AWOL on the Appalachian Trail

by David Miller

Many of the most gratifying experiences in life are those that are the most demanding.

“If you need to have a midlife crisis, couldn’t you just buy a Corvette?”

I could go back, and it would be as if I just took a few days off.

Everyone does his own walk, guided by conscience or by expediency.

Gumption is the most important thing for a thru-hiker to maintain.

Experience is enriched by reliving it, contemplating it, and trying to describe it to another person.

Frustrated, I stuff it all in the pack, losing all pretense of keeping anything dry.

I’ve yet to have a day when I wished I was back at my job.

the Virginia blues

Virginia Blues

Harpers Ferry, and the halfway point

In Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, lead character Larry returns from the First World War and declares that he would like to “loaf.”

Harpers Ferry is a major milestone. Thru-hikers consider it the halfway point, even though it is eighty miles short of the trail’s midpoint.

I think how impressive it is that so many retirees, grandparents, and kids take on the AT.

Doing this hike is too much hard work, too much pain, too much time away from my family, too many bugs, too much hot weather, too much cold weather, and too much rain.

We have an atavistic sense of well-being when immersed in the natural world.

“If we were paid to do this, we would have quit by now,”

I think of what I am doing on the trail. What have I accomplished? My time on the trail has been fantastic, but there has been no epiphany.

My hike has made me a believer in trekking poles.