Hi,
As most of you know I am leaving for 6 months to hike the Appalachian Trail (AT). The AT is a trail that travels from Georgia to Maine through the Appalachian Mountains for 2259 miles. At an average of 12 miles a day it should take about 6 months. We will pass though Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York, Conn., Mass., Vermont, New Hamshire, and finally Maine.
This is the preliminary list of people to be on a mailing list that I will write to about once every one or two weeks. If you want to be taken off the list just mail the top three addresses and the mailing list administrators will hopefully remove you. Please don't feel that you have to reply to my mail or that you even have to read all of them. If you want to mail me you can try me at kieran@clarkedesign.com. I will try and include a mailing address that you can write to so that I can recieve your letters when I pick up my food packages(mail drops). Hikers get very lonely so if you have a couple of minutes over the next 6 months then I would love to hear about what is going on in your world. Hikers also get very hungry so if you want to wrap your letter around a snickers bar you will gain big brownie points with me :)
A couple of things about our trip. We plan to leave for Atlanta on the 4th of May and start the trail on the 7th.
We have prepared almost 6 months of dry, dehydrated, and
freeze-dried meals that we will be mailing to post offices close
to the trail. We plan to pick up about 6 days food at a time and
buy the rest from stores and restaurants along the way. 1 days
food per person is about 1.15 lbs
dry.
We are planning to hike the trail Ultra-light. That means we hope to have only 12-15lbs gear excluding food, water, and fuel. Less than 10% of the 3000 people who start the trail each year actually make it.
My hiking partner is my Mom?????
I hope you enjoy the list. If you want to snail mail me you can try
Kieran Lal AT Thru-hiker
c/o General Delivery
Fontana Dam, NC
28733
Cheers,
Kieran
Awesome. That pretty much describes most of the trip so far. We are on our sixth day of clear blue sunshine skies and have had only 15 minutes of rain. On Thursday morning we woke up at Marty & Doug's place in Atlanta. We had drunk a couple of pitchers of Texas Margaritas at a restaurant called Rio Bravo. We had figured that hangovers would provide a good excuse for our poor physical condition the next days.
Eventually we made it to Amicolla Falls State park which was significantly further away than the guide books led us to believe. We signed the starting register Amazon & his mom. Our packs weighed 29 & 32 lbs. About twice as heavy as I had anticipated.
After getting lost on some fine road we made it to the parking lot. We took our packs and hiked a mile to the start of The Appalachian Trail at Springer Mountain. Somehow it didn't seem big enough. This is where the dream becomes a reality for so many thru-hikers (People who try to hike from Georgia to Maine). There was a zip-lock bag inside this drawer in a rock. It was filled with messages, tips, farewells, hello's and reasons for doing the Appalachian Trail. I tried to read them all but there were at least a hundred. A few days early a guy named Skip had finished the trail going southbound. I thought I might have meet him on my cycling trip through the Appalachians 3 years before. He was forced to get off because his mother was very sick at the time.
It was very inspirational to read all these notes. ONe couple was a father and daughter team. She was 4 months pregnant and he was 65 years old and a double by-pass patient. I read as many as I could and then headed out. 2259 miles to Katahdin.
Since it was late afternoon we only hiked a few miles to our first shelter. CHAD showed up around 6:00pm. He was carrying this 50 lbs pack. He was going to hike to Pennsylvania to his home near the AT. A couple of day hikers showed up and gave us a few tips. They told us to unzip out packs and open everything up so the mice could get inside them. Also we were to put toilet paper on top. If the mice could crawl around and take the TP then they wouldn't chew through our packs. We hung them from the shelter ceiling with tin cans part way down the cord to slow the mice down. In the morning the TP was gone from everybody's pack.
On Friday we hiked long and hard to get as close to Suches, GA. the site of our first food drop. Hikers on the AT mail themselves food to post offices close by the trail. This keeps costs down and prevents you from living out of corner stores for 6 months. The Suches post office was to close at 11:30am on Saturday. My mom and CHAD hike together for the morning while I hiked ahead and did laundry, breakfast and lunch for us. Then I waited for her to catch up. I even carried her pack for a mile. I sprinted ahead to get to Hawk Mtn. Shelter but on the way back realized I was too exhausted to make it. We ended up improvising a sleeping bag and pad from leaves, plastic bags and an emergency blanked. Froze my butt off. Next morning I rushed to Suches only to find our 6 day supply of food had not arrived yet.
Amazon.
Hi Everybody,
I started the trail three weeks ago so I haven't exactly kept up with my letter writing. I am now on my third state, Tennesee. I have completed Georgia and North Carolina.
Most of you know that I have done several other adventures. What's different about this one is the social nature of it. There are hundreds of other people trying to do exactly what I am trying to do. We all do it slightly differently but we have the trail in common and a love of being outdoors.
It is the people that I am meeting which really accentuates the experience. Most of the people doing the trail or I should say the most common is the early twenty college graduate male. My mother and I are an oddity and are becoming well known. I thought we might be the first mother and son team on the trail. Aparently there is another team further ahead. The mother is on her third Appalachian Trail hike. Her son is on his first. Apparently he is miserable because she is kicking his ass. She is running him ragged and to exhaustion.
One family of father, son, and mother sold their house and began the trail. The father and son pushed the mother really hard forcing her to do 17 mile days. She suffered stress fractures in her legs and was forced to get off. 30 miles later the father missed his wife too much and got off the trail. 60 miles later his son quit too. I never met them. I don't really want to.
I have one of the lightest packs on the trail. With 5 days of food and water my pack weighs in the low 20s. Another hiker started the trail with a very light pack. His trail name is Trailvis (trail + Elvis). He is a marketing professor. He has a personal < and publishes 14 peoples journals at www.trailplace.com. The problem with his pack was that he was so excited to start the trail he forgot to bring food.
Most people start the trail between March 15 and April 30th. Many people who start in May feel this < to rush and reach Maine before winter. We call them the mad May milers. They average 20 mile days and are constantly in a state of exhaustion. They also don't socialize very muych or stop to take in the views.
One couple, Little Red Ridding Hood and Lone Wolf, are hiking the trail for cancer research. Generally, this is frowned upon because people don't want the trail to become a race or a contest. But the cause is good so I didn't say anything. The worst part is that he chews tobacco and she smokes. They also fight like cats & dogs. She can barely hike and have been skipping mountains. They even took 2 weeks off because of her high blood pressure.
However, most people are fantastic. Getting out of the cities I think brings out the best in people.
I heard about this older couple from California who look like they just stepped out of a trailer park. They came down out of Blood mountain into the hostel with their gear dragging behind them. They have a 3 ft diameter bed roll that they use instead of sleeping bags. For dinner they had a 5 lbs Hersey Chocolate bar. He is a bean pole, she is about two hundred pounds. They were quite a sight to see. I wondered why they would want to do something so difficult. When I met Sierra (her trail name) she was collapsed on a down hill on her abck with her pack on. She was also out of water and her husband had gone to find some. She had a great smile and seemed so happy. I could barely control myself because I had learned why she was doing the trail. She was dying. It had always been her dream to hike the AT and I could seee the determination in her husband's eyes to make sure that she got her dreams. I stayed for a while and hiked over the next ridge with tears in my eyes.
Some how the pain in my knees and my problems just slipped away.
I just wanted to keep hiking.
Amazon.