Adventurestan!

Date:      Tuesday – 22 April 2014
Start:      Gooch Gap Shelter                      15.8 miles                    Today:            5.2 miles Finish:   Woody Gap                                  21.0 miles                    Total AT:     21.0 miles

Deciding to only hike 5.2 miles today was the perfect excuse to sleep in. I didn’t even bother setting an alarm. By the time I woke up, just after 8:30am, Rob Steady was long gone.

I packed up my tent, went up to the shelter to make breakfast, and was shocked to find it empty. I guess Bear Grylls took Danny’s advice and got an early start after all. I was genuinely not expecting that.

Catherine joined me at one point, and I almost made a comment to her about Mr. Grylls’ likelihood of finishing a thru-hike (low) and how shocked I was that he’d left before 9am (very), but thought better of it. It’s too early in the day for negativity, and I’m certainly in no position to throw stones.

That turned out to be an exceptionally good decision as Bear was most emphatically not gone. He’d just decided to sleep upstairs, where he was completely hidden from view. I was sitting at the picnic table eating a Lara Bar and trying to decide if I wanted to heat some water for oatmeal when suddenly his head popped up over the edge of the shelter and scared me badly enough that I shouted and dropped my breakfast.

At 9:50am I shouldered my pack and set off.

At 9:51am I felt raindrops and returned to the picnic table, where I put on my raincoat and my rain pants, double-checked my dry bags, and wrestled my pack cover on before bravely heading back out into the coming storm.

At 9:59am the rain stopped, and I had to strip everything back off before I died from heat exhaustion.

I don’t know what I was thinking. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest. I have hiked in the rain before. A light drizzle does not warrant a full rain suit. That way lies only sweat-soaked clothes and misery.

I did keep the pack cover on just in case, which of course guaranteed no rain for the rest of the day.

The clouds stuck around, though.

I took a Twix break at Gooch Gap, where USFS 42 crosses the trail. While I was sitting on a log, a guy drove up in a pickup truck and came over to say hi. He introduced himself as Papa Smurf which, as trail names go, is reasonably accurate if you overlook the missing hat.

Papa Smurf told me he was heading up to Gooch Mountain Shelter to leave a note for a young woman he’d rescued after she sprained her ankle badly on the first day of her thru-hike. He and his wife took her in for two weeks while she recovered, and they’d just put her back on the trail yesterday.

Now that? Is some serious trail magic.

He offered to give me a ride to the Hiker Hostel from Woody Gap if I could get there by 2pm, so I crammed the rest of my chocolate bar into my mouth and tried to shuffle a little faster. Joan and Catherine blew past me maybe fifteen minutes later. Papa Smurf had made them a similar offer, and they were not going to miss out on that ride.

I trudged and checked my watch and trudged and checked my watch and trudged and checked my watch and, despite my best effort, didn’t roll into Woody Gap until 2:30pm.

Noooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!

Such is the fate of the slow hiker. I had just psyched myself up for either hitching a ride or hanging around until 5pm for the Hiker Hostel shuttle when I spotted Joan and Catherine sitting under the cover of the Woody Gap sign near the restroom. Ha! Not too late after all.

While we were waiting, six cars pulled into the parking area. I’m not the most observant person in the world, so I just registered a bunch of grey vehicles, but Joan poked me and pointed out they were all identical brand new Porsches.

Huh. That’s… probably not a coincidence.

Some of the drivers had gotten out and were milling around, so I casually wandered over and waited for someone to make eye contact so I could start asking questions. It turns out they were all test driving an as-yet-unreleased model and, sadly, were legally prohibited from offering rides to hopeful hikers.

Papa Smurf showed up before I had a chance to ask how I could get in on this sweet test-driving gig, but I did get one gentleman’s business card and blog address so hope is not yet lost. I’m certain I would make a fantastic test driver. My driving record is spotless, and nobody ever needs to know that’s only because I’ve spent fewer than 200 days behind the wheel in the last decade.

