Election day was another clear, chilly day in an unbroken string of clear, chilly days that stretches back as far as I can remember. Since Virginia, maybe? It was my fourth and final day hiking northeast along the ridgeline of Kittatinny Mountain, which I’d first climbed onto back in Pennsylvania. The trail was quiet, I didn’t see much of anyone. I passed the office and visitors center at New Jersey’s High Point State Park, and stopped to get water and charge my power bank. The office was closed—for election day, I guess—but I found an outlet behind the building. I ate my lunch at a picnic table in the sun and listened to squirrels rustle through leaves. A truck groaned up the steep hill. In the silence after it passed, a crow called somewhere across the road. 

As I walked that day, I thought a lot about what we’re doing when we elect a president of the United States. This country is the most powerful and arguably the most violent empire that has ever existed in world history, and to the extent that we have an emperor, it’s the president. Every president kills people. It could be thousands of people, or tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, depending on their inclination. It could be millions, there’s really no limit. Killing people, choosing who will die both here in the U.S. and abroad, is a fundamental part of the job. It is the job. Whatever else the president does, they do on their own time. Is “Emperor of the Violent Hegemony” the kind of job that’s possible to be a good person in? Is it the kind of job where anyone, however well-intentioned, can effect positive change? 

Past the High Point, the trail turns ninety degrees and finally descends the shoulder of Kittatinny Mountain to follow the New York / New Jersey border southeast. The rocks underfoot ease up and there are long stretches of smooth trail through open lowland forest, dark tree trunks standing unusually straight. All of this land was taken from its original residents in a campaign of genocide so sustained, vicious, and ultimately successful that most of us can live our whole lives pretending it didn’t happen, if we choose to. The wealth and power we still enjoy today derives directly from the stolen labor and stolen lives of enslaved Black people. Our national government is a machine created by slavers to ensure their own safety and power was never threatened by the human beings whose lives they consumed to build their wealth, and they were masters of their craft. We eventually ended slavery, kind of, but the machine they built is still working perfectly. How do you create change within a system designed specifically to prevent the exact kind of change you are trying to create?

The tips of my hiking poles steadily punched little holes in the dirt on either side of me as I walked, and I imagined a fat drop of blood welling up from each one, twin parallel tracks stretching behind me like a thousand miles of torn sutures.

That night I stayed at the “Secret Shelter,” a little cabin on private land just off the trail that the owner leaves open for hikers to use. I had seen reports that it had a wasp problem, and so it did. I sat on the little porch in the early dusk and watched the wasps industriously coming and going from their nest in the outside wall. They didn’t seem interested in me, and I didn’t see any of them inside the cabin. I shined my headlamp all around the inside but aside from some old mud dauber nests up near the ceiling, I didn’t see any evidence that they had been inside. The grass around the cabin was long and tufted and didn’t look good for tenting, so I decided to risk sleeping inside. I only saw one wasp inside—it landed on my phone screen while I was eating dinner and watching a TV show. It was oddly sluggish, crawling slowly up the screen in black backlit silhouette. I carefully pinched it in a handkerchief until I felt its carapace crunch. Belatedly, I worried that killing it might release some kind of pheromone signal triggering the rest to attack, but they didn’t. I slept on my inflatable pad on the floor, with a wall full of wasps behind my head.

The walls are full of wasps.

It gets dark at 5 pm now, so I was asleep before any state even closed the polls. I woke up around 10:00 and it was too early to know anything. I woke up again at 12:45 and Trump was clearly winning. I had no sense of what had been counted and what hadn’t, but it didn’t look good. It took a long time to go back to sleep. I woke up for good at 4:30, and although no one had officially called the race yet, it was clearly over. I felt strangely empty, nothing like the shock and terror of 2016, when I hadn’t seriously considered the possibility that he might win. I didn’t think he was going to win this time, but I also didn’t think America was going to elect a Black woman president. One of those impossible outcomes would have to happen. Apparently it was this one.

Another hiker had arrived in the evening and set up a tent outside, a young woman who had flip-flopped up to Katahdin from Delaware Water Gap and was only about 50 miles from finishing her hike. She’d stored her food in the cabin overnight, and when she came in to get it our eyes met just for an instant and we both made this face: 😐. I knew she also knew. Neither of us said anything—I’m a middle-aged white guy with a beard, so I’m sure she didn’t want to hazard a guess at what my politics might be, and I don’t blame her. I didn’t say anything because I just didn’t really want to talk about it. 

A couple miles north of the Secret Shelter a short road walk brings you to Horler’s Deli in Unionville, New York. I was walking along the road into town when a work truck coming toward me slowed and stopped, and the driver leaned toward the open passenger window. This isn’t that unusual. When people see you’re a thru-hiker, they often want to talk to you, or give you a snack, or ask if you need anything. It wasn’t the first time someone had pulled a car over to talk to me. I looked in the window, saw thick fingers holding a cigarette. 

“How long have you been out?” he asked.

”Four months,” I said.

I looked up at his face, older guy, maybe late fifties. A lifetime of labor. Then my eyes caught his red hat. Make America Great Again. I imagine my expression visibly changed. I knew what was coming.  

“Trump won.” he said. Not in any particular tone, not gloatingly or sadly. Just a fact.

”Uh huh.” I said.

”I just didn’t know if you knew. If you have radio out there or anything.”

”I already knew.” I said, and walked away. Radio? 

I’ve thought a lot about this exchange and I think he was having a nice morning, and wanted to do me a favor and share the news with someone who might be yearning to know it. He was living in an imaginary world where someone in the woods couldn’t know the news. But we all have phones, like him, like everyone. His imaginary world doesn’t exist. I already knew.

To hike the Appalachian Trail is to constantly need help from strangers, and to receive it for no other reason than need. A ride to town. An invitation to fill up your water bottles at a home or a business. The convenience store clerk who put a banana in my bag of food after she rang everything up, without even asking me. Two huge coolers stocked full of food and drinks near a trail kiosk in Connecticut. There were days in Pennsylvania when my only water came from caches of gallon jugs left at road crossings by a local who made it their business to provide water on an otherwise dry section. A private cabin left unlocked and trusted to the use and care of whoever might be hiking past.

Even more, the entire trail exists as a gift from volunteers. Every night that I’m warm and dry inside a shelter, it’s because of the hard work and organization of the volunteer trail clubs who build and maintain them. I’ve hiked past trail crews at work on the trail itself, and it is hard physical labor, digging holes in unyielding mountain earth and moving rocks with human power and simple rigging. 

The trail isn’t just a path through the woods, it’s a society organized around some of the best and most characteristically American virtues: spontaneous helpfulness, neighborly concern for a stranger, collective work for the common good. These virtues aren’t restricted to the trail, I’ve seen them all over the country. I’ve lived in Massachusetts, Maine, Virginia, Washington, D.C., San Francisco. I’ve driven across the country several times. Everywhere, people are friendly. If you need help, someone will help you. I’m sure we can all think of exceptions, but they are exceptions—we’re famous around the world for our outgoing cheerfulness and willingness to drop everything to help someone we just met. These aren’t just “small town virtues.” I’ve watched half a dozen New Yorkers, all unknown to each other, convene an impromptu colloquy on a busy sidewalk to determine the optimum route for a lost tourist to reach his destination. In Union Station in D.C. I saw an elderly woman fall and cut her face, and a dozen passengers hurrying for their own trains stop to help her. Everywhere, as individuals, this is how Americans act.

In Maine, there’s a lake camp just off the trail where the owner feeds hikers every morning. For $12, he’ll make you eggs, sausage, coffee, juice, and a stack of twelve pancakes, if you can eat them all. If you can’t eat them all he’ll give you a ziplock bag to take the leftovers. If you can’t pay, or don’t want to, he’ll feed you anyway. He has a fund of money from other hikers who’ve paid extra just for this purpose, but he says it never gets any smaller. He doesn’t do this for money. He doesn’t get anything out of it but extra work, along with a little company in the morning. He had a son in the military who died, but he doesn’t like to talk about it. When you go inside the camp building you pass a huge Trump 2024 flag hanging on the wall outside. It’s tempting to imagine that the person who would feed a group of strangers every morning just because they’re camped at his doorstep and hungry is somehow different than the person who would vote for concentration camps. But they’re the same person. We’re all the same people. 

How can we reconcile living our lives with such openness, such abundant kindness, but governing ourselves with such fear and hate? I don’t know. It’s another clear, chilly day in America. I guess I’ll keep walking.

I’ve turned comments off for this post, because I don’t have the desire or capacity to moderate a debate. I trust you all but emotions are high right now, and I just want to sit with things for a bit. If you’d like to respond to me directly you can always hit reply and email me. I do receive them, and I always read them.

As usual my mileage and my word count are inversely correlated. While I’ve been quiet here, in the last ten days I’ve traversed 150 miles of Pennsylvania. I’m starting to smell the barn, as they say, both literally because I am in Pennsylvania but also figuratively because I’m starting to see my finish line for this year roll up over the horizon. 

I heard your feedback from the last post that many of you are confused about exactly where Mica and I are and what we’re doing, and that’s very fair because it’s confusing and I realize that you have more compelling things of which to keep careful, if not obsessive, track. So there will be a recap and summary below. But first I want to tell you about how nice Pennsylvania is, quickly before I get to the part of the state that everyone hates.

I’m in a motel in Hamburg, PA, which is about four long days hike north of Duncannon. Duncannon is where people say the dreaded “Rocksylvania” starts, but I have found the trail north of Duncannon to be mostly a series of gorgeous ridge walks, speckled with a few rocky sections. Yes I said “gorgeous” about Pennsylvania! I’m as shocked as anyone. 

The trail crosses this pedestrian bridge at Swatara Gap. This picture truly doesn’t do the foliage justice.

After crossing the farms and neighborhoods of the Cumberland Valley in southern PA, the trail generally climbs out of town about 800 or 1,000 vertical feet and then runs ruler-straight along high forested ridges, which are sometimes only a few dozen feet wide at the top. The mountains here are like if you took a normal mountain and stretched it out so it was 12 or 15 miles long, and flat on the summit. They’re technically part of the “Ridge-and-Valley Appalachians,” but I think of them as the mouuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuntains. 

The weather couldn’t be better. Every day has been clear and sunny, cool at night—occasionally downright cold, but not below freezing yet—and warm enough for shorts by noon. The gradually waning moon has spotlighted my tent at isolated campsites perched 1,000 feet above the twinkling lights of freeways and farms spread out on the valley floors below. Up on the ridge the leaves are mostly down, giving me day-long views through bare tree branches of the pumpkin spice riot of foliage blanketing the lower hills. The freshly fallen leaves crunch constantly underfoot in a way that never gets any less acoustically satisfying, although they also hide the smaller ankle-twisting stones that litter the trail, and force me to be more careful of my footing. I want to look up and enjoy the view but every time I do I’m immediately punished with a stubbed toe or a stumble, so mostly I try to absorb the view with my peripheral vision. Occasionally I just stop to look around.

