To Cheryl Strayed wannabes thinking of the PCT: hiking is not a cure-all

I got in touch with my inner 45-year-old woman and absolutely tore through Wild by Cheryl Strayed over the weekend. I found it a very enjoyable read, much better than I was anticipating. As a friend suggested to me before I read it, its main strength, aside from solid writing on a sentence-to-sentence level, is its editing. It's perfectly paced: it never beats the dead horse, so to speak, about any of the main plot arcs—the mom, the hike, the drugs, the dudes. The structure of the book as a whole is so tidy; fifteen years of retrospect and a good editor have really helped distill it (this may also explain why people who publish their own hiking memoirs on a shoestring in close proximity to their hike tend to create such uneven works).

But I have a big problem with the story. It's not that she went out grossly unprepared for hiking—that's pretty common both in hiking literature and in real life. It should be fairly obvious to anyone, experienced hiker or not, that this resulted in abject physical and mental misery on the trail, and it's a nice cautionary tale in that regard for everybody. Every Cheryl wannabe who reads the book and decides to go on a hike is going to think twice about their gear choices, because the descriptions of the blisters, random pains and her overall exhaustion are pretty lurid. At first I was put off by how these sections are written in a slightly lighthearted tone, because in my experience, hiking in pain is your WORLD when you are out there and it really doesn't seem funny at the time. Later I decided that this levity was a result of a) the author having fifteen years of retrospect from which to look back and laugh, b) relatively speaking, the blisters etc. are still not as serious of a problem as the ones from her outside life, and c) it keeps the entire book from being one huge downer. It's easy for any experienced hiker to tut-tut when they read about her preparation, call her an idiot or whatever, but who cares? We were all like that at some point.

My real problem with the book is the central conceit that one, few-month-long hike can be a panacea for anyone. It says it right in the title: From Lost to Found on the PCT. She went on this hike and, after a series of identifiable and discrete transition points, she was totally rehabilitated! How convenient! There is no afterword that says, "This hike was the first of many steps in the 180 that I was able to accomplish regarding the direction of my life." No, the hike was everything: she was fed into the PCT machine a depressive nymphomaniac heroin junkie, and got spat out at the Columbia River happy, sage and responsible. I am not at all denying that a long adventure can significantly change someone, even for the better; I just think it's unlikely that 3 months and 1100 miles on the PCT apparently fixed everything for her.

The last few paragraphs are careful to note that, as she finished, she didn't know any of this at the time, which is good—it would be even more delusional for someone to get to the end of a few months of journeying and say that they knew right then exactly how they'd changed. The most you can say while you are participating in any adventure is that it is novel and, well, adventurous. You can't determine its sub-surface effect on you without a hefty buffer period of retrospection. But the book does make it seem that, even after that period of retrospection, she has determined that the hike was the cure-all in her life. Now I don't know Cheryl Strayed; she might very well be telling the precise truth, instead of artfully presenting the truth to make it fit into the type of narrative that sells millions of books (which is what I've implied so far). But even if this hike really did rehabilitate her perfectly, that's not going to be the case for 90% of the people who go out to replicate her feat. If you're tired of your own flaws and think that a few months on the AT or PCT is going to fix them right away, you've probably got another thing coming. You'll get back and realize after awhile that those flaws might have been temporarily suppressed, but don't really disappear. People just don't change that much that quickly.

This has been Scrub's self-help session. Now go back and eat that brownie you passed up earlier—might as well do it now because you'll never change and you can't resist it, you FATASS! HAHAHA! No, just kidding. I do hold out hope for people who go on adventures for rehabilitative purposes. It's just that, in my worldview, things are never as tidy as this particular ~non-fiction~ book makes them out to be. I'm going out on the PCT in a week and a half not because it's going to make me a better person; heck, I might come back even worse, more maladaptive to the real world than I already am. I'm going because it's fun: I like walking, I like journeys, I like places I've never been, I like new people, I like the West, etc., etc. It's going to be novel and exciting if nothing else. IF it does more for me ... well, I'll figure that out much later. I don't care if a few hundred lost sheep read Wild and decide to stray out onto the PCT this year or in the future; I just hope they go out with grounded expectations about the inherent value of hiking trips.

