 I'm Rachel Weyn, I'm the programming manager here, and Zev Rassman is here today to speak about his latest adventures, which we'll get to in a moment. I just wanted to remind you of a few things before we get started. The restrooms are outside to the right in the hallway there. We do have hearing assistance units available. If you need those, they're on the back table there, and someone can show you how to use those. I'd like to thank our sponsors today, Coffee by Design, who always provides coffee for our brown bags. I'd like to thank Whole Foods Market anyway. They donate twice a month for our brown bag lecture series, but unfortunately there are no cookies today, because this is an off week. But we want to thank them anyway, because they'll come back next week. WCSA choose our media sponsor and also Longfellow Books, who isn't selling books, but will when Zev writes a book about his travels. I'd like to remind people to check that your cell phones are either off or on silent, and I wanted to let you know about some upcoming talks that we have here at the library. Next week, Don Potter will be here speaking about her new book on poetry called the Poets Source Book. Two weeks from tomorrow, Augustine Burroughs will be here speaking about his book This Is How. That's going to be a pretty popular event, so come at 6.15 to get a seat if you're worried about getting a good seat. That's at 7 p.m. here in the Rhines. And on May 1st, we have William Berry speaking about Maine, the wilder half of New England. So check out our website, and also our monthly calendar has more information about our ongoing programming. So Zev is here to do his second installment on his adventures. He is freshly back from hiking the Ozark Mountains, paddling the Bayou Tesh down south and down to the West Indies, all of which were on the heels of his finishing the Appalachian Trail last year. That's actually not updated from two weeks ago, so he might have done something else in between. I'm not sure, but I wouldn't be surprised. He's going to speak about his travels along the way, and who knows what he's going to say. It's always entertaining, and we're really happy that you're doing it again, Zev. So thanks for being here. Thanks for coming out for part two. When I put this talk together, I wasn't quite sure what it was going to be. The last one went over pretty well, and so I'll probably revert to a bunch of the stories from the last one. For those of you that sat through it last time, you can bear with me, but I've got a few good new ones and some pictures to go along with it. I know in the write-up it said that I was going to have some friends here, and I invited a few of them, but there was kind of an oversight on my part that through hikers are sort of hard people to pin down, and although they claimed to live in Maine when I met them, none of them are actually in the state of Maine at the moment. But I got some pictures from some of them, and at least have the stories, and can talk a little bit about who they were, how I met them, and still get a taste of what kinds of people are out there wandering around in the woods. So I'll get started with the Appalachian Trail, and then I'll kind of move on to the other pictures I have are just from the trip down to the Bayou Tash down in Louisiana, and I hiked the Ozarks, not the whole trail, I hiked for about a week in the Ozarks down, mostly in Missouri, the mountains go down into Arkansas, into the Ozark Highlands, and I got down there to check it out, but didn't really spend much time hiking down there, I was getting kind of cold during that time, and figured I'd better keep heading south, and that was when I moved down into Louisiana, and hung out down there for a while. So without further ado, I'll continue with the talk itself. Here's Springer Mountain, the beginning of the Appalachian Trail. This is the plaque that everybody goes to, taps it, and then starts walking north for what it's worth. This plaque, as I was just talking about with Dennis at the beginning here, is on the top of a mountain, the trail starts at the top of a mountain, so if you want to start the Appalachian Trail, you get to choose any way you want to get yourself to the top of that mountain, it's not like you can just take a bus or take a plane to the start of the Appalachian Trail. The nearest town that I found is right down, it's a little bit north of Atlanta, Gainesville, Georgia, that I was able to take an Amtrak train from New York City to Gainesville, and got off the train in Gainesville, and still wasn't quite sure what exactly to do to get to Springer, so I went and there was a taxi nearby that saw the backpack, and I went and talked to him, asked him how exactly I go about doing this, and he said he'd take me there for 120 bucks, and I didn't really like the sounds of that, so I told him I figured I'd just walk, and he said, well you know it's 40 miles, right? It's 40 miles, I figured there'll be plenty more to come after that, so through a combination of walking and hitchhiking, I ended up making it to Springer Mountain a few days after that, not all the hitches actually went in the right direction, I didn't know my way around Northern Georgia that well, but on the plus side I got to see a lot of other small towns of Northern Georgia that turned out to be trail towns also, they were towns that people were hiking off to buy supplies at, or to check out, well they were hiking the trail, so for the several, probably the first 50, 60 miles of the Appalachian Trail, all the hikers that I meet along the way and say, you know, we're taking off going into Delanaga, we're going to Helen, you want to come check it out, and I'd be able to be like, no I already been there, done that, so these are all from the beginning, the first few hundred miles were like mountains that I'd never really walked in before, the Chattahoochee National Forest down in Georgia are just amazing, they're a little steeper than the mountains I was used to, and I didn't really do a lot of research in hiking the Appalachian Trail, and had no idea what the mountains were like that I was going to be climbing, and I'm not going to say it was an unpleasant surprise finding just how rough the trail actually is, but it was a little more challenging than I'd expected, I sort of pictured this nice trail weaving in through valleys, and now every summit that was there it would ramp right up over it and then drop you back down and up over it, and just day after day, and the banks at first going off the sides of the trail are so much steeper than pretty much anywhere else that you you find them, which was that was just amazing, you're walking along these sort of clefts in the mountain side looking down, and on the misty mornings you can't see anywhere down near the bottom, you're just looking down these slopes of trees, and then every now and then you get to a viewpoint like this, this is actually this is reaching the end of the Chattahoochee's this is getting closer to the Smoky Mountains, and this was a morning that I'd woken up and started hiking at a friend Michael that I'd met along the way, he wasn't actually through hiking, he was just out sectioning for I think a couple weeks or so, he had a family and kids and things he actually had to get back to, but he made for good company while he was there, and then as I grew to find out with section hikers is you always want to become friends with them just when they stop hiking they've got all this leftover stuff that they don't know what to do, and sometimes they have a car which can be useful get into the next town or credit cards too, this is this is just the sort of sort of trail that you're seeing the whole time, these are some wood steps cut into it, the whole Appalachian trail all the way from Georgia up to Maine