With little vertical deviation in the trail most days, even the rocky sections aren’t stopping me from reeling off a series of 18 to 20 mile hikes. The prolonged lack of rain has put the state into a drought, and only the most consistent and reliable water sources are still running. Lacking better options, I’ve scooped silty water from some very questionable springs, but I haven’t actually found myself stuck without enough water yet. The next few days north of here look to be the driest part of the trail, so I hope that holds true. I’ve been pretty careful about researching my water sources, and Mica left a lot of comments in the Far Out app on his way through here southbound which have been enormously helpful to me and the rest of the crew of SOBOs behind him.

Again I don’t have the equipment to capture the views here but imagine this picture turned up to eleven.

Speaking of which, an unexpected delight of turning around and hiking northbound has been meeting SOBO hikers that I’ve lost track of, or heard about but never met. A few days ago I ran into Plum(b) and Zeb, from back in Vermont. They’re still at it, and incredibly still hiking together, which I was glad to see. Zeb (now known as Deep Dish I believe) said he’s planning to end his hike for this year at Harpers Ferry, while Plum(b) intends to keep going for a while yet. 

I reached my 1,000 mile mark at Center Point Knob, outside Boiling Springs, and who was there but a hiker and self-described “huge Washington Post fan” who goes by the trail name Re-Roll and has been reading my Post columns. Mica told me about him, after they met on the trail, so he’d been expecting to find me eventually. He tried to think of something surprising to do to ensure I’d have reason to mention him, but being there to celebrate 1,000 miles with me was plenty good enough to make him memorable. He’s also an aspiring writer so I gave him what is the least inspiring but only true writing advice, which is that the actual work of writing always sucks but you just have to do it a lot to get better. 

And I finally met Sharky again, who I don’t think I’ve mentioned yet in this newsletter. Our second day on trail, at the first shelter outside of Baxter State Park, I was talking to a longtime thru-hiker named El Flaco. He was telling me a story about running into a guy named Sharky, whom he’d hiked with years ago, at a recent thru-hiker Thanksgiving dinner. Just then, an older man with a white beard and a long wooden staff walked into camp looking exhausted, like a late-in-the-series Gandalf. El Flaco looked up and said “Holy shit. Holy shit! That’s Sharky!” Neither of them knew the other was even on trail this year, let alone that they would meet here, just south of Abol Bridge. Sharky talked to us briefly but explained that his food bag was down to “nothing but black coffee” and he was desperate to reach the Abol Bridge store before it closed. He was almost halfway through this year’s hike, which was northbound from Pine Grove Furnace here in PA up to Katahdin and then back down to Pine Grove Furnace. Last year he hiked from Pine Grove Furnace south to Springer and back, so in these two years he will have completed two full thru-hikes in an odd double-half-yo-yo pattern. 

Mica and I met Sharky again later on in Maine, when he was now also hiking southbound, and spent several nights with him at shelters and campsites. We last saw him in Bethel, Maine, where all of us were off the trail riding out the remnants of Hurricane Debby. He’s one of the people I was most disappointed to have lost track of, and I’ve spent the rest of the hike asking other hikers if they’ve met him, or know where he went. Most people on the trail have met him, but I never got much reliable news of where he was or how he was getting along.

Then yesterday morning, as I sat on a log beside the trail eating my last Little Debbie donut sticks and feeling kind of down, here comes Sharky walking out of the woods with a somewhat longer white beard, two long wooden staves, and a twinkle in his eye, like a more early-in-the-series Gandalf. I wasn’t sure he’d remember me, but he yelled “RUSTY!” and walked over and gave me a big hug, so I guess he did. I caught him up on what Mica and I had done since we last saw him in Maine, and he told me about a few other thru-hikers to keep an eye out for, and we exchanged phone numbers. He introduced me to another couple he was hiking with, and as they all walked away I heard him tell them “that was one of the guys I’ve been most disappointed to lose track of this year…” so I guess the feeling was mutual. Sharky lives on what he describes as a “hipster chicken farm” near Waynesboro, VA, close to Rockfish Gap, so when I do return to hike the rest of the southern trail, I know where I’m starting from.

Peak maple tree in Boiling Springs, PA.

A Brief Recap

I’ve named a lot of places in this post, and I promised you an orientation of some kind, so let’s do that. I know this should be a map, but I am writing on my phone and I don’t have the graphic design wherewithal to make such a thing. If you do, and you want to translate the following notes into an infographic, please send it to me and I’ll publish my favorite in a future post. But until then, a word is worth 1/1000th of a picture so let’s get to it. 

Here’s a link to a National Park map of the whole A.T., I’ll try to pin the following to places that you can find labeled on it.

• On July 2nd, Mica and I summit Katahdin, at the northern terminus of the trail. On the 3rd we proceed southbound past Abol Bridge into the hundred-mile wilderness.

• On July 5th, after I suffered three days of increasing and still unexplained nausea, we get a shuttle off the trail from Nahmakanta Lake, and go home to Peaks Island, ME.

• Nine days later, on July 14th, we return to the Nahmakanta Lake trailhead where we left off, and continue hiking south.

• On July 16th, we are shuttled out again, this time to a motel in Millinocket because I brought a case of Covid back with me from home. We are just north of Whitecap Mountain when we get off trail this time.

• On July 19th we return again to our last extraction point and resume the hundred mile wilderness. This time it sticks, and we will stay on trail together, with occasional zero days, through Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and a few miles into eastern New York.

• On September 25th, at Pawling, New York, where the trail crosses Rt. 22, Mica and I take a series of trains down to Northern Virginia for the wedding of my niece; Mica’s cousin.

• On September 29th, after the wedding, I get a ride to Harpers Ferry, W.V. from a friend who lives in Maryland. I get back on trail at Harpers Ferry, hiking southbound.

• Meanwhile, Mica has taken the same set of trains we took down to VA in reverse, and returned to Rt. 22 in New York. He gets back on trail there, near Pawling, on September 29th. He is still hiking southbound as well, but there is now a gap of some four hundredish miles between us, me ahead hiking into Virginia, and Mica behind, continuing through New York.

• Mica at this point simply continues hiking southbound according to our original plan. So we will leave him for the moment as he crosses New York, New Jersey, and hikes into Pennsylvania over the following weeks, while I hike from Harpers Ferry south into Virginia, and through Shenandoah National Park (please for the love of god don’t call it “The Shennies.” Ugh).

• On October 11th, just outside the southern entrance of Shenandoah N.P., at Rockfish Gap, I suspend my southbound hike, due to damage to the trail and the trail towns in southwest Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee from Hurricane Helene. I take a couple zero days at a friend’s house, and then ride yet still more trains from Charlottesville back north through Washington, D.C. to Harpers Ferry again.

• On October 15th, I depart Harpers Ferry for the second time, this time northbound, intending to hike back up to Pawling, New York, where I will have finished the mid-Atlantic section I tried to skip, ultimately completing 1,333 miles from Katahdin to Rockfish Gap. At that point I will call it a season and go home for the winter. So I am currently hiking northbound through Pennsylvania, on this final leg of the journey.

• Mica continues southbound, and on October 20th our paths finally cross again at the James Fry shelter in southern Pennsylvania. We spend the night together at the shelter, where Mica will write that we have “taken up our customary positions on opposite sides of the shelter and cozied up in our sleeping bags, and tomorrow morning we'll each make our customary pot of ramen.” I miss hiking with him too, I hope we will have ample time to do more of it in the future.

• That brings us to the present. I continue northbound toward Pawling, while Mica continues southbound through Virginia. He plans to hike until he has finished the trail, run out of time, or it gets too cold to continue, whichever comes first. I should be done sometime around November 13th, weather permitting. 

Mica and I on our frosty morning together at James Fry. People always say we look the same and I don‘t know if I’ve ever really seen it before this picture but wow, yeah, ok.

So that’s what has happened so far. Everyone keeps assuring me that a little further north, Pennsylvania gets unbearably rocky. I’ve seen some of that, but as a SOBO who is only temporarily NOBO, I haven’t found any of it too hard to deal with. But even if I do end up considering Pennsylvania the worst A.T. state, I’m coming to suspect that title might be akin to “ugliest supermodel.” I am a Pennsylvania hater from way back, when my sister went to college here and I was dragged sneezing on many a drive through endless cornfields, so it brings me no pleasure to report that the Appalachian Trail in Pennsylvania is not that bad. But Delaware Water Gap and the end of PA is just five days away, leaving only a couple hundred miles of New Jersey and New York. I’m taking what may be my last zero day today here in Hamburg to eat and resupply, and then perhaps one last push on to Pawling. This experience has been overwhelming, in all senses of the word, and I don’t regret a minute of it, but I am ready to go home.  

Oh you thought I didn’t have another field picture for you? Do u even know, me bro? This is near Swatara State Park.

Thru-hiking is an intensely quantitative activity. Days, hours, minutes, miles, feet, pounds, liters, and calories are my constant concern. So here is the hike so far, in its own native idiom.

If discussion of calories and body weight is troubling to you, there is a little of that coming up. Please remember that this is all in the context of a wildly disordered way to live, and should in no way be viewed as aspirational.

Some picturesque ruins in Maryland. There was likely a sign or placard that would have told me what this is, but if so, I didn’t read it.

There’s a reality competition show called Alone that I’m lightly obsessed with. If you’ve seen it you already know why, but if not, the way it works is every season the show picks ten survivalist / bushcrafter / primitive skills types and drops each of them off alone on a patch of wilderness in some remote location like Vancouver Island, B.C. or Patagonia, generally in the late summer. They are allowed to choose ten survival items from a list—things like a tarp, fishing line and hooks, snare wire, a machete, and so forth. Each of them can bring only these items, a standard set of clothing, and a huge box of camera equipment to film themselves as they attempt to survive, completely alone, longer than the other nine competitors. Each of them also has a satellite phone and at any time they can hit the button and tell the producers they’re done, or “tap out” as the show insistently puts it. A contestant who taps out is extracted by boat or helicopter (or, in one case, some sort of multi-wheel tundra crawler) as quickly as possible and whisked back to base camp where they can eat food and drink clean water and obtain the medical care they usually need.

The show’s eleventh season aired this year, and I haven’t seen it yet because I’ve been hiking, but I’ve watched the other ten seasons. And over ten seasons, I can’t help but notice some patterns. For example, tough military dudes always do very badly, I suspect because they’ve never had to be alone for any length of time, solitude not being a major element of military life. Canadians also tend to fare badly, and I don’t really know why considering it’s a Canadian production. 

Yes, I walked a bit of Skyline Drive, and I don’t regret it.

But the pattern that’s relevant to us today is what my wife and I call: ”I’ve learned all I needed to learn out here.” This is when a guy (and it’s always a guy) is doing really well in the game early on. He’s got a great shelter, usually a good food supply, he’s pretty much mastered the necessary elements of surviving on his plot. Then somewhere toward the mid-game, usually around day 30 or 40, he’ll do one of two things: carve a game, like a chess set or what have you, or make a musical instrument. In especially dire cases it might be both. 

