 The End to Enders panel turns 10 years old today, a decade of sharing information from experienced long trail end to enders to prospective end to enders and anyone who's really interested in the long trail. So thank you all again for being here. My name is Rob. I'm the Education and Volunteer Coordinator here at the Green Mountain Club. And I just wanna take a few minutes to let you know of a few things about the building. Who is a first timer here at Green Mountain Club headquarters? All right, cool, welcome. This is our home base. We love this place and just wanna make sure you know a few things about it. So first off, again I wanna thank you all for coming and I wanna thank our panelists here for setting their time aside tonight to share their knowledge and their love of the trail with you all. It's a really awesome thing that they're doing, they're volunteering their time and I hope you brought a lot of questions for them because they're eager to, sorry, I'm watching myself on the screen so I just need to minimize that. Don't have that. Really weird. Okay, I think I fixed it. So anyway, they're taking their time out tonight so please bring your questions to them. We'll talk about when that's gonna happen in a moment. I also wanna thank the online audience for being here. You can wave at them at the camera back there. Hey, online audience. I know we have folks from as far away as North Carolina and California tuning in tonight. I think over 70 people tuning in so thank you all for being here. And finally, a huge thanks to Orca Media, our friends in the back based out of Montpelier who have been broadcasting this event for close to seven years I think. So it's really great to have y'all back. Thank you for all you do for us. During your time here, I still hear myself, hold on one second. During your time here, if you need to use the bathroom, you may have found some already. There's two in the back and there's one downstairs. If you need any water, we have a couple of jugs in the back here. And if we run out there, we'll refill them. The exits, should you need to exit the building for any emergency, the best and most immediate exits are in that corner of the room and that corner of the room. And if you need elevator access, we will help you with that. That's just on the other side of that wall. If you need to get up and move around and stand, that's totally fine. We got a lot of room to play with here. Just please make sure you're not blocking anyone else's view as you're doing that. And finally, I just wanna go over our general schedule for the evening. This is a kind of a standard panel with a longer than average question and answer period from the audience because this is what this is all about. I have some pre-arranged questions here but I'm not gonna take up too much time with them because this is about you all and the folks online as well. So we're gonna start with a little bit about the club. We're going to actually involve the audience from the get-go with a few major topics that folks wanna hear about tonight. We're gonna get our panelists to introduce themselves. We're gonna have a brief slideshow after that that kinda gets us in the mood and shows us some really cool images from the trail and from all of their experiences. And then we're gonna go into the questions and discussion part of this. And I will lead with a couple just to kinda get things flowing. But the bulk of this evening, probably about an hour to an hour 15 is going to be for questions from you all and from our online audience as well. So that's really what we're here to do. Finally, at the very end, we're gonna take probably about 15 minutes to break off and we're gonna have our panelists kind of scatter throughout the room and you're gonna be free to kind of approach them and ask questions maybe you didn't get to during the panel or take a dive into their backpack if they allow you, you know, et cetera, et cetera. Ask permission before you dive into backpacks always. Great, are there any questions before we begin? All right, cool. So first off, the Green Mountain Club. The Green Mountain Club was begun in 1910 with one purpose and that was to build a trail across the high peaks of Vermont from Massachusetts to Canada. And the club succeeded in doing so over the next 20 years. And that path has changed somewhat in the last century but it has stayed true to that general length and the Southern and Northern Termini. And the Green Mountain Club exists today to make the Vermont mountains play a larger role in the life of the people. So we build a trail and we use it so that folks can enjoy their mountains and come and enjoy the beauty of Vermont from all over the world. So that is our mission. And we do that through education and through the stewardship of our trails and our mountains. So by participating in the trail, you are participating in our mission and that's why we exist. So thank you for that. The goal of this specific event is to share a wide range of knowledge and expertise from long trail end to enders that is folks who have traveled the entire length of the trail either in a single push or in sections over multiple weeks or even years. And we always aim to get a somewhat, as much as we can, a diverse audience to give you different experiences whether that be age, gender, group, race, anything. We wanna get the broadest spectrum we can so that you can get the different experiences and so that they can have a nice discussion and you see the different perspectives. So that is why we are here. So now I wanna know why you're here. So before we get going too much further I would love to hear three audience members give us three just general topics. Not specific questions yet, but general topics that you would love to hear about tonight. And that way we can kinda have those in the back of our minds as we're going further. So would anyone like to share a topic they would love to hear about this evening? Yes. Feminine needs. Feminine needs, excellent. Great broad topic, awesome. Very, there's a lot to talk about there. All right, what is the second one? Yes. Just resupplying issues. Great, resupplying. All right, and finally one more general topic. Yes. Like has and has not on the trail as far as gear goes. All right, has and has not, excellent. Great, thank you. All right, so we're gonna lodge those in the back of our minds to make sure we hit on those. And now, would love to hear from our panelists. We're gonna have panelists. I would love you to take three minutes each and tell us about yourselves based on your agenda in front of you. And we'll start here with Alan. My name is Alan Pashel. I hiked with my partner Morgan Irons in 2013 and then again in 2017. We share trail names. Together we are pokey and tag along depending on who's in the lead. I am usually tag along. She's actually a stronger hiker than I am. I'm from Callis, Vermont. Our favorite location on the trail, mine was a set of Cascades. That's below White Rock Mountain. Really beautiful spot. What I can offer as a panelist tonight is representing the older end of the population that hikes the trail. I can tell you the pain is relative. If you're stubborn enough, you can finish the trail. Thank you Alan. I'm Monica Quinn. We also share a trail name with my hiking buddy Liz here. The very first night on the trail, some AT hikers gave us the name Nama and Stay. So we're Nama, Stay together. I'm Nama, pretty much always. I'm from Sudbury, Massachusetts. Been in Vermont for about four years now and did a through hike last summer, starting July 1st with Stay over here. My favorite location on the trail, Camelshump has a special place for sure. It's a pretty wild, beautiful mountain but I had hiked that a lot before I did the trail. So one that I discovered on the trail was the big branch area and spent an awesome night listening to that babbling brook there. So offer as a panelist. Obviously I have a female perspective. I've done a lot of different sports in my life and this is more of a longer endurance, mentally challenging one for me. So that was kind of a cool perspective for me that maybe I can pass on to others as well. Sweet. So I'm Liz Locke and as you know, I'm Stay and I got the stand because I like to stay wherever we are. Which is usually the 10. I live here in Bolton and obviously we were through hikers and together as partners. My favorite location is probably Coralus Camp. It's really super cute and we had made some LT buddies and ended up having a birthday party there for one of them and that was just a really special moment and just a nice time with the friends that we made on the trail. And what I hope to offer as a panelist, I guess is just that I really love hiking and I really love the green mountains and if you're thinking about doing this, I would totally recommend it because it's a really special experience. I cried every day because I was so happy and most days cause I was sad too. It's an emotional roller coaster. We can talk about that more later. My name is Vlad Grass. My trail name was Ender. My hometown, I live currently in Shelburne, Vermont. I through hiked it with my partner and father right here. My favorite location on the long trail, I think probably White Rocks. I think it was really beautiful and I just love the environment there. It was a nice trail too. What I offer as a panelist, I think is kind of a more unique perspective as a younger person hiking the trail. I think I enjoyed it a lot and I can offer my view as someone who's 12, 13 when I hiked out. All right, I'm David Grass. I was born in West Bolton and live in Shelburne now. We through hiked starting in mid June and finished in mid July. We hiked together. We started off with our dog Stas and he accompanied us for the first week and then when we had our resupply, he saw our station wagon and he jumped into it and refused to get out. He was making his desires pretty clear. He rejoined us for the last week and after the first couple of days, we had to learn how to hike with him in a way that worked for him and we got better. So I'm happy to talk about that later. Favorite location for a shelter would be Theron Dean which has spectacular views to the east and other directions as well. And it was just an amazing place to watch the sunrise. Also, we went skinny dipping in big branch grove or something like that and I'll remember that too. And what I offer as a