Appalachian Trail 2010
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A Decade Ago – Our Springer-aversary!
As this date started approaching I wondered how I was going to be able to write anything about it. And I find myself sitting here unable to really figure out what to say. Time flies. I miss the ability to be able to get up and do this sort of thing and yet my brain could definitely not focus on a thru-hike right now. I think I’ll come back here in a few weeks or later this year when our Katahdin anniversary comes up and see if I can write anything more. But I just wanted to commemorate this day by posting here. I love you, Appalachian Trail!
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A Few Random Backpacking/Long Trail Thoughts
I often write in my head and many things never make it out into the internet. However, I have had a few backpacking and long distance trail thoughts building up over the summer that I think about and then forget, but I think I’ve got enough of them now to do a random list-style post. Here we go… Last fall Geraldine Largay’s, trail name Inchworm, body was found after having been missing for over two years after getting lost on the Appalachian Trail in Maine. When news broke in 2013 the she was lost it was easy to suspect foul play based on all of the circumstances. At the very…
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5 Years Ago | Katahdin Summit and Appalachian Trail Completion
It’s hard to believe our thru-hike of the AT ended 5 years ago! As I went back through and put together this video I was sad to see we did not take nearly the amount of videos I thought we had. Times are different technologically than they were 5 years ago. It almost seems like leaps and bounds different, though it really isn’t. Anyway, the video is really long. I only cut down or removed a few videos that were multiples, such as the timber rattlesnake and the beaver, and an epically long video at the bird feeder at the hostel in Vermont. But for the most part I kept…
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Life in Words | 5 Years
Five years ago today Chris and I turned into Panther and Ridley. We climbed out of my dad’s car at Amicalola Falls State Park, weighed our backpacks and signed the register at the gift shop, then ducked under the stone arch just outside and embarked on a side trail called the Approach Trail that would take us to Springer Mountain and the official start of the Appalachian Trail. It was chilly down in the lower elevations and threatening to rain. Weather conditions only worsened as we climbed in elevation that day and I wondered why on Earth I had thought up this harebrained idea the year before. By the time…
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Almost to Moosilauke | AT Video of the Week
Short fir trees, rocks…must be a mountain in the north woods. New Hampshire to be precise and getting into the White Mountains. I wish Chris had left the video on as we came out of the trees and into the open mountain top so you can see the full effect of getting to the top of a mountain. I loved how it flattened out, there are the end, time to speed up after several miles of a steady ‘up’.
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Summer
New Jersey, Appalachian Trail Some songs that are reminding me of summer, particularly of walking along the mid-Atlantic and New England states three summers ago. This feels like it will be a very enjoyable, full summer. I feel like I didn’t get a summer last year with the move to the house—the unpacking, the flooding, the constant barrage of things to do. Now I’m just trying to keep up with the garden and yard every evening, sweating through my shirt before I work fifteen minutes. The frogs on the pond get so loud sometimes I can hear them inside the house. It’s almost like camping.
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North of Lehigh Gap | AT Video of the Week
Once again I’m digging out some videos from the AT that I never uploaded. This one is of the area at Lehigh Gap in Palmerton where the superfund site is located from the decades of zinc smelting that polluted the mountain top. As you can see it is quite a different landscape that one would expect from hiking in the Green Tunnel. You can read more about our antics in Pennsylvania here. The storm clouds show you what kind of climb and day it was—-wet. And hot. This guy gives a good perspective on the climb out of the gap.
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Mile 0 + 8.5 Bonus Miles
“To walk; to see and to see what you see. ” –Benton MacKaye, on the ultimate purpose for hiking on the Appalachian Trail, 1971 Sometimes it seems like yesterday, and some days it seems like it never happened at all.
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Beauty Beneath The Dirt
Beauty Beneath the Dirt – Official Trailer from Jason Furrer on Vimeo. Let me introduce to you three people that Chris and I met in 2010 on the Appalachian Trail during our thru-hike. Ringleader (Kate), Monkey (Brandon), and Lightning (Emily). While for the most part we only hiked around this group not with them or necessarily hanging out with them, I knew we would still want to see this documentary they made while hiking in 2010. There was a bit of controversy surrounding them, particularly in the beginning of the trail, in regards to their filming and that is touched on a bit in the movie (I think in the…
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The Appalachian Highway | AT Video of the Week
Once the AT reaches Shenandoah National park it really becomes the ‘Appalachian Highway’. The trail smooths out and the climbs aren’t nearly as difficult. It’s pretty nice until you reach the north end of Pennsylvania and other than the rocks it is really not all that mountainous until Mt. Greylock in Massachusetts. So you set your cruise control and head on through the green tunnel, listening to the sound of the birds along the way. It really is that noisy at times with the birds. It wasn’t until we met Merf that we began figuring out what some of them were. She’d learned some of them from another hiker. “Here…