Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Planning for this long walk began during Thanksgiving break 2008. That’s when the idea ignited anyways. It first became a dream too long ago to remember how old I was. I would guess I was about 8 or 9 years old hiking in north Georgia with my dad. My dad had been taking me hiking and camping before I could even walk. Stone Mountain Park, Raven Cliff Falls, Fort Yargo, and Montreat are places of some of the first camping and hiking memories I have. Blood Mountain in north Georgia is where I discovered the Appalachian Trail. I remember starting up the trail to the summit of Blood Mountain and my dad talking with an older man hiking in the opposite direction. The man had a massive backpack slung over his shoulders, brown boots busting at the seams, and a widdled wooden hiking stick that looked more like a staff. His grey beard shook down below his neck as he talked with my dad about some trail he had been hiking for the past five months. He told my dad he had started in Maine and had been following the white blazes to where we were all standing now. The old man said he was almost finished; one or two more days away; about thirty miles. As we left the man to his white blazes and followed our own up Blood Mountain my dad told me briefly about these blazes and how they continued past the summit for miles and miles. That the trail we were walking on could be followed all the way to Maine! The details of the story are fuzzy and lost with time long ago, but I do remember looking down the trail as far as the next turn through the rhododendron, imagining what it’d be like to just keep walking and eventually making it to Maine. All the rivers I’d have to cross, mountains I’d have to climb, trees I’d sleep under and faces I’d meet. I remember I wanted to do that.

Like I said earlier, it wasn’t until many years later and a couple Thanksgivings ago when I saw the opportunity to make this imagination become realistic. I was talking with a my long-time best friend, Andy, at a friends’ house after a few drinks about how we were both considering our possibilities after leaving places we had been for the past several years. For me, I saw my time in Yellowstone coming to an end, to change jobs, lifestyle, and scenery. For Andy, it would be time to leave Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan, to graduate with masters, a new job, a career. Maybe with the help of some alcohol, the idea of hiking the Appalachian Trail with each after he finished at Michigan and I finished my winter season in Yellowstone started to roll. We could both start saving money. We would be giving ourselves plenty of time to plan. We would both be in a time of transition. I don’t think either one of knew at the time how serious the other one was about all this. I was serious. We may have made a drunken promise to each other that night that we’d hike the AT together 2010, but I guess I also made a promise to myself to do it as well. The idea seemed to fade with my friend. It only grew with me from that point on.

That following winter in Yellowstone, Mark Dixon, a former ski shop snow lodger, came to Old Faithful to visit his girlfriend and friends. He had recently finished walking the entire length of the Continental Divide Trail, the third of America’s greatest National Scenic Trails. After he gave a stunning presentation of his trek, full of gorgeous pictures, adventurous stories, and how he planned a good bit of it, I found out he had also walked the entire length of the PCT a few years before he had done the CDT. I talked with him about his PCT adventure in comparison to the CDT. By the time we had shared lunch together I felt like I had to hike the PCT instead of the AT. Actually I wanted to do both. Initially I didn’t consider the possibility of hiking both trails, maybe because I had never heard of anyone doing such a thing; not back to back in the same calendar year anyways. Guess most people would call me a dreamer, and I assume that’s what I was doing when I started thinking about trying to combine both trails into one long continuous hike. Could it be possible to do both without running into winter weather? How long would it take? Could I make and save enough money? I followed that lead, researched the possibilities and options and didn’t find a dead end. So then it began the preparation for hiking about 5000 miles from April to December.

Friday, March 26, 2010










The Pacific Crest Trail traverses only three states compared to the Appalachian Trail’s traverse of 14. But the Pacific Crest Trail(PCT) travels 2663.5 miles. That’s 485 miles longer than the Appalachian Trail(AT). 485 miles is longer than the AT miles in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York and New Jersey combined with almost 200 miles more to spare. The Pacific Crest Trail spans from United States’ southern border to its’ northern border. Mexico to Canada. Most of its’ miles maintaining a elevation of at least ½ mile above sea level.

The trail for me, will start on the Mexican border, right on the six foot metal fence that protects it from the Mexican influx. From here the trail wanders north through the Southern California desert and the Mojave. It’s not until after the first 700 miles of the PCT in which the trail reaches consistant high elevations above 7000 feet from sea level near Kennedy Meadows and beyond into Sequoia/Kings and Yosemite National Parks. Here there are stretches with consecutive miles reaching heights over 10,000 feet above sea level that will be covered by deep and treacherous snow fields. Once the trail leaves the northern stretches of Yosemite National Park in central California it continues north along Lake Tahoe. Hopefully, this is where I’ll be in late June so I can catch an easy flight from Reno, Nevada, just across Lake Tahoe, to fly home for my younger sister’s wedding. Once I’ve celebrated Erin’s wedding I’ll fly right back to the wherever I left the trail to continue trekking north. The Cascades of northern California and Mount Shasta will dominate the skyline for the next couple weeks until I reach the Oregon border. The Cascade Mountains surround the trail in much of Oregon and Washington. I’ll wind through Crater Lake National Park skirt along the side of Mount Rainier National Park, and finally finish after climbing through North Cascades National Park on the U.S.-Canadian border. I hope to reach the PCT’s northern terminus by mid- to late- August, just in time to start a southbound trek of the Appalachian Trail.