panelist, I worked for the GMC when I was in college. I was a caretaker at Griffith Lake and got to meet lots of through hikers coming through and admired what they were doing. I always wanted to hike the long trail. It felt like if you're a Vermonter, that's something that you try to do. My mom hiked with my brother around the Bolton area, did some overnights and I was always jealous because I didn't get to do one with her. So I was really glad to be able to do that with Vlad. And my other son, Yuri, who's 10 years old, is in back and I'm sort of grooming him in hopes that we'll get to do it in a few years together. Thanks. Thank you all. And I think of a special note, David, Vlad and Alan were all sitting where you are this time last year. And now they're on that side of the table. So if you're a perspective end to end or yourself, perhaps I'll be talking to you this time next year and you'll be sitting here sharing your knowledge as well. Thank you all. So we're gonna take just a couple of minutes to enjoy some photos from all of their end to end hikes and then we'll get into the questions. So Zach, if you wouldn't mind hitting those four lights which is behind you. Should we get out of here? Yeah, if you don't want to, you can feel free to rotate the chairs or walk aside either one, that's fine. Rob's. I hope that was nice and inspiring for everyone. Donals grow back. Donals grow back. It's scary when it happens, but they grow back, yeah. Or not, everyone needs them. So, warned the panelists before we began that I was gonna start with a deeply philosophical question because those are always really fun, right? I'm a big fan of asking why when I do things and I think that's kind of a deep need for a lot of folks. So I'm challenging our panelists to begin with this question. Why the long trail and what did you hope to gain from the experience and did you succeed in that goal? So I thought we could start at the far end with David and Vlad and we're gonna work our way this way and feel free to discuss it in pairs and feel free to discuss amongst yourselves as well as we make our way down. Okay, I'm gonna answer your very philosophical question with a not very philosophical answer. Great. A colleague of mine at work came back from hiking the long trail in the summer of 2017 and was so overflowing with the enthusiasm and the life and the magic of that experience that I was just like, oh my God, I want that. So it was Envy, you know. It goes a long way, right? So hearing her stories and I guess the question I asked myself was like, well, why not? And so I put the question to Vlad on a walk, not really expecting or knowing what his answer would be and he was like, yeah, sure. And I was delighted. And so we spent a long time planning, starting in maybe like January and we'd spend 15 minutes, 10 minutes, like once or twice a week doing planning. So yeah, that was nice. That's cool. So partially it was because my dad wanted to. But I think a bigger reason was because I live in Vermont, right? And I never gone into the wilderness for a long period of time. I never felt like I had that Vermont spirit and went out there and have a connection with the trees and the plants and the animals. And I was kind of seeking that. So when my dad proposed the idea to me, I was all for it. But I'm not seem super enthusiastic by the way you portrayed it. But yeah, also I love my dad and I love spending time with him. And I thought it would be a great way to spend a month doing what he loves and what I learned to love over my time on the trail. So yeah, I guess that's kind of my reason why. That's a really good reason. Okay, well you made it really pretty, Paulie. No, that's awesome. I think my journey is kind of similar in some ways. Like I choose to be a Vermonter and I love it here so much. And hiking is one of those things that it took me a little bit of time to find the fun in. And I got to a place where I found it to be really fun. I was like, I should see what it's like in all the parts of the mountains. And then I got this idea of hiking the lawn trail on my head, but I was pretty nervous about doing it by myself. So I was kind of in this holding pattern where I was waiting for somebody to come along that would want to hike it with me. And then I made the decision to hike it by myself and then I met Monica. And it was super fortuitous timing and I couldn't have been happier to hike it with a partner and just have somebody to share the experience with like, is this real? Like, is this really what we get to do every day? And it was. I can confirm that. Why the long trail? Yeah, I chose to move to Vermont. I'd been here for like three years and was falling in love with the state but had gone out on a bunch of summit missions and hadn't really called the woods my home yet kind of like what Vlad was saying. And I wanted to see the whole state. I wanted to see the south all the way to Canada. I wanted home to be on my back. I got on a couple smaller backpacking trips and had that itch to see how far I could push it. And it was kind of an objective based goal for me as well but it was the perfect length and I really felt like it was an awesome experiential time as well. Good journey in all those respects. My partner and I didn't start hiking until we were 60 and of course it was natural basically to go out our back door. Our first hike was up Hunger Mountain and then we wanted to do all the summits. We loved the places that we saw in the forest and thought that it would be quite an adventure to discover more of them. We're both sort of project oriented so the concept of hiking to Canada really appealed to us and we made it. Not once but twice. Twice, yeah. Awesome. Kind of touching on something you said Liz I actually have a question for you. Did Liz and Monica, did you meet on trail or did you meet beforehand and decide to hike together? Beforehand but actually not that far beforehand. Nice. Like a year max probably, about a year? Yeah. Okay. But immediately we're really good hiking partners and some of you might know you can't share a tent with just anybody. Especially when you're both really stinky. And it was really good complementary partnership and kind of knew that it would work out somehow. Well that's a perfect segue into my next question. I love it. Which is I just want to note that everyone sitting up here hiked with a partner for their through hikes. Also they're all through hikers I believe. There are no section hikers amongst the panelists tonight. But going back to the partner idea, I'd love to hear as someone who hikes alone a lot myself I'd love to hear from you all. If you've felt the desire for alone time while spending so much time with a partner while out on trail and how did you handle those feelings hiking these partnerships? And I thought we could start with Alan and work our way back. I guess I wouldn't really think about time alone you're really dependent on your partner on the trail for practical reasons and emotional reasons. I mean it can get a little tight in the tent once in a while. But we were extremely compatible. Not that there aren't brief moments of friction on the trail but we're also very aware that you can't let them go very far. You're there to support each other and that's probably the most important thing. Yeah I never felt that I wanted to be more alone. Our hiking style was kind of do however you're feeling and we had certain checkpoints. So we spend some like what hours hiking apart sometimes just because one person was feeling great and had fresh legs and was gonna charge up the mountain and one person wanted to like charge down the mountain or take it easy on the way up. So I think communication was really key for that and had enough alone time. Had separate chores at camp but Alan brought up a good point with the dependency. Like there was still only one tent. We had to end at the same place. One stove, someone else had the food, someone else had the sriracha. Yeah it was a really good experience sitting with a partner. But it'd be fun to do alone too I think. I think I agree totally with what Monica's saying and then also what Alan mentioned, like the level of communication that you're able to develop by having that sort of dependency but also choice to be doing something like this together is really special. And I feel like the way that we were able to like solve problems when they came up was just like really effective and kind and a skill that I think would be super beneficial to anyone in the front country or like in the real world. It was just really amazing to be able to experience that part of it. And then obviously there was some direct communication but then that trust that if you need time to hike by yourself and hike your own hike as they say like we knew that that was okay and it wasn't a personal thing. It was just like about the individual components of our journey. So yeah, it was great. Yeah, me and my dad don't think ever had any big fights at all. But I think it was super beneficial hiking with a partner. I don't know what I would have done with that one. I picked his brain thoroughly for every single story he had to tell. The miles go by a lot faster if you're listening to a story. I did contribute some but I have a lot less time on this earth to gather them. Hiking with a partner. I never really wanted a long time but I feel like even if you are hiking right next to someone you can be in your own space mentally. Sometimes we didn't talk for hours and that was fine. We didn't have to be interacting at all times and I think that provided me the ability to hike be with someone 24 seven for a full month. Yeah, I did know that. I never had any desire for a long time. I loved having Vlad in my line of sight. I loved sleeping by his side for a month and then when we got home and he went into his room and slept there it was like, this is weird. That was when I felt alone. Wanna go hiking? I dropped him off at Camp Abnacky one day, two days after we got back and he went to play tether ball with somebody and I felt like a jilted lover. I was like, oh, he's okay without me. So, yeah, being alone was never an issue. Like you are alone out there. We definitely spent a couple days hiking with other people but for the most part it's you and your partner and so no, I never had the desire to find space. We would have different chores and so those moments of quiet contemplation