A Promise to Myself

Hello! I’m new to blogging but old at backpacking. My first long hike was at the age of 15 when I hiked for 10 days through Philmont, New Mexico with the boy scouts. While I never really grooved with the boy scouts, I did love backpacking. After graduating high school, I began working and paying my way through college, and the only sort of vacation I could afford was in a tent in the woods. Backpacking became my default way to relax. So began my habit of taking long weekends, hiking and camping on the Appalachian Trail in New Jersey, where I lived.

In early 1994 I suggested to my father that we try out a long-distance hike in Maine, and tackle the 100-mile wilderness, continuing up to the summit of Katahdin, the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail. We meticulously planned our trip, bought the best equipment we could for the time, and at the beginning of July, we strapped on our 55 lb. backpacks and began a fantastic adventure. Toward the end of the trip, I mentioned to my father that I’d like to hike the entire trail someday, and made a silent promise to myself that I would. I had fallen in love with long-distance hiking and continued to plan trips through Shenandoah, the White Mountains, and other amazing trips along the Appalachian Trail.

Come 2000, my first child was born, and of course I bought a great carrier and started going on hikes with my little one. Unfortunately, being from New Jersey, almost every time I went out on the trail we ran into a bear. I slowly became discouraged, fearing for the safety of my child. This is a fear I had never had when I hiked alone. I slowly eased off from backpacking, and moved on with other parts of my life where I could be a father in much safer ways.

Re-awakening the Dream

About 16 years later, at the beginning of 2020 with my daughter mostly grown and essentially on her own, my wife and I planned a road trip to Minnesota to visit friends and enjoy all the strange roadside attractions along the way. Unfortunately, our plans to travel across the country got derailed by the pandemic. With no other activity available to us, we packed up our backpacks we hadn’t donned in over 10 years and headed into the woods around Bear Mountain State Park. I immediately remembered the joy and peace I found backpacking, and the promise I had made myself almost 30 years ago.

During my previous 20 years, I had been working as a funeral director. Working so close to death on a daily basis was a constant reminder not to delay my dreams. I knew first hand from watching other people’s mistakes and seeing other people’s wisdom that what we don’t do today, we may never get a chance to. But nothing hammered this home so much as experiencing those first few months of the pandemic and the devastation to so many families I was dealing with. I made the immediate decision to hike the Appalachian Trail, and began planning my trip for 2023. I would spend the next year training and gathering the equipment I would need to guarantee a successful thru hike (barring serious injury.)

Preparing to Hike

I celebrated my 50th birthday by hiking through Great Smoky Mountain National Park, and my 51st by hiking the 75 miles leading to Damascus, where I enjoyed the Trail Days celebration last year. I have honed my equipment from a base weight of 35 lbs., which I hiked with in 1994, to a base weight of 18 lbs., which I will review in my next post.

For this hike, I’m not concerned with how fast I go, or how many nights I actually sleep in the woods. I’m simply out to walk from Georgia to Maine, make amazing friendships along the way, learn the history of the east coast along the trail as I travel, and share that as I go.