On the way the Hiker Hostel, Papa Smurf stopped a few times for photo ops. This grave is right in the middle of an intersection.

Joan, Catherine and I got lucky at the hostel and managed to snag their last three open bunks. They took the private queen room upstairs, while I ended up on a futon in the basement. It was so nice to be done hiking by mid-afternoon. We made arrangements to slack pack the next day, pooled our clothes to do laundry, and ordered vegetarian pizza for dinner. While waiting for that to arrive, I raided the hiker box for extra snacks and came away with six Oreos, three packets of chicken ramen and a bag of BBQ corn nuts.

I also had an interesting chat with another hiker named Sam. He runs a towing company in Florida and came up to hike the length of Georgia, but halfway through his first day his knee gave out. I made the mistake of asking him about his most unusual or interesting towing stories. Maybe he’d had to pull a car out of a swamp and an alligator was inside? Or maybe he’d gotten a call from someone who’d driven into a Best Buy or something?

That led to a unbelievably racist monologue about how Haitians were the worst drivers, just the worst, white people would never drive that badly.

I stopped talking to Sam after that.

Fortunately there were plenty of other conversational targets on the premises. The hostel was hosting a three-day ultra marathon that would begin tomorrow, and several members of the Dahlonega Ultra Marathon Association were spending the night. There’s a 1km dirt trail on the property, and these people were going to run around it. Over and over again. All day and all night. For three days. For fun.

That’s simultaneously inspirational and horrifying.

Over the next three days, whenever the trail started to drag me down, I’d just think about how much easier hiking is compared to ultrarunning and suddenly nothing would hurt quite so much.

Date:       Monday – 21 April 2014
Start:      Hawk Mountain Shelter                       8.1 miles                    Today:          7.7 miles
Finish:   Gooch Mountain Shelter                    15.8 miles                    Total AT:   15.8 miles

Today was a very  s  l  o  w  morning, even slower than yesterday. I set my alarm for 6am but didn’t actually manage to break camp until 9:20am. This is becoming a disturbing trend, as it marks the second day in a row I’ve hit the trail exactly three hours and 20 minutes after my alarm went off. I’m concerned I’ll need to set it for 3:00am if I ever want to start hiking before 7am.

By the time I crawled out of my tent, Pop-C and the North Carolinians were long gone, never to be seen by me again. Joan and Catherine left ten minutes before I did, and I didn’t catch up with them until that evening.

All in all it was a pretty lonely day on the trail, and most of the people I passed were heading in the opposite direction. I met a family of five, a retiree doing trail maintenance and an older couple wearing very crisply-pressed matching khaki outfits hiking southbound. The only three northbounders I encountered were two 30-something guys from Alabama out on a ~90 mile section hike and a thru-hiker named Rob Steady.

Mr. Steady was also using a ULA Catalyst, which thrilled me to no end because he’s already got his Triple Crown, and this will be his third AT thru hike. Clearly I, too, will succeed in all my hiking endeavors because we have chosen the same type of backpack.

(False equivalence? What are you talking about? Look, a cougar!)

The elevation map for this part of trail didn’t look that bad, but I found the ups and downs pretty grueling, particularly the section between Horse Gap and Justus Creek that crossed Sassafras Mountain (3342 ft) and Justus Mountain (3226 ft). I thought I took this picture from the top of Sassafras, but it turned out to be a particularly demoralizing false peak.

The weather was cool enough that I kept my fleece on for most of the day despite all the climbing. That was probably a good thing, considering I fell down two more times. I’ve got another scrape on my left knee and a bruised right elbow, but I’m pretty sure the damage would be worse if I’d been in short sleeves. My forehead smacked right into the dirt on my second fall; I’m only grateful no one was around to witness this firsthand.

Fortunately, my spirit remained unbroken!