while I was filtering water were plenty sufficient. Nice, awesome, thank you all, yeah. That sounds great. I'd love to start taking some questions from our audience. As we begin to kind of get into this I am also gonna see if I can access questions from our online audience as well so I might be back here a little bit but I'll come back here. One thing that I do ask of folks in the audience is when you ask a question I would really appreciate if you just stand up, say your name real quick and then if you are directing your question at a specific panelist please make sure that's known. If you would like to hear from all of them that's okay too but in the interest of time and making sure we get through as many questions as possible I may ask that we only ask a couple of panelists for some questions. With that all in mind we have some questions from the audience. Dan, do you wanna start us off? Hey, everybody, my name's Dan. I guess most of us have never met before. I'm an editor from Summer of 17. Everybody has incredible stories and hiking the trail is absolutely an amazing, amazing thing. I think one thing that gets overlooked sometimes is that hiking the trail is something that is really extremely difficult to do and I don't know that a lot of people talk about that very much. I wonder if any of you would be wanting to share like what did you feel like was your most difficult day out there was the biggest challenge, the tough thing you faced while you were walking from Massachusetts to Canada or the other way around. Monica and Liz, do you wanna start off? Sure, that is really very true and the valley's very cheesy but the valley's made the peaks even better for sure. There was a day in particular where like my stomach was upset. I think Liz's knee was hurt. We were both like crying. I missed my dog. I didn't know how to get out of this mental rut because I felt like I was in a green tunnel and I had a lot of steps in front of me and there was never a moment of wanting to give up. It was just like how do I fix my brain back to the task at hand? But I guess other stimulation came in and I had to do what I had to do and I definitely communicated with Liz on that. I read a little bit of my book that was one of my luxury items and thought about the next steps. So there's a couple of things like that or a couple of hours in each day like that and there's no shame in that. It's definitely part of it. Yeah, I think to say that there's not a physical toll on your body would be dishonest. I mean we, I think we're in pretty good shape going into it and had relatively light packs and we're pretty well prepared for what it was gonna be like physically but my knee really hurt and I was eating six ibuprofen a day like clockwork and I'm not a big medicine person and you know it's not gonna last forever and you're making decisions like okay it's worth it and then obviously you can take a rest day if that's something you need but just you know checking in with your body and that part is, it can be really hard and you wanna make sure you take care of yourself so you can finish it as well. That's a balance for sure. Cool. Yeah. Alan, you wanna jump in? I think the most profound thing for me was that I had never been out in absolutely horrendous weather before. You know you're always inside looking out and it had it thinking boy I'm glad I'm not out there. You know that in conjunction with being on the trail it's getting dark and all of a sudden the sky just totally opens up and in minutes you're just completely trashed looking for some place to stop. On the first hike we dove off the trail and on an embankment I had to lash the tent to a tree to keep from sliding down the hill all night. We were miserable. So that combined with some of the things that go wrong that first picture on the slide show of the feet those were mine that was before they got bad hiking and wet shoes for days on end it's just impossible. I'm gonna try waterproof socks next time and see if that's any help. But when your feet get that bad it is extremely painful and it's quite a challenge to overcome that kind of constant pain mentally and just keep going. Yeah. David what do you have really difficult moments? Definitely. Probably my hardest moment was on day two. So it came pretty quickly. My body had really acclimated to hiking and it was supposed to be a shorter day than it was. It was supposed to be 11 miles. I think we ended up doing 13 because somehow numbers change on the map. Somebody might have made us read the map. But the beginning and you know like everything was fine until the end. I think the last mile maybe two miles I don't know how much it was but I think it was route nine. You went straight down you went straight up. Oh yeah you did. Yeah. The descent was brutal on these and you just took so much impact because I hadn't learned how to walk. I mean you're not in a little sense but I didn't know how to take the impact into my body and then I was also not super like fit for climbing up. So I was in tears by the end of it and I was just hating it I was miserable. And I wanted to get off at that point like I would just like screw it. You know this is terrible. But it definitely got a lot better and I'm glad I stayed on. And I think that probably where you hurt your knee and I'll let you talk about that. So my two low points one was day three when I felt like my knee was gonna give out. And so we took a half day off where basically I realized I couldn't go anymore without injuring myself. And so we camped I don't know 25, 30 feet from the trail and it ended up being really good because then like a really horrific thunderstorm came in and we already had the shelter up. And then about midway through maybe day 16, day 17 we were gonna slack pack because that's what the cool AT hikers do. And slack pack means you give basically like a support team your pack and you take a little day pack or a butt pack and you do high miles. And so we were gonna be ambitious starting in Stowe and go up to Johnson like 22, 23 miles. Oh no, okay. I'm sorry, we're starting with two. We got three miles in and I pulled my calf muscle because we were going fast. And it was a different pace than we were used to and that was enough to injure myself. So I took, we took a day and a half off back at the house. Again, it was sort of fortunate because it was right in the middle of a heat wave. And so rather than being out on the trail we were at home a lot swimming a lot for that day and a half. And I didn't, I really thought we weren't gonna get back on the trail. We've been waking up so early with the sun that I woke up at like 430 after that day and a half and I was like screw it. Like let's go back, we've got to try it. And we did and I was taking baby steps to get back up on the trail and we just kept on going. Yeah, low points. Before we move on to our next question I jogged my memory, David, with the heat wave comment. So last July, if you were here in Vermont or anywhere in New England you probably remember that period in July and that was at the end of a really long drought period here. So much so that water became a really difficult thing to find on the trail. And I got a couple of questions from folks in emails before the panel asking specifically about water and I know some folks might have that on the mind. So I'd love to just hear a couple of thoughts about your experiences finding water on the trail, how often you could, how good the sources were. I guess it all depends on when you were there, but if you were there at different times we might have some different perspectives. Liz, you want to take a look? So Molly and I hiked July one till July 24th. So we got rained on one and a quarter times. So we kind of had the opposite experience of the challenge which made packing really great but the average temperature was like 75 degrees. And it was really a little bit sketchy finding water towards the very end. Luckily there's people who care about through hikers and in some places people had hiked in five gallon jugs and left them at the shelters but we have a gravity filter so it was the two of us and we were also originally gonna bring our dogs and we pulled the plug on that because of the temperature. So we had a gravity filter and a filter, two liter or a liter of water at a time, two liters of water at a time. I think those two, yeah. Yeah, so pretty quickly for a lot of people and dogs. But there would be places where it would be really hard to just fill up and that was scary. So then sometimes we would also double up on purification if we were drinking from pretty gross puddles. So gravity filter it and then put in a dime or sanitation tablets. It was really thankful for our filter. It was one of the most efficient, definitely the most efficient I've ever used and that actually brings to mind getting from putting tablets in the water as well. We also got a lot of beta from people coming on the trail too. Wasn't afraid to speak up and be like, where's the last place you got water? And let them know the same as well. Just if you know this can be a dry spell, we had plenty of vessels that we were kind of loaded up onto. Yeah, I know now genes aren't the lightest thing, but it's worth it to have that, not skimping on water. What was the manufacturer of that filter? Just so folks know. I would keep, let me pull it up. It's a lot of pus, it's a lot of pus. A lot of pus, okay, cool. Yeah, so something to keep in mind. Yeah, it was really dry then. Alan, did you have any issues with water? Well, other than it on your skin. The first time it rained 25 out of 27 days, so that was a really wet trip. When did you do that? Was it summer? It was July and 213. But there are places on the trail where it's almost always dry along the Monroe skyline, water's limited, and you always have to be aware of how far you're gonna go that day and where you think the water sources are. Sometimes the sources at the shelters are sketchy, so we would always try to load up midday so that we would have something for dinner and hopefully a little leftover for breakfast if when we got to our end point that day, there was nothing. So we pretty much are always carrying each at least a liter of water. David, what was your water experience? I was carrying a three liter plastic platypus, well I don't know what this is called. Plastic bag that had water. Vlad had two liters, and my resource