As you probably know, Ben and I hike quite a bit. We've done some pretty long, pretty grueling day hikes, but I have never been a backpacker. Ben used to backpack a lot back in the day, but he hasn't backpacked in over 20 years, either. All that is about to change.
Although I've lived in East Tennessee all my life and have been a relatively frequent hiker (in recent years more than in past years), I had never ventured onto the Appalachian Trail before early April of this year. I don't know why; it's not like I made a conscious decision not to hike it; I guess I just hadn't gotten around to it. For several months, Ben had been saying he wanted to hike the AT from the I-40 Waterville Road exit up to Max Patch. It was longer than our usual hikes (14-ish miles) with some pretty long and steep uphill sections (turns out even more than we thought), so we did a few conditioning hikes before we attempted it, but we finally made the leap on April 7. Mom and Pat dropped us off at the Waterville Road trail crossing and then spent the day messing around in North Carolina while they waited for us to get to Max Patch, where they picked us up.
That hike was HARD. We expected the first five miles to be all uphill and STEEP, but as it turned out, the entire hike was 90% uphill and steep. We made it to the end, but it took us about an hour longer than the "conservative estimate" time we had given Mom and Pat. In spite of all that, however, it was a great hike. When we got home, I told Ben I'm not sure where I go from here, because I felt like after such a great, difficult hike, it feels silly to go back to the moderate 4-5 mile hikes that we had previously interspersed with our 8-10 mile hikes. I fell in love with the AT on one hike and have officially become addicted.
Ben said it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that I love the AT, as it's all about mountain ranges and working your way to the next summit (and, most of the time, the next great vista). If you know me well, you know that my favorite view is a birds-eye view and that, when I travel to see new places, I always want to get to the highest point so I can see what the place looks like from above.
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| Alaska: I took the birds' eye view a little to the extreme, judging by my airsickness. But man, look at that glacier! |
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| More glaciers on the flight (on a slightly larger plane - ha) out of Anchorage. These views went on for about an hour, and I was mesmerized. |
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| Italy's Amalfi Coast from the Sentiero degli Dei (Path of the Gods) between Bomerano and Nocelle |
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| From the dome of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome |
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| From Brunelleschi's Dome in Florence |
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| From the Torre del Mangia in Siena (seriously, I climbed all of Italy) |
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| Machu Picchu from the Sun Gate |
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| Quito, Ecuador, from the top of the cathedral |
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| As my friend Latisha says, #DarsiClimbsThings |
We had two summits with amazing views on the Waterville-Max Patch hike (Snowbird Mountain and Max Patch), and apparently that was all it took (I hit the Max Patch summit again on our Max Patch-Hot Springs hike to pick up the portion of the trail I didn't hit last time). I'm hooked.
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| Nearing the Snowbird summit a few weeks ago (the white building is a VOR aircraft navigation thingy) |
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| View from Max Patch back toward Snowbird (the front and center peak). If you zoom, you can see the VOR on top. |
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| This week's view from Max Patch |
I had pretty much decided before we got home that night after the Waterville-Max Patch hike that I have to hike the whole trail. Obviously, I'm not going to thru-hike the whole thing. I'd like to say that's because I have a job that I can't just abandon for 4-6 months while I play on mountaintops, but honestly, it's also because I don't really have a desire to live on the trail that long. I'm assuming this is why a few people, when I've mentioned my new obsession, have kind of snickered with a "yeah, right" kind of attitude, which honestly took me a little by surprise because HAVE YOU MET ME? On the opposite end of the spectrum is my wonderful friend Lindy, who said, "If I know you and your obsessions, you will achieve it." Lindy clearly knows me and my obsessions, and I love her for that. :-)
It's true that I enjoy a nice hotel or our motor home as opposed to sleeping on the ground while camping. It's also true that I have a love/hate relationship with nature. I love its calmness and beauty; I hate snakes, most bugs, and most definitely ALL THE POISON PLANTS. I don't particularly enjoy being in pain when I bite off a little more than I should chew with a difficult hike. What I do enjoy, however, are the aforementioned amazing views and natural beauty. More than anything, though, I think I enjoy the challenge and the sense of accomplishment that comes with reaching a goal, finishing what you started, surviving a particularly grueling section of the trail. Complacency is boring. Knowing now that my body is capable of doing this, why would I not want to do it? And if you know me at all, you know that if I have a goal, you'd better step the heck out of my way. Not to brag on myself unnecessarily, but just to hush all the "yeah right-ers," you don't graduate college and law school Summa Cum Laude or lose 80 pounds and kick diabetes to the curb in a year and a half by doing things half-assed (I make it a point to always use my whole ass). So don't bet against me. But if you do want to bet against me, please make that bet with me, because I'll happily take your money.