One of the more frustrating things about being a novice hiker is how much I don’t yet understand about personal hydration and water management. I don’t know how my pace varies based on terrain, so I’m never quite sure how long it will take to reach the next water source. I also don’t have any idea how much water I  drink per hour on average or how that will change based on the weather conditions. I’m always either carrying too much water or too little, and I’m not even close to dialing it in.

Today was a “carry too little” day, and I didn’t realize there was an 8.3-mile section of trail without any water sources whatsoever.

Oops.

I ran out of water at Horse Gap, four miles short of the next stream, and was seriously considering sticking a pebble in my mouth to generate some saliva when I stumbled upon this cache at Cooper Gap.

My first bit of trail magic! I was later told that local shuttle drivers do a water drop here every day during peak AT hiking season.

I sat down at the base of that tree and immediately chugged half a liter. I didn’t want to drink too much water out of consideration for other potentially thirsty hikers on the trail, but I figured taking half a gallon would be fine.

While I was sitting there, an extremely chatty section hiker came through heading south. This guy just would not stop talking.

His name is Danny and he’s from Florida and he’s in the Special Forces and he brought two knives with him, two big knives, one of them weighs a whole pound, and he could show them to me if I wanted to see them, but it was actually a mistake to bring them because he hasn’t used them at all and he’s only out for eight days but he’s ahead of schedule and he’s on his way back to his car now and he’s really loved the trail and is probably going to come back and do some more but not with his wife because she doesn’t like camping so he’ll bring his sister-in-law instead because she does like the outdoors and they do all sorts of canoeing and hiking and climbing together and he probably should have married her but she was too young so he married her sister instead and before he starts driving home tomorrow he’s going to come back to Cooper Gap to pick up a thru-hiker going by the trail name ‘Bear Grylls’ who is young and injured and has been making all sorts of foolish decisions and if I’m going to Gooch Mountain Shelter could I please give him a message because Bear is taking a zero at Gooch Mountain and needs to understand that the hike from there back to Cooper Gap is pretty hard so he should get an early start and am I sure I don’t want to see one of the knives?

I did a lot of nodding and smiling, drinking my free water and letting his words wash over me like gentle ocean waves.

When I finally reached Gooch Mountain Shelter, the first people I saw were Joan and Catherine.

Then I spotted Mr. Grylls sitting in the shelter. Oh, where to begin, where to begin. Before I left for the trail, I read a lot of stories about underprepared hikers carrying inappropriate gear, but honestly? I thought a lot of it was exaggerated for comic effect.

I no longer think that.

Mr. Grylls, who will be turning 21 in September, weighs 310 lbs and started the trail in eleven-pound carpenter jeans and steel-toed work boots, although he was forced to cut out the steel toes on his third day after the blisters got too bad. He brought only power bars to eat, and he ran out of those on the second day. He had a tent, but it was too heavy so he dumped it in the back of a day-hiker’s pick-up truck at one of the road crossings. Now he stays in the shelters in his too-thin sleeping bag, which he bought from Wal-Mart and is probably only rated to 50 degrees. He’s got a machete, a $300 solar charger and he’s keeping a video diary, but he’s only got four dollars in his wallet to get himself to Maine.

I actually really liked him. He’s quite charming and speaks very candidly about his lack of experience, and I could legitimately see him staying on the trail for a few months while relying on the kindness and generosity of strangers. I mean, let’s be real, there’s zero chance he’ll manage a thru-hike, but he could definitely live in the woods for awhile before heading back to his real life.

(Note: I had to ask the internet how to spell ‘Bear Grylls’ and, in doing so, discovered he has named his three sons Huckleberry Edward Jocelyne, Marmaduke Mickey Percy, and Jesse. Why does poor Jesse have such a short, pedestrian name?? I feel so sad for him.)

Rob Steady was also camping here, so the five of us ate dinner together and chatted. Bear Grylls told us about his time on the oil rigs, I interrogated Rob about all his fancy cuben fiber gear, and Joan told us she and Catherine had decided to get off the trail at Woody Gap tomorrow and make arrangements with the Hiker Hostel to slack pack the rest of Georgia.