is maintained by different volunteer groups, and they they take a lot of pride in the quality of the trail that they're maintaining and some of them will really try to one up the other groups you get up into the sections in New York and the stonework in there is it's like stonework that you don't see even in even professionally done around town it's it's amazing, I'm working on that there was a in Vermont there was actually a trolley car that wasn't part of the Appalachian trail but you're hiking up over these ski mountains and there was a trolley car that was running so I had a friend of mine went over jumped on it took it down to town bought a burger jumped back on hit the trail it took him less than an hour and I was pretty impressed all along the Appalachian trail there are these little shelters which are also built by the volunteer groups this is on the smaller end of shelters generally the capacity for that shelter is listed as six I've seen as many as 13 14 people piled in there you just sort of stack like sardines once you're in sleeping bags it doesn't nobody really cares but a rainy night it's not like not like you're gonna be sitting out in the cold wondering how awkward it's gonna be jumping into the shelter you just you can go for it now the shelters are also where the the fire pits were which I found to be a big draw as that's kind of a pyro I really enjoyed even the social aspect of just coming to a shelter making a huge fire and it has a way of gathering people around it that nothing else really works that well for making friends you just build a fire and all the sudden people start coming to you especially if you put some food on hikers tend to be fairly hungry people I've got a handful of trail pictures that before I go much farther I should add most of these actually aren't my pictures I have friends that I've been heading up who took the majority of their pictures I had a little disposable camera that I was using and I only got maybe 50 or so pictures and I had some friends that were hiking it a little bit differently had good electronic equipment and they were hiking in a way that they could take better care of it so they have all these nice pictures which I've been been borrowing from them this was from my friend skirt we all get these weird trail names it's a it's part of hiking that within the first several hundred miles you generally pick up a trail name from other hikers that something happens some misdeed or accident or so it generally trail names come out of some incident involving shame from there it kind of sticks with you and you get a nice trail name for the whole rest of the way up after a few hundred miles it almost becomes awkward not to have a trail name you're all going around introducing each other and you're like oh you know I'm I'm Cheddar I'm Amish I'm just Jeffrey it's kind of said with shame there was one person I met whose trail name was just Scott because he had to introduce himself was just Scott so many times the people finally said that's that's just your trail name your Scott this this was my myself and Shane friend that I met early on and hiked with until most of the way through the Smoky Mountains I hadn't quite gotten the hang of paring my pack weight down yet and I've got a nice big bag of shiitake mushrooms hanging off the back and I for a while was dangling stuff all over my pack I didn't know how to stuff it inside I ended up getting better as I kept walking you you learn that lesson the hard way here's here's Poncho Poncho was another person I met about the same time I met Shane he he was hiking down in the Smokies and the Smokies are fairly isolated you get to the National Parks and there's not a lot going on outside that draws other hikers away the towns and everything so you kind of bond together through the more remote areas and National Parks Poncho was someone that I met that way through the Smokies in this particular picture we had just gotten to a road you'll see this is a a sign that they had it just about every road crossing down south where the Appalachian Trail crosses a road to let let people know that that is indeed what's what's going on why these dirty bearded little boys are coming out of the woods and scurrying back up and and girls there are girls hiking the trail there aren't as many of them but the majority of the the hikers on the Appalachian Trail were young men about my age and most of them fulfilled the stereotype of being bearded and smelling horrible this this picture we're both in the state of euphoria we came out of the woods and there's this green minivan sitting there and an older older guy in the front seat back in just over there and he said I see you guys are through hikers I came to the area to do some hiking not really into the weather it was raining off and on he said so I'm I'm going back up I'm driving back home if you guys want some of my supplies and you know of course we'll take everything you got and he gave us a huge bag of pistachios and and a bottle of tequila which this was right before the the steepest climb and probably within 200 miles Jacob's ladder one of those things you you dread for days and days coming up to it and I don't remember it being so bad at all here's another one of the campfires here we have myself Papa Tats that was in the back corner and skirt blue eyes Papa Tats and blue eyes I only met for maybe a day or so in passing and this was a fairly cold night so in addition to the fire bringing people around for social reasons we all needed the fire to just to keep warm and in some cases it will boil our water one trick that you learn early on if you've got a metal canteen you can boil your water dump it in there slip it in the bottom of your sleeping bag and that'll that'll stay warm through through most of the night not everyone likes to go with the metal canteens there they weigh a little bit more and everyone's got their own opinions on weight and gear and hiking but that that was one trick that's really common handy for me Papa Tats I don't know what happened to him I don't think he ended up making it I heard he did something to his ankle back in North Carolina but blue eyes did what referred to as flip-flopping which is actually not that uncommon where you'll hike a certain distance north he started at Springer Mountain he hikes to about hot springs and then took a shuttle all the way up to Katahdin and then started walking back south from there Katahdin opens later in the season than Springer Mountain does so most people the majority of the through hikers start at Springer and then start walking north the the real southbounders that the true southbounders that just start at Katahdin and walk all the way down tend to get started a little bit later both because Katahdin doesn't open that early and in going through the ponder mile wilderness it's it's a lot it's harder in the spring you've got bugs you've got all these rivers to forward that are a little bit flooded through the rest of the Appalachian trail you've got these nice bridges all over everything and for reasons that I don't understand as soon as you get to Maine there are no more bridges just fords which I took as a matter of pride as a manor I said you know that's that's the way life should be but here we have the getting close to the Smoky Mountains I didn't know what Gators actually were I I knew what Gators were for snow but I hadn't heard of like hiking Gators for rain so when I got down there and saw all these people putting on Gators I figured I better at least try to look like I knew what I was doing and wrapped plastic bags around my feet and spent a while arguing with people about how this is a better method before I just said I just go hike on my own for a while in through the Smoky Mountains you've got all these fire towers these