This is the beginning of the end for him, because both of these actions are a manifestation of loneliness. What fun is a game with no one to play against? Where is the joy in playing music for the birds and the trees? “We ransomed our dignity to the clouds, and the uncomprehending birds listened,” says the Player in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. After this, we’ll start to get a lot of lingering shots of the guy staring morosely into his fire. And then by the end of the episode, despite being warm, dry, moderately well-fed, and relatively healthy, there he is hitting the sat-phone button and telling the producers he’s tapping out.

When they extract a contestant they alway do a little “how come?” interview, and this is where he says it: “I’m doing ok. I’m finding enough food and this little log cabin I built is very cozy. I just feel like… I’ve learned everything I came here to learn.” Maybe he even believes it? But the fact is he’s voluntarily giving up half a million dollars in prize money because he’s lonely. On our side of the screen it’s always extremely obvious, because no one goes on this show purely for a personal voyage of discovery. Being a survivalist doesn’t pay well, and ultimately they’re all there for the money. 

So when my wife and fellow Alone fanatic read my first post from Virginia, she spotted it immediately. “Sounds like maybe you’ve learned all you have to learn out there, huh?” she asked me archly. I think I argued that I wasn’t talking about this hike specifically, just my general trend of doing things with other people more often, but the fact is she wasn’t wrong. Even after watching this happen to someone for ten seasons in a row, my treacherous brain was trying it out. Maybe you don’t need to hike anymore? it whispered, so quietly that I couldn’t quite hear it. Maybe you’ve… learned all that you needed to learn out here? it practically leered.

Of course that’s always wrong. The nature of learning is finding out what you don’t know you don’t know. I hate that I can’t write that without summoning the ghost of Donald Rumsfeld but regrettably, you do gotta hand it to him in this one instance. 

I had no trouble setting a track on the Blue Ridge, which I’m told that all the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined could not do in the trial of a thousand years. Sounds like a skill issue. Maybe they should take a drink from the Ohio River instead? Lol, lmao.

The point is I’m not quitting. I don’t know what I still have to learn, and I want to find out. The faithless Alone contestant in my soul has been flushed out and euthanized by the glare of recognition. I also, after that first few drizzly Virginia days, had a glorious week of perfect weather and beautiful trail through Shenandoah, which went a long way toward rekindling the joy of thru-hiking in me.  

However, my original plan of skipping the mid-Atlantic and completing the southern half of the trail is kind of out of the question. On Friday I reached Rockfish Gap. As of today there are about 300 more miles of trail open south of here in Virginia, albeit with the potential for reduced services and trail damage. After that it’s still a patchwork of open and closed sections, including about 320 miles in southwest Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee that seem likely to be closed well into next year, at best.  

I have put enough time and energy into this trail that I know I want to finish hiking the whole thing. It doesn’t need to be in a single year, but I’d rather do the south in one big section then a patchwork of little ones. Rockfish Gap to Springer Mountain is about 865 miles. That feels like a good amount to me—enough that I’ll earn back my trail legs before I’m finished with it, and the logistics will just involve getting myself to Charlottesville, which is pretty easy. Ideally I would love to tackle this early next fall, but that will depend on how the recovery goes. 

Meanwhile I still have 427 miles of Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York looming over me, and (weather permitting) two and a half free months with no demands other than hiking them and writing to you about it. I’ve had two full days off down here near Rockfish Gap to rest, resupply my food, and pick up some warmer clothes. Tomorrow I’ll head back up to Harper’s Ferry and become a Nobo for the next month or so. 

Mica is still making good time southbound in Pennsylvania, and we will cross paths there at some point. I considered rejoining him southbound, but I’m afraid we’d just find ourselves with the same problems that convinced us to separate in the first place. He’s reeling off 19+ mile days routinely, and I’m still more comfortable around 15. So I think we’ll continue on our separate, if no longer parallel, tracks. I don’t know how far he plans to go southbound; likely just as far as he can. 

I’m expecting the Mid-Atlantic section of trail in October and November to hold some lessons for me about thru-hiking in colder weather, dealing with more limited access to water, and probably something nebulous about sticking to a difficult challenge when it lacks many obvious day-to-day rewards. But I don’t know what I don’t know, so I’ll let you know when I find out.

The trail in Shenandoah isn’t all this nice, but a lot of it is.

I’m at Loft Mountain campground today, one of the big drive-in campgrounds in Shenandoah National Park. My plan was to take advantage of the nice picnic table and quiet campsite this morning to write you a proper newsletter post. But today dawned 42 degrees and windy, so instead I’m huddled in my tent, thumb-typing this quick update just so no one thinks I’ve died. A friend has kindly offered to pick me up from Rockfish Gap at the south end of the park and host me at a real house this weekend (!) so I’ll have a proper post for you on Sunday instead.

In the meantime, here are three brief items of news:

1. I have passed The Bryson Threshold

Yesterday I reached Pinefield Gap, which is 128 miles past the Potomac River bridge at Harper’s Ferry. Added to the 743 miles from Katahdin to Rt. 22 in New York, that makes 871 total miles hiked, one more than Bill Bryson managed in A Walk In The Woods. I’ve maintained my one-sided feud with Bryson for a goof, but in all honesty 870 miles of hiking is an awful lot and no one should dismiss what he accomplished.

Of course I’ve now accomplished more, so suck it, Bryson.

2. Shenandoah National Park is an amazing hike

After one day of clinging fog, the weather for the last four days has been gorgeous, and the trail here in Shenandoah has been uniformly well constructed and well maintained. It’s not a land of dramatic alpine vistas, but I’m enjoying the gentle ascents and descents, and the occasional unexpected view out across the Shenandoah Valley. Also every day or so I’ve passed one of the roadside restaurant / store combos that they call Waysides, so I’ve been able to resupply without even leaving the trail and also stuff myself with burgers, fries, and the park specialty blackberry milkshakes. If the whole trail were arranged like Shenandoah National Park, the thru-hike completion rate would be 100%.

A local told me that’s Massanutten in the middle distance.

3. A Mica Update

Mica has made it to Pennsylvania, and is enjoying not being made to sit around at burger places stuffing himself. In his trail journal, he wrote about being concerned that he was going to run out of stove fuel, so he decided to cold-soak his breakfast ramen overnight and then just heat it up quickly in the morning, to conserve fuel. Here’s Mica on how that went:

I think he’s got some potential as a writer.

Skyline Drive is pretty nice too.

Mica and I decided to part ways after my niece’s wedding, and then I spent the wedding weekend in Northern Virginia watching Hurricane Helene drown the Southern Appalachians on Tiktok. My FYP was an endless scroll of devastation from trail towns like Damascus, Virginia, Erwin, Tennessee, and Asheville, North Carolina. That distinctive mixture of grief and helplessness cut with a nauseating undertone of voyeurism as I witnessed yet another climate change fueled catastrophe in the form of disjointed cell phone videos might stand as the defining emotional experience of 2020s media. But this time I was also watching the floodwaters submerge towns I was supposed to be visiting in the next few weeks. 

Everyone at the wedding who had been following the news asked me what I was going to do, and the only answer I had was the only answer I’ve ever had on this trip: walk south and see what happens. 

Julie Lawson via Bluesky

I crossed the Potomac on the railroad bridge and walked through Harper’s Ferry in the chilly mist that I would later learn was a continuation of nearly two weeks of constant rain and gloom. The Shenandoah River was at flood stage, pale brown like chocolate milk and high enough to wash over trees and shrubs growing on rocks that are usually well above water. I looked up at the fog that swallowed the hillside just a few hundred feet above me. It felt strange to be alone. Even though Mica and I have mostly been hiking separately for the last few weeks, he was still always there. He was at camp in the morning and the evening, and I knew during the day that he was walking the same path as me, and we would compare experiences later. The trail felt empty in a way it hadn’t before. 

The weather was also aggressively gloomy and depressing. The sun was a distant memory and fat droplets of agglomerated mist plopped from the trees to slide greasily down the back of my neck. The whole scene was giving big-R Romantic Nathaniel Hawthorne “nature reflecting the emotions of the protagonist” vibes, and frankly it felt manipulative. I crushed a few dozen invasive spotted lanternflies about it, put on a Fugazi/Wu-Tang Clan mashup album as counter-programming, and started climbing. 

i guess it’s a mood.

That day was all thick fog and drips, then it rained all night. While my tent kept me mostly dry, no live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute humidity. It rained all of the next day too, and after a brief road walk along the four lanes of Leesburg Pike into a stiff rain blasted sideways at me by passing semi trucks, I called it a short day and stopped at Bear’s Den hostel just off the trail near Bluemont, Virginia. All day I had been dreaming about how nice it would be to sit in front of a cozy fireplace, while knowing how unlikely I was to find such a thing. But Bear’s Den turned out to be a wonderland where a mere $40 got me a dry bunk, laundry, a very good frozen pizza, a pint of ice cream, the company of three delightful dogs, and—incredibly—a roaring fireplace surrounded by comfortable chairs.

I also met some new SOBOs, whose trail names I’ve been seeing ahead of us in the shelter registers for months. Most of the other hikers at Bear’s Den opted to zero there for another day and try to wait out the rain, but in the morning I felt fully refreshed and revived so I headed back out into what proved to be another extremely gloomy day, but one at least without much real rain. Little Orphan Annie at the weather desk continued to promise that the sun would come out tomorrow. But after another night of steady rain, the morning crept in on soggy cat feet, the same thick wet gloom looking over shelter and forest, refusing to move on.

8 am? Noon? 4 pm? Absolutely impossible to say.

When I left Harpers Ferry, I knew that several trail towns south of Shenandoah were badly damaged by the storm, but the status of the trail itself was still a question mark. Tuesday the Appalachian Trail Conservancy sent out an email to all registered thru-hikers which read in part:

Rockfish Gap is the southern end of Shenandoah National Park, about 110 miles beyond Front Royal. The ATC doesn’t have any legal authority to close anything, but most of the state and federal parks and forests between Shenandoah and Georgia have been closed by their managing authorities, and a statement this forceful from the ATC carries the ethical weight of a closure to me. For the first time, I realized that I only have eight or nine more days of southbound trail to hike. I can still make it past the Bryson Threshold, but just barely. But while my southbound hike was suddenly almost over, compared to the loss of lives, livelihoods, and homes throughout the southern Appalachians it felt irrelevant. I had walked south to see what happened. This was one thing that happened, and mostly it wasn’t happening to me.

No one looms like Gaston…

At 3:45 on Wednesday, after fifteen more soggy miles, I stood in the mud at the Route 522 trailhead, waiting for what the sign at the information kiosk promised was a free trolley to Front Royal that would arrive at 4:15. At 3:50 it started raining again. There was nowhere to sit down that wasn’t sticky mud, so I stood in the rain in my soggy rain jacket and ate some potato chips.

No trolley at 4:15.

