Thru-Hiking: Some of Your Questions Answered

By James Michael Fuller

There are how-to books and then there are snarky suggestions with the backhanded information you
need. No matter which way you like your answers to your questions about thru-hiking, you’ll be relieved
to know you can get it both ways between these covers. There are blogs and vlogs, posts and boasts out
there on this subject, but none of these consider the reader can do much more than add two and two
and get, well, four. James Michael Fuller, a five-thousand-miler in the world of thru-hiking, lets loose
with an enlightening look with hilarious takes and insights to help untangle the magical and mysterious
world of thru-hiking. The uninitiated reader won’t get half of it, but that’s OK; half of the people who are
setting out to thru-hike won’t get it either.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Feb 12, 2024
• ISBN: 9781304663030

Book preview

Prologue

As I’m finishing this project, I’ve been listening to the – as far as I can tell – the latest Jimmy Buffett album Equal Strain on All Parts. I can tell you I don’t listen to music to hear something powerful or something that resonates with me. If it happens to be there, great. I love the song Kashmir. Top twenty, if not top ten all time for me. But I have no idea what the message is. It doesn’t resonate with me at all. It’s just a cool song. 

There’s a song on this Jimmy Buffett album called Johnny’s Rhum. There’s a lyric: Leap and the net will appear. This resonates with me. If you are trying to reduce the art of backpacking to the absolutely most scientific approach, with a minimum of inconvenience – this is probably not the book for you. 

There is the unexpected. The unforeseen. Things you couldn’t have expected. Things you couldn’t have foreseen. True. Hindsight is undefeated. Expect. Foresee. Be surprised. Rinse. Repeat.

You all want easy answers.

I wanted to set the tone with something serious. And then I follow it you all want easy answers. Condescension at its finest.

If you can’t handle a bit of condescension, this might not be the book for you.

Learning how to backpack or thru-hike is not like replacing the kitchen faucet. How do think those of us who have been doing this got started? And with shittier stuff? We trialed and errored it. 

There’s no emotional attachment to replacing the kitchen faucet. There’s no emotional investment. 

You all want easy answers.

I can tell you as many answers as you can ask questions and I’m still gonna tell you it’s gonna suck sometimes. You all want easy answers. I can tell you my answers. Maybe they’ll work for you. Maybe they’ll give you a starting point.

There wasn’t an internet; a blog; a vlog; a Facebook page. There might be somebody at some store who knew a little something about it. We hardly asked each other out there what the other one was doing. Sometimes we saw something that we thought we might try.

There was absolutely nothing in the stores catering to thru-hiking. 

The trails existed. We had to figure out the rest.

And now you write a question and submit it to a Facebook page. Half of the answers will make fun of you while telling you something ridiculous. Forty-five percent of the answers you get might be aimed at being helpful; mostly by people who really enjoy being an authority – whether they are or not. Five percent of the answers you get are from people answering a good question with a good answer. They just happened upon your question while they were looking for someone and where they are or if they are still on the trail. The person asking the question got lucky.

If they even recognize that.

If they even asked a good question.

You all want easy answers.

Most of us who do this understand the futility of sharing how we do things. We exist now in the world where people tell other people how to do things. It’s making us stupid. If you can’t figure out how to do this, then you can’t thru-hike or do much of a backpacking trip. Yeah, I teach this stuff. For real. But just universal truths. Not step-by-step instructions.

You all want easy answers.

You want the answers and then you want the right to say, yeah, but what about . . . The correct question is you don’t understand why, not some sort of rebuttal. Do you think I’m gonna say, Why didn’t I think of that? I think I’ll try that next time I’m out. You could be a genius and you just figured out something thousands of others couldn’t figure out; without even setting one foot on the trail. But if you’re not, you just wasted my time. I realize at that point my answer’s a waste and now you’re going to waste more of my time with yeah, but what about . . .

You all want easy answers.

Good footwear. A backpack that fits well and is packed properly. Be warm (or cool) and dry at night. And I’m going to start adding one more thing here: have gratitude in your heart. It comes up in this book. I stole it from someone who asked a question about thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail. 

Have gratitude in your heart.

