| Preparations |
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| September 14, 2003 - Gear I’ve got to make some changes. I currently walk out of a resupply town with 45 pounds on my back and amble into the next with around 30 pounds. Somehow I’ve got to shed 10 pounds while adding some gear for winter. How the heck am I going to do that? Brian Robinson’s pack was about 19 pounds in winter (without food and water and fuel). This includes his snow shoes. Somehow I’ve got to get down (?) to his level. Here’s an example of how hard it’s going to be. I currently use a Sierra Design Flex 15-degree bag. It weighs 55 ounces. If I spend $320+ dollars I can get a Feathered Friends bag that is not quite as warm, but weighs 38 ounces. So is $320 dollars worth the 17 ounces saved? Boy, I sure don’t know at this point, especially given the tight finances. I’ll keep you posted. September 27, 2003 - Progress!! The CDT maps and guides arrived from the CDT Society about 10 days ago. They were quite intimidating. They filled a box 4x12x15, not including 5 maps that later arrived by separate shipment. I eagerly opened several of the maps, anticipating being able to quickly spot the CDT and follow its course through the mountains. No such luck. It took about an hour of scanning the map, reading the guide, consulting Rand-McNally to finally start to locate the trail. These maps were meant to cover hunting, fishing, RV’ing, and anything else that might occur in the wilds of America. Huge maps with tons of info on them, except in many cases no topographic contours. (I’m not sure what good those will be.) And to top it off, the map-packs didn’t cover the entire trail. There were huge gaps. This was quite discouraging. I would have to spend additional money to find my way. |
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| Preparations |
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| Well, I spent several nights reading the guidebooks and tracking the CDT on the maps provided. Slowly it started to make sense. I was able to develop an itinerary for the CDT from the info in the guidebooks. From this I picked out my resupply towns and the number of days between stops. Now I’ve got all three trails listed on a spreadsheet with the mileages and mail drops all laid out. (I’ll send it to anyone who wants it.) I needed this info so Nancy could begin her planning. Once the spreadsheet was done I began to feel confident again that this trip was going to come together. Nonetheless, I need additional maps. After emailing Jim Wolf of the CDT Society, I decided to purchase the MapTech CDs for the Continental Divide. I’ll be able to lay out the trail and print maps for those areas I’m lacking. The G4 pack arrived from GVP Gear. It looks like it will do the job. It’s light as a feather. I ordered their standard pack. I made some progress on the food front also. I’m going to use a 1/3-1/3-1/3 mix of freeze-dried dinners, corn pasta with sauce, and grocery store dinners. We’re fortunate to have an EMS store locally in Lake Placid. I asked the manager, Yvonne, if she could arrange a discount price for the freeze-dried portion. She checked it out and EMS was willing to offer me a very generous discount. Many thanks to Yvonne for helping me. I also started dehydrating sauce for my corn pasta in my oven. What a chore! At the current rate, I’ll be doing the last batch the day I leave for Georgia. I also managed to get a number of items done around the house that were needed before I leave. Half the battle in getting ready seems to be doing all the things needed to put your real life on hold while you hike. October 19, 2003 - Maps and Gear and The Gathering This morning I finished plotting the CDT in New Mexico using the MapTech CDs after about 2 and a half weeks of effort. I used the CDT Society guide books to locate the trail as best I could. Many times it was like trying to complete a crossword puzzle, using all the clues and doing some “what if-ing” to construct a logical track. Now that I’ve completed this exercise, I really appreciate the efforts of the AT Conference and PCT Association in preparing maps and guides much more. I can imagine what Earl Shaffer must have gone through. So anyway, even though I need to do some more of this, I feel like I’ve achieved a major milestone in my preps for this hike. After a little research I settled on and purchased a Garmin Geko 201 GPS. It’s very light (3 oz.) and has all the functions I’ll need to guide me on the CDT. This is my first experience with a GPS but it seems very intuitive. I used it on my walk this morning, and it was easy and fun. Most modern electronics (cell phones, VCR) are so complicated that they would qualify as mental torture tools. I bought Northern Lite Rescue snowshoes. They are fantastic. They weigh half as much as my Tubbs. I can’t wait to try them in the snow. Last weekend I went to the Appalachian Long Distance Hikers Association’s annual Gathering in Hanover, New Hampshire. It was perfect timing. I was starting to suffer hiking prep burnout and really needed a recharge. Nancy went also. We spent about 6 hours over the weekend going over the hike itinerary and resupply plans. We found some mistakes and fine tuned a lot of plans. One especially important thing we found was that my California PCT guidebook had been misprinted and therefore was missing portions of two trail sections. It’s easy to get a new one now. Not so easy when you’re out there and it’s time to use it. There were many pertinent presentations over the weekend, sometimes too many, and we would split up to cover all the things we were interested in. Especially good were the presentations on nutrition, resupply, the CDT and PCT. Fiddlehead and Pieps showed their new movie about their hike and then answered questions. I walked out of there so psyched to go, like a kid trying to wait for Christmas morning, eager to get back and finish getting ready. It was really nice to meet the folks behind the International Appalachian Trail at the