was really Vlad because he wouldn't drink any water. And so I would finish my container and then I'd be drinking from his. Which meant that I was stopping the pee 20 times a day, and he was like a lot less than that. So for our water, our experience was very similar. I think it just bears calling out trail granny who was close to Killington, a little bit north of there, which was one of the few dry shelters where we were. And she'd written in that she was there and it was a six gallon container. She'd made three trips to fill it up. And it was critical and wonderful and blew us away. Wow, that's wild. Very cool. All right, let's move on to another question from the audience, yes. I'm Ryan. One of the questions I have is, you mentioned preparing and planning. We were planning on just showing up. What kind of planning did you do other than we want to do this amount per day and this is what we're bringing with us? So my experience prior to hiking the long trail was primarily a semester in the Rockies with National Authority Leadership School. And that's like very expedition oriented and expedition planning. And so that was sort of my attitude going in that we were going to calculate the weight of the food that we were going to eat every day and we were going to buy those amounts. At your shop, we got that really useful in terms of what we actually ended up eating. Because I was, I don't know, I was planning basically a winter hiking trip. And so it was like super heavy duty, cooked breakfast, super heavy duty, cooked meals, and a handful of snacks for the day. And that was totally the wrong ratio. And so we had too much food after we had, can't remember if it was oatmeal or one of the dry cereals after the first day. Like that was the last time we ate it, the entire time that we were there. And we had like 12 pounds of it. So we actually, we dropped a ton of food on day two because we had too much. So you can speak to snacks. Yeah, snacks, they're key, like vital. I would not eat that much breakfast or dinner and I would just eat like 30 bars a day. I ate a ton of snacks. I think they were, got me through it. I had like a pop tart in the morning and a little bit of dinner, but I think snacks were very key. At the beginning, we had like an allotment that looked like a lot when we were planning. Like we had like three bars and some like, you know, small, like granola or something. And I blew through it. The first time we stopped and I was hungry, I ate his snacks. It was like a good trade, food for the water. Yeah. Ultimately we were filling up gallon bag, gallon plastic bags of snacks and he would have one for the day and I would have one for the day. I mean, that was the quantity of snacks. And that, it was just so much gratifying to be able to, you know, eat and look forward to snacks over the course of the day rather than like some big meal or big breakfast. Yeah. I got myself some candy and I would plan it out. I would be like, once I get here, I'm allowed to have this much candy and once I get to the end point, I'm allowed to have that much and that wouldn't motivate me. That's very familiar. I would, yeah, I would force myself to keep going because I'll be like, I got some airheads. I'm gonna get them. And that's not like what got me through it but that's what helped me get over those rough stretches where you're just going up and down and it seems endless. And yeah, I think that was super key and the food that we did bring seems to go on forever. It was like an infinite bag. You would like pour yourself a meal and that would be like too much and you still have like three quarters of the bag left and it's supposed to be like a meal for one person for one day and it ended up going for both of us for like two days. So that was a big surprise and a little bit more about his experience at Knowles. I guess they did lower mileage each day so they had heavier packs so we ended up going with way too heavy packs. We had advice that like cut down your pack was like the lightest possible, that's the best and we didn't really take it to heart as much as we should have. We definitely should have cut down on wheat and food and like week two and three we definitely got it down a lot lower which was way better. How much did you guys weigh? The first week, mine was 35. Mine was closer to 50. It was. Yeah, so I. It was the Knowles way. I would focus on like the weight of your pack for your planning and focus on your resupply points and then other than that, like you don't have to go to town. Cool. Yeah, rapid fire real quick before we move on. If you know your pack weights starting out, let's hear them. So 50, 35. I think 35. I think it was 35. 32. Okay, wow. Gotcha, cool. But with planning, like the biggest thing is the resupply. Yeah. You know, we were lucky enough to live in Vermont and have people who wanted to support us. Yeah. It's a bunch of road crossings. You could definitely do it unsupported and hitch into town and resupply. But we had boxes that were, we gave to people willing volunteers that like brought their cars to some road crossings. We ditched stuff, took stuff, mostly food. Yeah. I will put a shameless plug for us when we break into small groups if you're interested in super delicious menu planning. Like if you care what you eat on the chance, I would say that's one of our specialties. Some people are cool with nor pasta sides every day or pot charts, but like everywhere we went, people were always commenting on our food. So that would be something we'd be happy to share in that breakout time. I even brought a little bit of food. Not cooked yet, no. Just ideas. Speaking of that, I think, Alan, you're a food aficionado as well, right? I think when you're on the trail, it's probably the most common thing that's on your mind. Yes. So it's really important to bring food that it supports your body and that you want to eat. Yeah, so in planning, Morgan and I did the same thing that Monica and Elise did in terms of having family meet us and I had to plan out how many days I thought it would take us how much food I'd need to eat to resupply. We had four resupplies, three of them are road crossings and that pretty well worked out. How many resupplies did you guys have? I think probably four. Maybe six. So we got lucky too because people wanted to hike with us. So our friends came and joined us and so sometimes it was literally like one day. Yeah, like bring us like three dinners. I think it almost sounds like having beer, you know, people just met us and hung out. So it wasn't a super structured resupply and a lot of it was cell phone communication saying, we're faster, we're slower, we forgot toothpaste. We need so much more toilet paper. We planned three resupplies and so like seven days in between resupplies and that was too long and that was one of the reasons we were carrying too much weight. So I would definitely recommend doing a minimum of four. I think we carry like three or four days max and that's plenty, we ate a lot. Snacks keep you happy and going. You had a question earlier, do you still have one? I have two quick questions. You know, I wear a size nine boot and I've been told that you should really maybe go up a half a size or so in your boots and so I'm kind of curious about your thought. I mean, I've never had trouble but I have never hiked 25 days or whatever it may be. So that's one question and other people who have hiked that I've spoken to, I'm Diane, I'm not coming out of here, that was fine, is that they said, oh, well you should really just hike from hot to hot and I hadn't really thought about that. I thought, oh well, if you have good legs one day why not put in a few more miles and park yourself somewhere, so I'm interested in that, that to me is a big question. Great, all right, so let's tackle the shoe size first. Panelists, raise your hand if you went up a shoe size or half a size, all right, raise your hand if you kept your normal size, all right. So, even split, maybe, yeah. Better or worse. Yeah, were there any major issues with either of those? I never had problem with my shoes, I think they were great. I wore trail runners, I didn't wear big bulky boots. Yeah, I think that was an interesting game time decision if I was an avid boothiker and I switched to trail runners and I was really happy to be in trail runners. I wore what I'm wearing right now, which are trail runners. Did you do gaiters with the trail runners? No. It was so dry when we were. Oh yeah, dry ones. Yeah. We, well, when I came to this last year, I was planning on wearing a big bulky boot and then after talking to the panelists and Vlad working on me, finally decided to wear trail runners and was really, really pleased I'd made that decision. And we wore gaiters, gotcha. I've had my feet look like Alan's did and I'll picture in big boots that I was like, that's what I want to avoid. So, trail runners try out really fast. You can roll your ankle in a big boot and in a trail runner. So, you get a little bit more support when it's higher, but I found that being in shape is the best prevention for injury. And the second part of that question, what do you think about hiking shelter to shelter, especially on the long trail, because I understand that they're closer together on the long trail than they would be, say, in a hut system in Europe or a hut system in the White Mountains. So, yeah, what are your thoughts on hiking shelter to shelter? Alan, do you have any? Yeah, well, the distances between the shelters seldom work out with your motivation for the day. And it can be difficult to try to plan shelter to shelter. Not that it can't be done, but often you would probably be stretching yourself a lot of days and then be really short a lot of days because you'd have to double your mileage in order to head shelter to shelter. So, we pretty much like till we're tired and if there's a shelter within reach and there's tenting at that shelter, that would be our best choice because we prefer to tent and sleep in the shelters. It's a lot quieter. There's less bugs in the tent. Cool. Do you have any other thoughts about shelters? Yeah, definitely. So, me and my dad mainly hiked shelter for shelter. We didn't really just camp wherever normally unless there was something came up or like we just couldn't do it. It was an emergency, basically. Yeah, I definitely see what you're talking about. It was hard to