abandoned fire towers left over from before we had the technology to fight fires without them that you'd have to hike sometimes half mile a mile to get off the trail and go visit them but every single one of them was well well worth the a little extra time that it took and it was a good chance to drop your pack off you'd leave your pack on the Appalachian Trail because not like anybody is gonna steal it and I figured if anyone did I'd be able to outrun them twice as fast without a pack and they'd be going twice as slow with it as long as they'd run in the right direction I'd be more than happy here's a hailstorm that we got caught in and Nana Hala this this also had a way of really bringing friends together filled up this one shelter not everyone stays at the shelters there people camping out in the woods and so I was camping out maybe a hundred feet from the shelter so I had a hammock through the whole time and with this hammock I like staying in the hammock better than the shelters but I liked meeting people at the shelters so I generally camp out near the shelters to meet people but wouldn't actually sleep in the shelters if I could help it and this particular time it had started raining and then started hailing on me and being so close it was nice and easy for me to pack up and get into the shelter but the timing was just perfect that I got rained on so it looked like I'd been out in it and everybody that got forced in was was looking over at me and asking oh how far did you have to come in from and they're all suffering from miles and miles of trying to make it to the shelter yeah it was a rough 50 yards or so here's yeah just more of the the trail shots these rhododendron bushes are all over down south I don't have any pictures of the green tunnel but that's what it's described as when you have rhododendrons coming up on both sides of the trail so thick that you're walking through what's just machete hacked out of these these tunnels under the rhododendrons that in itself is fun enough and then at a certain point they start to bloom it's just such an amazing part of walking that everyone has their stories of where they were when the rhododendron started blooming it really changes here's Pinky it was just talking about him a little bit before the talk I met this kid in the Smoky Mountains and I don't know where he goes to school but his high school was actually giving him a PE credit to go out and hike the Appalachian Trail I I have my doubts about whether he's actually going back to high school after that I think he learned everything he needed to learn and here's a few more of the hikers I was with until about hot springs these these people were about as close to family as I got for that beginning of the trail I'd hike with people on and off through through the whole trail I had with probably 50 people or so but not all of them I grew to be as close with as these people and some of them you'd hike with for a day or two or a week but generally everyone had their own pace and you'd hike with them just long enough until you felt like you needed to go your pace they needed to go theirs and then you move on to the next group here we have a short term who had started out initially thinking that he was going to take a vacation from his work and go out hiking for a week or so until he met Eva here second and well this is tank also and then he met Eva and Eva managed to talk him into hiking all the way up to Maine then we've got Eva Gonzalez who was a fellow manor there there are a number of manors on the Appalachian Trail a lot of people who have grown up anywhere near the trail I find have this seed planted in them at an early age to go out and hike this trail that they know goes through their backyard but don't really know where it ends up and that that seemed to bring a more than a more than adequate number of manors to give me people to talk about lobster and chickadees with we have Trix Aquaman and skirt on the side all of them I ended up losing track with in Damascus which is about quarter of the way through the trail and then was able to track down most of them afterwards and have kept in touch with a good number of them after finishing hiking I went down and visited Mike and Eva well short term and Eva who at that time were living down in Tennessee Eva used to live up in Vermont after finishing with with the trail she'd never been down to Tennessee so moved down there and then Mike had never been up to Vermont so he came up here for a little while here we have just the trail kind of meandering through as you get up in the higher elevations the the forests get smaller and smaller and they become these dense little alpine forests and Klingman's dome halfway through the Smoky Mountains you hit the highest point on the Appalachian Trail which isn't the highest point by much it it just beats out Mount Washington and Katahdin and Lafayette we have a few peaks up here that are that are rivaling it but on technicality Klingman's dome is the highest point on the Appalachian Trail and you get to the top and there's this huge structure that just circles all the way up to the viewpoint up there where you've got 360 degree views of all all around the Smoky Mountains it's pretty spectacular structure yeah yeah so here's another shot of just coming up the up the ramp on the Klingman's this is actually maybe a quarter mile off the Appalachian Trail itself but as I found with so many of the little side trails that they're they're well worth it and it's not uncommon for people to set up what's referred to as trail magic on the trail or they'll be trail angels where they'll set up a grill or just bring a whole bunch of food to spots like this that are more accessible to the public even some of the firetowers they'll they'll drag food over to them and just feed hikers that go past you know we're we're not people that have easy access to food while we're on the trail it's generally a half a day if not more than that to hitchhike to most towns there are a few towns that are right on the Appalachian Trail but in most cases the towns are just far enough away so that it makes a huge difference just to have someone give you a couple burgers and a few beers or whatever whatever you can get out of them here's the the second after Klingman's Dome the second part of the Smoky Mountains it's all really just one big ridgeline you you start walking up and you spend about a whole day walking up to the the ridge line of the Smokies well less than that if you're a faster hiker but then you're just on top of it for maybe 80 miles walking this ridge line and you're you're going up and down a little bit but the climbs once you get up to the top it's just walking and viewpoint to viewpoint it's it's really a nice part of the country and here are the the balds in North Carolina these these balds are just spaces that have been cleared on the top of the mountain and they have little little trail markers where the trail isn't isn't perfectly marked into it that you'll see that the white blazes that are everywhere on the Appalachian Trail are just stuck into the ground and in trail markers showing you which trails to actually follow these are a lot of fun I think this was a big bald in North Carolina where there's a series of balds that you're just hiking up and over and from each from the top of each one you can see the next one so for days out you can see what your day is going to be where you're going to hike where you're going to walk it's really neat to be able to tell I will have questions at the end of it don't don't worry I'll leave a significant segment for for questions and answers here's Sassafras and Snaccosaurus they were a couple that I met through through North Carolina they were sectioning as far as Damascus so they started at Springer and walked the first