Are We There Yet? What to Expect in the Last 300 Miles of an AT Thru Hike

If you read that title in the voice of a child that is 5 hours in to a 6 hour car drive, then you would be correct; that is exactly how I felt the last 300 miles hiking the Appalachian trail.

I vividly remember a day back in Maryland when I came across a grandmother and her grandson hiking the AT. We struck up a conversation and she told me about another one of her family members that quit the trail when they passed the 2,000 mile mark. When I asked her why they quit, she told me that they were satisfied with technically being able to still apply for the 2,000 miler certificate given to thru hikers by the Appalachian Trail Conservancy. As it turns out, a lot of people quit or skip in the last 500 miles, even some who get all the way to Maine. I couldn’t fathom why anyone would ever get so close and not push forward to the end.

Then it happened to me.

Views like this make it easy to want to keep walking

It was pouring rain. I hadn’t seen the sun in nine days, and I was going through Southern Maine, notoriously one of the hardest sections on the AT. A cold front had settled in, and I was shaking and soaked. After getting back on trail from taking five days off in Gorham due to a stomach bug, I was feeling both physically and mentally weak. I was sad to leave home to get back on trail. I was sad to have lost all of my hiking partners. I was sad that I hadn’t been able to see any of the views that people had raved about due to the bad weather. I was post-holing in mud up to my hips. The watershed in Maine has never really recovered from the floods in 2023, and even the smallest amount of the rain causes the trail to form rivers of water and mud. It was steep. I had already broken one trekking pole, but I was a mile away from getting into Stratton, ME. I was excited about crossing the 2,000 mile mark, but I was also so miserable. How was it possible to feel these two things so strongly at once?

I was thinking about this when I slipped and fell hard, snapping my other trekking pole and slamming my hip into a rock. I’m very glad I was alone, because I threw a full-blown temper tantrum. I slammed my broken pole into the ground. I cried. I yelled at the sky: “I’m so sick of this!” I had never wanted to quit so badly as I did in that moment.  I finally got it.

When the bog boards are submerged under mud and you miss a step.

I got into Stratton okay, and a nice man from Maine was waiting at the trailhead with a warm car and a can of soda. He let me hang out there until Jenn from the Maine Roadhouse came to pick me up. It was such a nice stay, and I ended up seeing some of my trail friends at the hostel who had decided to take a zero. Things were better (at least for a bit), but I could still feel the urge to quit nagging at the back of my head, even as I could just as strongly feel the pull to continue walking down that trail of white blazes.

People don’t warn you about the end. Okay – someone out there probably did warn me, but I didn’t take it seriously. I didn’t understand until I was immersed in a paradox of emotions and feelings that were so contradictory but simultaneously true.

Maine is basically the Forbidden Forest (if you’ve ever watched a Harry Potter movie, you know what I mean)

I’m going to attempt to summarize what I mean by this below. I am taking from my own personal experiences as well as from other thru-hikers that shared my sentiment.  When you read these antithetical statements, know that it is incredibly possible to feel both at once or none at all.  If you’re planning a thru-hike yourself, I hope this may help you mentally prepare for when “the end is near” (or so you think).

You are so ready to be done. You never want this to end.

For the sake of their privacy, I will be calling the hikers discussed in the story below by the pseudonyms Suds, Raccoon, and Patches. The four of us were holed up in Ethan Pond Shelter – located near Crawford Notch at the end of the Franconia Ridge section. The weather in the Whites had been dicey for days. I had waited four days for the weather to “clear” (does it ever in the Whites?) before finally deciding to begin the ascent to Franconia Ridge. Ahead of us was the rest of the Presidential range, including Mt. Washington, infamous for its erratic and brutal weather. And to our not-so-surprise, it had started to rain.

