Update: One Month On Trail
This morning, I packed my bag by headlamp, creaked the gate open at Davenport Gap Shelter, and set off northbound as the sun eased over the mountains.
I dropped the other half of my permit into the northern terminus of the Smokies National Park, and walked right into trail magic - fresh coffee and warm bagels, courtesy of a 2019 thru-hiker named So Far So Good, who made the hour-plus trek from Asheville with a cooler lined in reflectix to keep the bagels and coffee warm.
Yesterday, as I took a side trail to see the lookout at Mt. Cammerer, I encountered a couple jeans-clad day-hikers, and answered their increasingly shocked questions at a safe distance from their deodorant and detergent and clean-human smells. It’s strange how foreign and strong these smells - which were completely normal to me 30 days ago - are… and how oddly repellant.
When I confirmed that I was thru-hiking all the way to Maine, the guy exclaimed: “The way you say it makes it sound like the easiest thing in the world! Like it’s nothing at all.”
And he was right.
Somehow, I’ve already been on trail for a month, and there’s already a pit of dread in the bottom of my stomach at how quickly time, and the miles, are passing.
Some days pass more slowly… like yesterday, when the temps were in the teens and my water bottles were frozen solid. But when I look back I realize it took me 17 days (including zeroes) to hit the first hundred miles. 7 days for 200 miles. And I’m closing in on mile 300 in less time than that.
The seasons are changing around me at lightning speed. Yesterday, I was hiking with numbed fingers and in all my layers through a frozen pine forest.
Today, I descended into a violent tangle of spring - utter, heartbreakingly beautiful chaos that has me stopping every few hundred yards to take pictures of new flowers I have no names for.
The biggest debate on trail right now is whether or not North Carolina is actually easier than Georgia, or if we’re just stronger. I wonder if we’ll still be having the same debate in Tennessee.
I don’t know if we will. There’s a lot of things I don’t know. But what I do know is that even after just a month, the trail has already given much more than I could’ve imagined or hoped for.
The big things that you can only be grateful for - a fleet of trail angels traveling cross-country for the privilege of feeding us hot dogs (they are the absolute lifeblood of the trail community,) the shuttle drivers, the endless kindness of strangers.
The little things to marvel at - clean water from a tap at a hostel, the chorus of air pads deflating in the wee hours of the morning, early-morning hikes by red headlamp light, inchworming into the last available spot in a shelter during a rainstorm, frozen, ice-encrusted flowers that were a little too eager for spring.
I’m ready to pack up and hike on from this little bubble of wifi I found at Standing Bear. But I’m not ready for it to end.