Mix in any variables you want, but footwear, backpack, comfort, and gratitude have to happen, or all this will really suck. Notice I didn’t mention age, fitness, or health. I didn’t talk about hiking with your dog, your husband, your granddaughter, or your neighbor.

You all want easy answers.

It’s beginning to hit me how dangerous the 2020-2021 trip was. My wife, Deb, and I were trying to do the Eastern Continental Trail, starting in the Keys in Florida, and ending in northeastern Quebec.

Walking along US 1 through the Keys was a nightmare. It had its moments. But nightmares have their moments, too. Walking across ditches with cold water up to your waist. The roadkill. The trash. Not being able to see where you are walking. The traffic. The heat. The cold. The lack of trail markers. The bushwhacking. The setting up of camps on the trail as a last resort; and then later as a first resort. Or behind a tree between a pasture and a road. Or just behind a pile of dirt off the curve of a dirt road. Or walking into your camping area and realizing there’s a hunter with a bow standing in the crook of a tree. Or trying to manipulate the last drops of water out of a garden hose. Or sitting there as three boys, about 18 or 19 – one cradling an AK-47; the other two with hunting rifles, mosey about. Walking along highways; both of us getting buzzed by pickup trucks. Walking into and hanging outside the most interesting – and I’m being kind here – stores in Florida. 

Swore off road-walking, but not creek crossing. Had to cross a raging waist-high river. Had to. Could have misjudged. Really, I did misjudge. One or both of us could have died. What was I thinking? My wife could have been swept away. Couldn’t wait for the water to go down. 

Twenty-four-mile days and temperatures in the teens at night. 

Perseverance. My brother Bill called it perseverance. It was perseverance. That was part of it. But it was so much more as well. My hands are freezing while I’m collecting water or fixing dinner or putting up a tent. Or taking down a tent. There’s condensation almost every morning. We broke a tent pole. It’s twenty-something degrees in the dark and I’m splinting a tent pole to have a tent up. 

I’ve got what I think is a hernia with 1,300 miles to go to Katahdin; 2,200 or so until northeastern Quebec. Turned out it was a nice little groin strain. We’re doing twenty-mile days in eighty-degree-plus heat to keep a schedule through the Shenandoah. 

The pain from that groin strain is about gone – two years after we summited Katahdin.

We endured day after day of rain for over a month in Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire. I about broke my arm in one fall and suffered a concussion in another on the same day. We were at a crowded hostel in Maine – eating breakfast on consecutive days shoulder to shoulder – while a COVID outbreak was occurring. From there we got a ride to the trail from a guy who announced he came down with COVID a day or two later. We were at the hostel with a guy named Argentina. His name will come up here again in a minute.

We pushed ourselves up and down rocks and pulled ourselves up and down others. We sat out eighty-mile-an-hour windstorms. We tried to sit out torrential rain when we could.

We were treated wonderfully. We were treated like shit. We watched the world go by one step at a time. We walked through the drive-thru of the Dairy Queen with our backpacks on in Pearisburg, Virginia to get milkshakes. We called a shuttle one time ahead of an approaching tornado-spawning storm to get off the trail. We watched at least two young men struggle with giardia at separate times. We were places where there was a norovirus outbreak later. We found things open. We found things closed. We found help at weird times in weird places. We found no help a couple of times when we really could have used it.

We stayed in a fishing cabin where my head constantly hit the sagging ceiling. We sat outside convenience stores and watched the locals go in and out, living their lives as if we weren’t there.

We sloshed through swamp for the better part of three days, knowing at one point a Burmese python – just recently spotted on the trail where we were going – might be up ahead. We dove into tents to keep as many of the mosquitos outside and then set about killing them all before we could prepare our bedding. We camped on canal embankments where alligators patrolled the water. 

We ran through swamps at dusk and over water moccasins nesting under wooden stairs. We camped behind oil tanks on the property of a general store in a town where the hunters talked about the night before’s high school game as if it was the Super Bowl; and bloodhounds howled at each other and anything else they felt like howling at.