Summit of Mt Washington with 65 mph winds

We began to discuss our options for proceeding forward. Raccoon leaned against the side of the shelter and smoked a cigarette. He was going to continue on regardless of the weather, stopping at Mizpah Hut and then traversing the whole presidential ridge the next day. Suds was sitting beside me under the shelter with tears in her eyes. She was at a tipping point, and she knew she needed a break, but she also needed to finish before her international visa expired. Patch was on my other side, laid face up on his mat with his eyes closed. I honestly hadn’t seen him open his eyes once, even when he stirred briefly to down a granola bar. A silent and hungry statue, he never chimed in on the conversation.

We were exhausted. We were agitated. We were over it. But we all agreed that we would never – could never – quit.

Descent from Mt Garfield after rain

As my friend Extra reminded me at the beginning of New Hampshire, there would come a time in our future that we would ache for these moments – a time when we would do anything to experience them again (and I take his word for it, as he’s a Triple Crowner and completed his second AT hike). Even as we began to miss the comforts of real life, we could never shake off the encroaching feeling of “what now?” that comes with finishing a thru hike. We celebrated how close we were to finishing, but we also mourned.

These thoughts create a sense of cognitive dissonance that was sometimes debilitating.  I would just want to cry and be frustrated at the things that went awry, but I couldn’t let myself. I had to enjoy all of it – the good, the bad, the ugly – before it was gone.

You’re starving and can never get enough food. You’ve lost your appetite and can’t eat.

As much as we talk about hiker hunger, we don’t talk nearly as much about how it can just disappear. It wasn’t even about being tired of the food that I was eating either – I just lost all desire to eat. Between the physical stress and weather, food was often the last thing on my mind. I’m not going to lie – it’s not very fun eating my millionth peanut butter tortilla while sitting on a tree stump in the cold rain. When I got into town, I would eat hundreds of calories of food, but it never felt like enough. For 1900 miles on the trail, I maintained my weight. In the last 300 miles, I probably lost ten pounds. I was starving, but I never wanted to see another peanut butter tortilla again. Balancing eating habits became an annoying – and borderline unhealthy – issue towards the end of the trail.

A snack on top of Mt. Moriah (last major summit in the Whites) before I threw up on and off the entire descent 🙂

You have a high tolerance for bullshit. Anything that goes wrong is driving you crazy.

Ever heard the phrase “when shit hits the fan?” When one bad thing happens, and then another, and then another, and before you know it, you have poop scattered all over your walls and you don’t even know where to start to clean it. That happened to me (not literal shit, thankfully) in my last 300 miles on trail. And let me tell ya, having things go wrong – especially at the end – is incredibly frustrating.

Cloudy views going up the Baldpate Mountain in Maine

My tent poles broke. I contracted a stomach bug that took me off trail for five days. I snapped a trekking pole immediately when I started back. The weather was abyssal through one of the prettiest sections of trail. I found a spare trekking pole in a hiker box just to break the other one once I started back on trail. I sprained my ankle. The trail flooded. I developed the worst blisters I had so far on the AT in the 100 mile wilderness. The list goes on…

But I was a thru hiker. I had hiked 1900 miles already. I was experienced, and I knew how to take care of things. I could handle these things.

But seriously… WHY?!

Squeezing through rocks in Mahoosuc Notch (known as “the hardest mile on the Appalachian trail”)

If I can give one piece of advice here, it is to never stop expecting the unexpected. The end may be near, but it doesn’t mean the AT gods will let you go through without a fight.

You are lonely. You want to be left alone.

I had a friend ahead of me on the trail that shared some of her final thoughts during the 100 mile wilderness on her Instagram story, and the above statement was one of the things she said (If you’re reading, hi Mountain Goat!). I just remember relating to that so deeply. By that point on the hike, I was mostly hiking alone. In some ways I prefer this; I like being responsible for only myself and going forward as my mind and body see fit. However, it feels so good sometimes to just have someone there to have your back, to help you grab your water bottle or share a snack, to bitch when it’s raining or cold, to laugh through the inherent craziness that is hiking the Appalachian trail.