Comments in the Far Out app said sometimes it was late. 

No trolley at 4:30. 

My phone had one bar of very intermittent internet service and raindrops on the touchscreen made it almost impossible to use. 

No trolley at 4:45.

I missed Mica. His superpower is figuring out public transit, and he probably would have known this wait was futile an hour ago. His phone would also somehow have full internet service and he’d have already found us a ride into town. There was no one else at the trailhead and it was still raining. Finally at 5:00, with three breaks to wipe my phone screen dry, I managed to summon myself a Lyft to the motel, but it felt like a defeat. 

If you go out walking for a few months, you’re bound to learn something about yourself. Back in New York, Mica is keeping his own trail journal, which you’re welcome to read, and he’s having a great time so far. I can’t speak for him, but from my perspective it seems like he’s learning that he can go out on his own in the world and be confident and happy. 

For my part, I’ve spent a lot of time alone in the wilderness in my life, hiking the Maine woods, climbing mountains in the cold winter stillness, sea kayaking for days among the islands of Casco Bay. But in all that time alone, I’ve never felt lonely the way I do now. Throughout my life, the outdoors has given me the space to figure out who I am and what I’m capable of as a person. I don’t know if I would have been able to understand that so clearly if I weren’t watching Mica head off on his own version of the same journey. But now I feel like maybe I know what there is to know about myself, alone. Maybe what I have left to learn has more to do with other people. And this is ok. It feels right. 

I’ll go back to the trailhead tomorrow and enjoy these last eight or nine days southbound through Shenandoah National Park by myself. After that, I don’t know. I could go back to Harper’s Ferry and hike north, eventually to cross paths with Mica traveling the same section south. I could go all the way home and load the dog into my camper-converted Chevy Suburban and head out on the road to support Mica, and see what the trail is like from that perspective. It will probably depend on how the next week goes.

So I guess my real plan is still the same as it’s always been: walk south and see what happens.

CONTENT REASSURANCE: Is that the opposite of “content warning?” I don’t know. Anyway I would like to reassure you that nothing in today’s newsletter is likely to make you cry. So you should feel confident reading it at work, or on public transit, or in front of United States Deputy Secretary of Labor Julie Su, or wherever you happen to be. If the last post made you cry, I’m not sorry and I’ll do it again as soon as possible, but that almost certainly won’t be today. Also if you replied to the last one to let me know the exact location and circumstances under which it broke you, thank you so much, that’s truly what I live for. 

PROGRAMMING NOTE: While we’re up here in the non-diegetic space, I should also say that Today on Trail will be off this coming week for travel and wedding festivities. I will return to your inbox next Sunday, from ✨Virginia✨ if all goes as planned. 

OH YEAH, ALSO: I talked to Mark Yarm for Depth Perception’s Long Lead Newsletter about what it’s been like writing from the trail and my overall lack of media strategy.

That’s a series wrap on New England, folks.

Yesterday afternoon we left New England, crossing the Connecticut-New York border for the third and final time at Hoyt Road, mile 736.1. Today we reached NY Route 22 north of Pawling, got lunch at Tony’s Deli, and then walked the mile and a half into town. That’s 743 miles of the northern trail done. Next week I’ll skip ahead to the Potomac River bridge at Harper’s Ferry, mile 1170.7, which is 434.6 trail miles from here. I put that here in the newsletter mostly so I’ll know where to look it up when I inevitably forget the exact number of miles I owe the Appalachian Trail spirits.  

743 miles is almost exactly one third of the trail. On one hand, it feels unfathomable that anyone could hike that much trail two more times. But on the other hand, it’s starting to feel normal to me to be out here. A couple nights ago I was lying in my tent and I suddenly realized I felt at home. Not that I want to live in the woods forever—I still miss the rest of my family a lot—but I felt like I was in a place I understand and belong. You know when you get home and close the door behind you and all your senses come off alert? I felt like that. I’m not sure when this happened but I think it was recently. I’ve been sleeping better too, although the inflatable pad still has me waking up with numb arms more regularly than I’d like. 

I did indeed park myself here for a while.

The rest of Massachusetts and Connecticut were pretty uneventful. It hasn’t rained in weeks. I had an outstanding zero day in Great Barrington, MA, which has friendly locals and many good food options, although no outfitters for gear replacement. In the brief 52 miles of trail in Connecticut, Cornwall Bridge supplied not one but two different chocolate croissants (the one at the shoppy shop was significantly better than the one at the fancy bakery, surprisingly), not one but two different iced coffees (the quality of which was exactly the inverse of the croissants), and a full gas station resupply when I accidentally ran out of food due to miscalculating how many days it would be to Kent. Kent itself, when we finally got there, had a laundromat, a coin operated shower, free restrooms, a burger and two excellent beers, and a grocery store all within about one block of each other. Kent also had several friendly locals. I’m starting to think locals in general are friendly? More research on this is needed.

✊

Tomorrow Mica and I embark on a public transit tour of the Northeast corridor comprising the Metro North railway, the New York subway, Amtrak, and the Washington, DC Metro. Then Sunday we go our separate ways, me to Harper’s Ferry and him back up here to Pawling. We’ve had a week and about 75 miles to consider our decisions and we both feel confident we’re doing the right thing, but I am gonna miss him. I hope he catches up to me soon.

That’s it really, this is not so much a polished essay as a little update on how we’re doing, which is: pretty good. I hope you are also well, and I’ll see you in the south.

Duck.

“Life is made up of meetings and partings. That is the way of it.” That line always wrecks me when Kermit says it in The Muppets’ Christmas Carol, and it was the thought that finally broke my fragile composure yesterday when Mica and I sat on a rock overlooking Great Barrington, MA, and he told me we’d be parting ways in October. We both had some big feelings in the woods, but that’s what the woods are for. And ultimately, this isn’t bad news. Let me explain.

Thru-hiking involves a surprising amount of math. Every day I add up mileage to figure out how far it is to the next shelter or the next town. I multiply average speed by distance to figure out where I should be trying to go and when I might arrive. On Sunday, after hiking nearly 19 miles from just outside of Dalton, MA to the Upper Goose Pond cabin, I found myself trying to estimate how long the rest of the hike might take. The news was not good.

I started my estimate assuming we’d be in Pawling, NY by October 1st, at the Route 22 road crossing—trail mile 743. My niece is getting married in Northern Virginia at the end of next week and we had originally hoped to be close enough on the trail to get a ride to the wedding from friends, but that hasn’t been a possibility for some time. Plan B is to take the train down, which will be easy since we’ll be somewhere in Metro North territory, and New York to DC is one of the only routes in this backwards country that actually has good train service. Now that we’re close enough to make firmer plans, it looks like Pawling is the easiest spot to hop on the train south, and therefore we’d be back in Pawling by the first.

Assuming the trail is 2,200 miles total, that would leave us with 1,457 more miles to hike. Taking December 31st as a deadline to finish, we’d have 92 days to cover that distance, which means we’d have to hike an average of 15.8 miles per day. Since September 1st, as we hiked all of Vermont and most of Massachusetts, we’ve averaged 13.3 miles per day, but in just the six days since we left Bennington, VT, we’ve been up to 15 miles per day. When I did all this math in my cozy bunk at the Upper Goose Pond cabin, I thought “15.8? Well that’s not so bad. We’re almost doing that now.”

A different cozy bunk, in one of Massachusetts’s lovely bunk-and-loft style shelters.

But the next day I had plenty of time to reconsider, as I doggedly followed Mica through another 17 miles of the Berkshires. I’ve been dealing with tendinitis in my right ankle since Maine, and it got much worse in New Hampshire. It’s better on some days and less better on others, but most days I’m walking with a deep ache in my whole lower right leg that only improves if I take five or ten minutes out of every hour to sit down and rest it. It’s tolerable, but it is slowing me down. Terrain that Mica can cover at three miles per hour, I am generally only doing 2.5 or 2.8, especially on descents which are much harder on my ankle. Averaged out over many days, it means we’re going slower together than Mica could by himself. 

I also need more rest days. Neither of us even know if Mica would ever take a zero on his own—every day we’ve taken off so far has been at my insistence. He’s always miserable the first day after a zero too, as if resting paradoxically makes him weaker. “Like Martin Sheen at the beginning of Apocalypse Now,” I said, but he didn’t know what I was talking about.   

And finally, I need to find time to write. You may have noticed I didn’t send a newsletter this past Sunday. That was because covering Southern Vermont and Western Mass at 15 miles per day has left me with no energy to sit down and type words into the phone. I’ve had some good ideas, but by the end of the day all I’m fit for is to boil up my Spanish Rice and go to sleep. I need at least four solid, alert-brained, could-be-hiking hours to write a newsletter post, which means I simply must go slower. I gradually realized that if 15 miles a day for a week is wearing me out in the gentle terrain of Western Mass, almost 16 miles a day for three straight months is simply not going to happen. I do not have enough time to hike the whole Appalachian Trail this year. 

At lunchtime on Monday, after spending the morning grumpily hiking and thinking about all of this, I came to a shaded picnic table at the top of a sun drenched field of wildflowers overlooking a tidy Massachusetts farm and more rolling green Berkshire hills. It was about as idyllic a spot as anyone could possibly imagine, but did I savor my simple repast whils’t gazing ‘pon the clouds and thinking poetic thoughts? Nope. Instead I called my wife and warned her that I was going to complain at her for twenty minutes so that I didn’t find myself complaining at Mica instead. Then I complained at her for twenty minutes, as promised, delivering a much less organized, coherent, or mature version of the list of problems above. 

Not the view from my actual lunch spot but the sort of view you find in the Berkshires, generally.

When I ran out complaints, and admitted that I was in fact currently in an absurdly beautiful spot eating lunch, and yes the weather was absolutely perfect, she asked me two very perceptive questions. First she said, “Put aside every other problem here. What are your goals for this hike?” 

We both remembered the first time she asked me that question, last fall, which she followed with “I mean, to hike the whole trail of course, but what else?” I’d had to admit that I’d made a list of goals and “hike the whole trail” wasn’t actually one of them. I added it, but only in a half-hearted way. It would be a nice bonus if it worked out, but as the hike has progressed it’s become clear to me that my only hard distance goal is the Bryson Threshold: 870 miles. As long as I cover more of the trail than Bill Bryson did in “A Walk in the Woods,” the rest feels completely arbitrary. If I hike 1,800 miles instead of 2,200, am I going to feel bad about that? Absolutely not. If I hike 1,000 miles? Amazing! Who can even conceive of such a thing? I will chew glass and crawl on four broken limbs to make it to 871 miles if necessary, because I am, as I’ve said before, excessively competitive. But beyond that, I don’t really care very much what the distance number ends up being. 