We got mad at each other. We were tired. We’d get tired and then get mad at each other. We’d get to our campsite and completely screw the pooch when it came to setting it up before the rain came. There were some miserable nights. We had aches and pains and sometimes we were walking in the run-off from cattle farms, in grass up to our chest. With a loose bull. With airboats buzzing in the not-so-far-off distance. While in our tent, we were stumbled upon by hunters reckoning they didn’t know what we might be – at 4 in the morning.

We took cold showers. We stayed for three nights in a Marriott near Lake Mary and at a first-class B&B on Lake Hampton. We camped in a shithole of a park in Lake Butler. We camped all alone on a beautiful lake in a closed campground. We charged our phones outside churches and inside convenience stores. We went days without decent water – even after it was filtered – in Florida. We ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches only for four straight days until we could get our resupply. We ran out of food in the Smokys. 

I almost had to eat a Twinkie. 

We listened to kids crushing beer cans at 10 at night and then again the next morning at 5. We didn’t get much sleep our last two nights on the trail because of noisy neighbors.

We laughed with people we didn’t know, but soon did know. We tried to stay away from some people, but we rooted for most. We had strange experiences in restaurants. 

We spent over 250 of our nights in a 316-night span in 105 cubic feet of tent. We didn’t sleep in our own bed for over 11 months. 

I’m no hero.

If anything in this book suggests otherwise, then I have failed my reader. 

Most thru-hikers romanticize their thru-hikes. They don’t want to sound like they’re crying, and I think they often leave the tedious, day-to-day, crappy moments far behind when they tell their anecdotes and give their accounts. (Otherwise, you’re bound to run into that familiar question: Why didn’t you stop?)

If this shit were easy, a lot more people would do it; and a lot more of those who claim to have hiked the AT would actually have done it. 

You end up telling stories of the weather on Firescald; the ice in the Smokys; a sunrise in Connecticut; or a breakfast in New Hampshire. Sure, there were some rough patches, but it was oh so beautiful and you met so many nice people. Man, it was incredible.

What I say about all this is from the perspective of a 62- and 63-year-old man who as a 55-, 60-, and 61-year-old man thru-hiked more than 5,500 miles. I wasn’t 22, 32, or, even 42. And I can tell you there was some physical deterioration that went on between 2015 and 2020 and into 2021.

Among ourselves, thru-hikers will say embrace the suck and things like it; and variations of no pain, no Maine. Everybody out there is on Vitamin I (Advil or its equivalent) to one extent or another. But it’s pretty rare for most thru-hikers to dwell on the suck in front of what I call muggles (non thru-hikers who can sometimes be easily confounded by what thru-hikers do.) I didn’t take a scientific poll, but the ones who dwell on sucking in front of muggles are generally not actually thru-hiking the AT as much as they are skipping around, posing, or shuttling ahead.

There are exceptions, but this has been my observation.

Most of the last 100 miles, we were hiking around Argentina, a hiker about our age or a little younger. He, too, was about to put the finishing touches on his hike. He was feeling COVID sick the week before he would summit Katahdin. He continued to hike, although by the time he reached the campground at Abol Bridge he was sick enough to need medical attention. Two days (one for some) short of the summit and he’s riding in the back of a pickup truck to an urgent care place an hour or more away. They tell him to rest for a few days. He goes back to the campground for three or four nights – until he feels better.

Argentina finished. That’s what it’s like. You just do it. This is what embracing the suck really means. I fell and hurt my elbow north of Lafayette. But we couldn’t stay there. It was exposed; rocky; and not suitable in any way to throw up a tent. Then I hit my head. At least a minor concussion. Same day. You have to keep going.

I’ve seen a number of people hike through Giardia. They may take a day or two off, but not the week they should have taken off. Giardia, COVID, and concussions are just some examples of what people will hike through to accomplish a thru-hike.

There’s a lot of big things to share about thru-hiking. There’s also a lot a rabbit holes; a lot of subtleties; a lot of nuances that can make your trip as good as it can be. 

The big things are the footwear, the backpack, some degree of comfort, and gratitude. You are stuck with weight choices, durability issues, and what you can afford. 