Some food and money stats from the middle of my AT hike

I have no idea how I was able to keep this up so thoroughly, but for the first 600 miles of the Appalachian Trail in 2011 I took a page out of my girlfriend Kristin's book and noted and categorized every single expenditure of my hike. I aborted this practice abruptly after Bland, VA, which was about six weeks into proceedings--most of the novelty of trail life had worn off by then and I had gotten too lazy to keep writing entries like "pizza & Dew - $17" or "moonshine - $9.27 + one day of blindness" over and over again. The tallies after six-plus weeks were as follows:

Lodging: $226
Prepared food (i.e. town food): $436
Alcohol, separate from that ordered with meals: $163
Resupply: $324
Misc. (laundry, tips, ATM fees, etc.): $81.50

This goes to show just how ridiculous the cravings for food and drink in town can be. Keep in mind that I chose restaurants and food options modestly, and everything is super-cheap in the South--the ledger is full of $5-15 meals and purchases, nothing crazy (except one trip to the brewpub in Gatlinburg, but that's another story). It does include three and a half days of Trail Days in Damascus, Va., which set me back about $100 in meals and $50 in beer. Unlike most of the attendees, I wasn't even day-drinking or doing drugs ... lame, I know. I was, however, relying on restaurants for every single meal, as I did, and as most hikers do, in every town. It turns out this adds up quickly.

The message boards that I read often feature people saying, "I don't plan on eating or drinking much in town on my thru-hike; what should I budget for?" Sweet, sweet baby Jesus are these people wrong--and usually there are a lot of other people around to politely tell them as much. Unless they are on a tight budget and very experienced at handling one, or they are in that minority of people who really are genuinely uncomfortable in any town or city, they'll be stuffing their faces at restaurants whenever they get the chance. Burning 4,000 calories a day will do that to a man.

And speaking of calories, I was also keeping track of total ounces of peanut butter and Nutella consumed, as well as total number of chocolate bars. I briefly tracked my Little Debbie fudge round/oatmeal creme pie consumption as well, but after a few tries I found these packed too heavy and bulky for my liking. I kept these statistics almost a month past the previous ones, up until Luray (pron. LOO-ray), Va., 930 miles and two and a half months in, at which point I stopped for a weeklong break to see Kristin and my family in Virginia Beach. When I started back up again, the stats-keeping impulses had been left somewhere behind. The results:

Peanut butter: 217 oz, or 13 jars.
Nutella: 93.1 oz, or 7 jars.
Chocolate bars: 85.

The peanut butter was almost always Skippy or Skippy Natural because Cooks Illustrated says it's the best brand and they're never wrong. Also I was told at several points that Skippy is the de facto peanut butter of thru-hikers everywhere and no one knows why (it can't be that we're all reading the same issues of Cooks Illustrated ... can it?). Anyway, this was about halfway through the mileage that I ended up completing, although I didn't know that at the time. Properly mortified by these statistics and their implications for my arteries, I tailed off ever so slightly from the junk foods as I went further north, although I never came close to giving up PB and Nutella altogether. Put together in a spoon at a 2:1 ratio, they absolutely give the strongest, best-sustained boost of any trail food I've tried so far. On the PCT this year, I want to say I won't be relying on them as heavily as on the AT, because my breakfasts and dinners will be quite a bit better (see previous posts for details), but it's really hard to know in advance how one's body will start to react after a few weeks of 20-mile days.

A final note: I wrote this whole entry on my phone--no internet access because I'm in the process of moving--so if it goes through and actually ends up on my blog, I will be pretty happy about my chances for updating successfully along the PCT.

Scrub's glossary of important trail terms

Whenever I hear rock climbers say something like, "And then he did a totally heinous dyno onto this manky overhang," I usually want to puke. That's not necessarily because I suck at rock climbing, or that I have known some climbers who have been real asshats (both of which are true)—at its core, my annoyance is based on my failure to understand the jargon of a group of people who are doing something pretty cool. You see climbers doing neat things, and you want to know about them, but you can't, because they've developed their own little argot that's inaccessible to the rest of us. Thru-hikers do the same thing. If you want a comprehensive and mostly PG list of trail slang, check out this article on WhiteBlaze. But below I am supplementing that list with a glossary of the terms that you're especially likely to see me using on this blog in the future. Study up now, so that when you're reading my August 14 blog post and I throw out a banana-blazing reference, you'll know the score.

