“🎵It’s-a Me, Mario🎵”
Did I say Greece? No Greece. Greece doesn’t exist. Greece never existed. What’s a Greece? Are you misspelling grease? Thinking of Grease The Musical? You must be. I don’t have any pictures of a “Greece Trip.” Clearly, you aren’t thinking straight. The only place I’ve gone to in the last month is Atlanta, Georgia, where I caught up with an old friend and hiked forty-ish miles on the southernmost end of the Appalachian Trail. Indeed, is this the trip you are thinking of? Regardless, let me tell you about it.
I like hiking. A lot! So much that I’ve briefly made a job out of it, for a summer! I also like seeing my friends. A lot! I’ve traveled many times to see friends and family. So what better way than to kill two birds with one stone by hiking with my friends? And what better place to hike than the granddaddy of all hiking opportunities, the Appalachian Trail? 2191.2 (+- 8) miles of hilly, mountainous, green terrain stretching across the entire eastern side of the United States from the northern end of Georgia to the northern end of Maine. It is the ultimate in America’s thru-hikes, taking anywhere from three to six months to complete in its entirety, and requiring a knowledge of not just wilderness safety and camping skills, but also the physical ability to hike 10-15 miles up and down while carrying 40-60 pounds on your back, every day. Did we do the whole thing? Absolutely fucking not. Do I want to do the whole thing? Also no. But I’ll be damned if it wasn’t a great time.
Technically, yes, this week-long trip to Georgia was, primarily, to hike the Appalachian trail, but in truth, I was going to visit a friend anyway and it was his idea to hike the trail, so what began (for me) as a trip to catch up with good people began a several-day odyssey into the backwoods of Georgia. This friend is, of course, Kenny, who’s shown up here a handful of times in the past. His goal was/is to hike the entire Georgia portion of the Appalachian trail, about 90 miles or so, and that was originally my goal, too. But since the purpose of this trip was to visit, and take it easy, and also because my summer is full of lots of other things, we didn’t have the 8 to 10 days necessary to finish that entire part of the trail. So we ended up hiking for three and a half days (if you count a day hike at the end), and covered around 30 miles of the actual trail, plus an extra 10 unofficial miles before/after you get to the start of the trail. But what does hiking on the Appalachian trail look like?
If you mean what it physically looks like, well, the view doesn’t change a whole lot! We’ll get to that later. But if you mean more along the lines of, what did it look like for a couple of clowns to go hiking on the trail? Well, it looked a little something like this at first:
See, when I first flew into Atlanta last Sunday, the first thing we did was stop and grab chili dogs. Then we had to prep for the trail, and this meant going to REI to get a map and last-minute necessities and going to Wal-Mart to get as much high-calorie food as we could stuff into a blue bear-proof barrel. Much like hiking at Philmont, or backpacking anywhere, really, on the Appalachian Trail, you have to be prepared to carry everything you need on your back. And I mean everything. Food, water, water filtration systems, shelter, clothes, rain gear, means to make fire, emergency supplies, bear spray, anti-bear spray, poop shovel, you name it, you’ve got to have it on your back. This is a lot, and you have to be prepared to carry it and dig it out of your pack at a moment’s notice. Luckily for thru-hikers, you don’t need to carry six months of food at a time. Sure, as remote as it feels on the Appalachian trail when you’ve been hiking for eight hours and it’s foggy and dark and you haven’t seen another person for two days, you’re never really all that far from civilization. Something that struck me as funny on the trail was how we’d sometimes cross roads or just hear a truck in the distance. We ended our hike at a resupply store/hostel that sat at the intersection of a major highway and the trail itself. We did not resupply there, since we were done with the hike, but if we were going further, we would have had to get more food. Because we did not eat enough.
But more about food later! When you hike the AT trail, you can really start from anywhere. There are plenty of on-ramps and shelters throughout the trail, and from what I’ve read, everything is well-marked. There is one road, and it goes north or south. No one is getting lost on the trail itself. Some places even have bathrooms! Sure, they’re just toilets over a hole in the ground, but it’s better than digging the hole yourself! But if you want to start at the true southernmost tip of the trail, you have to start at Springer Mountain. Which has no road access, so you actually have to start either a) two miles past the southern terminus, and then hike backwards, or b) seven miles before the start of the trail, at Amicalola Falls State Park, and those seven miles don’t count as officla AT trail miles. Guess which one we choose.