Those rabbit holes, those subtleties, those nuances you do not know are things like packing up in the rain. There are people out there who will sit it out. If it rains until 10:30, they’re not packing up until 10:30. They may go out and do No. 1 or No. 2, but they’re not packing their gear up in the rain. 

And if it’s a crappy weather day and they’re in a hostel. Forget it. They ain’t goin’ anywhere.

But you can.

I might be inclined to wait an hour or two. In 2015, I waited a whole day in my tent. But I do know how to pack up in the rain. Everything is done inside the tent until all that is left is the tent and the fly and if I have one, a footprint. Because I keep those things in a separate compartment in the bottom of my backpack, all I have to do is roll out of the tent and take it down. Do things get a little wet? Yes. Do sometimes things get a lot wet? Yes. But the sun or the wind or whatever else I need will come along before too long and help me dry them out. And because these things are at the bottom of my pack, they aren’t dripping on anything. Worst-case scenario, I have to put up a wet tent that night. 

I’m not going to intentionally talk about all the rabbit holes. A few will come up in the pages that follow. You might get lucky and I’ll toss out a gem here and there. 

Might.

There’s a few easy answers, but most things will require you to get your ass out there and figure it out. Some of you can learn it from a book. The only thing I’m going to stress is you should be able to think for yourself. Test yourself. Learn to rely on yourself.

Amen.

Many of the questions in this book are taken from Facebook. Not as many are taken from actual questions I’ve been asked in person.

I can’t help how you process this book. I couldn’t write it any other way than the way it came out. If it’s for you, great. If it’s not, thanks for stopping by.

The reasoner . . . only presents his reasons. He is not obliged to hand out intelligence beforehand – Fernando Pessoa, from a May 1912 essay printed in A Aguia

CHAPTER 1

On Social Norms and Tattoos

Q: What, if I may ask, is your reason for hiking the AT? What made you decide to take up the challenge? 

A: I haven’t been good at anything else in life, so I thought maybe I’d try hiking the AT. How hard could it be? One foot in front of the other, right? I took up the challenge because I didn’t know any better.

A: That’s not far from the truth. Escape probably should have been worked into that answer somewhere. But as I have thought about this more since the first draft, I’m thinking there really isn’t a reason; at least not a valid one. The first time I started off with an intentional thru-hike, I was just seeing how far I could go. I had no idea I could go pretty far. Not sure it was a challenge at first, but it did turn into a challenge.

Q: What led you to want to take on the trail and become a thru-hiker? I have not completed the trail yet, but I'm getting closer and closer day by day and I can't wait for my journey to begin. For me it’s getting away from the social norm. I'm tired of the day-to-day rat race and I feel like I'm losing it. I'm my own mind and feel the only place to find yourself is lost in the trail. How about you? What keeps you walking? 

A: First, see the above answer. Second, I’m my own mind, too! Third, what keeps me walking? It always gets better. Usually.

A: Some of what you guess is about right. Not sure about getting away from the social norm. If you think that’s what you are doing, be careful you don’t bring your social norm with you. I think the getting away from the social norm can sometimes look like nobody around to police you; rein you in. It can also look something like a tramily. How you react to being on the trail and how you process your experience is likely – if you are not careful – to be seen through the same lenses you’ve always used. But if you can let yourself go and spend some time alone with your thoughts, you might do what you need to do: Lose it.

Q: I'm curious about anyone that might have either an Appalachian Trail tattoo, or something that symbolizes their love for hiking, the outdoors, or mountains. I'm looking for inspiration.

A: I never thought of looking at tattoos to symbolize my love for hiking, the outdoors, or mountains. I’m afraid I won’t be providing much inspiration. I mean there is the Rangely Lakes map on my back and the timber rattler running up my left shin, but other than that I don’t have a tattoo expressing my love for hiking, the outdoors, or mountains.

A: I met this young guy once right after I got off the AT in 1-5. His left arm is one deep green sleeve except where the AT symbol was just his bare white arm in the middle of it. I thought, what a tattoo. Thinking I might be meeting a kindred spirit, I ask if he has hiked the AT. He says, No, but I’ve always wanted to. That probably didn’t inspire you either, but at least I painted a picture of a tattoo that could symbolize one’s love