My only real goals are to write a good newsletter and enjoy my hike. That’s it. And for the past week or so I haven’t felt like I was accomplishing either one, which made it obvious why I was so grouchy. Having casually sorted out that whole mess, my wife went on to say: “So you know you can’t finish the trail without sacrificing both the ability to write about it and the ability to enjoy it. And you don’t really care that much about hiking the whole trail. So all you have to decide is: which miles are you going to skip?” She pointed out that I could come back to New York after the wedding and continue through New York, New Jersey, and the dreaded Pennsylvania, universally hailed as the worst part of the whole trail. If I did that, I’d probably make it to somewhere in Virginia by the end of December. Through Shenandoah, but not the Smokies. 

Or, she suggested, I could take the train down to Virginia and just… not come back. After the wedding I could get a ride to Harper’s Ferry, roughly the midpoint of the trail, and continue south from there. Skipping about 350 miles of the mid-Atlantic would leave me with 1,100 miles to go at a very reasonable 12 miles per day average. If I finished, I would end up hiking over 1,800 miles total, or a little more than 80% of the trail. If I felt motivated enough, I could potentially even take a month in the spring and hike north from Harper’s Ferry back to Pawling, completing a calendar year thru-hike if I finished before July. Most importantly, this plan would have me hiking Virginia and the Smokies, the big mountains of the South that I really want to experience, while I still have the trail legs that will let me enjoy them.  

I understood immediately that this was what I was going to do. The realization was like puzzle pieces clicking together in my head. The only remaining question was what would Mica do? It’s been clear for a while that I’m slowing him down. He hasn’t complained about it, but as we’ve gotten stronger and he’s started to do more 16 and 17 mile days, it’s becoming obvious that he could go even faster, while I’m starting to wear down. It’s not a sure thing that he can average nearly 16 miles a day for three solid months, but it’s also not out of the question. Neither of us know what his limits are yet.

Monday night over dinner we talked about all of this. I told him I was going to continue south from Harper’s Ferry after the wedding, and that I was not going to be as ambitious as we’ve tried to be so far. He could stay with me, with the understanding that I’m going to go slower than he’d like, or he could come back to Pawling and see what he’s really capable of on his own. 

When I imagined him deciding to stay with me, or deciding not to, I was surprised to find that deep down, I didn’t have a preference. Or more accurately that my preference is for him to do what feels most compelling to him. One of my other original goals for this hike was to lay the foundation for a relationship with Mica as two adults, as equals, and here we are. This is a choice faced by two adults, each with their own ambitions and limitations, and I was glad to find that I didn’t want to sway him either way. I just wanted to know what he would choose.

He said he’d have to think about it, and I thought he might not decide for a while, but on our lunch break Tuesday, as we sat on a rocky outcrop in more of the seemingly endless Berkshire fall sun, he started to say something and then immediately choked up. It took a few minutes, which was ok because I was starving and needed some more time to eat just about every remaining item in my food bag, but eventually he told me that he was going to come back alone and try to hike the whole trail. That he’d decided on that goal at the beginning of this trip, and he had to do his best to see it through. He said he knew right away, the day before, but he didn’t know how he could possibly tell me. 

“It feels like a betrayal,” he said. “You planned this trip, and showed me the app I needed to get, and helped me get all my gear, and taught me how to thru-hike. How can I just abandon you now?” I shook my head, thinking about Kermit and helpless to actually say anything yet. “But then I realized,” he went on, “that this is, like, what parenting is? I mean this whole hike I’ve been literally and symbolically walking away from home, and I guess as a parent, you always know your kids are going to leave you eventually. I guess it’s kind of the point?” 

Had I been able to speak, I’d have said exactly the same. It’s the furthest thing from a betrayal—this is the best possible outcome for a parent. You give your kids whatever they’ll take and hope they can do something with it that you couldn’t. For Mica to say that I taught him to thru-hike, and now he’s going to take those skills and find out what he’s capable of? Maybe go on to finish a big hike that I couldn’t do myself? What parent could hope for more than that?

In theory, he will eventually catch up with me and we’ll finish the trail together. But there’s a lot of days and miles between now and then. Who knows what will happen? I’m sure neither of us shall forget this first parting there was among us, but that is the way of it. 

It’s the opening shot of Fantastic Mr. Fox. You see it, right?

Mica discovered they had Yahtzee at Zealand Falls Hut, where we stopped in the early afternoon the day after completing the Presidential Range. I had made a snap decision that I was done hiking for the day and not interested in leaving what looked like a very cozy hut, so I bought us bunks since it was too early to ask for a work-for-stay. This was the day before Zealand and Garfield Ridge, and it was similarly cold and wet, although less so on both counts. I didn’t know that at the time, of course, I was just tired. But with a whole afternoon to kill, we had an epic Yahtzee battle. For two complete rounds, neither of us marked zero in any of the scoring boxes. When we finished the third round after dinner and added up all the scores, I had won. This was my first good New Hampshire experience. 

Ensconced in a cozy third-level bunk at Zealand Falls Hut.

So far I’ve given you the impression that New Hampshire was nothing but traumatic, because it mostly was. But with the benefit of some distance—139 miles, to be exact—and nearly two weeks of psychological recovery in The Shire, I can admit that I did have some good New Hampshire experiences, which this newsletter’s animating spirit of honesty and transparency compels me to share. 

Beating Mica in a game might seem like a small thing, but I cannot stress enough how much “Mica always beats me in games” is a fundamental part of our relationship, ever since he was a little kid. At an age where most parents were letting their kids win to encourage self-confidence, I was wondering what happened when Mica demolished me at some board game that we had just taken the plastic wrap off but that he was somehow already playing at a grand master level. I’ve mostly learned to decline to play games with any of my three kids, all of whom share this same freakish talent, because at heart I’m too competitive to enjoy a game I know from the start I will surely lose. If you think this makes me a bad parent, all I can say is that it’s important to know your weaknesses. 

The next good New Hampshire experience came the day after Garfield Ridge. We climbed Mt. Garfield in the same relentless cloud bank that had followed us throughout the Whites so far. But about a half mile below tree line as we headed up Mt. Lafayette the sky suddenly cleared, and for the first time in a week we saw the sun. We immediately stopped and I spread out my sodden jackets on some bushes to dry, and then just stood in the sun with my eyes closed and my arms spread out for a solid fifteen minutes. I know this isn’t a profound revelation or anything, but direct sunlight is low-key goated when restoring a sense of safety and emotional well-being is the vibe.

It is August 22nd, 2024. The temperature on Zealand Ridge is maybe fifty degrees, maybe lower, and it’s raining. Everything I’m wearing is wet. Wet rain jacket over a wet wool t-shirt. Wet rain pants over wet shorts. My shoes and socks are wet from the mud and the streams. Earlier in the day I slipped on a wet bog bridge and did a full banana-peel Vaudeville slapstick pratfall. You stop for a snack, but as soon as I stop I get very cold. I have to keep moving. I eat a Luna bar as fast as I can and tell you I’ll meet you at Galehead Hut. I worry about you a little when we split up, and I usually like to be the one coming along behind, but this time you have new raingear that I bought you at the Pinkham Notch Visitor’s Center, and you’re obviously doing better in these conditions than me. I should have bought myself some new raingear.

A little later I reach the summit of Mt. Guyot for the second time in my life, and for the second time I’m greeted with freezing cold rain and high wind. I don’t know what I did to this mountain, but it wants me dead. The wind across the bare summit cuts right through my soaking wet ultra-breathable rain jacket, and I start shivering immediately. I know I need to add a layer, and I know that whatever layer I choose won’t be dry again today, or probably for some time. It won’t be dry later to keep me warm at camp. I put on my synthetic puffy, because it will add more wind protection than my sweater. It’s immediately wet, but I am warm enough now. I start thinking that I’m probably going to make it to Galehead Hut, but that this would be a very bad time to break an ankle. It makes me feel better to know that you’ll be coming along behind me, at least.

I am not impressed by the summit of South Twin Mountain either.

It is September 1st, 2024. We’re sitting under the bridge over the White River in West Hartford, Vermont, eating lunch. The concrete foundation of the bridge pillar is warm beneath us from the sun. On the far side of the river, the current ripples over a series of shallow rocks. On the near side a wide eddy loops sluggishly back upstream. In front of us a half collapsed lawn chair and a tackle box sit on the boulders, as if awaiting the imminent return of some Green Mountain Huck Finn. Flickers of sunlight reflect off the water onto the concrete underside of the bridge. 

You’re slicing a cucumber you got from a basket in front of a house on the way into town. The basket had a sign that said: “Free cuc’s for hikers.” We debated that spelling briefly at the time. I pointed out that “cucumber” doesn’t actually have a “k” in it, but you argued that clarity overrides orthographical strictness here, and “bike” sets a well known precedent. I had to agree. There was no need to even mention the apostrophe. 

The perfect lunch spot, just minutes before Plum and Zeb cannonball back into our lives.

I’m looking away from the river for a moment when I hear a whoop and then a heavy splash. A little later there is a second splash. I tilt my chin at the heads now bobbing in the river, and say “gotta be hikers.” You nod. 

They do turn out to be hikers, when we finish our lunch and cross the river to find the trail on the other side. In fact they are two other southbounders who we’ve met before. One is Zeb, a Michigander we first ran into way back at Abol Bridge, at the infamous “last moment I felt okay” before the hundred mile wilderness fiasco, and who miraculously recognized me again at the Hikers Welcome hostel a few days ago in New Hampshire. The other is Plum, who I met on the way up Moosilauke and you met slightly earlier, on the summit ridge of Kinsman. 

We will all hike together for a bit, then leapfrog each other for the rest of the day, and wind up at the same shelter that night. I’ll hang up a string of lights that I got at the REI in Williston and haven’t told you about yet, declaring that the shelter is in party mode. Plum and Zeb will build a campfire, only our second campfire of the trail so far. We’re Sobos in Vermont and we’re euphoric with the new certainty that we’re going to live.

It is August 22nd, 2024, later that afternoon. I’m huddled in your rain poncho in the muddy cooking area at Garfield Ridge shelter. Cold, mist, wind. The trees around the campsite are all dead, snapped off at about eight feet as if some giant had swept a careless hand across them. A worn tarp is suspended above the cooking area, tied off to the jagged stumps. It flaps heavily in the swirling wind, showering a fine mist down from above to join the mist blowing in underneath it sideways.  

I already had dinner but even in my quilt inside the shelter I was cold. You sit down next to me and light your stove to cook ramen. “I’m gambling that some hot chocolate will warm me up more than sitting out here to make it will freeze me,” I say, and you laugh. I can see in your eyes that you’re doing fine, and that knowledge warms me up a little too. You’re having an adventure. 

The hot chocolate works. Back in the shelter, wrapped in my quilt and wearing the fleece sweater I carefully kept dry all day, I discover there’s good cell phone service, and between the warm liquid sugar and the virtual connection with people elsewhere in the world who are safe and dry and going about their normal life, I feel like I’m having an adventure too. I start to feel like this moment is already a memory we can look back on and laugh about, a little bit. 

The last bit of trail before Garfield Ridge shelter is “climb this waterfall.”