So, yes, we opted for the extra seven miles before actually getting to the trail. Sunday evening, we parked Kenny’s car about thirty miles up-trail (from Springer, not from Amicalola), and then Kenny’s wife Eva kindly dropped us off at the approach trail (thank you, Eva!). We didn’t get any hiking done that first day, since it was already late, and it’s a good thing we didn’t because there was supposed to be a killer of a storm that night. And it was bad. Luckily for us, we snuck into an unrented canvas tent and squatted out the hail and lightning. Of all the campground sites at Amicalola, ours was right next to the only unoccupied glamping tent left; a big, heavy canvas thing with a wooden floor, air conditioning, and beds. Beds! In a tent! We didn’t even use them, since we didn’t pay for the thing and didn’t want to mess it up for the next people who actually paid for it. We were really on the Leave No Trace kick. Mind you, we did pay for a regular spot. An exorbitant rental fee, at that, so it isn’t like we totally squatted. We just happened to use the empty glamping tent to ride out a storm instead of trying to sleep in a hammock and/or on the cold, hard ground. Nothing wrong with that, yeah?
The next day, though, we actually got on the trail. Bright and early, we got up and hiked the approach trail up to the actual start of the AT. We summitted Spring Mountain, the first major peak on the trail (about 3700 feet, it’s not huge compared to, say, the Rockies, but it’s more than whatever Illinois or Minnesota have). And we summitted it pretty early, too. We realized pretty quickly that we were going to be hiking a lot faster than I had expected. Like, a lot faster. It’s been a while since I’d done elevation with weight on, I’d never backpacked with Kenny before, and I didn’t know what the elevation on the trail would be like, so I had been more conservative in my estimations. When planning our route, I expected us to go eight miles a day, stopping at the eight-mile marker shelters (which are large, wooden buildings that are erected specifically for hikers), and then trail camping one night at the end. We ended up doing between twelve and fifteen miles most days, and we got into camp by three or four every day.
Which was fine with me! We were hiking a lot, and hiking fast, which meant we were in good shape, I suppose. So that’s something? No one had ever told me I was “in shape” before, except these mountains. And we were doing pretty well, too. We hiked far, and we hiked fast, and that first day we got over Spring Mountain and ate lunch at a shelter there, and then immediately got back on the trail and got to our spot for the night at Stover Creek. There, we set up camp and basically just hung out for the rest of the day. Neither of us thought to bring books, or cards, or journals, or really anything to keep us entertained (rooky mistake), so evenings in camps were sitting and staring at the woods or just talking to each other. Which was fine with us, we had lots of stuff to catch up on and lots of woods to look at.
That’s the other thing; the view doesn’t change a whole lot. I think I mentioned this already, but it really doesn’t. It’s green and brown and sometimes you see the sky for about 2,000 miles. A billion shades of green, and lots of neat plants, but not exactly breathtaking vistas. That’s the Appalachian Trail. It’s one dirt path, with trees, for the whole way. It’s like that joke about sled dogs, the view doesn’t change unless you’re the front dog. Except here the view doesn’t change even if you are the front dog. Sure, we came across some really pretty streams and brooks, and it was still pretty to just look down a hill and see the slope covered in trees, but we got maybe two good views of the Appalachian mountains the entire time. We could just barely see them through the trees for pretty much all the rest of the trail. So close, and yet so far. Oh, and speaking of that, you couldn’t even see the stars! It was so dark at night, I got out of my tent to pee around 2AM and I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. It was a complete, smothering darkness. Perhaps the darkest I have ever seen on a campout. No moon, no stars, couldn’t barely even see the sky through the trees. True advanced darkness. It was pretty awesome.