One morning in the Whites, I woke up to my friend Old Soul at my tent telling me the trail was impassable due to a brook flooding overnight during the storms. It felt beyond good to have someone with me to discuss our options for getting off trail safely.

Cascade Brook after a night of thunderstorms in the Whites

Towards the end, thru hikers are a jumbled mess of emotions. We are elated, exhausted, anxious, sad, and the happiest we have ever been. It’s incredibly hard to process. Add other hiker’s emotional roller coaster to your mix, and the overwhelm just intensifies. I found myself seeking solitude more often in order to truly feel all that I needed to feel – to allow myself the grace to both grieve and celebrate.

You are broken. You are strong.

When I imagined myself at the end of the Appalachian trail, I pictured a Wonder Woman of sorts. I saw myself standing on top of Mt. Katahdin by the famous brown sign with muscles flexing that I didn’t even know existed. I saw a girl that was so strong – in the best shape of her life.

Coming down from Mt Katahdin

While I did finish feeling strong, the truth is I was also incredibly broken. What I learned is that there is an apex of physical strength on trail in which I was at my max healthiest, but then I began to slowly deteriorate as I kept hiking. I would say my epitome of health was around halfway when I was in Pennsylvania. By the time I got to the end, my body had started to revolt against me. Although I believe my injury and illness exacerbated this issue for me, I heard similar sentiments from my fellow thru hikers.

My piece of advice: Feel it all. Then keep walking.

I may sound sappy in this section, but it is true (because trust me, “feelings” aren’t necessarily my thing). You will feel more in one instance on your thru hike than you will ever feel in one day in your “real life.” Your emotions will be amplified and raw: You will laugh and cry; you will feel so strong but yet fragile and weak; you will want to scream but also want to bask in the silence of the trail. The days are arduous and neverending. The moments are fleeting and small treasures you will want to hold on to forever. These are the best moments of your life.

Keep smiling. Keep walking.

Let yourself feel every bit of it. There isn’t one right way to be. It’s okay if you feel like a hypocritical contradictory mess. In the words of probably one of all of our favorite poets, Henry David Thoreau: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself…”

There is a difference in allowing yourself to feel and sliding into a mindset of negativity. Embrace it. Allow yourself to feel. And then…

Take another step, and let it go.

Sunrise over Mt Katahdin on the day that I hiked into Baxter State Park

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Comments 8

  • Shannon "CanCan" : Dec 30th

    Hey, Carly! Great recap and insight! May I ask when you started and ended? I’m local to The Whites, and the conditions you describe remind me of June and early July. Just curious. I’m planning a 2025 thru with a mid April start and plan for less than 120 days. Happy trails!

    Reply
    • Carly : Dec 30th

      Wow that’s fast! I started March 23rd and finished August 30th! There was some weird weather that came through the end of the summer. I was in NH and ME from late July through August. I imagine that June would still be quite cold at times in the Whites and ME. I heard stories from others. I’m glad I went through when I did!

      Reply
      • Onward : Dec 31st

        This post, as so many of your posts have, makes me reflect on my thru-hike with a combination of fond remembrance, a new perspective, and mighty shouting of “She gets it!!” I feel mighty blessed that you shared your journey with all of us. Thank you.

        Reply
  • Kelly : Dec 30th

    I love how you expressed the range of emotions you felt , and yet the one that you let linger was ultimately determination which allowed you to finish. An amazing story .

    Reply
  • Jeff : Dec 30th

    Well spoken!

    Reply
  • Steve Schlosnagle : Dec 31st

    WOW!
    Happy New Year.
    Thanks for sharing!

    Reply
  • David Odell : Dec 31st

    Congratulations on finishing your AT hike. Enjoyed your writing about life on the trail. David Odell AT71 PCT72 CDT77

    Reply
  • Quiet Man : Jan 7th

    Very well written and excellent insights! Even as a section hiking, I can relate to much of what you have described so vividly. Thanks for sharing!

    Reply

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