T-minus ...

Two weeks. It's been kind of up in the air, but now it's settled: I'm flying out of Orlando for Atlanta the afternoon of the 12th, then taking the train as far as it'll take me, then getting a shuttle to a hostel. I'll be hitting the approach trail on the morning of March 13th. I should be at the top of Springer and starting the AT on 3/14.

Which means I now officially have less than 2 weeks to go.

Gear list

This may be less interesting to some of you (or perhaps "even more boring" is the way to put it), but the gear list seems to be pretty much a standard part of every hiking website, so here's mine:

Pack: Osprey Atmos 50
Miscellaneous Granite Gear stuff sacks
Jacks R Better pack cover

Shelter: Warbonnet camping hammock
Speer Winter tarp (spring/fall)
MacCat Deluxe tarp (summer)

Sleep: Jacks R Better Nest underquilt
Jacks R Better No Sniveller top quilt
$5 CCF pad from Wal-mart

Eat: Jetboil PCS stove
spork

Drink: Iodine to purify water

Wear: Fleece jacket
Dri Ducks rain gear
Hiking pants
2 microfiber t-shirts
2 pair socks
2 pair sock liners
Gloves
hat
lacy unmentionables by Nike

Miscellaneous other things:

Olympus Stylus 790 camera
Biodegradable toilet paper
Bug spray
First aid kit
Leatherman Micra multitool
maps
Credit cards
Headlamp
MP3 player
Bible

And a whole buncha other crap. My gear weight, including clothes, is something like 28 pounds. Add on to that about 2-2.5 pounds of food per day (heavier leaving town, lighter when heading in for resupply), and 1-8 pounds of water carried at any given time, and my total "skin out" weight will be 35-45 pounds. This is about average.

FAQ

What's the Appalachian Trail?

A 2,175-mile-long mountain footpath, running from Maine to Georgia. General information about the AT can be found at the Appalachian Trail Conservancy's website; see this and this, for example.

How long is it going to take you to walk it?

About six to seven months. Longer if I can't find my socks on the first morning.

Are you going alone?

Yes and no. I don't have a designated partner, but I will have company; every year there are over a thousand people attempting to hike the entire trail, and the bulk of them start out in March or April from Georgia, just like me. The trail is also extensively used by people out on weekend camping trips, dayhikes, etc.

Where will you sleep?

There are something like 200 shelters along the trail. Most are basically three walls and a roof (Google image search), and are usually located near a good water source (creek or spring). I will sleep in them occasionally, but my preference is generally to camp out a hundred yards or so away -- close enough to be social, far enough that people won't hit me with shoes for snoring.

I am not bringing a tent. I will sleep in a hammock, with a tarp over me to keep the rain off and with two down quilts to keep me warm -- one over top, one suspended underneath me. If you're having a hard time picturing this, look here. I'll also have a foam sleeping pad and thermal jammies. Compared to tenting, camping in a hammock is a bit more complicated to set up and not quite as good in truly awful weather (though I have hammocked in heavy rain and in subfreezing temps), but much more comfortable to sleep in.

What will you eat?

Plan A is roots, berries and fresh possum. Plan B will be an energy bar for both breakfast and lunch, and then grazing throughout the day on nuts, dried fruit, beef jerky, chocolate, etc. Dinner is whatever can be cooked by adding boiling water; usually some kind of pasta, maybe with some tuna added. I'll carry 4-7 day's worth of food at any given time and get off to resupply in small mountain towns as needed. While in those small mountain towns, I will also seek to bankrupt any Chinese buffets I encounter.

Is it safe?

No, but neither is Orlando traffic so I figure it's a wash. There are snakes, bears, disease-bearing insects and the occasional homocidal maniac; having been a teacher for a decade now, I'm used to facing that every day. Statistically speaking, it's no more dangerous than walking around the block 6,000 times (assuming you live on a mountain, in a forest, in Eastern North America) .

You're taking your cell phone, right?

Nope.

How are you paying for this?

Since my plan to sell tattoo rights to my forehead to goldenpalace.com fell through, I've been reduced to self-financing. After the hike, I'll be auctioning a kidney on ebay to pay off my credit cards.

