100 Wild Miles

People who have spent time west of Denver seldom appreciate the East Coast’s nature. Devotees of Mozart don’t dig Meatloaf, but a level of camp and questionable merit is critical to a cult following. Before I set out on my latest backpacking trip, a walk through Maine’s 100 Mile Wilderness and Katahdin, a friend from Alaska asked me whether Maine had mountains. Katahdin may be a quarter as high as Denali, but it casts a 2000-mile shadow.

Toward the end of my trip, I recounted this tidbit to my new friends the Hikers’ Union, and they laughed. The Hikers’ Union—Fish, Melly, Mona Lisa, Lone Wolf, Dance Party, Critter, and Garfield—stood on the cusp of concluding their 2,183-odd mile walk from Georgia. They had all been through their share of “cruxes,” moments when they consider quitting, walking away from the Appalachian Trail and the dirtbag hiker life, but they made it. There were, they knew well, mountains in Maine.

Debating whether to reunite on another trail, perhaps the Continental Divide, they agreed the better views wouldn’t compensate for the AT’s shared buy-in. The price of this community, the AT’s cult following, is that sometimes it’s a little silly. The outfits people wear to throw rice at Rocky Horror Picture Show are not high fashion, and AT hikers walk through backyards. Even in lush areas like the Berkshires, nobody’s safe. Smack in the middle of the view from Mt. Greylock is the Walmart where I bought bags of discount cereal throughout college. The emperor’s clothes are grand at times, but in between costumes, he sure is naked.

I had chosen the 100 Mile Wilderness because it is the least silly, most remote stretch of the AT. The Wilderness is so named because between the town of Monson, ME—population 686 as of 2010, home to the slate mined for JFK’s headstone—and the campground store at the single-lane Abol Bridge, there are no towns, gas stations, paved roads, or other chances for a resupply.

A George Harrison stand-in atop White Cap Mountain told me it was the most spiritual part of the trail. Hikers describe the area as what they thought the AT would be when they started, five months prior.

At either end, a warning sign stands a few hundred feet into the woods, asking hikers to register, carry ten days of food, and abstain from underestimating the terrain. The almighty dollar has influence even here, and the good people at Shaw’s Hiker Hostel will pick hikers up, drop them off, and even meet them on one of the dirt roads for a food drop part of the way through.

Hippie Chick and Poet, whose trail names are too long-established to be derivative, have owned Shaw’s since 2015. In that time, they’ve expanded the 35 year old hostel into another building, opened one of the better gear shops on the trail, and established a well-reputed breakfast.

The place smells like hiker except in the half hour before breakfast, when it smells like bacon. The workforce tends toward the transient. A tall skinny guy had put diesel in their newest van his first week on the job. A couple had been working there for a couple months while debating whether hostel ownership was the life they wanted, an unusually deliberate act.

Some guests, like the squat, mustachioed New Jersey hockey player Highlander, grow into part time staff. Highlander played just one year of juniors before heading to college, but he played annually in a draft showcase tournament “just in case.” Chatting with Highlander is easier than slicing butter with a flaming katana. Shaw’s is the first place most southbound hikers, sobos, take a break. 115 miles in, they begin to build their trail legs, but they know a lot lies ahead of them.

Sipping a coffee before breakfast, I eavesdropped as two sobos debated whether to leave. They had only planned to take one “zero,” a recovery day with no hiking. Somebody in town, however, had told them to stick around because “tomorrow is Monson Day.” This kicked off a debate about whether there even was such a thing as Monson Day, or whether the locals promised it as a free lobster tomorrow ploy to keep hikers from leaving the Hotel California.

The last day of my trip, Mike from the hostel picked me up at the base of Katahdin. Mike had worked as a civilian employee of the US Air Force for some 40-odd years. He hiked the AT in 2019, and he has returned both summers since to help drive hikers around, he said, out of fear that he would burn out his television in Atlanta.