It is September 5th, 2024. I’m sitting at a picnic table behind the red barn at the Stone’s Throw farm stand in Shrewsbury, Vermont. I’m eating a mid-morning snack of fresh sourdough wheat bread with guacamole and cheese curds, and drinking a cold chocolate milk. It’s almost 11 am but somehow the vegetable patch is still sparkling with dew. Sheep graze a nearby field, watched over by a few alpacas. I’m talking to my wife on the phone. “Vermont is literally The Shire,” I tell her, “You walk up and down a few gentle mountains, and then every 25 miles or so there’s a delightful farm stand or coffee shop.” Another hiker at the table laughs. 

We passed each other as I was walking on the road to the farm stand, and you were headed back to the trail. You told me you’d been there for almost an hour. Lately you’ve been leaving camp earlier than me. Sometimes I catch up to you during the day, and sometimes I don’t. After the first time, you told me you realized you’d never actually hiked alone before. I was surprised at first, but then I realized of course not, when would you have? I’ve hiked alone a lot—most of my hiking has been alone, probably. I like hiking with you, but I’m also glad you can have the experience of hiking by yourself. Making your own decisions about when to stop and when to keep going, learning to enjoy your own company. 

I wasn’t planning to stop long at the farm stand, but the food is too good to pass up and the sunlight diffused through the awning over the picnic table makes it the perfect temperature. I stay for more than an hour, and I know it means I’ll get to camp long after you, but it’s fine. Everything is fine here in The Shire. We’re all going to live.

Lunchtime in The Shire.

We’re in Rutland, Vermont, at the Days Inn next to the Denny’s because the Inn at Long Trail was full last night and we needed to rest and resupply before we turn definitively South at last and head toward Manchester Center, about 60 miles away. Vernont is really living up to its reputation so far, with lovely pine needle cushioned dirt trails, frequent short side quests to interesting country stores and coffee shops, and a plethora of beautiful open fields. I think I’ve taken more pictures of just the fields in Vermont than I took in all of New Hampshire, so I’ll illustrate this post with some of my favorites.

Out here in the fields…

There is still a lot of climbing and descending in Vermont. It’s a wrinkly land, with every climb containing numerous smaller ups and downs. The trail so far generally climbs up 800 or so feet above a road and stream, then gradually rises and falls for a few miles, then drops down another 800 feet to the next road, and so on. In a fifteen mile day we’re still doing three or four thousand feet of climbing, but it’s somehow not as menacing as three thousand feet of New Hampshire climbing, or as aggressively vertical as three thousand feet of Maine climbing. Vermont is basically all what Campbell Scott, in “Top of the Food Chain,” called “the hilly lumpy bumpy part of town outside of town.” The ongoing tendinitis in my right ankle yearns for the flatlands of Massachusetts and Connecticut, but the rest of me is pretty happy to have a hundred more miles of Vermont to enjoy.

I’m still trying to gather my thoughts and recover from the general trauma of New Hampshire enough to write about it, so in the meantime I thought let’s have a meeting of the Appalachian Book Club. I’ve brought four books to share that I read so far on the trail, and I hope you’ll recommend some more in the comments. 

Ok I think this was technically in New Hampshire but it’s the part of New Hampshire that’s actually Vermont so it counts.

A Walk in the Woods, by Bill Bryson

If you’re reading this newsletter you’ve surely read A Walk in the Woods. But have you read it lately? The main thing I remembered about this book was that Bryson didn’t actually hike the whole trail, and anecdotally that’s the main thing everyone else remembers about it too. But I think our collective impression of Bryson’s failure as a hiker stems mostly from his success as a self-deprecating humorist. He actually hiked more than 800 miles of the trail, which is a whole lot of miles by any standard. We’re at mile 487 right now, and believe me, 800 is a lot of miles. If I met a section hiker who’s done 800 miles of the trail, and I have, I would congratulate them for the impressive accomplishment, not sneer that they didn’t even finish the trail.

So, when I re-read A Walk In The Woods earlier in the hike without the expectation that I was reading the definitive chronicle of an AT thru-hike, I was much more able to enjoy the book on its own terms. It offers a lot of trail history, both cultural and geographic. Bryson also spends a surprising amount of time on comprehensive critiques of both the Forest Service and the U.S. National Parks, which feels a bit dated now. But the 90’s were the last moments before criticizing the Forest Service put you on a particular side of the culture wars, so it’s interesting to see that critique made from a hard-line ecological perspective. 

If you haven’t read A Walk In The Woods yet, please do yourself a favor and rectify that oversight promptly. And if you read it once in the distant past, I would say it has enough substance to reward a revisit. But if you ever find yourself sharing a trail with me and you want to hear a forty five minute tirade, ask me what Bryson got wrong about the moose (it is: everything). 

A Walk in the Park, by Kevin Fedarko

This worthy follow-up in the “A Walk In…” family of books is journalist and former Colorado River poop raft captain Kevin Fedarko’s story of thru-hiking the Grand Canyon with his photographer partner Pete McBride. It turns out thru-hiking the Grand Canyon is barely possible for the most experienced and prepared canyon rat, which Fedarko and McBride are absolutely not. 

It’s not an Appalachian story in any way, of course, but it is a satisfying tale of two ignorant newbies learning what they didn’t even know they didn’t know about hiking, with an enormous amount of help from experts. It’s also full of cultural and geological history of the Grand Canyon, which gets a bit intrusive toward the middle of the book and makes the pacing sag a little. I was glad I pushed through, because the second half is well worth it.

Fedarko’s writing is terrific. His talent I most envy is a gift for describing landscapes in a way that’s almost dreamlike, more metaphorical than literal. I often found myself not so much visualizing the land he was describing but rather feeling what it felt like to see it, which I think is a deeper and better reading experience. There’s also a thread running through the story about his relationship with his father, and the way that fathers can pass on a love for the outdoors to their kids, and you bet he got me in the feels with all that business. 

Vermont!

Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver

Through the last hundred or so miles of Maine and most of New Hampshire I read Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, and the highest praise I can give it is that it kept me awake and turning pages after some of the most exhausting hiking days of my entire life. This is flat-out one of the best novels I’ve ever read. It’s a retelling of David Copperfield set in the Appalachian Mountains of Western Virginia in the early 2000s, as the opioid epidemic was starting to massacre entire poor communities at scale. And all of those details combined to make me think I wouldn’t like it, so if you’re feeling that way too, forget them. It’s a book about people—real people—the things they do and the things that are done to them, and how difficult it is to tell the difference. It’s both funny and heartbreaking and you will fall in love with at least a few of the people you meet in there. It’s a whole world, the way the very best novels are, and I’m sad that I had to leave it. 

The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake

Breece Pancake (the D’J was an Atlantic magazine typo of his middle initials that he liked and decided to keep) was a West Virginian associate professor of English and short story writer who killed himself in 1977, at age 26, with only six published stories. This collection adds six more unpublished stories and I believe contains his entire literary output.

There are a lot of “undiscovered geniuses” in American letters, and most of them are undiscovered for a reason, but Breece Pancake is the real thing. A couple of these stories tip over the razor’s edge into melodrama, but the best of them are perfect short stories—deep enough to capture whole lifetimes but short enough to land like a punch, or what Stephen King called “a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.”   

Pancake’s stories are all set in more or less the same Appalachia as Demon Copperhead, but a few decades earlier, and if you just finished the latter novel and miss the places and people you met in it, these stories feel like a prequel of sorts. They’re grittier and less funny, but no less human. 

Onward…

So that’s one book of Appalachian adventure, one of non-Appalachian adventure, and two of Appalachian culture. I hope that sets the parameters appropriately broadly, and I need some new books to read so please join me in the comments with your own recommendations. 

The stove flame cast flickering shadows around the lean-to as my pot of Knorr Spanish rice simmered. We had arrived late to the Tall Tales Shelter, just before the Maine-Vermont border (or just after it, depending), and the sun quickly disappeared behind the mountains to the east, leaving us sunk in arboreal gloom. But despite the lateness of the hour we had found the shelter empty… or so we thought. 

“What was the deal with Goose Eye Mountain?” I asked as I squeezed the mud out of my jacket. “Three summits? It seems excessive.”

“Right?” said Mica, stirring his bowl of instant mashed potatoes and oatmeal. “And just before the main summit, were those… vertical bog boards? With ladder rungs nailed across them? How can a sheer cliff also be a mud bog?”

Suddenly a gravelly voice emerged from what I had taken to be a discarded heap of wool blankets in a dark corner of the lean-to. ”Ah, ye be wantin’ to know the story of Goose Eye Mountain, be ye?” 

Mica and I both screamed politely, and the heap of blankets straightened itself up into the shape of a slightly more upright heap of blankets. We heard the snikt of a lighter and its flame revealed a general suggestion of whiskeryness and flannel before going out. A red coal glowed brightly and then dimmed, and the smell of weed smoke drifted across the shelter. 

“I, uh. I guess we be. I mean, be we. That is… yeah?” I said eloquently. 

“Aye…” said the voice, and coughed for quite a while. When the coughing ended, it was quiet again. The stove hissed. The quiet stretched out as long as narrative tension demanded, then just a tiny bit longer, until I started to say ”So—” and then the voice came again, louder than before, as if it had been waiting for one of us to say something so that it could interrupt us.

”WELL,” said the voice, “I suppose ye know that Paul Bunyan retired to Maine?” 

“Of course,” I said with barely disguised contempt. “Everyone knows that.”

”Well, Mr. Smarty Britches, and did ye also know that he retired right here to this very area, just before the Maine-Vermont border (or just after it, depending)?”

”I—“

”Exactly,” the voice cut me off. “Well what most folks don’t know is that when he retired, Paul Bunyan wanted to find himself a place to relax and look at the clouds a bit and smoke his pipe, where everyone would stop pestering him to re-route this river or chop down that giant tree. And he reckoned Goose Eye Mountain, surrounded as it is by nearly a million acres of impenetrable mud bog, was the perfect spot.

”Well Goose Eye Mountain was much taller in them days, in fact it was famous for being the tallest mountain in all of Maine, all New England in fact. They used to call Mount Washington ‘The Goose Eye Mountain of the Whites.’ But no one had ever climbed it, due the mud bog problem. In fact no one had ever properly seen it, they simply deduced it must be there, from the gravitational effects measured upon other mountains.”

“How did they—“ I began.

”Magnets,” snapped the voice. “Now hush your fool mouth while I tell you this tale proper-like, without all these gol’darn framing narrative quotation marks.”

I turned off my stove and began to eat my Spanish rice, stifling the usual wails of pain as the boiling hot rice gradually burned all of the skin off the inside of my mouth, and the voice continued its tale without further interruptions or quotation marks.

The sky outside the windows of the Mt. Washington summit cafeteria was the color of a television tuned to a dead channel. The mountains of New Hampshire have consistently provided us views of a blank white nothing, like everything past the cliff we stand on has simply been deleted. The summit of Mt. Washington was so cloud infested that not only could we see nothing beyond the mountain, we had to follow signs to even find the giant cafeteria and gift shop. There was a crowd of tourists at the summit cairn, blasting music from a bluetooth speaker and woo-hooing. Behind chain link construction fences, a backhoe lurked in the fog. 