Did you have to quit your job?

The college where I teach has very graciously given me a six-month leave of absence. Even more graciously, they're continuing to pay the employer portion of my health insurance while I'm gone. This will enable me to keep my other kidney.

Paid Leave?

They're gracious, not stupid.

Have you ever done anything like this before?

I've been walking for over 35 years now, so I feel I'm pretty experienced at that. As far as the whole camping-in-the-woods thing, my previous longest hike was 45 miles through Ocala National Forest in Florida. I figure this will be pretty much like that, only 50 times longer and with a few hundred more mountains.

Do you think you'll finish?

The failure rate for thru-hike attempts is about 85%. For a variety of reasons, I give myself a slightly better shot; I'd say my chances are 50-50.

You should write a book.

Hmm, I wonder if anyone's done that before

Have you read A Walk in the Woods?

Yes. For those who don't know, AWITW was a 1999 bestselling book about two guys hiking the trail. It was responsible for a huge jump in the number of people hiking the trail in 2000-2001 (Numbers). If you're looking for a book about the AT, his is the one I'd recommend. It is much funnier and more interesting than this website, in fact. Stop reading this and go pick it up. (I should add that Bryson's book is not as popular among many serious hikers, for reasons that you may be able to guess when you read it.)

The other books I'd recommend are Earl Shaffer's Walking with Spring and Bill Irwin's Blind Courage. You can follow other people hiking this year by checking out trailjournals.com

Why is this blog called "A long walk home. " You live in Florida and you're from New Jersey.

I ripped it off a Springsteen song because I couldn't think of anything better. I'm open to suggestions.

Staring it in the Mouth

Hoo boy, this is starting to get scary.

You're fascinated by grizzly bears. You learn all about them, studying their habits, their ecosystem, their diet. You read stories about grizzly bears and put a grizzly bear calendar on your wall. And then you go on a trip to Idaho hoping to fulfill you fondest wish and see one for yourself. All of which is great, up until the moment when you find yourself alone in the forest, ten feet away from 1,200 pounds of Ursus horribilis.

That's kinda how I'm feeling these days. Actually, I've been feeling that way ever since my leave got approved last fall, and it's just gotten increasingly more intense every day. Well, you got what you asked for, smart guy; now what?

Yesterday I was back at school, staring my last three weeks of teaching before I leave. I'm training my replacement. Six people asked me about when I was leaving. You're committed now, chucklehead. No way to back out without looking like a loser.

Of course, some of this is good and productive. I want the pressure, the sense of being watched and silently judged, because it's one of the things I'm counting on to keep me out there when I feel like quitting (almost everyone I've read about did, and I know I will). It's one of the reasons I'm creating this whole farging blog, to make failure as embarrassing as possible ... thereby lessening the chance of it happening. Marsellus Wallace was wrong about pride never helping anything.

And before someone says anything, yeah, yeah, it's "amazing just to try," follow a dream blah blah blah. Sorry, but right now it's better for me to think like Yoda: Do or do not, there is no try.

Warm-up day 4: return

Really not much to say about this day. Woke up early, and decided to get a start on the day: real food awaiting before the day was out! Weather continued good, with temps in the high 50s, and mostly sunny; perfect hiking weather. Spent the morning walking on one of the Forest Service roads that I'd originally been planning on driving on. Nice to not have to worry about roots and loose rocks for a change.

Got back to the car in the afternoon, and headed for the nearest place with food and clean bathroom. It 's always kind of odd getting back to civilization after a few days away. Within an hour off the trail, I'm going 70 miles per hour as opposed to 7 miles per day. I make in to Durham by about 9 pm, catching the last quarter of the Super Bowl on TV.

Not a bad trip.

Warm-up day 3: Big Spring to Carter Gap, plus Timber Ridge Trail

The forecast for last night was very cold: temps down well below freezing. I decided to forego hammocking tonight and try out my plan for very cold weather: I slept inside the shelter directly on my foam pad, with both my down quilts over top. (When I'm in the hammock, I've got one quilt over me and one under.) It worked well, except for the fact that I had only 1 cm of foam padding in between me and a wooden floor. But I was plenty warm, at least, and I was able to take some of my things (boots, water bottle) under the quilts with me to prevent freezing.