plan. Like, some days we'd end up doing way more than another day because the shelters just wouldn't work out. They're not like set distances. They're kind of scattered and you got like two-mile shelters apart and then you got like six miles or something like that. And that was harder. I think we probably should have taken up the opportunity to camp wherever because it did end up with some harder days that we shouldn't have done and some totally easy ones that we also had a lot more energy. And yeah, I definitely, we kept going if we could. If it was like within reach. Like if we got to a shelter and we still had four miles to the next shelter, we would keep going. But we would also always debate it and see what our bodies wanted to do. And if we knew we could do it, but I think we would probably usually be on the safer side because the repercussions for not having those four miles I think is a lot more impactful than the gain of doing those four miles. I thought it was really easy to go shelter to shelter. And we really enjoyed the planning part of that. Like the piecing out the miles so that it worked out. It's kind of a puzzle. You have to piece together. Shelters typically have the best already cleared out 10 areas. Best, most reliable water sources, a privy. So we didn't sleep in the shelter hardly ever, but having those amenities basically. Yeah. Very trivial. Yeah, luxurious privies. I guess if you're a leave no trace person, that would say that you'd want to camp at the shelter too because then you're minimizing your impact. It also allows you to conserve time and energy. You know, there'd be more work in digging a cat hole or there'd be more work in setting up your tent in some place. So you can focus on resting and hiking. Nice. Can I just, before we get off the tent, how do you pick your tent spot or what made you decide where to go? Or you know, I've only done shelter to shelter and so I was kind of curious about what is involved in the tenting side of the hike. Tents these days are really small footprints so you can pitch them in a pretty small area. We just learned what kind of routes we could handle sleeping on and what we couldn't basically. Having an air. Well, like I said, a shelter area, it's typically like a couple of tents off the trail maximum, but in a pretty designated tent area. If you're tenting, you know, just in a stealth site or a primitive site, I don't know, it's, you don't wanna be making a lot more trails in the woods but I also prefer would be a little bit more private, you know. Also just as like a small female in the woods alone, well, not alone, but two small females in the woods. Yeah. Is that answer your question? Yeah, yeah, yeah. There is this thing called Gut Hook that a lot of people use. We didn't use it. It's an app. I think it was more popular on the Appalachian Trail but people could put on stealth sites and say and add that water feedback and it's sort of, I think, kind of this live blog where you can add information about what's going on in the trail. So that's how people would find out like, oh, there's a great stealth site that's actually really cool next to this stream and big branch on that. What was it called? I think it's called Gut Hook, right? Gut Hook, yeah. It's like crowdsourced from hikers real time pretty much. So a stealth site is just kind of like where you go off and you're like, this is flat. Yeah, yeah, okay. You want to read the maps and often look for areas where the contours aren't changing, which are often either side of road crossings and here, there and everywhere in terms of anticipating that's gonna be a good place to stop and then you just start looking at that an hour before you really wanna stop. That's a great point. You don't look when you want us to hop. Cause it could be a place where it's totally overgrown with like prickers and you're like, I have to walk until the prickers end, basically. Yeah, I think it's important to know that in terms of stealth sites and campsites in general, Green Mountain Club obviously promotes leave-no-trace and there are some guidelines on our website for choosing a campsite on trail in a sustainable leave-no-trace way and I'd be happy to chat with anyone about that afterward as well. Yeah, choosing a place that's already free in fact and it's really helpful, the Long Trail C is nearly 200,000 annual users. Not all of those are camping, but you get the gist, so yeah, something to think about with stealth sites in particular. I wanted to take a moment and pose a few questions from our online community. They are hitting us with lots of questions so our YouTube stream must be working really well. So, it's great, there's a whole wide world out there that wants to know some things. I'm gonna start with a question that at least three people online have asked which is they wanna know some things about bear bags. So, bear systems, let's hear it. What do you do for bears? How do you store your food at night? Alan, let's start with you because I know you have evolved your system over the years. I've been around Robinson Barn on this a lot of times. I do carry what's called an ursac which is a Kevlar fabric bag. It's not bear proof, but it is critter proof. And actually the squirrels and mice are your main problem, but as far as bears go, you need to do a hang. And there are seldom proper trees wherever you are camping, and that includes the shelters. Where you can do a proper bear hang which in my understanding is supposed to be 10 feet up and 10 feet out. I have hit myself in the head throwing rocks over trees and just about driven myself crazy doing bear hangs. But I also learned that I'm usually trying to throw a rock over a branch that's about 25 or 30 feet in the air because that's all there is. So, I have sort of reduced my anticipation of doing proper bear hangs to the point that I've realized that something is better than nothing. Just get it away from you wherever you're camping. And I realized that if I can find a dead branch with a fork on the end, I can actually reach a branch in a tree that's about 15 feet up or I can lash my hiking poles together and just drop the little rock over the branch instead of standing around for half an hour trying to lob it over the branch which I'm not very good at. Excellent. We used these heavy duty plastic sacks which are not bear proof but supposedly they were scent proof. And so we would put all of our toothpaste and food in these two very large plastic bags, then throw them in these cheap nylon shopping bags, put a beater on it and hang those, you know, we never had any issues. You'll also see these little things hanging in the shelters, a twig on a string with a coffee can inverted over it and that's a critter hang. And so if you do have anything smelly or food or actually not even that, just your gear, like putting your backpack on it so that the mice aren't eating through your backpack, we learned it was really good to get all of our gear off the floor. Yeah, we never had any direct runs with bears or anything like that. Funny thing that I found at one shelter, I don't remember which one it was, but they had a barricade. Oh yeah. There's a, oh yeah. I had a canvas on that. Like a fence sort of thing? It was a barricade that said bear, a cate on it. I thought that was hilarious. I smiled for like two straight minutes. It's a two by four on the door that locks into place. Yeah, apparently a bear actually got in that one. And that's, yeah. I met her on the other side of the mountain and I was like, who put the barricade there? And she's like, that was me. I did that, and she just told us the whole story. But yeah, the barricade was a highlight. I loved it. I'm pretty sure about that. Yeah, that was super funny. That was just kind of my only experience with bears. That was as close as we got the bears. Excellent. Was it Monica? What would you all do for the bears? We did the tie rock to a string and throw it over a branch and then hoist it up. No? Yeah. Yeah, it's predators, you know. And I think there's always lots of good communication amongst the hikers and the journals and in person. Yup. So like if there's a bear in a place, you're probably gonna hear about it. Unless you're the one who discovers it. Okay. Another thing with going where the shelters are is there will be other people there usually and they've already hung their bags and you can typically use the same branch unless you're gonna knock their bags over. But so, you know. I think they're just great. Yeah, we've had hikers be like, just clip yours to my carabiner. It's strong enough, it's fine. And then, you know, you pay that forward too if you end up finding a good limb on a tree at the next shelter. I actually have. I'll get it out. While she's doing that, I wanna make a note of the critter hangs that David and Vlad mentioned. I hung my stuff from one in David Logan's shelter and somehow the critters still found it. So when possible, the bear bag is definitely the, in my experience, the more foolproof way. The critter hangs will do some for you but may not ultimately protect you. You pretty much use this bag, it's just a dry sack, nothing fancy. And hung it with, it's a P-cord. Ta-da! Sack and root. Keep it simple, right? Yeah. Which is ultra light. Right on. Sweet bears, always fun. Also in a few sites in the south, there are bear boxes too that have been packed in by staff or volunteers. And so if you see a bear box, that's easier and safer than a bear hang. So that's always here. If you're number one, then the bear hang and then hopefully you can do one of those. Another question I'm getting online a lot and was touched on earlier was resupplies. Resupplies is a recurring theme. So just wanted to kind of revisit that again. Someone online asked, what are the best resupply talents? And assuming you went into town to resupply, what are some of the talents that stick out in your minds? And if you didn't, then that's fine too. So we were hiking with a pretty solid group at some points and some of our hiking buddies did have to go into town to resupply. But we were pretty, had the luxury of not having to do that. Yeah, I would say when the LT and the AT are the same, all the major road crossings, a lot of people are coming off because the AT people are getting resupplied. Then as you get up further north, it gets definitely a little bit quieter. Crossing route two, it's a little bit far to get