But to get back to the hiking, we were doing really well by comparison, too. Getting onto the AT trail is really different than Philmont, because at Philmont you have base camp and rangers and staff and people constantly watching your every move (for better and for worse). The AT trail, on the other hand, is a bit… hodgepodge. They really let anyone on this trail. Kenny and I were easily some of the most competent people on the trail for our days there. Which is worrying because, while I’m pretty experienced, I haven’t backpacked in years, and never in this part of the country, and, well… hiking miles into the wilderness for weeks on end is not an activity for the incompetent. You do not fuck around with bears, dehydration, falls, or getting lost. Not that the AT trail is all that dangerous, compared to other places you could be hiking, or even that the skills necessary to do well are prohibitively hard to learn! I don’t want to give off the impression that I’m gatekeeping here. The more people who get backpacking, the better. And it’s not that hard to learn. But still! There are certain expectations and courtesies that everyone should know before getting on the trail, and there’s risk for serious injury out here! But anyone can just drop off their car and start hiking, and that was maybe, to me, the biggest culture shock I’ve ever experienced.
Like, for example, after sleeping at Stover Creek, we got up and hiked fourteen-ish miles the next day to Gooch Mountain. Yeah, laugh it up, haha, Gooch Mountain. It is a funny name. Gooch stank shelter. Gooch sweat camp. Gooch gap. The jokes practically write themselves. But that’s beside the point; at Gooch Mountain, as we were getting ready for the evening, we looked over to the people at the site next to us and they were eating food. In their tent. They just up and opened a can of soup. In their tent. In a place where bears live. Do you see an issue with this? That’s like hiking rule number one, do not eat in your tent. No food should ever, ever go in your tent. Maybe Philmont’s made me bear paranoid, since the Boy Scouts are famously risk-avoidant, but come on! Not only that, I saw garbage strewn on the trail. Just bits and pieces of food wrappers, in shelters, in campsites, on the trail, just, you know, around. Not only does that attract bears, it’s just kind of gross to look at. A couple we saw on a ridgeline threw their apple cores into the woods, and that pissed me off, too. “They’re biodegradable!” I don’t care! I don’t want to see your apple cores! Pack out what you pack in! If every hiker did that (and, if talking the locals is any estimation, every hiker does, and they hate it), the place would be covered in garbage. It’s just… come on. Please pick up after yourself.
Those were my only major gripes, but it’s still weird to think about that they really do just let anyone on this trail. Like, we didn’t talk to other hikers too much, besides a courteous hello or chatting over dinner, but we did talk at length with a couple of characters. Most of the hikers were father-son duos, friends hiking together, a group of older women with a guide lady, and a couple of solo hikers. Most were fairly put together. But it was the solo hikers who were… interesting. Like, there was this one guy, Scott, who we met at Stover Creek on our first night. He was in his mid to late fifties, had just retired, and had been training with day hikes for a while but had never done overnight trips before. Ok, cool, he’s only going a few days. He did not have a sleeping back, just a quilt. Ok, getting a little weirder. He woke up at 4am the next morning to try and hike twenty-seven miles in one day. His goal was to complete the Georgia portion of the trail in a long weekend. Kenny and I heard this and said, “good luck to you,” and then promptly agreed that he would not make it 27 miles in one day. Sure, maybe he could. He looked like he was in good shape, and not carrying a ton of weight. But did he? I don’t know. We’ll never know, because we never saw him again. Kenny and I would, for the rest of the trip, get to junctions with mile markers and say, “Well, Scott’s got ten miles to go from here before he reaches the base of the mountain,” or “Scott’s still got six miles before sundown.” That was over the next two and a half days. Good luck to him.
As much as I love to judge others, I try not to make a habit out of it. I try to give people the benefit of the doubt. Let me not be the one to cast the first stone and all that. But it was hard not to judge this other guy, Dennis, as he came up the trail the first day. He didn’t spend the night in Stover’s Creek with us, though we did see him again at Gooch Mountain, but he was also odd. He walked up to the Stover’s shelter, after having been on the trail for maybe, I don’t know, five miles? He already looked desperate and worn down. He had that vague, distant, dirty look that’s common to both homeless people and backpackers, but he hadn’t even been on the trail a full day yet. All his stuff was strapped to the outside of his pack, and he had this little dog, Spinx, with him. No leash, of course. The dog was friendly enough, ran up to us and wanted to get pets and stuff, and he was a kind enough person, once we got talking. Although I couldn’t make out half the words he was saying because of his accent, from origins unknown. He said this was his first time on the trail, and asked where we could get water from.