So all that out of the way, yes, it will be necessary for me to do some camping in order to accomplish my goal of section hiking the AT. Because Ben hasn't backpacked in so long, and because I never have, we went to REI and loaded up on ALL THE GEAR last week. There was an amazing lady helping us who gave us a "friends and family" discount card, which saved us 25% and was very much appreciated. Look at all this cool stuff!
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| Side note - I also love shopping, so that's another point in favor of camping! |
Also because I've never backpacked, I have no idea what is a reasonable distance for me to expect to cover in a day while carrying a loaded pack. What better way to figure that out than to load up all my stuff in my pack and carry it on a 20-mile day hike? I figured I'd find out what point in the middle (or hopefully close to the end) of that hike that I really, really wanted to abandon ship and put the dang pack down, and that would be useful knowledge for planning future trips. So, 28 pounds later (more than 15 pounds heavier than the daypack I usually carry), I set out on this little experiment.
Problem # 1: Thursday night before hiking on Saturday, I bruised the balls of my feet and my big toes in a Barre Power class (in a normal Barre class, I use a mat that keeps this from happening, but we move too much in Barre Power to use a mat). So by the time we were at mile 10 on our hike (after one significant downhill but before the steepest of them), the bottoms of my feet were feeling pretty terrible. Then I think I started compensating for my sore feet by walking funny, so by mile 14, I was pretty miserable from the hips down anytime we were on flat ground or a downhill grade (uphill was my saving grace and magically made everything stop hurting, I guess because my glutes can do ANYTHING - once again, my policy is to use my whole ass). Somewhere in there, I was focusing so intently on where my feet were hitting the ground so I didn't unnecessarily step on roots or rocks that would further bruise my feet that I walked straight into a low-hanging tree branch with the crown of my head. That knocked me off my feet for a second (to be honest, sitting down felt good aside from the splitting head, even if it wasn't a voluntary sit).
By mile 17, I was dreaming of an exit strategy. Because I was carrying a loaded pack (conditioning, remember?!), I had all my sleeping gear, water purification, etc., and I had enough food to stay overnight in a shelter and do the last 3 miles the following morning if I had to (I always, always carry more food than necessary). Ben, however, had only brought his daypack and, thus, would have nothing to sleep on or in, not to mention that any other people in the shelter would probably hate us due to our wild, terrorist dog. And I knew that there was no way Ben would hike on into town and leave me in a shelter by myself (with like 8 other hikers, most of whom we saw that day were women and totally non-threatening, but that mattered not to him). So, my only real option was to finish the last 3 miles. Miraculously, we got about a 1.5-mile uphill at that point, which postponed further torture. However, the last mile and a half was a steep descent into Hot Springs, and it was AWFUL. For about the last 6 miles, I kept myself afloat thinking of what great food I would get to eat at the end of the hike (I give myself an extra cheat meal on big hiking days because I burn over 5,000 extra calories on those days - I think I've earned it). By the last mile and a half, not even food was helping me, and I was more into the "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me" phase. There was a lot of praying, a little crying, and Ben distanced himself from me by about a tenth of a mile (not because he's a jerk; just because he knows me and knows I just needed to get my own head together and push onward without distraction).
We eventually made it, and I can't describe the amount of relief I felt when we came off the trail. I'm not sure when my knees, quads, and hips will stop hurting (all I can tell you is it's not today - ha). But silver linings:
1. My pack did GREAT. It put 90% of the weight on my hips like it's designed to do, and there is zero pain in my upper body (back, neck, shoulders) at all. Of course, the extra weight on my hips probably contributed to the extra pain from pounding on a downhill grade for 80% of the day, but that's to be expected.
2. I accomplished my goal of finding out how long I should reasonably expect to be able to hike in a day with a loaded pack. That distance is not 20 miles (at least not 20 miles with any significant elevation change one way or another). I'm thinking somewhere between 10-17 is reasonable depending on the elevation profile.
3. I got to eat dark chocolate peanut M&Ms and Chex Mix (two of my favorite foods that I can't eat "in real life" but that are excellent trail snacks). I also got to go to Shoney's on our way home and have their club sandwich WITH FRIES AND A HOT FUDGE CAKE. Why Shoney's? I have no idea, because it's probably been 15 years since the last time I ate there, but I remembered that they had excellent crinkle fries, and the stomach wants what the stomach wants. As it turns out, they've dropped the crinkle fries sometime within the last 15 years, but their new fries taste just as good (thank goodness, or there may have been a meltdown).
4. Most importantly, I got to check 20 more miles off of my AT adventure! Thirty-five miles down; approximately 2155 to go! #CrushingGoals
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| Literally checking off waypoints is so satisfying. You can also see the elevation profile of both hikes in the watermark-ish print behind the waypoints. I'm a planner, so of course I have ALL THE BOOKS AND MAPS. |
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