I latched onto this idea immediately. I didn’t want to slack pack all the way to North Carolina, but I was sore from hiking and sore from falling, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to tackle Blood Mountain with a full pack.

It’s 15.9 miles between Gooch Mountain Shelter and Neel Gap, the next convenient resupply point. Between 1 March and 1 June, the two shelters in that section of trail – Woods Hole Shelter and Blood Mountain Shelter – are closed to overnight campers unless you’ve got a hard-shell bear canister. The ominously-named Blood Mountain is 4461 feet high, and I’d heard rumors it was a difficult climb and an even more difficult descent. There are designated campsites at Lance Creek, about halfway between Gooch Mountain and Neel Gap, but I wasn’t sure if they had bear cables, and there were few enough people on the trail that I worried I might be the only person sleeping there.

More to the point, this was going to be my third night sleeping outside. I really missed hot water and flush toilets. This new plan meant I’d only have to hike 5.2 miles to Woody Gap tomorrow, could spend a glorious night on a mattress indoors, and then just carry a day pack over Blood Mountain. Thank you, Joan! You have the best ideas.

Date:      Easter Sunday – 20 April 2014
Start:      Black Gap Shelter                             -1.5 miles                      Today:        9.6 miles
Finish:   Hawk Mountain Shelter                   8.1 miles                      Total AT:   8.1 miles

A lot of hikers swear by the shelters. They love ’em. They’re so convenient, there’s so much camaraderie, blah blah blah. I hated my first night in Black Gap Shelter, hated ever single minute of it.

• I am a light sleeper and Pop-C snored.
• I am a cold sleeper and a structure with only three sides doesn’t retain heat very well.
• I am a restless sleeper and felt guilty every time I rolled over because my mattress made the most godawful rustling noises.
• I am a private sleeper and do not enjoy knowing someone could be watching me drool.
• I am a lazy sleeper and would prefer to pee in a bottle at 3am than leave the warmth of my sleeping bag to venture outside in search of a more secluded location.

Also? It turns out I’m a late sleeper. My alarm went off at 5am as planned, and it took me almost one full minute to turn it off because my right hand was numb from the cold and my left hand was numb from sleeping on it. I kept dragging my unresponsive fingers across the screen, desperately trying to muffle the sound with the corner of my sleeping bag while praying nobody tenting near the shelter could hear it.

Pop-C jumped up right away, packed his stuff and hit the trail before 6am as planned. I just continued to lie there, waiting for him to leave so I could go back to sleep. So much for my grand aspirations of the previous evening.

I didn’t break camp until 8:20am, long after sunrise had come and gone.

At least the weather was gorgeous, and it only took about an hour before I reached the summit of Springer Mountain, official starting point of the Appalachian Trail.

It was very exciting! I took some photos of the plaques!

I took some photos of my very first white blaze!

I took some photos of the view!

I took a bunch of slightly blurry off-kilter selfies, none of which I’m going to post!

It was great. I got a little too into the picture-taking, though, and completely forgot to sign the register.

Five minutes after I left the summit heading north, I started running into hikers who had been dropped off that morning at the parking lot. Not gonna lie, I felt really smug about having done the approach trail and tried to think of a way to subtly let them all know I was an overachieving superstar already on the second day of her hike.

The best conversational gambit I could think of was to ask what the parking lot was like, which is kind of sad and the polar opposite of smooth, so I just nodded regally at everyone I passed.

This included my second Sarah, hereafter known as “Sarah with a black dog,” and my first ridgerunner, Becky.

Once I reached the parking lot, I loitered around in case someone wanted to give me something (food? soda? Easter candy? religious tract? anything?), but nobody was feeling very generous. Where is my weekend/holiday trail magic?! I’ve been on the AT for one whole mile, where is my reward?!

