#86 Beyond The Hike

Friendships were built with new people that went beyond my time on the trail.....

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The 2020 hike is the longest hike I’ve ever done. If you remember from the early pages of this book that my section hiking ventures actually began as a dream my son and had concocted years ago: to through hike the entire Appalachian Trail. But things changed.

This two hundred mile hike gave me a better look at what a through hike might have been like had I been able to do it; to move along the trail with through hikers, some of them off and on for many miles over the course of two weeks. I had a chance to get to know people deeper than in the past by sharing more experiences with them.

The dynamics of the trail’s environment changed as I push on mile after mile; dry rocky areas faded into dense green forests, which faded into dry grassy areas, then to open mountain tops, then to low lush swampy areas.

I had to work out logistics for ever-changing scenarios, our own group’s dynamics even changed a couple of times.

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Friendships were built with new people that went beyond my time on the trail, and some continue to this day.

Antz and I kept in touch, beyond his hiking the trail. He ended up flip-flopping from Mt Katahdin in Maine and hiked south. We kept in touch on social media until he cut it off about a year later. We now message one another from time to time. We are literally messaging back and forth as I edited this section of the story for my blog over two years later. (Aug 2022)

BeatsWorkin’ and Hummingbird continue traveling the country, posting their videos and photos online. We keep up with one another mostly through social media, but sometime through personal messages.

I saw a photo of Blue Sasquatch on one of the Appalachian Trail FB pages a few months after my hike. She was posing on top of the Mt Katahdin sign waving the American flag she had carried with her tied to her hiking pole. The caption with the photo read “Sasquatch Out.” We hadn’t traded info while on the trail so I sent her a friend request, which is something I rarely do. She accepted and we’ve kept in touch regularly ever since. She went on to have great adventures out west with her dog and RV, she even showed up in episodes of Stranger Things. Pretty cool, huh?

Hiking with new people and keeping in touch with some of them beyond the hike makes me feel like I’m part of the trail community, and not a dude who just drops in once a year for a week or so, then disappears.

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We chipped away roughly ten percent of the trail in one hike. This excites me. It inspires me to grow in mileage each time I go back. Now that I know I can do two hundred, perhaps I can do three hundred, six hundred—what’s my limit?

We are move farther up the trail geographically. We’re also getting farther from home. Hiking longer sections at a time will make travel to and from the trail worth the longer drives. Who knows how far we’ll hike in the future.

Book Two will feature the 2021 & 2022 hikes.

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This is the last section hike of Book One - Sprawl: An Accidental Hiker.

There are a few final posts for this book coming over the next few weeks. They share where the father & son relationship stands at the end of this collection of stories.

I keep using the word “book” because I wrote it with a physical book in mind. I will have to go back through and edit it for book form, of course, but I believe this dream can become reality.

I am talking with a publisher in hopes that this body of work, along with the next three, become a book series based on four sections of the Appalachian Trail over four time periods of life as I navigate the trail and my relationship with my son.

Be sure to read the last few chapters to see where the story is headed and to find out when book two begins here on my blog.

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Below are start/finish photos for each section hiked in this book.