quarter of the trail and they were a lot of fun as I said with section hikers we always become friends with them they ended up leaving me with a huge bag of gorp like a gallon bag of gorp homemade with chocolate covered cranberries and some good stuff always remember that here's more of just the trail markers that I was talking about weaving through the meadows and up and over the balds it takes it takes more more effort than you really think of walking it to maintain these things and there's always people going out there and painting the blazes on the trees and having to repair these little stumps or or stakes or whatever the blaze may be on the the one problem I found with the open trails was that they tended to get muddier than when you're in the woods even if the woods were muddy you have stuff to grab on to but these you had this on a wrong day and it's just a slip and slide all the way down there at one point I spooked some deer going down one of these and you know that it's going to be rough going if you watch deer slipping while they're going down I was like covered in mud by the time I was done it wasn't you know you'd hit your side you'd fall on your back everything but face first into it which I was grateful for that I that was lucky and I met people that they were covered on the front here's sunrise or the sunset near near the Smokies this is probably a little bit after the Smoky Mountains through I guess tend to be kind of mischievous and sex panther actually was someone's trail name so we figured we had to you know the trail names are a lot of fun because they they keep you anonymous so if anybody gets into trouble you you don't actually know it was you know just some kid named bonk or it was sex panther's fault I don't know he had a beard the there was a trail festival in Damascus where this church was offering free showers to any any hiker that would go by and it was all these these older Baptist women running it and when it was time for your shower they'd all go down through a list and call out the names for whose shower it was which was I stuck around long after my shower just to watch these women trying to like they're screaming out is there a sex panther through through the Grayson Highlands it's the only part in the Appalachian Trail where you're gonna find wild ponies these things are fearless they they come right over and they start nibbling at you they I mean they get fed a lot by people passing through so they're they're really just trying to get some food out of you but as trail names go I have another friend that I met along the way who got his got his trail name from the Grayson Highlands he was feeding some carrots to a pony that turned out to be a female pony and while he was doing this male pony came over and decided to assert himself upon the female pony and he was forever known as pony love after after that I'm not sure that he adopted that nickname immediately I think it took time of people badgering it and I'm doing but he ended up ended up keeping it here's looking back over Hot Springs Hot Springs is it's really the first town that the trail hits that it goes right through the downtown area and it's this little town middle of well not middle of a middle of nowhere North Carolina it's a little bit outside of Asheville there's not a whole lot going on there other than that the Appalachian Trail goes through there so it's a real friendly real hiker friendly town it's got the bars there all used to being a little bit flexible on people's hygiene and this that and the other they have outdoor seating they know to always have ice cream on hand here's another shot of the Highlands you can't see them that well but there are a whole bunch of ponies grazing off and the distance and then the trail hooks up around here and over the rock pile there the Highlands were also kind of neat because they were the first part on the trail that were cleared to this extent that had a much more Western feel than than the the woods that you'd been traipsing through up until this point James River this is the longest footbridge on the Appalachian Trail and when I got to it it's it's maybe 30 feet out of the water and I I'm not bad with heights but I don't like jumping off of things for no good reason and I was with two other hikers that there's the end of the day it had been a really hot day and we all sort of threw the idea out there of maybe jumping off the bridge and none of us wanted to at first but one by one I'll decided to jump off the thing ended up being most refreshing thing I done in a while and it's it's one of those small traditions on the Appalachian Trail there are a number of things that you just do for the sake of doing them if you cross the trail on Mount Washington if you cross the cob tracks you have to moon it it's just tradition here we got Betty Betty was pony loves aunt and I met Betty I didn't know that she was related to pony love at first I came out of the the woods to a little logging road and was about to pass back into the woods and Betty rolls down her window and calls over you know are you hungry and that's just a rhetorical question I figured so I came over and started seeing what was in her trunk and it was like a mobile gas station that just she popped the thing open and there was lunch meat candy sodas everything but beer in the trunk and pony love came along and told me that the deal with Betty was that she was his aunt but he he hadn't talked to her in a long time and she was meeting him at every road crossing and giving him all this food and he seemed actually kind of disappointed and I'm like I don't really see the problem she has food we need food but he was he was moving much faster than than anybody that I'd met on the trail so for him it was actually a detriment so I explored the option with him with maybe like trading clothes or something like today she could be my aunt for a little while when that didn't pan out I figured I better just keep up with him and he moves about 30 miles a day which at that point in the trail was it was really pushing it for me but at 30 miles a day Betty 30 miles a day she kept she'd take requests also which was amazing she came back at one point in this particular scene she had come back with root beer floats for myself and everybody there and I I tried to convince her to be my aunt instead of his but no dice and we've got in the background grandpa detour and Shaggy I by the time other hikers started figuring out what was going on pony love had this trail following him wherever wherever he went here's the priest looking back over three ridges this is hitting the end of the trail in Virginia this is one of the last big climbs until till the Shenandoahs and through through the whole the whole trail I was actually having friends here from the library send me all kinds of food and I I would generally be as non-specific as I could about what to send and saw it was just good fun to eat whatever would come my way and in this particular situation I had a pound of fluff that came my way and it was actually amazing I'd sit down for a snack and I'd have my pound of fluff and I'd just take out a jar of peanut butter and sit there and one spoon into one one into the other your diet changes usually for the worst when you're out hiking I ran into a number of parents that were hiking with their their little kids on the Appalachian Trail and they'd hear your through hiker they'd start to say you know what what could you tell my child that would want to make them hike the Appalachian Trail that is so easy you get to eat candy all day long here's this nice brewery right after right after the priest in three ridges this is the devil's backbone brewery one of the hikers I was with grandpa detour I don't know where he found out that this brewery existed but as we're