The summit of Mt. Washington is not exactly a wilderness experience, and we didn’t see any of its famously breathtaking views. But on the other hand I was able to put on some dry clothes and get a pretty decent bowl of chili and a hot cup of coffee in the cafeteria. The Marxist in me would point out that a pretty decent bowl of chili and a hot cup of coffee are the material conditions necessary for life, while a breathtaking view and a solitary wilderness experience are merely bourgeois aesthetic desires. Much to think about. 

The real Mt. Washington summit picture.

I said all those nice things about the Maine woods last week, and then the Mahoosucs tried to kill me on the way out. I think they’re jealous, because while the Maine woods are amazing, the last eleven miles of the Appalachian Trail southbound in Maine are absolutely dreadful.

The fun started at the summit of Old Speck Mountain, with a harrowing descent down several steep, featureless rock slabs to Speck Pond. It would become clear that “a harrowing descent down steep, featureless rock slabs” is the main theme of this section, and these slabs serve as both a prelude to and variation on that theme, with not only tricky footing but a sense of exposure from their placement on the side of a cliff that appeared to simply drop away below my feet. I don’t think I could actually fall off the mountain here, but it constantly felt like I was about to. 

The Speck Pond campsite offers a gorgeous, nearly new shelter which my dumb ass didn’t sleep in because it was supposed to be clear all night, and I thought “hey, empty tent platform!” A tent is a very nice place to sleep unless it rains. I know this seems counterintuitive but think about it: even if your tent keeps the rain out (and few really do), you will be cozy and snug listening to the rain drum on the fabric above you precisely until the moment you need to do anything else, then you’ll be outside and wet. A shelter has the drawbacks of chilly drafts (sometimes), mice (usually), and snoring hikers (always), but at least you can stand up to get dressed. 

The night we spent at Speck Pond, the “mostly clear” weather forecast turned out to mean a huge thunderstorm and forty five minute tent-flooding downpour. Somehow one end wall of my tent got pushed in by a combination of wind and rain and started dumping all that water inside the “bathtub floor” that’s supposed to keep me dry. If I were making tents, I would probably call it a “boat floor” and then make sure I understood which side the water was meant to be on, but that’s just me. Some hasty mopping converted my tent floor to merely wet and my towel to soaked, which seemed like a fair trade. The initial deluge was followed by hours of steady drizzle that continually splashed off that lovely wooden tent platform and under the eaves of my tent, leaving me and everything else inside evenly damp, like a wrung-out dishcloth.  

“Look how good I did setting up my tent on the platform.” What a dumbass.

Monday dawned… well, that’s not quite right. Monday failed to dawn, the air instead gradually became a uniform steely dark gray, like if a day were also a World War Two battleship. This is August 12th in the inland Maine woods, notoriously the hottest time of year in the hottest year any human being has ever lived through, and I was huddled in the cooking area wearing literally every (uniformly damp) item of clothing I have in my backpack and still shivering while I waited for water to boil for coffee. I sincerely think the temperature was in the forties, but I can’t prove it to you. The air was equal parts air and water, like Maxwell’s demon had gone on smoko and said we should work out how to separate them ourselves. It was hard to tell whether the air was making me wet or vice versa. Possibly both. I ate breakfast with Mica, who had slept in the shelter and “didn’t even notice it had rained.” I stuffed all my gear and several extra pounds of Old Speck Mountain’s finest drizzle into my pack and we set off.

The first thing we did heading south out of Speck Pond was climb Mahoosuc Arm, which is a mountain, despite the name. This climb is nothing much, because we were already basically at the summit elevation of Mahoosuc Arm, so I will reluctantly say: this part was fine. There is a viewpoint marked on our trail app near the summit of Mahoosuc Arm, and we stopped to admire the view. It was a uniform steely dark gray, like if a view were also a World War Two battleship, very close up. The air was so opaque it somehow felt worse to look at it than to stare at our feet. 

Which is a good thing because what followed the summit of Mahoosuc Arm was a descent down Mahoosuc Arm that the Far Out app describes as “one of the steepest on the Appalachian Trail, with the trail dropping 1500 feet from Mahoosuc Arm to the edge of the notch in just one mile.” That’s an average slope of about 28 percent, which if that doesn’t mean anything to you, picture the steepest street you’ve ever seen. Got it in your head? Pretty steep right? It’s way steeper than that. 

And the average slope here is made up of short stretches of merely steep descent punctuated by long stretches of high-angle bedrock, green with algae, running with water, and edged with a dubious assortment of loose rocks, roots, and mud. Every step is a split second calculation of weight, balance, counterbalance, friction, and gravity. Every step is a choice: go to the left? Go to the right? Is this slab too steep to inch straight down, or can I wedge my poles into some minute crevice in the rock ahead and send it? Will that mud on the edge help or just grease my shoes right down this next thirty feet of sheer rock face? 

An entire mile of this. Conservatively, at least one thousand seven hundred individual decisions. I’m not scared to do this kind of climbing, I’ve done a lot of it on both rock and ice, and I’m out here by choice. But it is mentally exhausting. Physically exhausting too, but the amount of sustained concentration it requires is really what made this mile of descent so draining. 

It’s hard to tell in the picture but this is somewhat steeper than a normal staircase.

But guess what? Right after the steepest mile on the entire A.T. comes what is generally called “the hardest mile on the A.T.” That descent somehow wasn’t the hardest mile! There is a harder one, and here it is. This is Mahoosuc Notch, where the trail passes for about a mile along the bottom of a deep, narrow cleft between Mahoosuc Mountain and Fulling Mill Mountain. Over the centuries, every boulder that has fallen from either cliff above has collected here, in this tiny gap. And now, according to the sadist who routed this trail, it is our task to hike through them. 

The trail here allows only very occasional moments of what you could call “walking” or even “climbing” in any normal sense. It’s mostly a boulder scramble, over and under rocks that range in size from “large car” to “small house.” Again this goes on for an entire mile. It took me and Mica an hour and a half to get through it, and believe me, we are absolute beasts at this kind of thing, especially for a cold, wet, and slippery day. Two hours is the standard estimate. We met other hikers who reported that it took them between “four hours” and “what day is it now?” 

“The” “Trail”

Honestly, I can imagine the Notch being fun. On a sunny day, if you hiked up the Notch Trail from Success Pond Road just to do that one mile of scrambling, full of high calorie town food, clothed in dry sportswear, carrying a tiny day pack with some candy and a bottle of water? Sure. It would be a great time. Even as titanically Not In The Mood as I was that day, I will say it wasn’t my least favorite part. But I would still like to meet the person who decided the trail needed to go down Mahoosuc Arm and through the Notch, so I could earnestly and thoughtfully punch them in the face.

You’d think all that would be enough for one day, but we haven’t even made it to lunch yet. After the Notch we climbed Fulling Mill Mountain (steep, slippery) then descended Fulling Mill Mountain (ibid.) Then we stopped at a shelter for lunch, and commiserated with everyone else there, who were all equally Going Through It, whether northbound or southbound. Then we climbed the hundred false summits and sloshed through the endless poorly-bridged alpine bogs of Goose Eye Mountain. Every time we reached an open part of Goose Eye Mountain the cold wet air roused itself into a furious rain and wind. Once I heard a muffled sound behind me and turned to see Mica, halfway up a twenty foot cliff scramble, with his poncho flipped over his head and trapped under one knee. He got untangled and gave up on any pretense of remaining dry or slightly warm, in the interests of safety. In between the many false summits are alpine bogs with mud up to four feet deep, which are traversed by a series of bog bridges that are mostly either broken, sunk invisibly somewhere between one and twelve inches deep in the mud, or absent.

In fact the actual summit of Goose Eye Mountain is at the top of what appears to be a deep mud bog that is somehow simultaneously a steep cliff. The creative trail maintainers of the Appalachian Trail Club invented a bog board that has rungs nailed across it, so it can also function as a ladder. If you think I’m making this up, I don’t blame you. I would also think so. But I know it’s real. I climbed/forded it.

Finally, after descending Goose Eye Mountain (steep, slippery, plus deep mud) and climbing over Mount Carlo which wasn’t even mentioned in our guide, we stumbled down the steep, rocky third of a mile side trail to the Carlo Col shelter, which is just a half mile from the New Hampshire border. We had traveled eight point eight six miles, and it took us just over ten hours. Over fifteen thousand steps, every single one of which had to be precisely judged and executed to avoid potential consequences ranging from drowning in mud to breaking my neck. I have been more exhausted in my life, but not often. 

The next day, Tuesday, also failed to dawn. And in that last half mile to the border, Maine still had a fifty foot boulder scramble perched on a cliffside for us. We laughed at it. “Ha ha!” we said. “You didn’t kill us yesterday and you won’t do it today either. We have hiked two hundred eighty two miles of you, Maine, and that’s enough.” We stood in the mud pit at the border and another hiker took our picture, and then we left Maine.

We lived.

I’d like to say that as soon as we entered New Hampshire the skies cleared, the air warmed, the birds started singing, and the sun came out. I’d like to say the trail improved noticeably, with actual dirt often found between the roots and rocks. I’d like to say I was able to spread out my still-soaked tent in the sun at lunch and hang up all my soggy clothes to dry. And in fact, all of those things are exactly what happened. 

On Friday Mica and I made it to Bear River Road in Grafton Notch, a deep, narrow cleft in the Mahoosuc Range between Baldpate Mountain and Old Speck Mountain, about fifteen miles short of the New Hampshire border by trail. After two hundred sixty seven miles of roots, rocks, and mud, we’re almost done with Maine. 

I’ve lived in Maine for twenty three years, and Mica was born and grew up here. Both of us have done the majority of our backpacking here, so the notoriously difficult trail in Maine is mostly just how we expect trails to be. We have heard tell of distant lands like “Vermont” and “Virginia,” where the trails are supposedly paved with dirt and you can walk upon them with the upright stride of a modern hominid. I’m not sure I believe any of that, but whatever is to come I have a hard time imagining the trail anywhere else being much harder than this. 

Over the last thirty one days, as we’ve slipped on slimy roots, tripped on shifting rubble, slid down frictionless rock slabs, and occasionally refreshed our tired feet with an accidental slosh through calf-deep mud, Mica and I have devised a little rhyming mnemonic that captures all of our best advice about hiking in Maine. It goes like this:

When we tell hiking stories, most often they’re tales of woe featuring bad weather, errors in judgement, fiascos both navigational and interpersonal. When the suffering is over, and if everyone survived, this kind of story can be a lot of fun. Obviously I’m not above a tale of hiking disaster myself. But what’s not as common is the story of a day everything went right, when the weather was good and the trails were smooth and life put some happy surprises in your path. But those days can be just as transformative, albeit in smaller, quieter ways.