“Oh, we’ve been filling it up out of the creek,” we said. “Me too, I’ve been drinking a bit of that. I was wondering if there was a spigot,” he said. “What have you been using to filter your water?” I asked, out of curiosity. “Filter it?” He asked. Oh. Oh no. “Yeah, like to get the bacteria and stuff out. Do you have a water filter?” “….No.” “Do you have iodine tablets?” “….Iodine what?” Oh dear. Oh no. Look, I’m sure you can probably drink the stream water and be fine, but dysentery/norovirus/beaver fever are not things I want to catch when the nearest hospital is at least three hours away, at best. Like I said, we saw him later, at Gooch Mountain, and there he asked us for some water purifier tablets, so he could purify his three liter Mountain Springs plastic jug. He offered to pay us, but we did have extras and a big gravity-powered filter thing, so we just gave him a handful of our extra tablets. His follow-up question was “how do I get off this trail?” He did not have a map. Oof. Poor guy.
When Dennis first walked up, he eyed our stuff up and down for a good minute. Kenny’s initial reaction to this was worrying that he was going to steal our gear. This was, admittedly, also my knee-jerk reaction. But talking to the guy some more, my theory became that when he first walked up and saw all our fancy stuff and water filtration gear and my enormous pack (105 liters, baby!) and our fifty liter food container and he realized, “Oh, shit, I am not prepared for this.” Best of luck to him; I hope he made it off the trail alright.
But speaking of gear and/or being woefully unprepared for the trail, that above picture is what our camp looked like on the average evening! Kenny had a hammock and a very efficiently-constructed rainfly, and I had the tent. I’ve been collecting backpacking gear and and off through birthdays and Christmases for the last couple years, so I have a fair set of gear, but you don’t really need fancy gear to go at the AT trail. In fact, we technically didn’t even need our bear vault for our food; most places had shelters and bear boxes, so, in theory, we could have done away with both tents and bear cans. All you really need is gear that’s comfortable for you, light enough to travel with, a way to replenish (fresh) drinking water, and emergency clothing for inclement weather.
And food! Of course you need a lot of food. When you’re backpacking, you’re burning somewhere between 4,000 and 7,000 calories on a given day. If you want to be able to sustain the same level of ability the entire trek, you have to be replenishing those calories, otherwise you’re gonna lose weight and crash, eventually. It’s a good thing we weren’t out for more than a few days because we did not have enough food. We were eating at starvation levels for most of our trek, getting maybe 1,500 calories a day. Breakfast? Dry oatmeal and a granola bar. Lunch? Packaged meat and freeze-dried fruit. Dinner? Beef jerky and more freeze-dried fruit. Backpacking is funny because in the real world, most people want low-calorie foods. Not backpackers. We need food to be as high-calorie as possible, both for energy and efficient storage. Less volume is better to pack. The only proper caloric intake meal we had was probably our first lunch, where Kenny and I had an entire can of Spam. Each. And what a delicious meal it was. Nothing could have been better in that exact moment than an entire can of Spam. You really learn to appreciate shitty, shitty food when you’re backpacking.
After spending the night in complete darkness in the folds of Gooch Mountain (ew, I did not like writing that sentence), and eating not nearly enough food, we hiked on from there and had two possible outcomes for the day. If things were tough and we hiked slow, we’d spend Wednesday night in a trail camp and hike the rest of the way Thursday out to Kenny’s car. If we hiked fast, we’d spend Wednesday night at the campground we parked the car at, just two miles off the AT, and do a day hike (without weight) up Blood Mountain the next day. Figures, we hiked pretty damn fast. We made it to Jarrard gap by the middle of the day Wednesday, and got off the trail around the twenty-seven mile mark (Scott still had five miles to go). We spent the evening at Lake Winfield Scott state recreation area, squatted in another unreserved campsite (without glamping tent, sadly), and talked about the goofier things we had seen on the trail.
Speaking of talking, what do you do all day when you’re hiking? Well, on the AT where views are slim to none (except at the occasional conveniently-placed overlook), you have three options. One, you can look at the cool stuff on the trees and the ground, like the loads and loads of snails, centipedes, millipedes, and cool mosses that I found. Two, you can talk for eight hours a day, which Kenny and I also did. Topics ranged from the purpose of our lives, the nature of God and Man, and who hadn’t shit for three days. The third option is, when you’re going uphill, to suffer. That’s mostly what you do on the trail.
