An important message from Jabba, The Real Hiking Viking

This message has been edited for length and clarity. All photos courtesy of Jabba.

All right, so here’s the deal. I grew up in central Pennsylvania. I was the youngest of four kids in a lower-middle-class family, and we never really got to experience the world much. I didn’t travel a ton except for maybe one week out of each summer when we would go on vacation. Early in my life, we would travel about an hour north to a lake, a private lake area in north-central PA called Eagles Mere. My dad used to go there as a kid too, so it was a family tradition. It was about an hour to an hour and 15 minutes from our house, and being, like I said, a lower-middle-class kid from central PA without much money, that was my idea of “getting away.”

Then, at some point when we were a little older—maybe when I was in fourth or fifth grade—my parents decided to start traveling with the whole family in the station wagon all the way down to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Now, I know we’re talking about “Feeding the Carolinas”, and that’s Western Carolina, but Carolina’s Carolina. So my first taste of the Carolinas was the Outer Banks, and I fell in love with it. That was my initial foray into experiencing North Carolina. We must’ve done that several years in a row—maybe half a dozen times in my childhood. We’d load up the station wagon or, as we got older, the conversion van with all four kids, my mom and dad, and sometimes one of our friends would join us, depending on how things worked out.

A young Jabba and his family.

A young Jabba stands seaside on a boardwalk.

So my initial North Carolina experiences were in places like Cape Hatteras, Ocracoke—those kinds of areas. I loved it, and it made me start loving North Carolina at an early age. But I didn’t start experiencing the rest of North Carolina until after I joined the Marine Corps, more directly. I didn’t join the Marine Corps until I was 23 years old. After boot camp, which was in South Carolina, just across from Savannah and Hilton Head on Parris Island, I graduated and moved back to basically the Outer Banks area. Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, was my duty station for four years. Half the time I was in Iraq, and the other half I was stationed at Camp Lejeune, which is right on the coast. To the south of Camp Lejeune is Onslow Beach, part of the base, and north of it are Emerald Isle and all the other islands leading up to the Outer Banks and Hatteras.

To the south of Onslow Beach is Topsail Island. The locals pronounce it “Tops’l,” though it’s spelled “Top Sail” if you’re not from there. I lived on North Topsail Beach and started falling in love with the Outer Banks all over again. While I was stationed in North Carolina, every other weekend or so for years, my best friend from the Marine Corps, who was from the Raleigh area, and I would travel to Raleigh. I started experiencing life a bit inland from the Outer Banks, experiencing more of the Southern culture and the people of Raleigh, and I fell in love with North Carolina in a different way, in a different place.

This was in the mid-2000s, and I finally got out of the Marine Corps in 2010. I went back to central PA, went back to college, and got a job with Vargo Titanium. That job led me to have a vendor booth with Vargo Titanium on the Appalachian Trail down in Damascus, VA, during Trail Days in 2012. Nine months later, in March 2013, I was hiking north on the Appalachian Trail. By the time you leave Georgia, maybe around 100 or 200 miles in, you get into the Smokies in North Carolina and Tennessee. When you get to Hot Springs, NC, you experience everything North Carolina has to offer on the east side of the Smokies. It’s unbelievable. I mean, what’s not to love about the Smokies and Hot Springs? The people there, the Laughing Heart Lodge, the various trail angels and locals, and the community are so incredibly welcoming to the thru-hiking culture. It makes your whole day, or even your whole week, to be in a town like Hot Springs. You come out of the mountains exhausted, starving, dirty, and needing some reprieve—and you fall in love with it.

Jabba celebrates atop the Mt. Katahdin sign, marking the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail.

Every town you come to makes you feel a little more at home on the trail, with these places and these people, and it’s rare to have a bad experience. Even Franklin, North Carolina—can’t forget that place. All these towns are unbelievably essential to feeling like you belong in this new culture, this new lifestyle, and this different way of thinking. These places slowly shift your perspective—from town to town—on who you are, who you want to be, and where you want to go in life. Without these communities, it wouldn’t be nearly as impactful. That hike in 2013 changed me. By the halfway point, I knew I wanted to change my life completely.

It’s not just a thought you have in an instant. You’re becoming completely enveloped by this new way of living. And I’m telling you right now, it doesn’t exist without these communities along the way supporting you in every way. It’s the first time some people experience this level of care and community. Coming from the military, you don’t know how much you need these kinds of experiences until you’re in the process of having them. It seeps into your veins, into your soul, and into all your thoughts. And without the Appalachian Trail, without those early towns, without walking through Spring, and the Smokies, and watching the flowers and the trees and the bushes and the world come to life as you’re hitting North Carolina… I’m not where I am today without the AT. I’m not where I am today in my life as a professional thruhiker without that experience being exactly what it was.

Jabba with a frozen beard during his southbound winter thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail, December 2015 to April 2016.

And I’ve come through there again; I hiked southbound in the winter on the AT, and all those towns were just as wonderful and just as critical to me having a great time and a great experience. And I can’t even imagine what those people are going through. Instead of worrying about hikers, they need people to help. Instead of them worrying about hikers and helping hikers, it is time to do something to help them as hikers. And I know for myself, I am probably on the receiving end more than I’ve ever been on the giving end, and it’s time that I do something. I’ve done other things in the past—I have done other things in the past for people—but this is a time of need, a very, very important and sad time of need for these people.

When I decided to say, “Hey, I’m going to have a fundraiser for these people to raise money for food and water, and for these food banks all across the Carolinas—Feeding the Carolinas,” people are like, “No, you can’t shave your beard; it’s your brand.” And it’s like, who the fuck cares about a brand when people are actually critically in need of these things, these resources—a literal lifeline in some cases for these people? A beard grows back.

I don’t give a flying hoot about my beard. If it can help people, it’s not even a question—I’d be happy to shave this off, even if I haven’t seen this face in over 11 years, going on 12 years soon. It’s inconsequential. It’s just a beard. It does not matter in the grand scheme of things when people are hurt, injured, sad, lonely, hungry—and whatever raising this money does to quell any of that. I’m happy to provide whatever that is, as small or as large as it grows to be. I’m happy to offer up some measly beard trimmings as a reward for helping people.

To learn more about Jabba’s fundraiser for Feeding the Carolinas, read The Trek’s fundraiser announcement or donate directly via the GoFundMe.