On July 26th, Mica and I awoke at Horseshoe Canyon shelter, an easy day’s hike south of Monson. No one else was there when we arrived and no one showed up overnight, so we had the place to ourselves. The morning was cool, it had been almost chilly overnight, but the sun was already shining greenly through the leaves and casting bright little pools of gold on the forest floor. As usual Mica got out of bed an hour after me and was ready to go a half hour before me. I’m not one to race through the morning routine.

We stopped at the river a quarter mile down the trail, just below a rushing cascade, to collect water and wash some socks and bandanas. I sat on a rock and squeezed water through my filter while I watched blobs of foam dance a stately quadrille in an eddy. Dragonflies patrolled near shore, occasionally landing on my knees. I felt like they accepted me as part of the landscape, and I was weirdly touched.

Mid-morning, we were hiking quietly along a section of trail lined with large flat rocks to ease our way through a muddy patch. I had been lost in silent thought for an hour, zoned out on the meditation of moving, when Mica suddenly said: “I’m having such a good time!” 

Mica hiking a particularly nice stretch of trail on July 26th.

I have good news and bad news, but the bad news isn’t even that bad, so I guess I have good news and ok news.

The good news is that Mica and I are both getting our trail legs under us, and the hiking felt so good this week that our very conservative five day plan to get from Monson to Caratunk turned into a quick and enjoyable three days when we decided not to finish hiking at lunchtime every day. I swam alone in an alpine lake, Mica picked wild blueberries on top of a mountain, the weather was clear and warm by day and clear and cool at night. Our food supplies were ample and our packs weren’t too heavy. You can’t reasonably ask for much more.

You specifically, however, could ask for a Sunday post. And the less good (but still ok) news is I don’t really have one for you. Or rather I do but I was too sleepy to write it last night. Today we cross the Kennebec in a canoe ferry and head into the Bigelow range on our way toward Stratton, so instead of an essay that will make you cry, please enjoy this brief mostly good-news update and some pictures from the last few days. We have a very short day ahead today (what hikers call a “near-o” or “near zero” mile day) and another easy day tomorrow, so I plan to use the extra time to write the real Sunday post that’s been percolating in my head the last couple days.

We should be in Stratton and back online by Wednesday, but if you see us on the trail before then, Mica needs apples.

Back on the trail at Rt. 15 near Monson, clean, fed, rested, and headed south again.

We actually saw some level ground in this section!

One of the very few pictures of me hiking.

Mica said “I took more pictures this time!” and every picture he sends me is like: “This is a cool caterpillar I saw.”

Mica admiring the view from Middle Mountain. A+ for Middle Mountain and Pleasant Pond Mountain on their effort to view ratio. Well worth the climb.

I went swimming here. Had the whole lake to myself, as far as I can tell.

And finally, I have a hiking meme for you. Many of the privies at the campsites in the Northern Maine part of the trail have recently been upgraded from pit privies (small, dark, stinky) to the glorious palaces known as “moldering privies,” which despite the name are large, airy, good smelling and generally very appealing places to attend the call of nature when you’re out enjoying nature.

This is not even one of the bigger or nicer ones! They even have bundles of pine shavings inside for you to sprinkle into the pit when you’re done.

They seem too nice to be called “privies,” so I’ve been mentally calling them “privileges,” which is what I assume privy is short for. That led to this meme, and now it’s your problem too.

We finally made it to a town that isn’t Millinocket! Five days and a lot of mud and mountains after our last shuttle back into the hundred mile wilderness, we popped out at the parking lot on the side of Route 15, a few miles by road from Monson, Maine. 

The hundred mile wilderness sign in Monson, which somehow took us 21 elapsed days to reach.

We’ve completed one hundred fourteen trail miles, and we’re currently ensconced for two nights in a thru-hiker’s heaven called Shaw’s Hiker Hostel. As the last town stop of the trail for most Northbound hikers and the first for most Southbound hikers, nearly everyone visits here. I can’t even express what it means to come out of the woods and find yourself at a place that feels like you’re staying with family, but family who also understand exactly what you need to recover and prepare for the next section of your hike, and truly care about providing it. I’m writing this at the Shaw’s kitchen table as our esteemed breakfast chef, Amelia Airheart, and one of Shaw’s co-owners, Hippie Chick, finish cleaning up from breakfast, orient new arrivals, curse a bit about the trials of running a busy house full of hikers, and do a hundred other tasks at once. In the next room a group of hikers are debating the mileage for their next few days and laughing. The other owner, Poet, is giving the  orientation tour to some new check-ins. I’ve been hearing hikers rhapsodize about this place for years, but if anything they undersold it. 

But I didn’t promise you a travelogue, I promised a chronicle of what happens in my brain while I’m hiking all day, and one thing that happens is that my brain starts making lists. So here are some lists I meditated on while I picked my way around the rocks and roots of northern Maine.

The Chairbacks are tough but some of it looks like this, so it’s not that bad.

The day before we got back on trail, someone tried to assassinate Donald Trump. The ten miles of trail south of Nahmakanta Road are uncharacteristically smooth and level, sometimes for long enough that I could focus my eyes in the middle distance and let my body do the walking, while my mind worked on other things. I was trying to decide if going out in the woods on this personal adventure was selfish, what with The Way Things Are Today. But I wasn’t making much progress on the question. What can I do, as one person, about climate change, genocide, rising fascism and political violence? Would it be better for me to sit in my house and “bear witness” somehow? The only answer I could come up with was something trite about doomscrolling.

Fortunately Mica, my bard, interrupted these fruitless thoughts to tell me that he had downloaded some books of mythology, and he has a plan to read one myth each night and try to learn it well enough to tell it to me the next day. For his first myth he told me a Mayan creation story, in which I thought the monkeys were treated unnecessarily harshly. But that got me thinking about creation, which suggested a better question than whether this hike is selfish. Instead I wondered whether it‘s creative. 

Tell the world you’re going to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail and watch the gods laugh. Like some kind of anti-Odysseus, fated never to wander, I’m back in Millinocket once again because I got Covid.

Everything was going so well. On Saturday Mica and I took a bus from Portland to Bangor and then another bus from Bangor to Medway, where a shuttle from the Appalachian Trail Hostel brought us to Millinocket. Being afoot in the depths of America felt right—it felt like we were truly back on the trail, at liberty and reliant on our own logistical ingenuity. We spent a night at the A.T. Hostel (strong endorse) and then on Sunday we got a shuttle back to Nahmakanta Stream Road, trail mile 41, with Gail from the 100 Mile Wilderness Inn and Shuttle and her assistant David, the same team who’d transported us out the previous week. “The universe put you exactly where you need to be!” declared David the holistic co-pilot, and who could say otherwise? Not me. 

We followed Polly’s advice and hiked like sickly cowards through what proved to be twenty miles of the nicest trail we’ve seen so far. I did slip on a stream crossing and slash open my left shin not even an hour back on trail, but the bleeding eventually stopped and the shin is one of very few places on the human body where Band-aids adhere well. So that wasn’t so bad. 

The trail near Nahmakanta Stream Rd. Can you spot the white blaze?

The trail wound through lowlands and along streams, past Pemadumcook Lake and Lower Jo Mary Lake, then picked up Cooper Brook. We gratefully passed over long stretches of marsh on hundreds of yards of log bridges. Some of the trail was even devoid of roots and rocks, flat and carpeted in cinnamon-colored pine needles. The kind of trail where I could zone out and let my feet find their own way while I thought about other things. I listened to music and worked on an essay about trails and memory in my head. My body felt good, and the air smelled like it contained some extra essence, an oxygen more potent than the usual kind.

This whole section would be impossible without these log bridges.

Monday we hiked a short eight miles, and arrived at the Cooper Brook Falls lean-to around 2pm. It was still hot enough that I wanted to swim, and there was a perfect swimming hole in the river at the base of the falls, right in front of the shelter. I floated on my back and squinted at the sun filtering through the branches that met overhead from trees on either side of the stream. I washed out my socks, and put on clean underwear, one of the least often appreciated joys of life. I spent a couple hours hunched in the lean-to writing while my legs gradually went numb. I went to sleep looking forward to finally leaving the lowlands and starting up the flanks of Whitecap Mountain the next day.

Of course you know what’s coming, and in a way so did I. Saturday night, when Mica and I were at the hostel in Millinocket, my wife texted me a picture of the consummate 2020s icon: a positive Covid test. My middle son Calvin had just returned from a teen group trip to Italy and Greece, and we suspect he was the original source. However they got it, by Sunday Christina and both of the younger kids were all testing positive. Mica and I felt fine, but we knew that chances were good we’d picked it up too. There wasn’t anything we could do about it, so we just did what we had planned to do. We hiked.

I’m not just trying to draw out the suspense here. I wanted to describe those few days because for the first time, I truly felt like I was on trail. Like I was exactly where the universe needed me to be. And I still feel that way, despite writing this from a motel in Millinocket. Because at 3am on Tuesday morning I woke up in the Cooper Brook Falls lean-to feverish and shivering uncontrollably.

When Mica woke up I told him I probably had Covid, and I think he feels on trail too, because this time he didn’t immediately say we should go home. What he actually said was: “You said if we got Covid we were just going to hike with Covid.” Which is true, I did say that, but faced with the prospect of actually doing it, it seemed foolhardy to head up into the mountains in a state of uncertain health. The fever had abated with some Tylenol, and I felt sniffly and fatigued but not too bad, even with the thunderstorms and torrential rain that greeted us Tuesday morning. So we sloshed the 3.4 miles to Johnson Pond Road and waited with a handful of other hikers for a pre-arranged food drop, where we begged a ride back to Millinocket (again) from the driver. 

I didn’t want to become a superspreader for the whole hostel and potentially the northern part of the trail in Maine, so we had them drop us off on the outskirts of town at the Katahdin Inn & Suites, which is truly one of the strangest hotels I’ve ever seen. Hidden behind the Dollar General, it’s a nearly windowless cement block cube whose rooms overlook a three story lobby that contains a swimming pool, some kind of cabana, a hot tub, several pool tables, and a few elderly video games. It feels like a cross between a casino and a minimum security prison—a kind of store-brand panopticon. I will say the staff was exceedingly welcoming to a filthy and disreputable looking pair of hikers, though, and it offered coin-operated laundry machines. However none of that stopped us from moving a few blocks away to the slightly more normal Baxter Park Inn this morning.

If you ever feel like you’ve seen it all, come check out the Katahdin Inn & Suites.

So here we are, back in Millinocket, feeling like Martin Sheen at the beginning of Apocalypse Now. I’m napping a lot but not doing too badly otherwise. I’m well vaccinated and this only lasted a few days for Christina and the kids, so I have good reason to believe I’ll be back in hiking condition in the next day or two. 

I started this trip saying that one thing I needed to learn is how to let go of my own plans and expectations and accept whatever is happening, and right now this is what’s happening. I wouldn’t have minded getting a little bit farther along the trail before I had to learn that. You know, like, maybe past the first town? But this is what’s happening, so I accept it.