Date: 2022-08-21
To: View Entry
Miles today: 0.0

I am sitting here in my hotel room in the Quality Inn in Harpers Valley, WV. Tomorrow I start my hike, but tonight I have laid out all my gear on my bed to check, one last time, that I have forgotten nothing.  This is a bit of overkill - there are many outfitters along the Appalachian Trail who will be happy to sell me something I have forgotten. But after all the months of planning, it would be a bummer.My gear philosophy for this trip is pretty simple: bring as little as possible. A reality of my hike is that I need to be much more aware of backpack weight than the 20-somethings speeding by if my joints are going to make it 2000+ miles. So I have targeted a fully loaded pack, with food and water, of under 20 lbs (is it alliteration if everything starts with a 2?) and a base weight of about 13. This has taken a bit of research, but I¢ve been amazed by the innovations in hiking gear fabric and construction over the past 10 years.  The conventional wisdom is to divide your hiking gear into 3 piles - things that you must have, things that are nice to have, and things you are not sure about.  You should only take the first pile. This has forced some hard choices (in all honesty, I caved on a couple of those choices), but I can always adjust later.I will spare you my detailed gear list at this point. Nothing is more hilarious than the gear list of someone who has almost no experience with the gear on that list. However, in a couple of months, if things work out, I will get into specifics.In the meantime, a couple of general notes:Big 3 (Shelter, sleeping bag, backpack) - Managing the weight of these items has a big impact on the total pack weight, so I¢ve chosen to use cottage manufacturers whose use of advanced fabrics and design have created lightweight and functional gear. As a general observation, each of these items is 12 the weight compared to what I used when hiking Shenandoah 4 years ago.Seasons - I will be progressing rapidly from high summer (Virginia in August) to fall to winter (Smoky Mountains in November). While I could carry clothing that would handle all of that, I¢ll instead be using maildrops to swap gear in and out to keep my clothing load manageable.Clothing - speaking of clothing, I only have one set of clothing for hiking and one set for sleeping. That¢s it. This will often mean that I am donning cold, wet clothing in the morning before starting off (better than caffeine for a wakeup call) and will also mean that sometimes others will be able to smell me before they see me.Food and water - these get surprisingly heavy surprisingly fast, and will probably be a huge learning curve for me as I progress. I will be relying on foods with high calories per oz to keep the food weight down, as I will usually have 3-4 days between resupply points. Water, which weighs a blistering 2.2 lb per liter (I¢ll need 4-6 liters per day), will be obtained from streams, ponds, and stagnant puddles along the hike, filtered or treated to remove the worst of the contaminants.Gun - no, I have not packed a gun. Along with other principled objections, it would be too heavy and, unfortunately, one can not shoot a tick. Ticks are what I worry about the most on the trail, so my gear and clothing are treated with permethrin to keep those darlings away.  Anyway, I am getting ready to stuff it all into my pack for tomorrow.  After traveling here today by car, plane, train, and Uber, I will be walking for the next 3 months.  I am nervous, a bit terrified, excited!!