THE BASICS

zero day — a day in which zero miles are hiked. Often spent in towns, but the on-trail zero can occur from time to time (for instance, Manks and I waited out a storm for a full day in the Fire Wardens Cabin Shelter north of Hanover, NH on the AT in 2011).

nearo day — not quite zero miles, but not a full day's hiking either. Fiddling around in town accounts for most nearos.
   (note: nearo and zero can also be used as intransitive verbs: "Cynthia nearoed into Idyllwild and spent most of the afternoon gorging on ice cream.")

trail magic — any act of generosity, often the provision of food or drink, to hikers by members of the community. Can be planned or unplanned. Examples include someone leaving a cooler of Gatorades/sodas at a road crossing, or grilling hot dogs and handing out fresh fruit by the side of the trail for hikers to enjoy. Very common in the beginning stages of a NOBO PCT or AT hike.

cowboy camping — sleeping out under the stars, no shelter of any kind. Not very common on the AT because there's seemingly always the threat of rain; very common in spring and summer out West. I've read some people say they had to pitch their tarp/tent a total of 5 times over an entire PCT thru-hike.

NOBO/SOBO/flip-flop — northbound, southbound, or different-sections-in-different-directions thru-hikers. People flip for any number of reasons, but running out of time before winter is the biggest one.

hiker trash — a nebulous term. Refers to the fact that hikers generally start to look, and sometimes act, like shit after a few weeks on the trail. Used as a term of pride or scorn, depending on speaker and context.

hiker hunger, or simply the hunger — refers to the incredible rate of metabolism acquired after a few weeks of hiking. Feats like eating $26 of Taco Bell food, having to order multiple entrees at sit-down restaurants, or consuming upwards of 10,000 calories on a zero day become possible. Tends to outlast the trail and result in significant weight gain upon returning to civilization.

SUBCATEGORY 1: TYPES OF BLAZING

The Appalachian Trail is marked for its entire length by white blazes painted on trees. People have since combined other colors with "-blazing" to mean many different things. Such as:

pink-blazing — adjusting one's hiking schedule to be in the company of a lady

banana-blazing — the opposite of pink-blazing. Significantly rarer due to the imbalanced gender ratios among thru-hikers, but still possible.

blue-blazing — taking any side trail that reconnects to the white-blazed trail eventually. On the AT, these are sometimes marked with blue blazes.

retro-blazing — hiking a portion of old trail which has since been re-routed

yellow-blazing — skipping sections of trail via car. Yellow-blazers are severely annoying to me.

aqua-blazing — on an AT thru-hike, canoeing through Shenandoah National Park instead of hiking. People on the whole, myself included, don't get nearly as morally uptight about this as about yellow-blazing, mainly because it sounds awesome and everyone who actually forced themselves to hike through SNP is jealous.

brown-blazing — 1) leaving the trail to find a place to poop. 2) hiking with giardia or other pooping-related issues

MISCELLANEOUS

hitch bitch — the female, hopefully long-legged and long-haired, that you stay nearby whenever a potential hitchhike is coming up. Cars are much more likely to stop for her than for you (assuming you are the average grimy, bearded male). Also called a "ride bride" by people of taste.

Type 2 fun — not fun to do at the time, but fun to talk about later. Contrasted with Type 1 fun (fun at the time, fun to talk about later) and Type 3 fun (not fun at the time, not fun to talk about later).

Vitamin I — a lot easier to say or spell for some people than "ibuprofen"

cameling — drinking a bottle (or two) of water right at the water source, then filling up again before moving on

the Dirty G — Giardia. The enema enemy of hikers everywhere.

Body Glide — anti-chafing lubricant. In my top five of essential pieces of gear. Would not have been able to walk some days on the AT without this stuff.

trail tail — carnal relations between or among hikers

Connecticut cute — refers to the state by which a northbound AT hiker might eventually find a given member of the opposite sex attractive. Connecticut, for reference, is ten states and usually 3.5 - 4 months into the trail. "Georgia cute" would be more of a compliment.

PUDs — Pointless Up & Downs. The AT has hundreds of these, the well-built and more gently-graded Western trails not so much.

gram weenie — someone overly concerned with cutting ounces from their pack weight. They may want to talk about gear a lot more than you do.

base weight — the weight of one's pack excluding consumables (water, food, fuel) and clothes worn. Skin-out weight includes clothes and shoes worn. Ultralighters might go an entire thru-hike with a base weight at 5 or 6 lb. Mine is 11 lb for comparison. Average is probably 15-20.

goofer — a weekend warrior. Someone carrying more weight for a 6-mile day hike than you are for a 2,000-mile thru. Someone decked out in shiny new clothes that an REI salesperson convinced them were necessary. Someone hiking 1.5 mph convinced they're going 3. Someone doing their dishes in the water source. Etc., etc.