hiking past he threw it out there that there's an award winning micro brewery less than 15 miles from the trail maybe we should all go there and it didn't take much convincing to have I think there were eight or nine of us at the time all decided that was where a night was gonna end I ended up beating all of them to the brewery and we had called ahead to to warn them that we were coming just sort of a common courtesy and to make sure there was outdoor seating which which there was and showed up there and the the manager was so into having hikers there I didn't even get to open the door I walked up and he opened it started introducing me to all the wait staff and by the time the rest of my hikers and showed up I had this nice table laid out with plates and the drinks were flowing and they sent us out to camp in the yard afterwards we we were in no condition to actually go back to the trail so they sent us out into the yard with four free growlers of beer and then woke us up at 9 the next morning with two more brought us in made us breakfast this is a this is a like a barbecue and brewery this isn't a place that actually serves breakfast the cook came in especially made us all breakfast and then right around noon we ended up getting back to the trail and still managed to get in a pretty good like 19 20 miles until Waynesboro which for for starting at noon I was I was quite impressed with with all of us it was easy trail but then Waynesboro amazing all you can eat buffet here's sunset from McAfee's knob McAfee's knob is one of those parts of the appellation trail that pretty much everybody hears about it way before you get to it it's this rock overhanging up over the valleys of valleys and farmlands of Virginia and I happen to make it up there for sunset and met you can't tell very well in the pictures but in the corner there with a Stetson hat and his Willie Nelson braids his pops and pony loves down there making dinner and we've got hand bone up there in the corner pops I ended up hiking with on and off for maybe a week or so after that this the section down in Virginia from McAfee's knob up through the Tinker Cliffs and into Troutville was really one of my favorite parts of the trail not not my not my all my overall favorite but one of my favorites if you're ever down in that area I'm looking for a hike I strongly recommend even getting up to McAfee's knob is an easy enough day hike here's Troutville Virginia I didn't have a guidebook through through hiking the appellation trail and part it was just because my lack of preparation left me not realizing that guidebooks actually existed for the appellation trail I knew there was something obviously something out there but didn't realize that the most popular one the AWOL guidebook was was being used by everyone except me and as such I ended up in this little town in Virginia where nobody else seemed to be going because there's another little town nearby that actually has things that hikers would want but this one I found the town to be even though they didn't have the cracker barrel and the McDonald's and whatever horrible things we all slink off to as soon as we get into a town I found the town to be a really nice hiker friendly place the the fireman in the local fire station they let me do my laundry there and they let me shower there they they told me as soon as I got there that there was a trail festival going on that weekend and at first I kind of brushed it off I wasn't really taking days off while I was hiking and the idea of taking a day off for this trail festival wasn't wasn't in the cards for me then through a little bit of convincing in a fairly eye-opening executive meeting at the fire department I decided that it would be be in my best interest to stick around they let me sleep in the gazebo I went and rounded up a few other hikers and told them that you know there's a trail festival going on here I'm the only hiker here there's all kinds of free food free stuff free showers you start saying free on the appellation trail and people start really coming in and droves so yeah they fed us pretty well there were five of us to take down a feast that would was meant for a lot more than five people we we did what we could though here we are still plowing through the feast we have bam and ambassador apollos hiding behind the post they had a 5k at the at the trail festival I thought it was a bad idea to run a 5k in the middle of the appellation trail but Apollo didn't so props to him made made the papers while we were there too that that was always fun here's trailville trial days we have the whole fire department those those were some real fun guys I'm hoping I get a chance to go down and go to this trail festival again as a as a non hiker and maybe actually do my part to bring food and instead of just consume all of it here's pops given a speech he was he was quite the orator as as things went when I was at the trail festival I was really hoping that pops would show up because I figured if there's anyone that can just stand up there and tell it how it is it it's pops and that's exactly what he did he's a gas station little bit little bit down the road from travel this is probably a few more days in you really grow to appreciate gas stations in a way that you don't at all in the real world I'm not the kind of person that would go into a gas station normally in order three chili dogs and two sodas and a half gallon of ice cream and then go back and do it again three more times but the cashiers get pretty used to this kind of behavior when four or five hikers show up and you go in and you buy everything that you think you need or that you can carry out of there and then you go outside you eat it on the front steps when you walk back in and you buy more they just it's how hikers work here's a little I named it Bambi but I don't think it really responded to the name this deer hiked with me for not quite a mile but it just I came upon it its mother and one of its siblings while I was coming through the Shenandoahs on a fairly rainy day spooked them all the mother and fun took off in one direction and this one wasn't really the sharpest attack in the shed took off in the wrong direction came back starts looking around for mom looks up at me and figured I was good enough and just started called it even started hiking with me and so I was walking and walking this little deer is following right behind the healing just like a dog and I got to feeling pretty bad about it because I thought you know I'm gonna be responsible for the death of this young deer I can't take care of a deer I can barely take care of myself out here and I every now get down and get in its face and just scream out and tell it to like go run away go go anything I could get to spook it and it wouldn't wouldn't have any of it just kept going and kept going and I I got to like thinking how does this actually play out you know a couple days in if I roll up to a shelter I have a baby deer with me is that gonna be a problem new new trail name coming maybe ended up working out though I I guess dear fairly territorial they they live out much of their lives within a fairly short radius so I got not not too far from where I'd spook the thing and looked back after going around a turn and it wasn't there so I'm assuming it lived I'm hoping it lived here's the farmlands that you see walking through large parts of Virginia you're just looking down at valleys like this this one isn't the Shenandoah Valley but it's the sort of this is what you see in the Shenandoah Valley and for miles and miles on either end of it through for the the most part you're not really walking down into these little towns you're just following ridgelines but every now and then it'll weave down off of the ridgeline if you need to get water and it's I