Trying to look needy got boring after ten minutes, so I got back on the trail and hiked another 1.8 miles to Stover Creek Shelter before stopping for a lunch of smoked salmon and seaweed. While I was there, I met Joan and Catherine, a thru-hiking mother/daughter duo from Toronto, and Roger from Houston, who’s carrying a 55 lb backpack with approximately ten days of food.

Let me just repeat that:  Ten. Days. Of. Food. Weighing 25 pounds. On his back.

Unsurprisingly, Roger was stopping at Stover Creek Shelter for the night, even though it wasn’t quite 1pm. I was a little jealous; the shelter was built in 2006 and looked lovely.

Roger, who also hiked the approach trail, spent last night in his hammock at the Springer Mountain Shelter. I felt really good about my life and my choices after he told me everyone who opted to sleep in the shelter fled in the middle of the night because of “rats.”  Laziness pays off!! Clearly, stopping at Black Gap Shelter was the right decision after all.

Lesson learned:  Quit early or your face might get gnawed off at 2:30am.

Within ten minutes of leaving Stover Creek Shelter, I met my third Sarah. I wish I could say I was surprised, but I gave up the dream of being the only Sarah in any given social situation when Sarah Moen and I were assigned to the same second grade classroom and I had to start writing “Sarah B.” on all my assignments. It’s been downhill ever since.

Sarah #3 and I became acquainted when I heard her come up behind me and mutter, “What the hell is that? Ohhh…” Apparently she’d mistaken the camp shoes attached to the back of my pack for some sort of doll – a bright red, hairless doll. Sure, why not.

After we introduced ourselves, I made the rookie mistake of trying to walk and talk at the same time. Some people can manage that, but I am uncoordinated, graceless and clumsy under the best of circumstances, and the “best of circumstances” does not involve carrying 30+ lbs on my back. We exchanged, at most, three sentences before I fell down.

Awesome. There is nothing I enjoy more than falling down in front of a total stranger. On a perfectly flat section of trail, no less!  !@$!@%!@#$

Ah well. Like death and taxes and the premature cancellation of whatever new television drama I’ve just started to enjoy, falling down on a semi-regular basis is one of the inevitabilities of the universe I’ve had to accept.

So is getting lost.

At Three Forks, so named because it marks the convergence of three different trout streams, the Appalachian Trail passes over a footbridge, crosses USFS 58 and continues uphill. It also happens to briefly merge with the Benton MacKaye Trail for about a mile before the BMT splits off to the west toward Long Creek Falls. The BMT is marked by a white diamond; the AT is marked by a vertical white rectangle. Imagine my confusion when I crossed USFS 58 and started walking up what I thought was the AT, only to be confronted with a diamond painted on a tree.

The 2014 AWOL Northbound guide doesn’t explicitly mention that the trails merge, probably because it assumes its readers are thinking creatures who don’t need to be spoon-fed information. Frankly, it’s giving me too much credit. I definitely require spoon-feeding. I can’t tell my left from my right without holding up my thumb and forefinger to make an “L”.

So when I crossed the footbridge and walked across the road and started climbing the hill and saw a white diamond painted on a tree, I thought, “Oops, must be on the wrong trail.” I turned around and went back across the footbridge. I walked up and down the bank. I crossed back to the other side. I walked up and down the road. I asked two women walking their tiny rescue dogs if they knew where the AT went. I asked a family having a picnic by one of the streams if they knew where the AT went. I got out my book again to see if I was missing something that would tell me where the AT went. I walked up the road again. I shook my fist at the sky.

WHERE IS THE TRAIL OH MY GOD I JUST WANT TO FIND THE TRAIL WHY IS LIFE SO TERRIBLE RIGHT NOW?!