Life on the trail is weird. The days blend together, everything looks the same and yet everything is also different. All the shelters are distinct but I get the order of them mixed up in my head. There’s only one way to go, and it’s forward. It isn’t like Philmont, where each camp has an activity, or there’s something you’re supposed to be doing, or your weird neighbor’s dad is constantly leaning over your shoulder to make sure you’ve set the camp stove up correctly. You are under your own power, and the only requirements you have each day are hike and sleep. That’s it. Eating and drinking are optional, depending on how far you’re going. You might not even poop while you’re on the trail. I did, once, and I was treated to a view of perhaps the most cursed object I have ever seen in my entire life. Behold: A bird’s nest made out of used toilet paper.
It was uncomfortable and I hated it. Other than finding the bird equivalent of running a daycare in a meth lab, the trail was really well maintained! Shelters were clean, signage was great, and there were trail blazes everywhere to make sure we didn’t get lost on the one (1) trail. We hiked all the way through, and made it to the end before we even knew what had happened. Somehow, we even got some good views. On Wednesday, we ate breakfast at a pretty solid view, finished breakfast, and then walked fifty feet only to find a better view. For lunch, we did the reverse; we found a great view at Preacher’s Rock, didn’t eat there, and then kept hiking to eat in the woods an hour later. Our food schedule was way off.
The final day, after leaving the trail and getting to our campground, we spent the night off-trail and then drove up to Neels Gap the next morning. It was a short drive, and we really only skipped two or three miles of the trail, but we made it up by making a day hike up BLOOD MOUNTAIN. Yes, that is the real name. Yes, it is a stupid name. BLOOD MOUNTAIN, right next to SLAUGHTER CREEK. That is also not a joke. We continually made jokes about the names of places throughout the trip; this was a running theme. Also, how all the signs for BLOOD MOUNTAIN looked vaguely threatening and hand-carved. Scott still had to get over BLOOD MOUNTAIN before his day was through.
Our day hike up BLOOD MOUNTAIN was a relatively easy one. Well, easy for me, anyway; in exchange for me carrying the food on the trail, Kenny carried the water and rain gear up BLOOD MOUNTAIN, so I didn’t have to carry anything. Hey, that was a trade-off that worked for me, because I had a great time taking pictures of everything I saw. Flowers, hollows in the trail made of arched treeways, the stones beneath our feet, and the first proper view we really had from the top of the mountain (about 4500 feet at the top; elevation went as low as 2700 at some places but didn’t go above 3800 except at BLOO MOUNTAIN).
After summitting BLOOD MOUNTAIN, that was the end of our official hike. We’d done pretty well, I think! We hiked around 40 miles in three and a half days, went from glamping at Amicalola to worrying about Scott and Dennis at Stover’s Creek to being shrouded in the void at Gooch Mountain to squatting once again at Lake Winfield Scott before finally ascending our true enemy, BLOOD MOUNTAIN. We didn’t get quite as far as we had hoped, and we didn’t hike for as many days as I might have wanted (just as I was getting into the groove, it was over), but it was a great chance to talk to Kenny and hang out in nature. Plus, I still had two more days in Georgia!
After the hike, we stopped at the resupply store at Neels Gap and got an excellent lunch of barbeque at a random roadside diner. Honestly, it’s always the hole-in-the-wall place or the “nearly world famous” place that has the best food. The fact that this was our first real meal since Taco Bell on Sunday also probably had something to do with it, but the food was excellent. And then we drove to the North Georiga Bigfoot Research Station, also known as EXPEDITION BIGFOOT. I’m not joking.
It is well–documented that I love tourist traps. Those stupid, kitschy places that make you chuckle in wonderment at not just dancing bears, but chuckle in wonderment at how the fuck anyone came up with this shit in the first place. Who’s convinced by it? Is anyone here unironically or are we all in on the joke? Does it matter? Did I just pay a reasonable amount of money to stare at fake plaster casts of Big Feet? Yes to all! No to all! It’s a tourist trap! We put the fun in no refunds!