think at this point in time I was probably June I was hiking through here and that was I couldn't have been happier spending my summer just this is what you see when you're going to bed at night what you see when you're waking up you get to see the sunrise and set over the ridgelines in the back this ridgeline in the back isn't particularly even but a number of the ridgelines through Virginia you get up onto them and they just it's it's right flat across you just walk these ridgelines for sometimes 10 15 miles at a time if not more towards the end of the Shenandoahs I grew to question whether I wanted to actually stay on the trail I didn't reach a point where I was sick of hiking enough to get off of it but you spend so much time walking through the woods that at some point you're going to start to ask yourself like it do I have a good reason to actually keep going and towards the end of the Shenandoahs I had sort of a rough go of it been rained on a lot had all my my gear soaked through at one point I got halfway through cooking some mac and cheese on an open fire had all my clothes out to dry which had previously been soaked for a few days thought that I was finally going to get things dried out this storm came in and just soaked all of it doused the fire like eating half cooked mac and cheese sitting under like a little information kiosk in Shenandoah Park it was one of those moments where it just makes you think what why am I here and then there are tourists driving by and like snapping pictures of you well well this is going down the Shenandoahs that there aren't many places in the in the trail that sort of thing would happen but in the in the Shenandoahs you get people that don't really understand what you're all about with with hiking and they kind of keep their distance when they could actually you know maybe a change of clothes would be nicer even even a little bit of food like the mac and cheese was not the most palatable thing I've ever eaten so as I got towards the end of Shenandoah National Park I and this isn't all that uncommon on the Appalachian Trail I decided that I needed a little break from it so I bought a little inflatable that's a wave racer it's sort of like an inner tube that you tow behind a motorboat jumped into the Shenandoah River and floated for about 40 50 miles until Harper's Ferry where the trail crossed the Shenandoah River again that was the whole time I was hiking that it took me two days and three nights that was the biggest break that my feet got they felt amazing after after I was done just having my feet up the whole time dipping them in the river and in this picture you can actually see a deer crossing in the in the rapids up ahead I I didn't plan out the Shenandoah River particularly well either and didn't know there was gonna be be white water on it but most of it turned out to be fine at night you just wake up when you'd hear it and start paddling immediately the the current was just enough so at night I could usually drift for maybe five six miles and then wake up at sunrise and watching the sunrise over the river and at early in the mornings you get these little bubbles that are all starting out and it it was really a nice rhythm to the day which led me in many ways to do the the Bayou Tash afterwards I liked the rhythm of paddling so much I mean I liked hiking but paddling is such a such a different way to travel here those little bubbles early in the morning you're watching the sunrise come up the white water didn't end up being a problem until the end I hit like a class 3 rock garden that was a little bit of a problem to get through but what what was a problem was after I was done with all of it I was still conditioned to the the idea of waking up in the middle of the night hearing the white water and feeling that I needed to jump into action and it took me about a week or so at least to break that cycle where I was waking up in my hammock after I started hiking again with this urgent need to to jump into action I feel like I needed to do something immediately and I'd look around there's nothing to do up there's no white water I'm just sitting in my in my hammock but it took a while for my brain to kind of cycle the river back out of it I met these guys while I was hiking down the river they they had a separate cooler for their their beer and their Yeager which was drifting away from them a little bit and I I didn't have a paddle what I had was my hiking stick with a trash can on it but it was enough of a paddle to get over and rescue their beer and we became friends pretty much immediately and then when they were done they were kind enough to leave me with a few for the road or the river in this case here's Boiling Springs is another one of the trail towns that the Appalachian Trail goes right through the middle of it there's a nice loop in the middle of town that goes around a fishing pond and the Appalachian Trail is blazed right along the loop and then you get to the the ATC I'm not sure if it's their headquarters but it's some some official office office for the Appalachian Trail Conservancy that seemed like a good enough place to stop and take a break and there's a hiker box behind it you can look through for anything from food to medical supplies through Pennsylvania you start walking through a lot of crops through the beginning and end of the trail it's it's it's all just mountains up and down ridge lines and then it flattens out speaking relatively through through Pennsylvania you're still climbing mountains but they're they're not four or five thousand foot mountains and through much of it you are just walking through through crops little trails that have been cut through the sides of it which is a nice change of pace but it's also really hot and then Pennsylvania is also full of these sharp little rocks that it's probably better not to talk about them they're still a traumatic memory here's another one of those those fire towers that you can see as you you get up to the top of them the mountains there's this dense little this alpine forest just so much fun to walk through in some cases as you get up higher and higher the trees even get short enough so you're walking through these alpine forests that are shorter than you are and you can look out over all of it and when they disappear completely there's nothing left to put the white blazes on so that the trail maintainers just build these cairns these big rock piles and instead of following the blazes you're just following rock piles over open mountain faces here's from the top of Mount Killington the trail doesn't climb to the summit of Killington but it goes close to the summit and then there's an optional blue blaze trail which the the Appalachian trail is white blazed all through it and then the side trails are all blue blue blaze so they're just if if I refer to something as a blue blaze it's just a side trail and then the water is generally blue blazed also had a friend of mine come out and hike part of the long trail as I was getting closer to Maine I was able to find more and more friends to come out and just hike with me for a day or two and some of them even just would come out for a night here's getting up into the white mountains these are the the cairns I was talking about the trail just follows this ridgeline that's Mount Lafayette right there and it follows these ridgelines and you're just following little rock pile after rock pile and through through much of the whites this is the the sort of thing you see through the presidentials another view from Mount Mount Lafayette Mount Washington is often the distance distance it's not the closest mountain it's the next next range over and this the light doesn't reflect it but this is just about at sunset we were we were up on top of Mount Lafayette and we're able to