Day 1 - Benton MacKaye Trail

We made the four hour drive down to Springer Mountain in the Chatahoochee Forest... A place I was surprised to be again! After making the 1-mile trek up from the parking lot with my dad, we took some photos and said our goodbyes about 0.2 miles back down the trail at the official start of the BMT. A few hundred feet in we saw a plaque dedicated to Benton MacKaye and began our day in the hot GA mountains.  After doing copious amounts of downhill, we took a break at Three Forks, where the AT and BMT meet for a mile. We also took a 0.2 mile round trip to see Long Branch Falls, which is where NoKey camped on his first  night on the AT.

Our climb after this was a little steeper and we decided to camp in the unnamed gap at the Bottom of the hill. As soon as we stopped, thunder got loud and we set up the tent and quickly jumped inside for an hour and a half due to a thunderstorm. Looks like our timing was good!  We never found the spring here so I backtracked the quarter mile up the hill to one we saw on our way down for water.  Nerves didn't let me get much sleep the first night!

Long Branch Falls

A blaze leading the way to "The Bald". 

One Summer, Two Hikers, Three Trails, and Not a Single Lipton Side in Sight!

An entire summer worth of food stretched out all over our spare bedroom!  Everything we will be consuming on our three hikes is here. 

I've finished!  A week ahead of schedule I have all of our food dehydrated, packaged, and ready to mail out to a friendly post office near the trail somewhere in the eastern portion of the US.  Thanks to a friendly hiker on Instagram I have also learned that Priority Mail Regional boxes will save me a FORTUNE!  Seriously, go to the USPS website and order your own regional boxes.  They're bigger and, for the BMT if we mail them from my parents house, we're going to save SEVEN BUCKS a box!

So, here's the breakdown of what I've made meal-wise for the summer:
Breakfasts: Sweet potato pudding, rice pudding, pizza grits, breakfast couscous, assorted Poptarts.  I also made a special breakfast drink out of Carnation Instant Breakfast, powdered coconut milk, and instant coffee.
Lunches: Refried bean burritos with salsa, dal with tortillas, sandwich thins with peanut butter/cashew butter or tuna, Poptarts
Dinners: Dal with rice, Hawaiian-style ham and pineapple rice, "soul food" with brown rice and blackeyed peas, mushroom stroganoff with egg noodles, mac & cheese, sloppy joes, Thai-style ramen. 
Snacks: Picky Bars, candy bars, trail mixes, dehydrated apple chips

We'll have enough dinners to get through the trail and we'll need to supplement still with the tuna packets and the peanut butters.  I don't have either of those meals planned for the BMT though, so the shopping for the tuna can wait until we're back in NY for the Finger Lakes Trail. I'm hoping that our portion sizes for the meals we've chosen work out alright.  The hardest part of planning all this cooking has definitely been the fact that the meal sizes all seemed to vary SO MUCH!  One recipe I made, the dal, called for serving 3 people.  I ended up getting 14 servings out of it with the measurements provided in the recipe!  I ended up with more dinners and less lunches due to these sorts of discrepancies, but hikers are great at adapting and if we end up having to cook lunches - so be it!

I had a few people ask me how expensive it was to do all these meals so here's the price breakdown:  I had budgeted approximately $400 for food and shipping and I'm happy to say that after we ship everything I will be under $400 for the entire summer.  That's for TWO people plus shipping!  For an average AT resupply, I was typically spending $25 to $30 per stop on just myself.  So, if we say that NoKey and I were spending $30 per person on our summer hikes, we'd be spending approximately $480 on food.  This, of course, assumes we'd be able to even get to a decent store on these trails!  The BMT goes through smaller towns than the AT - smaller towns which also see less hiking traffic than the AT and aren't quite resupply friendly.  Most of our options are tiny stores or convenience stores.  Those types of stores don't often carry much and are often insanely expensive.  Since I've done our food, I know we'll have the nutrition we're looking for, as well as the variety to keep us from getting sick of everything we're eating.  I know the Long Trail will have better resupply options on the southern portion so when the lunch/breakfast situations starts to look slim, we can supplement for a regular town resupply for breakfast items.  

I hope you've enjoyed seeing all the food prep I did over the past few weeks.  I'm very excited to get out and get hiking and can't wait to share the journey with you guys.  Happy Trails!

Gear Review - Saucony Women’s Xodus 4.0

While shopping at EMS a few weeks back these sexy shoes caught my eye. I was really in the market for a Brooks shoe, more specifically the Brooks Cascadia, for my next set of thru hikes starting next summer.  When I saw these shoes on clearance in my size I tried them on and liked what I saw, so I snapped them up at a bargain price, only $58 after tax!  I figured for that price I could justify just using them for running if they didn’t work out.  After doing two 4-mile runs and a 10-mile hike in them yesterday, here’s how I feel they performed. 

The Cons:
-This shoe will NOT stop slipping on my heels when hiking uphill.  I’ve tried a few combinations of lacing and haven’t found a totally slip-free fit. I’m assuming I have narrow heels as most of my casual shoes tend to do this anyway.  I tend to buy children’s shoes if I can for a better fit, so this may not apply to everyone. 
-You can see the crazy grip on the soles of these suckers.  They work on every surface except smooth rock. One step on smooth rock and the soles might as well be made from wet glass because you cannot grip at all and will slide.  This is a major down side since The Long Trail has a lot of rocks!
-The shoe is TIGHT for the average fit.  I think if one were to put a substantially padded insole in here they’d probably lose a few toenails. I have a pretty narrow foot and this shoe fits my foot like a glove, which is hard to get used to. (This is actually a selling feature for the shoe, a “midlock” foot band).