Kenny is also a big fan of Bigfoot. I don’t think either of us particularly believe in Bigfoot, but it’s one of those things that’s just so ingrained in us that you can’t not love Bigfoot. It’s a truly American thing, more folklore than Paul Bunyan and some that truly counts as an American cultural entity. Whether it’s through Boy Scouts or popular culture or what, Bigfoot and other Cryptids (like the Moth Man) are just a part of our identities, and I can’t even tell if it’s totally ironic on either of our parts. I think a lot of people feel the same way. Bigfoot himself may not be real, but the feeling of Bigfoot is. The real Bigfoot were the friends we made along the way.
The museum was your pretty standard tourist trap fare. It had a surprisingly high production value, all things considered. They have the largest collection of Bigfoot feet casts in North America, so that’s something! They had different exhibits, with signs about Bigfoot, newspaper clippings and stories from the past, all sorts of the usual things. It was almost good enough that I didn’t really need to even laugh at it. Until we got to the video. Oh, this video was solid gold. I wasn’t even going to watch the thing until Kenny told me I had to, and I’m sure glad he did. In a little velvet theater in the back of the museum, they’ve got this ten-fifteen minute video playing on repeat and it looks like, as Kenny put it, it’s from video game from 2003. The graphics are awful, the sound design is bizarre, the story of it goes nowhere and told me nothing, they used the same clips over and over again, and ever visual is just a frightening, uncanny choice of design. It is hard to convey just how surreal and fucking funny the thing is to watch. I wish it was on YouTube somewhere, but I also don’t want to go looking for it, so I can forever preserve the memory.
Oh, they also had a Bigfoot print cast from Decatur, Illinois! Hey, I’ve been there! I don’t know where the hell Bigfoot would hide around there! It’s all corn!
But after that we went back to Atlanta proper and spent the last few days relaxing. We showered, ate proper food, played Mario Kart and watched TV, lounged in the luxury of air conditioning, and took his dogs for a walk. We went to Piedmont Park, and the city market in Atlanta, and he showed me around some of the sights and sounds of the city. Kenny hosted an excellent stand-up comedy evening, which was quite fun to see, especially since I’ve been going to Kenny’s stand-up comedy stuff for like… gosh, six years now? Since freshman year of college. That’s weird.
And, of course, the last thing we did was go to the Georgia Aquarium, home to the largest indoor saltwater enclosure on the planet. Funnily enough, this is actually something I’ve done before; I went to Atlanta with my parents when I was like, six, and there are two things I remember from that trip; my mom’s friend wouldn’t let me play lemmings on her computer, and seeing the whale sharks at the Georgia Aquarium. And I have to say, going back, it does not disappoint. As someone who has always been fascinated by the ocean, I love aquariums (aquaria?). I love fish. I love seeing fish. One of my favorite video games growing up was Endless Ocean, a game entirely about finding and looking at fish. I Love the ocean. So I cannot properly communicate to you how unearthly it is to be sitting in a glass tube, in a fish tank where you cannot see the edges, and a fifteen-foot Manta Ray comes swooping out the blue haze. It was magical.
Honestly, the whale sharks didn’t impress me as much this time around. Eh, they’re big fish. That’s cool. But the Manta Rays? Oh, baby, let me tell you, it’s insane. The pictures can’t do it justice, nor can my words. The sheer majesty, the magnitude of these creatures, as they dive out of the formless blue, take shape and drift by, unaware of my presence, unaware of how in awe I am of their size, and then disappear into the wild blue yonder. It’s borderline life-changing. It reinvigorated my appreciation for large ocean creatures, and made me want to go Scuba diving more.
But after that, it was time for me to fly back to Chicago, and say goodbye to Kenny and Eva. And the Appalachian trail. It was a long, exhausting hike, but it was a great opportunity to spend time with people whose presence I enjoy, and it was a great opportunity for me to get back on the trail and see how I’ve held up since I was last backpacking four (holy shit how has it been that long?) years ago. Turns out, it’s like riding a bike; I still can’t quite do it properly, and I haven’t forgiven it either. It was a fun time, both in spite of and because of everything that happened on the trail. Kenny and I have shared a lot of good times together. And this is definitely one of them.
And it brings a close to yet another week of mine this summer, and I am one step closer to leaving the United States for Sweden. Alright, who’s next on my list of friends and family to see…