watch the sunset from up there at that point I was hiking with San he can he's a retired Marine that I met right before the whites and hiked through most of the whites with him and this is the same this is Lafayette this is looking back over the ridgeline back over the way that you come up it here's one of the shelters this is one of the nicer shelters as soon as you get into the white mountains the the ATC is the AMC sorry is the one the organization running things they're more business-like than any of the other organizations well they they are a business it's not a volunteer organization so you get shelters that are more professionally done than the the other ones but in the end that all you really need is a roof and walls and somewhere to start a fire so it was nice to have the change of pace the the mohusiks the mohusik notch is is so much fun it's described by a lot of people as the the hardest mile on the trail but it's all what your definition of of a hard mile is it takes a long time to get through it but it's like one giant playground we've got tipsy and coffee to go coming up out of a cave in the mohusik it's just this big boulder field that you're going down into caves and coming up out of them climbing up over boulders here's my my dad and my little brother came out just after crossing the border in domain they they came and spent the night at a shelter brought all kinds of food we cooked up food for the other people at the shelter that night I was Chris Bear jingle I I met him in the parking lot while I was waiting for my dad and my little brother he he came over from Poland he wasn't through hiking but he was just over here exploring parts of the Appalachian Trail you get a good number of Europeans mostly Germans hiking the Appalachian Trail I guess the story that many of them told me is that the disco they're equivalent of the Discovery Channel ran a documentary on the Appalachian Trail really romanticized it all so you've got all these Germans that came over thinking that it's this amazing wilderness experience and a lot of it it's it's fun but there's a lot a lot that the documentary must have missed just like a lot of blisters and all the all the other stuff that they they left out here's a shot of a watering hole up in the White Mountains had friend came and and met me took me out showed me one of one of her personal secrets of the White Mountains her and her husband showed me their their watering hole and this was probably the first real bath I'd had in a few weeks too this is looking out over I think that's Moosehead Lake if I remember this might I could be wrong but this is in Maine slightly after the the height of land it's this nice overlook that the trail comes fairly close to and here we have the bigelows looking out you can see just the edge of sugarloaf there and the trail doesn't climb to the the summit of sugarloaf but it goes pretty close to it and then it hooks around over the crackers down up onto the bigelows over the whole bigelow range that was for as Maine goes that is one amazing section of trail if any of you are ever looking for just a good way to spend a weekend or want to get out and hike some part of the trail in Maine the bigelows are really they are spectacular they're not they're not easy they if you if your knees aren't particularly in good shape the bigelow mountains won't really do anything to make them in better shape but the views from the top or they they rival just about any any other piece of the Appalachian Trail I'd say there were some views down in the Smokies that were amazing there was Blood Mountain down in Georgia and then from then it was just Lafayette the bigelows in Katahdin where some of my favorite peaks on the whole trail here's some road walking the the trail tends to borrow roads to get over bridges at at times as you get closer to Maine they they don't seem to believe in bridges as much but this was New Hampshire in Gorham, New Hampshire at borrowed this road for about a quarter mile to get over one of the rivers there. Here we have the Kennebec which used to be a river that you were supposed to ford and I guess I don't think anyone ever ended up drowning but there were a number of instances where it was enough of a problem that they now have a shuttle service that's offered and they must have had the shuttle service since then yeah it's just a volunteer in a canoe that shuttles you across the river that was this was also on my birthday so it made it that much better when I when I first got to the the shuttle my mom was waiting for me on the other bank and I told all the other hikers it was my birthday and they let me go across first because here's a picture of my birthday party I told my mom to just bring bring cake and food and a bottle of Allen's coffee brandy we have Tex who I I met Tex way back I met him in North Carolina and lost track of him for about a thousand miles and then we crossed paths again somewhere in the white mountains and towards the end just started hiking together more and more and reminiscing about the the good old days even though it was only a few months before but then we have good medicine and I think we had one other hiker so between the four of us we had the whole birthday cake to ourselves that was just pretty good odds and into the hundred mile wilderness this is another another one of the Fords when I went through the the water levels were down enough so I really didn't have many problems fording these places but I got that it just seemed kind of dangerous to me it didn't seem like the sort of thing I'd want to cross if the water was running any any faster than that and through the hundred miles I ditched most of my gear at this point my backpack is shrunk to a nice 15 pounds or so that was my birthday present to myself was just get rid of close to everything and did the last last 130 miles of the trail with as little as possible not not that I was able to move any faster for it I just the hundred miles is not something I really felt like rushing through there's so much so much to see there part of the way through the hundred miles and this was in part because of a misjudgment on my part in getting rid of all of my stuff which seemed like such a good idea until I ran out of food luckily standing Barrett run out of food also and Tex was more than happy to go along with our shenanigans so we decided to flag down a car that was driving on this old logging road and got them to give us loads and loads of food and then as soon as the car left we scooted it all behind a rock and flagged down the next car so by the by the time we started hiking again we had cans of beef erronean like a gallon bag of ripple chips and all the other hikers that we met are just shaking their heads going like how how did you manage to get all of this food 60 miles into the hundred mile wilderness just skill here's just building a fire this was a fairly cold night so we built it next to a rock and we were all kind of huddled around trying to get the heat to reflect back and up in this picture this was actually in the town of Monson we we met one of the locals there at a at a bar that claimed he'd take us out to this jumping rock and we have caboose here was a southbounder so he had just started his hike he was maybe a week into it if that and that was a lot of fun to get to hang out with someone who's on on their end of it when we're all on the opposite end of it we've got maybe a week left to go and you can kind of see so many of the ways that you used to think about hiking in in the ways that he organizes his pack and his just his ideas about how to move down the trail and it became also with the cliff jumping it the cliff must have been about 35 40 feet which again I don't like jumping off perfectly good structures so I opted out of it but then caboose