The Pros: This list is ultimately longer than the cons!
-NO BREAK-IN PERIOD!  Saucony shoes are known for having no break-in period required and I definitely found this to be true. These shoes fit like a glove, as I mentioned above.  They didn’t even need a hiking insole added like pretty much all other trail shoes do.  The factory insole is crazy comfy.  
-The insole has a 4 mm offset, which gives your foot a more natural gait.  While the manufacturer states that this in itself can cause some sore muscles, I found that after my first short walk in these I didn’t have the pains in my calves again. 
-The sole on this shoe is amazing!  First and foremost, a Vibram sole is important to me when I hike. I know the thing will hold up to whatever I can throw at it.  Secondly, the grip on these shoes is like monkey feet digging into the turf.  From grass to mud to gravel, this shoe grips hard and therefore makes you work less hard to push your way up a tough hill. 
-Built in “sock liner.” Whatever it is they are using to keep this shoe breathable, yet soft, is top notch. I ran on crushed gravel for a total of 8 miles and never once had a single teeny pebble in my shoe.  There is also a plastic loop on the forefoot to hook on your gaiters if you wear them. 

Overall, this is a seriously kick-ass shoe.  It’s comfortable, breathable, and high performing.  My foot feels stable due to the tightness of the mid foot banding I mentioned in the “cons” section of this review.  Overall, I think I’ll get another pair and wear them for the Benton MacKaye Trail and the Finger Lakes Trail next summer.  For the Northville-Placid Trail and the Long Trail, however, I may look into something else just for more stability on rock.  It’d be a long day hiking over Mt. Mansfield in Vermont if the rock is slick as I really don’t find these shoes perform well on wet rocks, even small ones.  

This post is not sponsored or endorsed by Saucony in any way.  I’m just a huge fan of this shoe and wanted to share my views. 

Big Announcement #1: Summer 2015

Well, it’s official… after taking two years off from doing a thru hike we are apparently happier on the trail than sitting at a desk job!  We have decided that next summer we will be hiking four (YES, FOUR!) trails!  The first trail on our stop around the east coast will be the Benton MacKaye Trail!

The BMT is named for Benton MacKaye, one of the original visionaries for the Appalachian Trail.  This trail runs from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Big Creek in North Carolina, just off the Waterville Road exit in the Smokies.  It runs nearly 300 miles through some of the most remote backcountry in the three states it passes through, Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina.  The trail was organized in 1979 by hikers who were tired of the crowds on the Appalachian Trail and wanted a more remote backcountry experience.  Sometimes, this trail even passes over the original route of the Appalachian Trail before it was rerouted to go over Fontana Dam in the 1940s.  

We’ve chosen this trail for a few reasons: 
- It’s in familiar territory.  I have hiked the “900” miles in the Smokies and, thanks to my AT thru hike in 2012, am familiar with the southern Appalachian Mountains.  When doing trail magic/trail angel drives in the fall of 2012, I became more familiar with the region and towns the BMT travels through. 
- I learned to hike in these mountains and it feels like going home.
- We, too, enjoy more of a wilderness experience.  This summer while doing shorter backpacking trips in Central New York, we’ve pretty much been entirely alone on trails, and it turns out it’s not half bad!
- Historically this trail WAS the original AT, and that’s pretty cool!

I hope you’ll follow me on this new adventure planned next year.  No set date is planned yet for the departure, but I plan to do some blogging about all that later this fall…

Stay tuned for the next three parts of my big announcement! 

Big Announcement #1: Summer 2015 plans

Well, it’s official… after taking two years off from doing a thru hike we are apparently happier on the trail than sitting at a desk job!  We have decided that next summer we will be hiking four (YES, FOUR!) trails!  The first trail on our stop around the east coast will be the Benton MacKaye Trail!

The BMT is named for Benton MacKaye, one of the original visionaries for the Appalachian Trail.  This trail runs from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Big Creek in North Carolina, just off the Waterville Road exit in the Smokies.  It runs nearly 300 miles through some of the most remote backcountry in the three states it passes through, Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina.  The trail was organized in 1979 by hikers who were tired of the crowds on the Appalachian Trail and wanted a more remote backcountry experience.  Sometimes, this trail even passes over the original route of the Appalachian Trail before it was rerouted to go over Fontana Dam in the 1940s.  

We’ve chosen this trail for a few reasons:
- It’s in familiar territory.  I have hiked the “900” miles in the Smokies and, thanks to my AT thru hike in 2012, am familiar with the southern Appalachian Mountains.  When doing trail magic/trail angel drives in the fall of 2012, I became more familiar with the region and towns the BMT travels through.
- I learned to hike in these mountains and it feels like going home.
- We, too, enjoy more of a wilderness experience.  This summer while doing shorter backpacking trips in Central New York, we’ve pretty much been entirely alone on trails, and it turns out it’s not half bad!
- Historically this trail WAS the original AT, and that’s pretty cool!

I hope you’ll follow me on this new adventure planned next year.  No set date is planned yet for the departure, but I plan to do some blogging about all that later this fall…

Stay tuned for the next three parts of my big announcement! 

I got myself a fancy new Facebook page ;)

I thought it was time I made a Facebook page where I could share my journey.  I’ve had a lot of friend requests from people I don’t know on Facebook lately and this seemed like an easier option.  Enjoy!