2,181 Miles. 14 States. 178 Days.
Reflections on Hiking the Appalachian Trail … 10 Years and One Month Later
(plus a photo gallery of that first month on trail)
Over 178 days, from March 12th to September 5th, 2011, I hiked a total of 2,181 miles across 14 states on The Appalachian Trail with my dad Mike, aka “LongTime.” It was an unbelievable experience and one that was truly life changing. (As in, there’d be no Girl Gotta Hike without it!) So I thank my lucky stars every day that he asked me to join him on a journey he’d been dreaming of since he was a teenager! And I’m still so grateful for the entire Appalachian Trail community I met out there, some of whom I still consider my closest friends.
So it’s now April 2021, but we started the trail in March 2011, so I know I’m a little late for celebrating on our actual start date anniversary. I did, of course, mean to start publicly reminiscing about this 10-year Trailversay last month, but, (as my mother continues to like to point out to me, even though I’m over 40), it seems I’ve never been great with meeting deadlines.
One could posit, that when tackling a fairly unfathomable thing, (like setting off on a cold winter day atop Springer Mountain in north-western Georgia, with just a vague notion of walking the entire rest of the eastern seaboard toward Mount Katahdin in Maine), that not being so tied to the concepts of time and expectation is probably a good thing. Especially for two people who had never backpacked before. Yep, that’s right – both my dad and my first backpacking trip ended up lasting the entire Appalachian Trail! But just saying “See ya when I see ya,” isn’t the easiest thing to hear for the folks staying at home, ya know, the ones not out having a life-changing experience. They wanna know when you’ll be back.
Despite the unknown of what our bodies could handle, we had a spreadsheet with projected dates of completion – one that my dad had calculated based upon our basic premise of “15 miles a day sounds do-able, right??” Add up a few days off trail for my uncle’s wedding, a side trip to my apartment in Brooklyn, and that would have had us finishing the trail in Maine sometime around August 10th. Easy-peasy! But not exactly — while we did end up becoming hiking machines out there, regularly hitting 20-or-more-mile days, we’d then end up landing in a town after just a four mile morning, resupplying, doing laundry, eating burgers and then end up staying the night in a hostel — so that would sink the whole average. Still, despite those big days and all of the ideal target dates, I couldn’t help but think in the back of my head that our actual, final, really-really final, hard-out deadline wouldn’t be until October 8th – one day before my own scheduled wedding.
I sure as hell hoped I wouldn’t still be hiking in October, but I guess it was my mind’s if-all-else-fails-back-up plan, in case of unexpected injury or horrible weather or something. We did, (to my mom, dad, and now-husband’s relief), end up summiting Katahdin five whole weeks before my big day. But it’s funny — this whole remembering about all of the re-planning and re-calculating LongTime and I were doing out on trail 10 years ago, has got me thinking about how I (and I suspect many of us) tend to treat time in general.
In real life, I’ve found that I’m often operating under what I’ve learned is a concept called Parkinson’s Law – that work expands to fill the time allotted — if you have a week to do something, it takes a week, but if you have a month, it ends up taking the whole month. Just knowing about this has helped me understand why I always need the push of a due date to get a project going. Deadlines are a great motivator, but despite them, the more time I have to reach that deadline, the more time I wait to start the project, and then suddenly I’m scrambling to get it done, as if I only had a week to do it to begin with. It rarely feels good to be sprinting toward a finish, knowing how much better the outcome could have been if I had just started the damn thing sooner.
So, should I have tried harder to reach that original August 10th hiking deadline? Or was that actually going to be impossible for me? Despite eating upwards of 5,000 calories per day out there, I was losing weight. My body was incredibly strong, yet I was physically exhausted every single night.
Maybe it was my body trying to preserve all the calories it could that made me feel like I couldn’t go any faster. Or maybe I was operating under a bit of Parkinson’s Law out on the AT and didn’t know it. I’m not sure that my dad will agree, (certainly not on those days we strolled into camp at dusk with headlamps on after staying too long in town eating extra ice cream), but perhaps what appeared to be procrastination on my part, was a result of my mind saying, “What’s the rush? Your wedding’s still a long way off.”
Whatever the reason, what ended up happening is that we got to actually live in the moment. How often is it that you get to truly be enveloped in the task at hand (or foot, in this case) and appreciate all that surrounds you? Taking a longer than planned lunch break beside a beautiful stream may have pushed back my arrival time to camp, but rewarded me with an overwhelming sense of calm, which I needed to feel in order to stay motivated and keep hiking day after day after day for six months. Listening to the sounds of the water splashing over rocks and feeling the sun warm up my skin, left me feeling so much more connected and in touch with Nature than anything I was getting in my usual day-to-day life back in Brooklyn.
Hiking the Appalachian Trail was a bit like a six-month long meditation for me, and while I know that a life spent simply traipsing through the trees is unrealistic, I relish in every moment I got to indulge in it at the time, and every memory of it that floods back now.
Happy 10-year Trailversary Dad/LongTime! I can’t wait for our next adventure!
Below are but a few moments (1 image per day) from Click (that’s me) & LongTime’s first month on The Appalachian Trail in 2011. If you’d like to read more about our (relatively) in-the-moment thoughts from back then, (in those pre-social media days), be sure to check our our old blog at melandmikehike.com.