Eventually Jerry and his buddies, the four section hikers from North Carolina I met the previous day, found me wandering in circles and were kind enough to pull out their map to reassure me that, diamonds notwithstanding, the trail I originally started hiking was indeed the AT. Sure enough, just past that stupid painted diamond was a tree with an AT blaze. I swore and kicked at a tree root until I felt better, but seriously, would it kill somebody to put a giant blinking neon sign at the base of the trail so hikers with a terrible sense of direction don’t have to suffer such needless confusion?? Maybe I could get a Kickstarter funded to pay for that.

Since I’d wasted half an hour stumbling around like a fool, I opted not to take the side trail up to Long Creek Falls, a decision I almost immediately regretted. I don’t know if I’ll ever be in this section of north Georgia again, and I don’t want to miss out on interesting sights and experiences simply because they’re not directly on the trail. That seems unnecessarily limiting.

I tried to make up for this oversight by taking a quick detour to Hickory Flats cemetery a little further up the trail.

The place was completely deserted, and the sun felt really nice, so I took off my pack and had a little nap. I was tempted to turn it into a long nap, but I was low on water and the next source was two miles away at Hawk Mountain Shelter.

I made it to the shelter by 6:25pm to find Pop-C had rolled in four and a half hours ago. He’d already washed and dried all his hiking clothes, set up his spot in the shelter and reorganized all his gear. His efficiency is starting to give me a complex.

I opted to forego the shelter and set up my tent before joining Pop-C and the four NC section hikers at the picnic table for dinner. The mother/daughter duo from Canada were hammocking across the clearing, but we only exchanged waves.

I was inside my tent by 7:45pm.

The day before I left, Hiker Hostel called to let me know they’d pick me up at 1pm from the North Springs MARTA station. They kindly warned me the station had no amenities, so I dozed intermittently by baggage claim for a few hours before catching the train. There were three other people also meeting the shuttle:  Ali, a thru-hiker from Chicago, and Kathy and Bobby, two sisters doing a section hike.

Derek, our shuttle driver, showed up right on time and took us to Wal-Mart. I honestly don’t think I’ve been inside one of those since October 2001.

The only thing I had to pick up was a mini Bic lighter, which didn’t take long to find, so I spent a few minutes browsing the aisles to see if I could find some Georgia beer. One of my goals for this trip was to try to drink as many different local brews as possible as I passed through each state. Unfortunately the closest beer option I found was this:

Sorry, 28 proof malt substitute beer from North Carolina isn’t going to cut it, even if it does taste like delicious apple pie. Whatever, Wal-Mart. You let me down.

I did, however, spend a little money at the Subway franchise located right inside the entrance. I am generally not a fan of their food, not since the year my grandmother ordered a six foot party sub for Christmas Eve and made me pick it up in her car, but I couldn’t manage to angle it in such a way that it fit properly, so I had to drive through town with a foot and a half of sandwich hanging out the window. (More importantly, that sandwich was disgusting. Never buy a six foot party sub. Never.)

But Derek reminded us all before we went inside that Hiker Hostel only serves breakfast, so dinner options were either buy some raw ingredients to cook in the basement kitchen of the hostel, order a pizza to be delivered from Papa John’s, or Eat Fresh.

I decided a sandwich would probably be the better option considering my stomach was already a little queasy from nerves. Plus, I’d been re-watching all five seasons of Community through Hulu+ while endlessly organizing and re-organizing my hiking gear in the weeks leading up to my departure, so I was feeling kindly disposed to the chain. I ended up with a six-inch spicy italian on garlic bread with pepper jack cheese, lettuce, onions and banana peppers with sweet onion sauce and three chocolate chip cookies. It was not the worst thing I’ve ever eaten, so there you go.

After everyone finished shopping, it was finally off to the hostel.

I’ve gotta say, I’ve stayed in a lot of hostels in a lot of countries, and this was easily one of the nicest. I thought perhaps Ali, Kathy, Bobby and I would end up in the same room, but Ali got a bed in a room on the first floor, while Kathy and Bobby had reserved a private room. I was assigned a bottom bunk in a four-bed room on the second floor. Check out those privacy curtains!