to the nearest grocery store, but people also know that that's where the long trail is and there's a fair amount of traffic on route two. So if you're out there with your backpack on, somebody will pick you up and drive you to the grocery store and you need to go to the grocery store. And there's a post office there that I think services packages if you're mailing to yourself. And then Johnson is the other big one as you're getting closer to Canada. There's a gear slash convenience slash coffee store that is supposed to be a good spot for resupplies as well. And it's another kind of big road where you have a pretty good chance of getting picked up if you're hitching to that. If folks are coming from out of state, they might see Jonesville on the map and be like, I'm going to Jonesville for my resupply. So that's not a place you can do that. That's where I live. There's nothing there. You're gonna have to go to Richmond or I guess to Waterbury. Two memorable towns for us were Manchester and Whitesfield. Originally I was planning to have friends of the family and colleagues do our resupplies. But after our first resupply where my wife and younger son met us and we went into town and we brought her close to the laundromat and we hit the supermarket and we went to a restaurant and we got cheeseburgers. It was like, this is how I want to do it from now on. So I fired my friends and colleagues and just asked my lovely wife to meet us at the remainder of, and that was a highlight of hiking the Long Trail too. Like our town days were so much fun. We were in Whitesfield and next to the laundromat there's Vermont Fish Place and she told us about the local swimming hall and so we spent the afternoon at the local swimming hall and it was fantastic. Yeah, so on the resupply days we had super low mileage, like only like four miles to just the nearest shelter basically and we would do it like an old day kind of event which is, I mean, if you're gonna do a lot of them I don't think that's an option but since we only did three, that was easier for us. It, I mean, we spent money that we weren't planning to. We would go into a supermarket and buy a bunch of snack food and a bunch of other stuff that we weren't planning. Kind of candy too, but we don't talk about the candy more. I over ate one of them and I had a terrible stomach ache because I was just like burger, get it into my belly. They'll see the same thing. It's like shoveling food into my face. It's not a good strategy. My stomach was accustomed to like not having a ton of food and it was not very good. I didn't even wanna look at food so it was hard telling my father to plan what we wanted because I was just like, I don't wanna have it. Don't overdo it. On our hike, we did not get off the trail except for hiking the one mile up to the Inn at Long Trail where you can leave a resupply box and you can spend some great time there in their pub and most people can get a room there. They have a reduced rate for a hike there so it's a great place to stay. I actually found that even road crossings were sort of disruptive to my state of mind. We just wanted to be in the forest. It was great though to go to the Inn at Long Trail. So did you carry like 100 plus miles worth of food? No, we got resupply to road crossings three other times but with boxes. But you didn't go on a tap? No, we never went on a tap. Gotcha. So you had a sport crew? Yeah. Cool. Nice. Next where is the Inn? Where is it? It's near Killington on route four. You come down off of Killington if you're going north. It's right at the junction where the AT turns off so it's kind of like a big spot. Yeah. The food is good. Yeah. Good beer. Yeah, that's great. The Ender's Guide actually has a couple of things you wouldn't expect as far as resupply. Those towns are really great. One of them is like, for example, the Steam Control Office at Stratton Mountain, which has people in it all year around, they'll take a box for you. You want to mail it to them. They're listed in the book as a source and so I called them off and I said, you know, it's just right. Can I send you a box? Which you say again. So I sent the box to Stratton Mountain, went down the mountain, picked it up, went back up the mountain, went out our way. So it's not always necessarily a town if you have certain resorts or other places around. They're all listed in that guide and some of them are places you might not expect to definitely check them out. Right on. Sweet. Questions? Yeah. What was the clothes washing style, change of clothes style? Nice. Clothes washing style, change of clothes. All right, that's a lot of good questions. We had that really hot spell. So everything was completely sweaty. There was no point in keeping it not sweaty and clean. So had clean, dry for sleep and then back to the still soaking wet, dirty for hiking. Yeah. Even underwear? I think I probably used three pairs of underwear. You turn them inside out and then get the sports tab underwear too. You can plan on getting pretty stinky. You can do laundry at the end of a long trail. People who get off the trail often find a laundry mat but basically you just get used to it. It was so cold on our second hike that I just slept in all my clothes. I didn't change. I put on my rain gear at night. There's a few creeks you can do. Yeah, rain. A quick rinse in, which is pretty helpful for getting just like, salty to fat off. Clarendon Gorge and Big Branch. Or two that come to mind. I don't know for that. Do you guys recommend for like, how many pairs and like, type of socks to bring on a hike? Gotta go with the darn tux. Definitely darn tux. Yeah, I would wear a pair of socks and get a new pair between each resupply. So five days maybe. And they're pretty ripe after five days. They just hold their shape really well. You're supposed to only have one luxury item but having a lot of socks was one of my luxury items because I personally found that like, my feet get really sweaty and then the salt makes the little crystals and that is the source of blisters for me. So I was like, two or three days in a pair of socks and then I would switch like, which ones were sleep ones and which ones were day one so that, you know, I could sleep in dirty ones and have clean ones for hiking. But I would just do a little bit of hiking in dirty socks maybe to see how your feet handle it because that was personally something I knew could be an issue. David, what were your clothing and sock strategies? Same deal. Like you minimize the amount of clothes that you bring and it ends up being the clothes that you have and camp and the clothes that you have on the trail and sometimes those are the same thing. I had dual purpose for the socks. The nasty pair that I didn't want to put on my feet anymore, I would wear underneath my shoulder straps on my backpack because I was starting to get some pretty brutal abrasions here. Liz used duct tape for that instead. And duct tape all over our bodies. It's great for blisters of all kinds and something you can wrap around your trekking pole. That's another gear tip. That way you have it. Yeah, there's some trekking poles. With the duct tape and it's black. Yeah. On that note, I thought I was fine hiking without trekking poles, but was really glad I brought them. Especially for descents. You have like two extra legs that can help stabilize you. Cool. I can't like reinforce that enough. We started off I think with one pair and it was clear we needed duct tape. Let's take your question and then we're gonna go to a couple good ones online as well. So let's start with you. How do you guys use cell phones on the trail? I've noticed in the Green Mountains you have service just about everywhere and then I'll let out a comment that you guys mentioned. Got help or whatever. I wasn't on, between the two of us we tried to keep one on I think. Or like, I don't know. We weren't on it that much and didn't really have to recharge it. Kept it on airplane mode. There are some dead zones that are pretty lengthy. Maybe a day or two. But wasn't relying on that for intel or communication unless we knew we were getting to a road where we needed to talk to our people. We used them for photos too. That doesn't take much battery or service. Yeah, you often won't find service except on the high points. And when you're deep in the wilderness you won't find service. But because we were gonna be met at road crossings we could often find a place the day before to contact people. We did run down the battery on the phone the first time we got halfway through and somebody brought us a fresh one. And then the second time I got one of these little super battery that you can recharge with and that worked fine. It's just a little bit extra weight. So we brought just a little flip phone. Yeah, we have this right here. Wow! It still exists. It's still exists. They're 35 bucks at CBS. Not right now. Bye, y'all. Yeah. We mainly used it for like, if we figured something out that we wanted for our resupply while we were on the trail we would use it to contact my mom to get it to bring that thing for us. We also had it for emergencies, obviously. Luckily we didn't have to use it. I don't know, maybe once, zero. But I think it's definitely great to have. We didn't take any pictures well in the forest which I kind of forgot a little bit. I think if you have the ability to take photos it's definitely a good idea. I really like not having the smartphone with us. The lack of electronics was one of the beauties of being out there. There were some AT hikers who spent a lot of time on their phones in the shelters and that was kind of a turn off to me because it's just like a wonderful time to spend to meet people and talk. So I was really psyched with this solution. The battery lasted a full week, no problem. We texted what we needed but that was it and we kept it off most of the time because we didn't want to have access to the time of day because that was a real like mental health burden if we knew what time it was. So yeah. I think we checked the weather a couple times because we were trapped on a hub of a mountain and a thunderstorm and we wanted to see the radar if it was gonna pass. But that's good stuff to know if it's gonna storm or what you're looking at. Yeah, we were definitely milking other people for information about them. Yeah. We were taking you back to their cell phone. Yeah, so if you're doing