Zen and the Art of Pre-Hike Planning

     As I said, this was going to happen despite my life as I knew it.  First off, I needed the time off; a lot of it; and I still had a high-maintenance wife and a mortgage to take care of.  Second, I needed the right gear, and third, I needed ways to get to the trail head and a way back from however far I could get.  But this is where the magik began to reveal itself:  First off, it turns out that one of my best Facebook friends just happened to live very near Damascus, Virginia, the Mecca of Appalachian Trail hikers and anyone associated with that legendary path.  AND, it was more or less HER idea, once I began to vocalize my desire to hike the AT, to drive me back home if I decided to finish my hike there (passing thru towards their Florida vacation, two birds dead with one stone!)  THAT alone made it obvious I should time my trip to coincide with getting to Damascus in time for their Trail Days celebration, the middle weekend of May.  So, with more than a year and a half lead time on the 2013 hiking season (generally starting around March/April), I had plenty of time to save up my PTO (Paid Time Off) towards the trip.  I carefully studied what the average hiker's mileage was, divided that into the total distance to Damascus (466 miles) and came up with how much time I'd need to get there.  So, I figured that if I averaged 11 miles per day, and allowed myself a "zero" day about every five days, it would take me about a month and a half to hike the distance, barring injury/death/just plain quitting.  Realize, now, that this was all coming from the mind of an armchair hiker, a place where the rubber has not quite met the road.  But my introduction to the realities of hiking up and down mountains was to come soon enough and toss all those fancy figures right out the window.
     Then there was the equipment.  Now THIS was an area that I already had a leg up on.  As it turns out, I had, as a young man in his mid-twenties, already hiked up one mountain in the Chughiac Mountain range in Anchorage, Alaska, as well as spent a week hiking thru the vast Denali National Park, hauling some 80 lb.s of camera gear in my then-new external frame pack.  And I STILL had that pack, in almost as good a condition as the day I bought her.  Yes, I know, according to the present-day hiking community, she was a real dinosaur, an extra-heavy throw-back to a day when hikers carried so much more weight due to as yet evolving equipment technology.  But as far as I was concerned, she was actually much more versatile and really not that much heavier than what was now available, which I dismissed as nothing more than rucksacks with shoulder straps.  So, I considered my backpack taken care of, as well as the beefy rectangular down bag rated at 20 degrees, but which weighed in at over three lb.s.  I considered the modern day "mummy" bag to be far more constricting to me, a dyed-in-the-wool stomach sleeper, than I could tolerate.  I was also giving serious consideration to taking my old Whisperlite white gas powered camp stove, which was at least twice as heavy as the modern alternatives, but the plastic pump on the fuel bottle, being so brittle with age, broke apart as I tested it, so I retired it for good and went with a fancy little alcohol stove instead.  It turned out to be the right KIND of stove, just the wrong stove.......but more on that later.
     The only thing remaining then was how to get to the trailhead at Springer Mountain, Georgia, a good ten hour drive from Jacksonville, Florida.  As it was, the Wife and I shared one automobile, a Ford Focus over ten years old that I'd managed to keep running with duck tape, chewing gum, and pure luck.  I can't tell you just how invaluable You Tube has been in teaching me how to fix things myself when I just couldn't afford to have someone who actually knew what they were doing fix it for me.  So I was really excited when a nurse I worked with at the hospital stepped up and promised to drive me to the trail, and even accompany me up the trail a ways.  Things were really falling into place, as though the universe itself had my back, and was going to insure that this adventure happened.
     So I tried to save some cash, didn't use my vacation for ANYthing (which is really not that hard to do when you only work three days a week anyway), and slowly but surely collected my gear and began to head to the nearby State parks to put in some practice miles.  Yea, they were FLAT miles, but better than nothing.  And eventually the big day arrived............

Next:  Scary Forest Service Roads and Last Minute Disasters.........