As I prepared to return to civilization the following morning, I met Kitchen Sink. Kitchen Sink was Patton Oswald but born and raised in Maine. In 2020, he hiked the 240-odd miles of AT in Maine over a couple months. This year, he implied, he would make it to Georgia. We met on a Saturday morning. He had checked into Shaw’s on Tuesday. As I stood in the gear shop, paying for the night’s bed and non-included breakfast, I asked him if he would leave today. He said he was thinking about it, but I sensed that, at best, he was thinking about thinking about it.

Hiking the Whites in 2018, some of my acquaintances would bandy about the phrase “hike your own hike” as a disclaimer, a “with all due respect”-type precursor to a gripe session. This group did JV miles and skipped any debauchery, so I could sense a bit of jealousy in their tone as a  parade of olympians, free spirits, and drunks floated past them.

If used in a non-self-excusatory way, “hike your own hike” can make for a nice ethos, a subsidiary of the golden rule. I therefore didn’t press the issue when I calculated that, if Kitchen Sink were to take five zeroes per 115 miles, he was looking at some 95 days of non-hiking before Georgia, roughly enough to take him into the beginning of November. Similarly, when I met Nate at the east end of Nahmakanta Lake, 40 miles from the top of Katahdin and 10 days into his trip, I left the tea leaves unread.

Wednesday, just over halfway into my hike, I sat around at the Jo Mary Road, waiting for Mike to show up with food for me and a couple others. A gray haired hiker stumbled up and lit a cigarette. He’d made it from Georgia to Virginia by early June, when he got Lyme disease. He tried to return to the trail too early, and left again, sick. He figured he’d pop up to Katahdin and try to finish the rest headed south. He lit a second cigarette and explained that he’d had enough. We all left him alone, and when somebody from the AT Lodge—a hostel owned by Hippie Chick’s mother, serving Baxter State Park out of Millinocket, ME—drove up, the Marlboro Man pled “Can you get me out of here?”

Everybody’s number is different, but I heard just 20% finish the AT same season they start. Heavier traffic in the south leads trail crews to reroute the trail periodically, so even two stickler hikers might not hike the same trail. In Shenandoah, the park is set up to offer motorists better views than hikers, so road walking is common. Hike your own hike is necessary because people who walk for five months tend not to be huge into rules.

The freedom to hike one’s own hike comes with the responsibility of defining it. Do I want to do giant miles and never enjoy a dip in Pemadumcook Lake? Do I want to respect my body’s limits and do this in a healthy way, potentially never finishing?

I knew already that Kitchen Sink’s hike was not mine. Nate initially carried a stove that, when fed the right number of acorns and twigs, turned heat into electricity and charged his phone. This very cool device presupposes an unusual wilderness where adventurers have cell service but are I don’t know, this thing has like no use case. Nate’s hike is not my hike.

At the Cooper Brook Falls Shelter, I met Songbird, his father, and his buddy from Oregon. Songbird, at roughly my age, addressed his father as “Papa.” The two each wore “Utilikilts,” exercise skirts for men that would be appropriative were people concerned about Scottish heritage. They swore the Utilikilt offered extra mobility, but hiking 20 miles a day was mobility enough for me. Songbird generously offered me all types of food and support, yet he seemed like he’d be a bit too keen to urinate on my hard-to-reach blisters or cut off a spare digit at the slightest whiff of danger. Papa was an outdoorsman of the 1970s boy scout school, all knots and pocket knives and suspect lore.

Papa referred to a conference call with the friend picking them up at the end of their hike as a “powwow.” He offered me several bars of homemade pemmican. He described it as “an old Indian food” derived from ground smoked beef, clarified suet, dried berries, and this or that. To be fair, the food’s history seems to be cosmopolitan enough that Papa isn’t the first white guy to botch the recipe. Its name comes from Cree, there’s a Lakota word for it, and it was popular among French Canadian traders. The texture was new, and the suet left my mouth a well-seasoned cast iron pan, but it was savory, which I craved. In another life, this could have been my hike, but not in this lifetime.

Wednesday evening, I stopped for dinner at the Hurd Brook Shelter. I had planned to spend the night there, and they had space. Hiking through sheets of rain, however, gave me fire enough to hike the incremental 3.5 miles to Abol Bridge. I hoped to celebrate my first 25 mile day with a roof and four walls. As I unpacked my stove, a haggard Michigander too old to be named Swag Man warned me about an expected guest.