it by yourself and planning to have a pretty solitary hike it might be good to have a backup charge. Great. So a quick question from the internet. This comes from Ms. Fizzle. For the ladies, I had a friend suggest not bringing a tent but I'm worried about A, lean twos being full and or B, sketchy people at the camp and wanting the flexibility to sleep on my own. Thoughts? Yeah, we approached one shelter that we didn't want to stay in. It didn't, it looked like someone had been there, someone maybe living there. There was trash that we didn't want, we weren't able to pack out and we thought was not sitting right with us and that's something we were pretty aware of. Luckily having two minds on it was good. It probably would have made me really nervous if I wasn't able to say to Liz, this is a good idea as it's not, am I being crazy? Am I being not crazy enough? And I don't think we ever really got close to being in a shelter that was full. There's definitely more people in the AT section but it's just kind of nice to have your tent as personal space. We did get matching pepper sprays on Amazon before we went so I would highly recommend that. It just brought a little bit extra peace of mind and because there are times when it's not ideal. I felt very safe in general but I think part of that came from having the tent so... When folks hear the AT section of the long trail, are we all on the same page? Where as the southern 100 miles. So when the AT either, it's along the long trail and then departs or vice versa, then it gets a lot busier in that section. So yes. Hi, I'm Kate. I have two questions, one for everyone. Did you do northbound or southbound and if you were doing that, did you catch wind of A and O's being like, oh, the other way is awesome, sucks. And then my second question is also again for the ladies because I just really wanna know. I feel like some of us might wanna know. I've never been hiking for so many days when it's my time of the month. So I wanna know what you did for that, how you trashed it, how you did it or if you use a different method. Sure. All right, so let's do a quick nobo sobo. So northbound and southbound. Raise your hands. Who went northbound? Okay. Did you hear from anyone that southbound was better or northbound was better or anything? Any opinions out there on the trail? For us it was like the southern part of the state is intermediate difficulty. The northern part of the state is advanced and we needed to start on the easier side. Nice. And you also have access to the AT hikers. I think it's really good to pick up wisdom and advice from them because they have been doing it for a long time and have a lot of experience. And I think that definitely helped us to know what we needed on the trail. For us I think it worked out really nicely going northbound because we went straight through to route two because we both live here. And then we slowed down and we were like we're going too fast and it was cool to be able to slow down in the north and also really helpful because it is harder. But we really want to really enjoy being here for the last end of the trail. I like going north for the same reasons that the more rugged mountains are in the north which are more enjoyable for me. So that was such a pleasure having that. And if you went south you would be cruising in the southern third of the hike. And I would love to track going south as well. We heard a lot of comments that when we hit Mansfield and beyond it was going to be much, much harder. And we didn't really feel that was true. By that time we were harder ourselves. We did slow down some but we were really focused on getting to Canada. And you sort of get an adrenaline rush and you realize you're five days out. You're not going to stop. But next time we're going to go in the other direction just to do it differently, be a whole new trail. When's next time? When's next time? This fall. Whoa! All right, number three. All right, on it. Cool. Yeah, so Liz and Monica, you want to take away what the feminine needs? My time of the month timed itself perfectly to not really affect me but we were prepared. And I wouldn't have felt good about doing anything besides packing it in and packing it out, just having a separate plastic bag and not leaving a trace of that ever happening. Yeah, I mean, for me, I would, well, I relied on Tums and Alka Seltzer as it was and she relied on Averprofen and I would probably need some more of those things if that had been a factor too. I have a surprise on the trail. Obviously, you're prepared and pack it out in a separate little plastic bag. I'm a big fan of applicator-free tampons in the first place so that wasn't a big switch. But if you're comfortable with those, I would suggest it because then you just have all that more minimal waste. But I, and swimming lies like hygiene, I feel like, you know, you don't wanna take a bath in the water source but you could definitely bring a bandana and get it wet and clean yourself up a little bit without contaminating the water. This is Dr. Browner as we can't says or something. Yeah. Another chance your body will like react differently to be on the trail too. Yeah. I think my like fat content went down so you know, I was, I don't know, I felt different. My body felt different in a lot of ways. Thanks for that question. All right, let's stick to working out. It says back here, yeah. And then we'll go up front. Yes, David, Joe, how was your total time did you plan on for your trap and were you able to stick to your time plan? Let's start over here with David and Vlad. I think we might have planned 28 days and did it in 27. Yeah, but we did it basically on plan. I think we were going to end even earlier but then we had to take a day and a half off. It's all 10 miles a day. You know, it doesn't feel like that. Um, because it's average. Because it's average 10 miles. They're like very rarely is it 10 miles. It's those like four mile days when you're going into town or headed out of town and then like the 14 or 15 or 16 mile days. Like it's not an average, it's a highly varied. We had a pretty cautious estimate of the 28 days and we did it in 22 of the actual hiking. Wow. We did it in 27 the first time and actually felt that we probably could have done more because of the rain was slowing us down. The second time we did it in 25. And that was pretty much what we had planned for which means that's how much food we had. That's all about it. Although in the last hike, we actually were pretty thin the last day. We had two cookies and two crackers to go 13 miles. We found a half eaten cliff bar on the trail and we didn't pass it by. Nice. I would not pass it by. I wouldn't eat it. All right. Yes. I have a few part but they're very closely related. Peak food craving and best trail snack. Favorite trail snack. Peak food craving and best trail snack. You really like that cliff bar. Yeah. But you don't. Melanie, you want to start us off? Oh yeah, it's absolutely. I dream of pizza every night. You know, I want something salty and greasy. So actually my trail snack, I can't carry pizza was planting chips. They're a lot sturdier than potato chips. Just a little bit salty. They really hit the spot. Easy on your tummy. I got really sick of planting chips. Well, maybe one of us said it and then it got in the other one's head but we both really wanted salty and like olives and pickles. I always think of watermelon. Yeah. Ice cream is like great. Yeah. We opportunize one ice cream a bunch. Our best snack for sure is peanut M&Ms and Monica taught me this one because they don't melt. So even when it's 100 degrees in July, your peanut M&Ms are good to go all the time and they're delicious. And the funniest peak craving for sure was we were having that birthday dinner at Coralus and Monica's dad was the next resupply. And like dinner's being made and she's actively texting him like, wait, we need like olives and pickles. It's like a ridiculous. And blueberries and beer. So he showed up with like these, like four containers of canned dolmas and then a jar of olives and then a plastic wrap pack of olives. And we had like 20 miles to go and we'd been trying to go pretty late and Monica's like, we're carrying a special place in my heart for dolmas ever since. So my craving was a burger, like a nice juicy burger. That's what I thought about for like half the time. Honestly, on the trail, like three hours a day, I would just be like, and that's why I got over eight. But the best trail food, like this beef strip, it was like beef jerky type of thing. It was like a strip and it was really great. And I had a typo on the packaging because that's what I had to do all day. You know, I had to train myself somehow so I combed through every single ingredients list and I found a typo. It was like, proud of that. Maybe two salads. It was a 100 gram sausage that supposedly had two kilograms of potassium. Is that lethal? I also wanted, you know, really fatty meat. And, you know, like Vlad said, that was something, it was like fantasizing about food is how you passed a lot of the time. Peek snack was, we had a thing of peanut butter. It was on a day where we thought we were gonna stay in a shelter, we got there and it was full of Boy Scouts. That full of Boy Scouts. Not even a thing. It was maybe an hour before sundown and there was skyline lodge two miles away. So we're like, okay, we'll just press on and it turned out it was during a time in the year when there'd been a really bad wind storm and so there were a ton of blow downs on those two miles and so it ended up, and it was raining and wind and we thought, you know, blow downs were gonna end up on top of us. So it was probably the one time on the trail where I felt like I'm like criminally negligent for bringing my son and body in this situation because I was worried, I was scared. We eventually got to the spur trail. Some forest service or somebody had cut through the blow downs on the spur trails and that was awesome. We got there, we were both like, you know, Vlad more than me approaching hypothermia because he has no body fat. He stripped down, went inside and the first snack that we had was some baking M&Ms, those are the tiny ones, and we just poured them on to the peanut butter and ate it with a spoon. That was the peak snack game experience. Yeah, that's awesome. Oh, pretty much the kiss, back there. So I just, hi, I'm Hannah and