SUBCATEGORY 2: FOOD CHALLENGES

Half-gallon Challenge — at the store at Pine Grove Furnace State Park in Pennsylvania, which is on the AT at roughly the half-way point, eat a half-gallon of ice cream purchased from the freezer. I've heard something like 75% of attempts are successful. I was one of them, but it was a long, disgusting slog (1 hour, 11 minutes). Here's a picture of me doing it in 2011.

Pancake Challenge — consume five pancakes at one pound each in under two hours at the cafe in Seiad Valley, CA on the PCT. I think only 6 thru-hikers have ever completed this challenge. Whatever it is, it's a minuscule percentage of the number who have attempted.

Case Challenge — From the VA 606 road crossing, which is 24 miles before Pearisburg, VA on the AT, obtain a case of beer. Over the next 24 hours, hike the 24 miles into Pearisburg consuming all 24 of your beers in the process. This one is particularly sadistic and of the 10 people I knew who tried it in 2011, only one finished.

McDonald's Challenge — 50 McNuggets and a gallon of McD's Sweet Tea in under an hour. Only the McNuggets part is known to have been completed.

Mayo jar + spork = kitchen

That whole thing about the alcohol stove and the joy of trail cooking? Forget it. I changed my mind a few weeks ago and I'm back to being a stoveless hiker, as I was on the Appalachian Trail. Backpacking without a stove is somewhat of a fringe technique—I'd guess that less than 10% of long-distance hikers do it for an extended length of time. But it works for me, and here are the brief pros and cons, as I discovered on the AT. Pros:

1. NO FUSS. This doesn't refer just to the possibility of mechanical failure, which is essentially nil with some alcohol stoves. It refers to the entire act of cooking: finding a flat place to set the stove, making sure it doesn't start a wildfire, tending to the kitchen when the weather sucks, carefully packing the stove and fuel, rationing fuel, resupplying fuel in town. When I hike, I am LAZY and HUNGRY and I want that food in my stomach as SOON as I stop moving. No fiddling around and waiting for 15 minutes while it boils and soaks.
2. You can eat whenever and wherever you damn well feel like it. This is especially nice in the tent in bad weather.
3. Cold foods may, but don't necessarily have to, use less water than cooking. It's a nice option to have when water is scarce, as on, say, most of the PCT.
4. Meals are a vague concept when resupplying (not always a pro; see below). Basically, as you're standing in the grocery store, you don't feel so limited to "dinner food," "lunch food," and "snack food" when you're eating them all interchangeably at different times of the day.
5. Weight savings? Disputable. Some cold food staples have a lot of water or fatty weight built in (think peanut butter, for instance). That said, if someone really had their diet dialed in and was using a lot of dehydrated food that reconstitutes well with cold water, they would absolutely save weight over someone with a stove and fuel. This is what I'm trying to accomplish this year.

Cons:

1. Variety is limited, especially if your resupply takes place only in grocery stores along the way. Some of my favorite no-cook foods, instant hummus and instant refried beans, are not found in most grocery stores and need to be shipped from home, where there is this glorious thing called the Winco bulk aisle. You may get into a rut, as I sometimes did on the AT, where you walk into each grocery store and don't have the imagination to come up with new meal ideas that really satisfy you. But I'm not sure that this problem is limited to stoveless hikers—a lot of people who cook their meals basically eat the same hot salty mush (ramen, Lipton or Knorr instant rice/pasta, instant oatmeal) each day. Being able to receive maildrops from home, modified to your real-time specifications (i.e. not all prepared before the beginning of the hike), increases the potential food variety for just about every hiker.
2. Meals are a vague concept (see above for why this is a good thing too). The whole no-set-meals concept on the AT frequently resulted in me taking more food, and hence more weight, than was necessary, as it was harder to plan for what I needed. People who have really figured out their trail diet have learned how to determine their food needs by weight and calories per mile, not by planning for specific meals. For instance, Scott Williamson lost zero pounds on his record-setting 64-day PCT thru-hike. But I'm not at that stage of understanding my metabolism yet. This summer I'm sure I will learn more.
3. Breakfast. I almost never found no-cook breakfast food that satisfied me on the AT. Pop Tarts and granola bars are shit when you have to eat them day after day, cereal doesn't go well with just water, and powdered milk gives me awful acid reflux. Nowadays I'm working on a homemade muesli concoction that can be soaked overnight, Swiss-style, and eaten on the go in the morning. Again, it will have to be shipped from home to ensure that it's (a) what I like, and (b) is the right amount for each section.
4. Not good in very cold weather. Fortunately, there's not a lot of that on an AT or PCT thru-hike. It may freeze overnight, but during a normally-timed thru-hike there will hardly be any days where you walk all day, and have to prepare food, in freezing weather.