PsyOps took her name not from a wealth of experience with psychedelics—this was an impolite supposition on my part—but rather because of her job in the military. She hated hiking. The purpose of her trip was not to find herself, not to do something active, but to spite an ex. I didn’t want her hike, so I hiked to the bridge and caught a ride to an inn that time forgot.

Friday, atop Katahdin, I met Spring Break, Smokeout, and a third guy. Spring Break had finished in four months over four years, about 120 days. The other two did it in 114 days. Spring Break would be doing an Iron Man in August. They made the same jokes as the Williams students who camped out in the library to be first in line to choose a study carrel. Their hike was impressive, sure, but who cares?

Baxter State Park exists primarily as a wildlife preserve and secondarily as a place for recreation. Its relationship with AT hikers is fraught. Rangers reserve just twelve spots for long distance hikers hoping to spend a night without a reservation. Hiking some 120 miles all in, I qualified for one of these spots, but it didn’t feel right to take one.

Luckily, I bumped into Singin’ Dave Monday afternoon. A tall, lean man just shy of 40, he was trained as a chemist but had a dentist’s penchant for monologue. We bonded over an aversion to buying new things, and he was just easy to get along with. This was his final section, and the last piece of a years-long effort to complete the AT in pieces. He doesn’t have a driver’s license. That he found public transportation to and from each end of each section indicated major logistical prowess. Four friends were to meet him at a reserved six-person campsite in Baxter, and he graciously offered me the last spot. He and his friends welcomed me with the friendliness and intimacy that comes with membership in this AT cult. A truly standup guy, I could do a lot worse than hiking his hike, but there was no spark.

On my way to Singin’ Dave’s campsite, I reunited with the Hikers’ Union as they sat watching members of a rafting group flop down a natural waterslide. I’d met them back at Shaw’s, and then again 15 miles in, my first night. They pushed me to follow through on my plan to make a grueling 20-plus mile day over the Chairbacks, the toughest bit of the 100, on day two. When I made it to the shelter that second night, they were comfortable ribbing me as I struggled to pitch my tent in the rain.

They dusted me the next day, hiking 27 miles to make it to the Antlers, an admittedly majestic campsite. They would end the week with a couple shorter days, so I resolved to catch them.

A bunch of good-for-nothing lost souls in their mid 20s, the Union and I clicked. I’d spent time in New Jersey, Chicago, and Western Mass, covering the places most of them grew up. My worldview seemed just about as similar as it could be to that of a group of people hiking for 140 days. Lone Wolf, for one, has become my favorite van-dweller, eclipsing some of the many I’ve met in the last few years.

Thursday night, July 22nd, I slunk over from the posh Katahdin Stream Campground and Dave’s hospitality to the Birches, the bad neighborhood where they hide the thru hikers. We made a little fire, and I turned into a plot device, peppering them with questions about their life-changing experience on this, its final night.

140 days is good time. Their group were the 137th through 143rd nobos to get Katahdin permits, a nice symmetry. Along the way, they completed the Four State Challenge, hiking 47 miles to hit Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania in one day. Mona Lisa managed the 30/30/30, hiking 30 miles in 30 hours, drinking 30 beers. In Virginia, they bought three days of food at Dunkin Donuts. Mona hiked two days with a gallon jug of whole milk and three boxes of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Fish had been stung by hornets many, many times. Other stunts lack concise explanation.

Their patience wore thin toward the end, and Dance Party barked “I am” when I joked “It’s only 115 more miles, but who’s counting?” back at Shaw’s. Every night, before bed, Fish would ask his friends “Hey, what do you guys wanna do tomorrow? Maybe go for a hike or something?”

They granted me a trail name, Kawincydinque (no canonical spelling, Kwink for short), the phonetic misinterpretation of “coincidence” for the ease with which I fell in with them at the eleventh hour. I swore to never cross a picket line, and I’d do my best to hike the Union’s hike, devoted to the cult of East Coast mountains.