And We're Off....

Sherry
Apr 13, 2019
3 min read

So here we are only days away from beginning our 2,190-mile adventure on the Appalachian Trail, and we are so excited—and a little bit terrified (well I am). After all our preparation, the only thing remaining is just doing it, at which point I’m hoping most of my pre-hike anxieties will be alleviated. I desperately need to stop reading articles with titles like: Trail Casualties and Death and Illness on the Trail.

For the past several weeks we have been preparing our gear and supplies. I’ve read that our biggest risk on the AT is contracting Lyme disease by tick bite, so I’ve treated our clothes, packs, tent, and sleeping bags with Pyrethrin as recommended. Too bad they don’t make a spray to prevent bear or snake bites!

We are not “ultra-light” hikers by any stretch of the imagination—at my age, spending 6 months sleeping on the ground requires at least a few creature comforts that true ultra-lighters would surely scoff at, like carrying a tent or my 6 ounce inflatable pillow. But, on the other hand, when you are going to carry everything on your back for over 2000 miles, every ounce counts. So, in order to eliminate the weight of carrying rain pants, I decided to try to make my hiking pants rain-proof. I saw a video on YouTube where a hunter water-proofed his pants by rubbing candle wax on them and melting it into the fabric with a blow dryer. Thinking this was an ingenious idea, I decided to give it a try. I’ll keep you updated on how this works out in the rain, but in retrospect, I’m hoping I didn’t just turn myself into a giant, flammable wick—I’ll keep my distance from the open flame of campfires just in case!

We are doing what is called a flip-flop hike. This means we are starting in the middle of the trail (Harper’s Ferry, WV), thereby relieving some of the pressure on the southern part of the trail in Georgia where the majority of hikers start their northbound hike and relieving ourselves of some of the hiking crowds. Since we will have our car with us, we are trying something that we haven’t found any information about—though someone out there must have done it before. We are carrying our extra gear and what we anticipate to eat for 6 months in the car to use as our main re-supply point. We hope to do a sort of leap frog with our car, driving to a spot near the trail where we expect to hike in a week’s time, get a shuttle (many hostels near the trail offer shuttle service for a fee) to where we last left the trail, then hike the trail back to the car.

And what do we eat on the trail? Every morning for breakfast we will alternate between instant oatmeal and instant grits with bacon bits and coffee—thank you Starbucks Via Instant Coffee for helping us maintain our addiction while hiking. For lunch we typically graze as we hike on foods like dried fruit, nuts, crackers, granola bars, and jerkey. For dinners we mix and match foods like ramen, stove top, instant potatoes and soups, and noodles—anything that you simply add hot water to eat. Dehydrated backpacker meals tend to be a bit heavy and quite expensive, but very tasty. Therefore, I have allotted one dinner and dessert a week to one of these meals to break up the monotony as a special treat.

Though I consider myself as being the weakest link to our completion of the AT, Lily is a great concern. Physically, she is more than capable of completing the trail, however, I’ve read about dogs that couldn’t continue because they couldn’t get enough food and nutrition to maintain their body weight. For breakfast she will eat dehydrated pork that makes an unappealing paste when mixed with water, (she doesn’t really like it so I mix in powdered eggs, parmesan cheese powder, and bacon bits for added taste, texture and calories). She has some treats and jerkey along the trail in the afternoons, (we don’t feed her our jerkey and dried meats as they always cause her to vomit, too much salt??). And for dinner she gets a mixture of her high protein kibble and a dehydrated dog stew. She carries just about all her own food in her pack, but as we monitor her weight, Jim may have to pack extra dog food.