So what do I actually eat on the trail if I don't use a stove? Well ...

Breakfast: 

• That muesli I just mentioned. Ideally, it's soaked in water for a long time beforehand, overnight if possible. Sometimes, if I have to buy granola or cereal from the store and it doesn't go well with water, I'll soak it in peanut butter instead. (You see, when you're a hiker, it's okay to write sentences like that.)

Snacks/lunch: 

• cheese
• summer sausage/pepperoni
• Nutella
• peanut butter
• chocolate bars
• Snyder's flavored pretzel bits (Buffalo wing + honey mustard and onion = ambrosia)
• jerky
• mustard
• sometimes a bread medium like bagel-thins or tortillas. My consumption of bread decreased as the AT went on; I found I rarely desired it and it was too dry to ever want to eat. I envision a similar issue on the PCT.

Dinner (if it's not more of the above): 

• couscous
• instant refried beans
• instant mashed potatoes (Idahoan only)
• powdered hummus
• ramen (without the flavor packet)

These can all be rehydrated nicely without hot water. They also all benefit from an enthusiastic application of olive oil and spices—the spices added at home, the olive oil added on-trail. The couscous and beans that I have been experimenting with, both from the Winco bulk aisle, take about 25 minutes to come fully back to life with cold water. The ramen I'm not sure about yet, but I've heard half an hour. I plan on using either a screw-top tupperware container or perhaps something like an empty plastic mayonnaise jar to let the rehydration take place as I hike, rather than after I've stopped. Again, waiting around sucks.

Going stoveless takes away some of the burden on Kristin, my maildrop coordinator and self-appointed Dehydration Doyenne, which is probably a good thing. We're way behind on learning the dehydrator, and there's only a month left to figure it out, in which time we each have only a hundred other things to take care of. The new food strategy is easier to manage logistically, but still leaves plenty of room for experimentation and variety. After the AT, I thought I might not like to go the no-cook route again, but I hadn't really paused to consider how much I could improve on my food options if customized maildrops are thrown into the mix. Luckily, I have someone who is willing and able to assume that role for me. 

Keeping in touch with the world of words on-trail

That store-bought white is pure,

Not destined to endure

The hiker’s daily flood

Of sweat and dirt and mud.

Some grimy, smelly blight

That ten washings will not smite.

So radiant garments gray;

Nothing white can stay.

People who know me well know that I can sling cute poetry all day. The above is one of my efforts from the AT, and the only one that I bothered to record in my own journal. The rest were scattered in trail logbooks up and down the East Coast, and those don't end up in a centralized location, so they're basically lost and I don't remember any of them anyway. It turns out that someone out there thinks a lot like me, because there was a poem posted on WhiteBlaze a while ago called "Sand and Snow" that was a takeoff on "Fire and Ice," also by Frost.

I remembered a few days ago that I had written that little ditty and it got me thinking of how I handle literature while I'm hiking. The practical concern of weight infuses every decision: most thru-hikers are not willing to carry long books because they're heavy and don't pack well. I'm no exception. When I was on the AT, I didn't really have the urge or necessarily the attention span to be caught up in a novel most of the time. I did finish a few, but what I really needed--and what I pretty much always need, and always come back to if I'm away for it for any time at all--is to see the English language wrought by a skilled artist from time to time. The form in which this is accomplished is immaterial. Long-form feature articles, poems, books, well-crafted entries by the anonymous wordsmiths who wrote in trail registers before me--on the AT, I ate all of these up as they became available to me. Kristin sent me articles that she knew I'd like from The Browser's Best of the Moment feed, printed out in 8-point font and squeezed onto a few sheets of printer paper. I'd read them and then either pass them on to someone else or burn them in a campfire. This worked well, but that was in the Paper Age and I was limited to hard copies for anything I wanted to read.