The day ended up being really nice, though. The sun came out and temps shot up into the 50s. With the sun out, the trees of the Standing Indian Basin looked very different. Still bare and cold, but now with a kind of spare beauty; like a brand-new house for sale, without the furniture, the floors vacuumed, the walls painted white, the heat turned off and sunshine shooting through the windows.

The exception was the rhododendron. The trail would frequently run under and through thick green tunnels of rhododendrons, and when you were inside you could think for a moment it was summer. They're really an amazing plant, when you think about it. You look at a spruce or a pine, and it just makes sense that they stay green all winter long; they're big tough-guy trees. But rhodos are evergreen, too, and not with measly little needles either. They've got these big, floppy, beagle-ear leaves that stay on all winter long. They actually are kind of doglike, if that makes any sense: hardy, loyal, humble, dependable. They even produce flowers for you in spring. A botanical overachiever.

The first thing I come across this morning was Albert Mountain. Stupidly, I did not get photos of the view, but thankfully other people have (Image search). The first time I came up to this area, a year ago, I hiked this same section of the AT northbound; Albert Mountain is the reason I'm doing it southbound this time. Going north, there's a stretch about where the trail rises 400 feet in about two-tenths of a mile. I opted to take that downhill this time, thanks just the same.

By midafternoon I reached Carter Gap, and had to turn off the AT. As noted before, I was behind schedule, and if I kept to my original plan to hike all the way to Deep Gap before turning off the AT, I would not get back to the car before Monday. Given that my folks were expecting me in Durham on Sunday, given that I had surgery scheduled in Orlando on Wednesday, and given that I did want to catch at least part of the Super Bowl, I needed to start heading back.

I had hoped to cover this whole loop, so that when I come back through here in April I could just skip it as having already been done in the same hiking season. Alas, I'll guess I'll have to cover that when I return.

I walk down the Timber Ridge trail into the valley, and camp near a Forest Service road next to a creek.

Warm-up day 2: Rock Gap to Big Spring Shelter

The night of 1/31 was nasty. Temps dropped well into the 30s, rained pretty hard, and was fairly windy. All-in-all, my hammock setup performed beautifully. When I got in at night, I was thinking that I'd be cold before dawn; in point of fact, I was already bit chilly when I first got in at 8pm. But I nodded off to sleep, and woke up at 10 sweating like a pig. This was my first time sleeping out in down, and it was amazing to discover how much of your body heat it retained. I was actually having to pull the covers back to let in some 35-degree air. Even as the night went on and it began to get windy and rainy, I was able to be pretty comfortable.

It was raining in the morning, so I definitely took my time getting started. Today's goal was pretty modest -- Big Spring shelter, 5 miles away. But it was 5 miles uphill the whole way, and today I was carrying the 35 pound monster on my back.

The woods are bit spooky in winter. Even after the rain lets up, it remains overcast all morning, dark and cold. It's almost totally silent -- no animals that I can see, no birds to speak of and a thick layer of dead leaves that seem to soak up all sound. The trees are bare as skeletons, and the wind through their bones makes them ache and twist; I think about the feel of cold air blown onto a cavity. In places, the trail ducks into narrow little notches in the mountain that are always in shadow, and there are little patches of snow, unmelted since it fell days or weeks ago. Several small creeks cross the trail, leaving little splashes of ice on the rocks as they hurry down the mountain.

I think about third grade, when the quickest way to walk home was to cut through the graveyard next to the Methodist church. It was no problem at 3 pm, but if something kept me at school late, and I was walking home at 4:30 in November when the sky is just starting to thicken into evening ... well, it wasn't much farther to walk all the way to the corner before turning left, and there was really no big rush to get home anyway.

By afternoon, though, the sun is coming out, and the spookiness leaves. I lunch by the side of the trail at Glassmine Gap (an energy bar, water, dried cranberries) and meet a couple of older local gents out dayhiking.

I make Big Spring by 4:30 and call it a day.