My three bunkmates were:

• Pop-C from Arizona, a retired Forest Service employee who hiked the Arizona National Scenic Trail last year and is only planning to go as far as Pearisburg VA;
• Ted, a doctor from Atlanta; and
• his friend Tim, also a doctor from Atlanta.

Pop-C had arrived that morning, but Ted and Tim showed up yesterday and already had one day of hiking under their belt. Tim just started a nine day vacation and planned to hike the entire length of the trail through Georgia, and Ted agreed to join him for the weekend.

But it turns out Tim didn’t enjoy hiking as much as he thought he would, so that night he bought a plane ticket to Cancun. He was REALLY excited about this change of plans.

It took me the better part of three weeks to make a final decision on how best to get from southern Oregon to the Amicalola Falls Visitor’s Center.

My first and most ambitious plan was to travel by train. I’ve taken Amtrak cross-country between Oregon and Boston twice, but each time I was on the northern route through Chicago. I thought it would be great fun to take the Coastal Starlight south to Los Angeles, switch to the Sunset Limited to New Orleans, then hop onto the Crescent to get to Atlanta.

For not much more than the price of a direct ticket, it’s possible to get a 15-day rail pass that allows for eight travel segments, so I plotted out a glorious two week extravaganza that involved visiting Hearst Castle, spending three days playing tourist in LA, renting a car in El Paso and driving to Roswell and Carlsbad Cavern, visiting Austin and having 36 unforgettable hours in New Orleans.

Doesn’t that sound like fun?? It totally does.

Which is why I’m still bitter it didn’t work out. When I was laboring under the misapprehension that my mother’s surgery was scheduled for the 21st of March, I thought I could wait for her to come home from the hospital, stay an additional two weeks until she was cleared for regular activity, and leave sometime between the 10th and the 15th of April. Even leaving as late as the 15th would still put me into Atlanta on on the 29th, and I could start the trail on April 30th. That’s a little late in the season, but I had already accepted I would need to leapfrog or flip-flop at some point. No big deal.

Unfortunately there was a miscommunication with the surgeon. Two days before what we thought would be the day of the surgery, we were informed by his receptionist that March 21 was actually just an office visit. At that appointment, it was determined some additional tests needed to be run, but they had to be done by a new doctor working out of a different office. After several weeks of back-and-forth phone tag, the test dates were finally nailed down for the first week of May. The results would take at least few days and only then could the surgical procedure finally be scheduled.

Yikes. By now it was already the 7th of April, so clearly that sweet train trip wasn’t going to be possible. At this point I decided my best option was to start the trail as soon as possible and have my parents notify me about the surgery date once it finally got scheduled, at which point I could arrange to fly back in time.

I did some frantic searching for affordable plane fares, bought a one-way ticket from Portland to Atlanta leaving the 17th of April and arriving the morning of the 18th, and did some last-minute browsing through the forums to see what my best shuttle option might be for transportation between the airport and the trailhead.

The Hiker Hostel in Dahlonega, Georgia, has received a ton of glowing reviews, so on the 9th of April I emailed them to see if they had any last-minute vacancies for the night of the 18th. I was honestly shocked when they said yes. They run a Thru-Hiker Special between February 24th and April 20th where, for $80, they will pick up up from either the North Springs MARTA Station or Gainesville, GA, drive you to a supermarket so you can buy supplies, give you a bunk for the night in a shared dorm, serve you breakfast, give you eight ounces of white gas or denatured alcohol for your stove, and shuttle you to either the Amicalola Falls Visitor Center or the Springer Mountain parking lot. That’s an unbeatable deal.

All told, it took me about 22 hours, door to door, to travel from my parents’ house to the Hiker Hostel. My parents drove 90 minutes to drop me off at the Eugene airport, where I picked up a one-way car rental from Budget and drove to the Portland airport. I caught the 10:15pm US Airways flight to Charlotte, switched planes, and landed in Atlanta at 9:12am.