decided to jump and then one of us had to jump because we can't be shown up by a southbounder luckily I think it was trips this is I think it was trips that ended up taking the fall and jumping off of it and this is just up through the 100 mile wilderness this is white cap here's a view of Katahdin before you actually climb Katahdin you can see it for days and days as as you're walking along the trail and you're just stopping and it in complete awe of this this mountain that it's not like any other mountains that are around you at the time and just winding your way to it slow and steady part of the way through the 100 mile wilderness we also ran into a group of college girls from Coa and managed to finagle our way into their sunrise yoga session here's the morning before climbing Katahdin at this point I had met a group of hikers hippity hop and Tex who I'd mentioned standing bear and they'd sort of become my my second trail family of the of the hike we were all completely in sync with each other we'd hike together we'd take synchronized naps together on the side of the trail we were just we were pretty much inseparable and we're all just mulling around the the ranger station here not really sure if we should start hiking or not because we know that as soon as we reach the top of Katahdin it all ends and we all have to go our separate ways here's standing bear and I think hippity must have taken this picture standing bear and then there's Tex and myself and a few other southbounders that are coming down they may have been flip floppers actually I seem to remember that they they knew more about the trail than than I thought a southbounder would not I shouldn't be too judgmental of them but southbounders and northbounders always have this sort of clash around who's actually hiking the trail the right way on our way up Katahdin this is just after the table ends so we've got maybe a mile or so left to go and it's the same sort of thing you're having a lot of fun just in in awe of the fact that this hike is is finally about to be over but at the same time you don't you don't want it to be over so we took more breaks on the way up Katahdin and I think we had it any other point in time hiking and then everybody has their their summit photos from the end of the trail got myself standing bear Tex hippity one of the three of us and afterwards the only thing to do was to throw a party when we got home these are my cousins who actually met me and hiked in in Pennsylvania for a good couple days with me and I was kind of restless once I got home so loaded this little purple boat on the back of my truck and figured I'd better better just take off and go keep traveling this sort of it's a really strange time in everyone's life having finished the Appalachian Trail because you've you finished what's kind of a monumental achievement by most most people's standards but at the same time you're still living on a day-to-day basis and well everyone I'd meet was saying oh this is this is amazing this is amazing I'm just I was completely lost for for direction really and you'd wake up and you know there isn't some white blaze to follow you're not you can't hike and find these amazing people miles and miles down the trail who have just hiked 2,000 miles to to get here and part of what I took off was I needed to go find those people again and some of the people I met on the trail I started looking them up and figuring out where they actually were in the country and made some plans to go out and start visiting them and hiking with all of them and most of them seem to be going through the same thing and we're more than happy to to have me come come by and at least share in their general confusion that what life was all about now so I headed down among other stops I stopped in with Standing Bear and he since finishing the Appalachian Trail it basically just kept walking he decided to be the the only person to hike the Appalachian and then the Ozark Trail in the same season which now although it is quite an accomplishment to do both the Appalachian and the Ozark Trail are two completely separate trails and the problem that I found with the Ozark Trail was that there aren't many people on it the support network just isn't there you don't have this vibrant trail community that is I mean on the Appalachian Trail you're meeting people that have hiked in years past they're just hanging out on the side of the trail some of them own lot land there some of them are coming back to visit on a regular basis and even if they're not hiking they're supporting the hikers that are going through the hike that year and the Ozarks doesn't have any sort of concept of that but we did a good bit of hiking there went down through through the town sock portion of the the Ozark Trail which just about completed his his goal of finishing the Ozarks and then or finishing the Appalachian and then finishing out the Ozarks and after that I was starting to get a bit cold so I headed down started paddling down in the the bayous of Louisiana stumbled upon the bayou Tash as this historic waterway that runs from near near Baton Rouge it's probably 10 miles or so from Baton Rouge down to about the Gulf of Mexico and as stayed on that I met an outfitter down there who gave me a few connections to other locals that that enjoyed paddling not just the Tash but the the basin down there the Chaffalaya Basin and they they basically just helped me through guided me through the whole whole experience of paddling which I wasn't very used to it I'd gotten pretty used to hiking and could handle myself there but paddling I had a lot of trouble just staying dry and keeping everything organized in a whole different way I'll just flip down through most of these I know we're sort of running low on time and then leave some time for the questions but going down through the Tash as you get closer and closer to the end of it you hit the the Chaffalaya River this is actually this is the charlatan cut but the Chaffalaya River for for being a river is just it's it's huge coming out to the end of it it felt a lot like Casco Bay really with the the Casco Bay Bridge and the Portland old port to me I've got a picture of that here we go coming down this is the end of it after going down through these swamps and bayous you end up at just this this massive of industry you've got tugboats and barges going in and out and the but again it's not it's not the ocean this is all on a river that's just up up into the waterways and the barge traffic from from down here tends to make it up miles and miles up into the bayous and yeah this was the the end of it the finishing up down in the end of the end of the bayou Tash I made my way back home visited a few more friends stopped into some spots in North Carolina I went went back to the trail and the Shenandoahs and even though the only people still hiking at that point were a few straggling southbounders but it was real cold time to be hiking still stopped out and I'd leave beers and food for him by the side of the trail to do anything I could to help them get along being a southbounder it's really kind of a lonely way to hike it because there aren't so many southbounders and to make the choice to travel southbound is basically making the choice to not experience the trail community to the extent that the northbounders will the people that are trail angling generally cater to the northbounders they're just they're way more accessible if you want to make sure that you find someone to actually receive the the food that you're cooking or whatever you're trying to offer to people it's it's really kind of hard to hit the the 50 to 70 southbounders that it's not a lot of people that actually complete the trail going south each year so that that's all that's all I've got for for the pictures