I am now in Downers Grove, Illinois (Chicago suburb), awaiting an amazing wedding; a union between two people that I can clearly see are perfect for each other. I know that sounds super mainstream cliche, but that is truly the bottom line. As I am sitting in this plush DoubleTree Suite, so many thoughts about everything are rifling through my head that it is exhaustingly overwhelming. Tonight will be my last night in a bed until November, most likely. I look very forward to this in addition to chuckling to myself the stark contrast of this 10 million thread count douvet and the 52" plasma LG flat screen that I have at my current disposal and what lay ahead Tuesday night when I bed down for my first night beyond Abol Bridge in the Hundred Mile Wilderness Area, outside Baxter State Park.
I have barely been able to contain myself the last two weeks, really let alone the last four months. All of my energy has been channeled into running, strength training, dreaming, and working relentlessly to fund this venture. The mental planning and logistics have been unequivocally insane. Between the fine balance of bringing just the gear absolutely necessary, but still having enough and the formidable task of trail diet research and finding the perfect amounnt of quantifiable calories, as well as weighing the nutritional trade-offs for every potential meal, no doubt that my brain has approached spontaneous combustion more than once.
A number of weeks ago, I contacted the Appalachian Trail Conservancy Headquarters in Harper's Ferry, West Virginia. I called mainly to inquire of thru-hikers that have finished so far in 2012, if there were any state records, and if there was price inflation for gear and other necessary supplies. Although many answers to my battery of questions were not answered or inadequately answered, I had the unique opportunity to talk to a thru-hiker over the phone. He had started at Springer Mountain April 14th and as of a few weeks ago, was half way to Katahdin. My original plan was to devise a mail drop system to subsidize shopping in town, thus avoiding potential price inflation. I was convinced that this would be far more cost effective. This is evidently not the case. With ten planned mail drops, this would supply me for a little over one-third of the thru-hike. While talking with Erwin (or "Dickflap" as his trail name would become) he explained to me that he had tried to do the whole mail drop process to no avail. He told me that it was far more of a logisitic headache than it was worth, not to mention more expensive than actually buying in town due to the out-of-sight flat rate shipping (at ten to twelve dollars per parcel). It also put undue pressure on the backpacker to pace perfectly to get to the P.O. box at a certain time of day and when approaching smaller towns, on weekdays (most of the P.O. boxes are closed on weekends). So to put it succinctly, I am just going to fly by the seat of my pants and just resupply along the way and scrap the maildrops that I have listed in a previous blog post.
Among other things...
So as soon as I ascend and descend Mount Katahdin and make my trek out of the 200,000 pristine acres of the North Woods, I face the Hundred Mile Wilderness Area. This is quite a befitting name for an area larger than the state of Connecticut with absolutely no trailheads, road access, parks, or of course, potable drinking water. This area alone has enough ascent and descent combined to summit Mount Everest sixteen times. The wind perpetually blows so hard that treeline here is only 4,000 feet and has one of highest population densities of black bears in North America. Use peanut butter at your own risk. When I get past the Presidential and Mahoosuc Ranges, I knuckle up with the White Mountains. Here is another fun fact that I posted on my Facebook wall:
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