I wanted to ask like what you guys did for training for the trail and if that was like sufficient, like and how long did it take you to get your trail legs? So we had a whole like regimen of hiking that we were gonna do, we were gonna do like two miles and three miles and four miles and five miles and six miles. We never did it, like we did like three hikes. I wish we'd done it the first four days I think or when we didn't have our trail legs and those were probably the hardest. But day four at the end, the last four miles of day four were like amazing. That was the first time we discovered that stories make the miles go back so fast. And I felt like we just started when we reached the shelter and we also met some really nice AT hikers and that's kind of when we got into our stride and started being able to do higher mileage and I've got everything started going better from that on because the first couple of days are rough. Yeah, like you become a long distance hiker and it's just a question of how long that's gonna take. And if we trained more, it might not have been four days, it would have been less painful. But man, it felt good after those four days. That transition felt miraculous. Was Monica, did y'all do any training and training regiments? Hiking when we could from Labor Day to July 1st. I like riding my bike and like going on runs and stuff so I was just doing all that stuff before. I mean, you can do it. It just, if you're going for like speed or miles, you might need to prepare a bit more but no matter what, we can all put one foot in front of the other and carry stuff on our back. I'm just remembering that my roommate thought it would be a good idea for me for training to put a 50 pound bag of cement in my bag. I'd hike up to the Dexbury window because he was like, you're ready to go but like you just need to practice carrying a bag. So I did it, I'm gonna get really small because it's like cement is really dense and I saw these people, it's like this little nice hike here in Vermont and I'm like, don't train that way. It's not necessary. I mean, no matter what, you're gonna have hurt from carrying the weight. So like, I don't know if you're gonna be able to train your way out of that but something else will always hurt more. That's coming. Yeah. It's nice if it's not your feet. Nice. Ellen, you started hiking when you were 60. What sort of training brought you to a long trail? We were hiking about once a week. So actually our legs were in pretty good shape but there is quite a difference between putting on heavy pack as compared with the day pack. It's a whole lot harder to get up the hills. We did only have one night of backpacking experience and that is a big learning curve once you start out on your end to end hike. I have replaced all the gear pretty much that I bought the first time around because I found that it didn't work for me and that includes all the recommendations I got from people. The gear thing is very individual. Nice. Speaking of training, a quick shout out to Ryan who I met on trail last week with a bag full of water training for his in and stuff. It's true. There are many ways to do the training. Dump it out. Anyway. Dump it out before you dump it out. So, it's very nice to offer me some as well. Excellent. I wanna hit on one thing I'm seeing a lot in our online questions real quick and that is the topic of travel arrangements. Real quick I'd love to pull the panel and see kind of how you transported to or from the northern or southern terminus and then I wanna potentially add some thoughts as well for our online viewers who are mostly out of state and potentially coming far away. So, let's start down there and kind of how did you transport to and from the Farans? My wife, Ola, who's sitting in back dropped us off in Williamstown. We got a later start because it was like, yeah, my pack's whatever, 60 pounds and his was 45. So, it was like, oh God, we gotta get rid of more weight and so that made us late so we didn't start hiking until 4.30 that day and that was rough. My dad picked us up at the end. It was crazy driving with him to Waterbury to drop somebody off and it's like just a compression of time and space after you've been on the trail. It's not fair. Why do cars get to go so fast? That is true. Friends and family for us. If people are coming from out of state, I think Vermont's a pretty decent place to hitchhike and there's some awesome trail angel resources as well as GMC resources. I mean, you can call me and I'll come pick you up at the end if you want to. Call Monica. You heard it here. Yeah, we had family take us down to start and pick us up. So, that's not very helpful but I know that I believe that in the guide there's a list of trail angels and my understanding is that they will help you out. Yeah, anyone who is looking for rides can contact us here at Green Mountain Club headquarters. We'd keep a list of volunteer shuttle drivers and trail angels that will, they all have their own personal rates they will charge and a lot of those folks, what they do with that money is they donate it back to the club at the end of the year. So, it's like you're donating to the club on the trail so you're doing it through your driver sort of. So, that's another option as well. We gave rides to a bunch of other through hikers too. So, like when we had support we would take people into town, help them resupply, drop them off at a different location if they were back a few miles or something. So, there's a good chance you'll meet people on the trail. That's kind of the spirit of it. People who are in for the weekend. Not at the beginning and the end but for resupply. We have time for just one more audience question and then we'll break off into our small groups. So, yes, right, take it away. Sorry for taking so many. How did you guys deal with ticks out there? Ooh, ticks. I'm a rather furry individual and relatively afraid of ticks. As you should be. Yeah. There's six very, very relevant there being on a big problem. So, yeah, ticks, there's some thoughts. Well, ticks are always on your mind but they're really hard to see. You know, you are advised to do a tick check every night but I'll tell you, you're so tired and it's often dark that it's difficult. We did find one tick on Morgan once on the trail. You know, people wear low gators in the summer. I think that's probably helpful. We actually gave up on bug repellent but my understanding is that you can treat your clothing with things that you wouldn't wanna put on your body like deep that are helpful. Ticks were one of my number one fears for sure and a lot of research into permethrin treatment before and, you know, I just feel like it's becoming more and more of an issue each year and most people, lime cases popping up and people firing ticks on them, their dogs and whatever, their friends. So, we treated, I bought like a gallon or something or like a quart of permethrin, diluted it to probably concentration and soaked our socks, shorts, tent. I think I did one of my shirts, an outer layer maybe. Really like all our soft goods. Yeah, so things that we're gonna be at places where ticks could come in that's a treatment that bonds chemically to the fabric. They use it on baby blankets. It's safe as long as it dries in the shade and completely dries, it's good for like 10 washes even. There's a bunch of, much more you can read about it but that made me at least have some peace of mind that ticks were deterred from our tent, were deterred from calling up my, past my sock. It's probably not perfect, but the shorts too, like that's an area that they wanna go. So, permethrin and it needs to be diluted to like half a percent or something. So, definitely do your research in YouTube but I went, I went to a farming garden store to get the bulk that I needed. I was gonna do backpack too but it didn't fit in the tub that I was using. You can also get spray on permethrin treatments or clothing by certain brands that has it in there. And there's probably people that look down upon it as well but to me ticks are worse. We use the spray on on our shoes and on our gaiters and that was it. We were most concerned about picking up ticks from our dog because he was sharing the same sleeping space and we just got lucky that we were super fortunate not to end up with a single tick. I don't think we even saw one on might have been at the time of year but we definitely got lucky and I would still advise to use permethrin and other measures to make sure that you do not pick up ticks. We didn't have seen that many either for the record but we also carried a tick spoon which is a good way to get ticks off. So, that's the light weight, I think it's worth it. So, thank you all so much. We're gonna take the next almost 15 minutes now and we're gonna have our panel. Can I say one more thing? So, I worked for the health department but that's not why I'm giving this event. So, the health department piece is that Lyme disease has higher prevalence in Southern Vermont than it does in Northern Vermont. It's a good thing to keep in mind. Lyme disease is not the only disease you need to be concerned about. There's also anaplasmosis and the counts of anaplasmosis are starting to approach those of Lyme disease. I was really concerned about us getting a tick bite and so we talked to our respective physicians ahead of time and we got a prophylactic amount of the antibiotic that they prescribed. And so, if you meet certain conditions which are that you think the tick has been attached for a certain amount of time, then it's indicated to take this prophylactic antibiotic. It's only four Lyme disease but that gave us a little peace of mind that both of us had a few doses each in case we got a tick bite where we thought that the tick might have been attached for more than 12 hours or whatever the conditions are. Excellent, excellent advice. Yeah, thank you. All right, so we're gonna have our panelists now split up into different areas of the room. Feel free to film mob them please or go straight into their backpacks without asking permission but this is gonna be a free question and answer time kind of off the camera. Online folks, I'm gonna jump on the computer for the next 10 minutes and try and answer any questions we did not answer here with our panelists. So let's do that and then when it's nine o'clock I'll call everyone back together for a quick wrap up.