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.........

Blame it on Bill......

     I had acquired myself a Kindle Fire, one of the newfangled tablet/readers that were coming out to compete with the Apple iPad.  I have always been a stalwart Apple fan, but in this case, economics ruled my decision, and at less than $200, the Fire was a clear winner for what I needed it for, which was to simply read in bed without needing a light (the Fire is self-illuminated, unlike the readers, which are more like a paper book; black and white and not back-lit).  This led to downloading books from Amazon left and right to keep my voracious appetite for something to read well fed.
     One of these books was "A Walk in the Woods", by Bill Bryson.  This turned out to be a real treat, and educational to boot.  Bill was already an established author with such titles as "Neither Here nor There" and "Made in America" when his cult best-seller was written.  Although it is marketed as non-fiction, Bryson is said to have melded the personalities of several friends into a composite character named "Katz".  In it, he describes The Appalachian Trail in fairly good detail, describing it's character and history, and his ill-fated attempt to thru-hike it along with the thousands of other enthusiasts who crowd onto the trail with the idea of completing the whole thing within a six-month window, give or take a month or two.  I personally had heard of the trail in passing as a young man, but with so many other priorities, few of them involving the great outdoors, I had never delved into the subject deep enough to realize what an amazing construct it really was.  However, as a much older man thirsting for something to fill a void in his life, indeed his very soul, the IDEA of this trail suddenly became an obsession, a SOMETHING I knew more than anything I could DO, not just dream about from the relative comfort of my computer chair.
     After my twenty-fifth-odd book outlining yet another intrepid hiker's epic journey up the spine of the Appalachian Mountain chain, I began to believe I knew everything I needed to know about this trail, and began to plot my adventure in my mind and in reality, albeit somewhat stealthily, because the very idea that I was daring to plan something of this magnitude and duration to partake in WITHOUT her was not going to go down well with the wife.  And sure enough, by the time the cat escaped the bag, her total lack of support (and even hints of outright desire for sabotage) became quit clear, but this time my dedication to this cause was unwavering, and I made it clear to HER that for once, this WAS about ME, and the planning proceeded without her support or participation up to almost the very day I departed for Springer Mountain.
     So, like I said, blame it on Bill, because his "Walk in the Woods" inspired me to take to the woods myself, and to overcome many obstacles to begin my own adventure on "The Road to Damascus".

     Next:  Simply getting there alive.........

A Story to be told.........

     Hello, and welcome to a blog with a very specific reason for existence; to tell the story of one man's journey up the footpath known world-wide as the Appalachian Trail, starting in Springer Mountain, Georgia, and ending in Damascus, Virginia.  No, it was not the classic 6-month trek known as a "Thru-Hike", in which you continue on and end your self-inflicted task at Katahdin Mountain in Maine, but for ME personally, it was still the journey of a life-time.  So please, if you were one of many of my ardent fans and benefactors who supported me and helped make this adventure possible, puruse these pages and read the nitty-gritty details of this journey as I can best remember them.  And even if you are a complete stranger to me and have been brought here by whatever circumstance the Gods may have dictated, then read on anyway and you just may be enriched in some way by it.  It will be my honor to share this life-changing experience with you.

     And thus, we begin, on a Kindle Fire somewhere in the depths of the deep South.............