Where most of the AT’s thru-hikers start in north Georgia in mid-late March, I’ll be starting in central Maine atop Mount Katahdin in Baxter State Park. Mount Katahdin is higher than any other in Maine, with its’ jagged summit resting a mile above sea level. I’ll be one of the few hiking south on the AT. Less than a 1/3 of the AT’s thru-hikers are southbound, where the trail starts on some of the roughest terrain passing through rocky, muddy, steep trail that is usually without switchbacks or nice grades. After leaving Maine the trail climbs into more intense terrain and weather into the White Mountains of New Hampshire and on into Vermont. Massachusetts and Mount Greylock, Connecticut and New York are next with elevations dropping and rugged mountains becoming farer in between. The elevation changes stay fairly moderate passing along farmlands and pastures in New Jersey and into Pennsylvania. The AT then crosses over Maryland and into Virginia and Shenandoah National Park. Virginia holds 549 AT miles, about a ¼ of the AT. After catching all the fall foliage in the long state of Virginia the trail will lead further south into Tennessee. The trail actually hugs the Tennessee-North Carolina border for over 150 miles, some of which trail stretches through Great Smokey Mountains National Park. I’ll finally reach my home state of Georgia at Bly Gap on the North Carolina line with only 75 miles left. Trail’s end of the AT is atop Springer Mountain in north Georgia, just a couples hour’s drive from my hometown in Lilburn, Georgia. After 14 states, the Appalachian Trail covers 2179.1 miles from Maine to Georgia.

The above was a very brief description of 4843 miles worth of walking, but hopefully you got the general idea for some of the territory I’ll be spending the next nine months exploring. And with that, that’s all I got for today, because I’m heading up to the Tallulah River to do some easy camping for the weekend with the guys within the hour. Thanks again for checking out the blog and all your support. Happy trails.

Thursday, March 25, 2010


Looks like I’ve finally found something that is going to pull me away from Yellowstone National Park’s summer. I’ve been working at Lake Lodge for the previous six summers. It’s been my last summer in Yellowstone for the past four years. This is usually the time of year when I am repacking all my things to return back to the park for another long summer season. I have been packing, but not for Yellowstone. I’m packing much, much lighter. Just one bag, weighing in at roughly 25 pounds. Minus food and water, and a few spare pairs of shoes, I’ve got everything in that bag that I’ll need for the next nine months!



Although I’ve been planning this trek for the past two years, it hadn’t hit me harder than when it did this winter, as all the other Yellowstone Snow Lodge employees started turning in their summer job applications. I was one of the few that was not. A few weeks later, those same employees, were all talking about what new location in the park they would be working at. Some with new exciting jobs. Some getting a promotion from the last summer. Some happy to hear they’ll be coming to the park early for management training in early April. That was my typical summer agreement for employment. BE AT GARDINER HUMAN RESOURCES TO CHECK-IN ON APRIL 11, 2010. Not me. Not this summer. I will be unemployed.



In the next two weeks, I’ll be standing on the Mexican boarder in southern California looking north. After 2663.5 trail miles, at the Canadian boarder in northern Washington, I’ll be looking to catch various forms of transportation to Baxter State Park in Maine. Once I’m there, I hike south for 2179.1 miles to Springer Mountain in north Georgia. Seventeen states, nine months, countless blisters and amazing stories to come, and 4843 miles. Unemployed, may be the wrong word to use. I’ll have plenty of work to do.



My hopes are to keep you up to date with my progress, stories, and day-to-day life on the trail by using this blog for the next nine months. I obviously won’t be carrying my laptop with me, nor will I be anywhere’s close to internet services during most of this trek. So, I plan on keeping a journal and log of my travels with pen and paper, and sending it home to the family in Georgia when I can get to a post office about once a week. So, after I leave Atlanta on the 8th of April, I won’t be doing the updating as often on this blog. It will be up to my family to relay the news as they feel to you. Pictures and even video will be taken along both trails to document through my eyes, and I will get those posted as well when ever I get the chance. Which I will, every month or so, get a hotel room with a hot shower and bed to sleep in and hopefully a computer and internet to use, to personally keep you up to date.



If I have your e-mail address, you will be able to keep track of me on the trail everyday. I will be carrying a SPOT. If you read backpacker magazine or have been in an REI type store lately you may have seen one of these devices. SPOT is a satellite tracking device that allows me to push a button, and within minutes send an e-mail to you with a link to google-maps with my exact location pin-pointed. I already have a few handfuls of your email addresses that will be lumped into a mass email list and forwarded by my family to you everyday. If you’d like to be apart of this daily update via SPOT and my family just email me at yellowstoner22@comcast.net with PCT/AT as the subject and your name in the entry before April 8th. After April 8th? Send the same email to my family at kim-finley@comcast.net and you’ll be added to daily update. Tomorrow I’ll have more information about the two trails, the Pacific Crest Trail and the Appalachian Trail, along with some of my preparation and planning. Feel free to comment or ask any questions by clicking on the comment button at the bottom of the posts. Thanks for taking the time and interest. Happy Trails!