Gathering also: Dick Anderson, Viateur de Champlain, Monique Dykstra. They’ve done so much work in the past 5 years to get it going and promote its use. The results are there waiting to be explored in Quebec, New Brunswick and Maine. Go see it. November 15, 2003 – Things are really coming together My map making for the CDT is complete. I have maps suitable for hiking from Canada to Mexico. They’re all labeled, numbered, packaged into groups, and sealed in Ziplocks waiting for Nancy’s resupply boxes. I have included Rand McNally road maps for each state in case I need the big picture for a bailout and MapQuest.com street maps for each resupply town big enough to warrant the weight of a 3 x 5 piece of paper. I’ve also completed dehydrating sauce into leather. There are about 80 dark brown crusts waiting in the freezer for the resupply boxes. That was a lot of boring work, sort of like watching paint dry. I thought about clothing a lot in the past three weeks. The inspiration was the weather outside. It’s been windy, cold, and rainy, often on the border of snowfall. I remember crossing Wayah Bald in a cold windy rain in November two years ago. By the end of the day I was really chilled and out of energy, probably a good case for hypothermia. A car slowed at a road crossing and instantly my thumb was out. I hitched to Franklin instead of staying in the upcoming shelter. There will surely be a lot more of that weather on this trip, and I can’t afford to bail out very often. So my clothes have to work. The competing factors, as always, were weight versus warmth. What can I do to get the maximum performance without adding undue burden? Eventually I ditched my acrylic shirt (that I love) and my poly tee shirt and added a new coat to my mix of winter gear. It’s an EMS Apollo Jacket. It feels great and it’s supposedly wind-, rain-, and snow-proof. It’s close fitting so there are no drafts, and lined with fleece for warmth. Thursday and Friday we had our first snowfall, a foot of it, blanketing the trees until it looks like Currier and Ives around here. So today was the day for my first Shakedown Hike. It was the first time everything was together so I expected some tuning would be needed. The pack weighed in at about 25 pounds including alcohol, water, and some food I put in to simulate the real thing. That included the snow shoes, and the ice axe added again for weight. I hiked for three hours, breaking trail for others to follow on skis. I’m really happy. The snow shoes are quick. The GPS was consistently telling me I was moving over 2.5 mph with them on. The pack fit well and felt very light. This is a very good thing. The new coat vented well and didn’t absorb any water from the constant fall of snow off newly disturbed branches. Only one small issue to resolve: I need to redo the sternum strap I installed on the pack. It immediately fell off and was unusable. All of this gives me a lot of confidence. There’s going to be a lot of hardship on this trip. Having the preps near complete and things working out as well as they have starts to paint a picture of success. If I can plan this hike well, I can do it. I know it. One loose end that still needs more thought is transportation from trail to trail. Without any research I originally thought that I would just rent a car and drive from one trailhead to the next. I wouldn’t have to worry about schedules, searches and prohibited items. Well, then I started thinking about it with the computer to aid me. MapQuest says it’s about 2200 miles from Hanover, NH, to Chama, NM. That’s 4-5 days of hard driving and several nights in a motel. That’s not cheap, fast, relaxing, or anything. Well, how about a nice train ride with a sleeper cabin. That’s two days and nights and $460. Well, that’s better on the body, but pricey. If I sleep in the seat, it’s still two days, but only $160. That’s cheaper, but a mild kind of torture. And a plane ride is six hours and $370. I’ll probably fly this leg of the journey. I’ve not checked the rest but I think I can drive some of them. And finally, Nancy has been patiently nudging me to let the world know I’m doing this hike. I tend to avoid drawing a lot of attention to myself so I’ve been putting it off. It’s been kind of comforting to know that I could call this whole thing off without the embarrassment of having to tell lots of people I chickened out. I guess that’s behind me now. I emailed most of my friends a week ago about what I was up to. Their responses ranged from alternate recommendations to join a Washington S & M parlor to enthusiastic envy. Maybe I should change my trail name from Barkeater to Crazy Too (Earl Shaffer was Crazy One). Anyhow, the cat’s out of the bag, and now I’ve another reason for commitment to this hike. But I didn’t need another reason. I’m ready to go. December 30, 2003 -- On a Bus to Georgia The rain stopped as the morning brightened. By 8 am a strip of yellow low on the southwestern horizon heralded a better day. The bus dipped and swayed in excess along I-85 making reading and writing into a stomachache. Nonetheless, the promise of sun and blue sky was cheering to this weary traveler. Leaving Judith yesterday morning was the hardest thing I've done in a very long time. The entire day was filled with second thoughts and regrets. It was good that my plans were so ironclad. It made backing out not an option. The bus ride is an ordeal. The bus is full of large people. It's warm and we all smell. There's no sleeping. It's too cramped and bumpy. So I just dozed on and off for 29 hours, taking every chance offered to get off and walk or stretch. Later in Gainesville: I called Coosa and she's on her way to pick me up at the station. I'm always in awe at the generosity of the Trail Angels. She's driving all the way over from Blairsville to pick up a hiker she's never met or even heard of. She's planning to spend New Year’s Eve on Springer Mountain. I get to tag along and get a smooth start to my adventure. But I didn’t need another reason. I’m ready to go. |