd managed to settle into the US, even though Yas was finding the idea of paying tax for the first time in his life to be both unpleasant and bewildering. Matt, another friend from Abu Dhabi who was doing some nanotechnology research in Harvard's labs for a few months, also came down for the weekend to Jen's sprawling and pleasant family home in Hingham, on the coast east of Boston. This was about as establishment as it was possible to get. The town boasted the US's oldest continually operating church and Jen's family had countless previous generations buried in the local cemetery. Her parents, both Harvard-trained doctors, had a huge and magnificent mansion. It was somewhat sobering to realise their annual property taxes were more than my annual budget to live on in retirement.They were given a crash course on the practicalities of hosting a hiker (a shower and laundry were top priorities -- in their own interest as much as mine -- and my trail runners were swiftly banished to the furthest reaches of the property). I'd mailed my hair clippers here, which turned me from a hairy bearded hiker into something slightly more respectable, with a midway point involving a mohawk. The weekend was mostly about catching up with friends who I hadn't seen for up to a year. Yas had been in the US the longest, with it being deemed safer for Jen to return briefly to Abu Dhabi to pack up their life in case there was a sudden change of policy that could strand him on the other side of the world.I returned to Hanover feeling reinvigorated by a weekend away from the trail and among friends. Life is good.AT fact of the day: The hitch hiking was not the only way in which Hanover is hiker friendly. Because this is the home of Dartmouth, an ivy league school, accommodation is expensive but there is a phalanx of trail angels who take hikers into their homes. One of them is Greg, who hosts two hikers a night at his historic home in the outlying village of Wilding, just outside Hanover.
Date: 2017-07-17
From: Dartmouth Skiway

To: Hanover
Miles today: 17.4
Weather: few clouds

Ever since we left behind Mt Moosilauke, we're continuing to find signs that the trail really has changed character. One example later in today's hike was when the trail came up to a series of ancient glacier-scoured bedrock ledges from when this area was under the Laurentide Ice Sheet until 20,000 years ago.But instead of the trail going straight up the ledge, as it had done so often in Maine, it meandered around them using natural ledges to find a relatively gentle route. This was yet another revelation that I was happy to discover. Earlier on our hike, we'd be able to tell we were getting closer to civilisation by hearing traffic -- sometimes from up to five miles before we actually crossed the highway we'd been hearing.That was the case here but since Hanover was the first major town through which the trail goes, we also had sightings of buildings through the trees to show we were getting close to the urban area.Soon I was stepping out of the forest and onto a sporting field that will be familiar to anyone who read A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson's 1998 book about the AT that caused the number of wannabe thru-hikers to soar. Soon after moving to Hanover, he found himself bemused by the presence of a path that led into the woods and went all the way to Katahdin. That sight prompted him to try to hike the trail. It was where I stood now.I'd expected to have to hike today's section in reverse, since that would allow me to leave most of my pack's contents at the Dartmouth Outing Club's huge offices and slackpack the 17 miles. But with impressive act of generosity, Greg offered to drive me to Dartmouth Skiway so I continue from where I left off and walk back to town.Now that I'd reached town, yet another sign of the changed nature of this trail was that the white blazes were now marked on streetlight poles through the most urban and pleasant of environments. Instead of going past hillocks and swamps, I hiked past cafes, pubs and restaurants. In both cases, I was able to acquire tannin-hued liquids, but I prefer the ones that taste of hops rather than swampwater.Life is good.AT fact of the day: I'm used to hearing the sounds of the wilderness as I'm going to sleep. Tonight I'm listening to the sounds of music coming from a frat house.
Date: 2017-07-20
From: Stony Brook lean to

To: Killington
Miles today: 8.4

For the next couple of days, I'm going to be hiking the Appalachian Trail the, um, Governor Sanford way. Except four of these miles -- from Mountain Valley Retreat to the Inn on the Long Trail -- involve actual AT rather than the metaphorical kind.See you on the other side.Life is good.AT fact of the day: Food is not the only sustenance we need out here.
Date: 2017-07-26
From: Manchester

To: Manchester
Miles today: 0.0
Weather: overcast clouds

Pulled a muscle in my back. Unplanned zero day. Argh! Life is good, but it'd be better without these niggling injuries...AT fact of the day: The only upside of this development is I got to stay at Green Mountain Lodge, which had been full the previous evening. It's run by Jeff, a graceful and generous host whose welcome included hoisting the New Zealand flag outside the house in honour of my stay.