Fast forward two years and I now own a smartphone and a Kindle. My strategy for reading on the PCT was originally going to be to pack the Kindle, but I decided against it because it's of limited utility to me. To a voracious reader who inhales whole novels every few days, an e-reader absolutely transforms hiking. But for me, I just need to sip from the well of the English language often enough to keep my mind from shriveling up. Therefore, I just have two items, The Seashell Anthology of Great Poetry and a Complete Works of William Shakespeare, synced to the Kindle app on my phone (no novels: reading those on a phone would be too eye-intensive). There should be plenty to chew on within those, especially in the opening sections of the hike when I'm too excited to concentrate on books before bed. Maybe later when I calm down and the novelty of the trail existence has worn off, I'll want to sink into novels and I can have the Kindle shipped to myself.

One thing that I look forward to in this setup is the chance to memorize poetry, which is something I used to do more often but haven't undertaken since high school. Someone in the New Yorker wrote a piece recently on the virtues of memorizing poetry but, in a move which will just shock readers of the New Yorker, he did not actually explain any of the virtues, instead finding several ways to state that it's something he's done a lot of and enjoys. I, similarly, can't come up with a good reason for doing it other than that it comes somewhat easily to me and I like it. I do know that it would make for great mental exercise while hiking. For instance, iambic meter is just crying out to be recalled at the rhythm of one's own footsteps: "When IN disGRACE with FORtune AND men's EYES"; "To STRIVE, to SEEK, to FIND, and NOT to YIELD"; "ToMORRow, TO fresh FIELDS and PAStures NEW" and so on.

I've heard that people who hike with FM radios develop lifelong trail associations with the popular songs from the summer of their thru-hike. I didn't even have a radio, but I will never again be able to hear "Strawberry Wine" without thinking of Manks and Perro in Connecticut on the AT in 2011 ... it's a long story. Who's to say poetry couldn't function the same way? If I decide to have a go at memorizing "If—" one sunny afternoon in the Sierra, I would probably remember that sunny afternoon every time I see or think of that poem for the rest of my life. Not bad.

I will close with this unrelated funny story about books and hiking:

In recent years, there have been a lot of Germans on the AT after a National Geographic-esque thru-hiking documentary was made auf Deutsch. One such German was on the trail in Virginia one day in 2011, cleaning out some books and magazines that had been left behind at a shelter. He had just started a campfire and was right in the middle of tossing one of the books into it when his friend (American) walked up and, without missing a beat, said, "Oh, you guys still do that?"

Hiking as a gay man and hiking with a significant other: two guest perspectives

That thing about trail love from a few weeks ago has seemed flimsier and flimsier each time I've looked back on it. I had such grand designs on a three-part series filled with all manner of wit and anecdote—I was all set to deploy some of my favorite terms, like "onanism" and "hide the salami"—but it's never going to happen. What is going to happen is that I will reprint, here and now and without much additional commentary, the contributions of two friends who, prior to me giving up, had produced very thoughtful answers to some of my questions.

First is my AT friend Soulslosher, who was the only openly gay thru-hiker I knew. I asked him to write anything, anything at all about hiking through Appalachia as a gay male, and he gave me this awesome response:

My sexuality, it was one of the last things on my mind when I stood atop Springer Mountain. Yet when my thru hike was fully underway, in my mind, I was confronted with just how I was going to handle my sexuality while hiking the trail. I was far removed from my comfort zone in the liberal Northeast and felt as if I had to dial myself down. Rural communities can be unwelcoming to LGBT people and I was slightly concerned if the inevitable thru hiker feelings of loneliness, sadness, etc. would be amplified since I likely wouldn’t have many, if any, gay people to relate to. 

In the very beginning of my hike, I considered if I should promote my sexuality, so it wouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, by having some sort of LGBT orientated patch on my pack. I also contemplated trying to hide it or be honest and open about it when the time was right (if I was asked, etc.). I decided to opt for the last option, mainly because I didn’t want to risk a conflict by being too open. Yet being gay is something that is a part of my identity and it was the approach in which I felt the most comfortable. 

I had the assumption that if anyone was willing to go hiking in the woods for 6 months with a bunch of strangers from all over the world—through unfamiliar towns and territories—that most people would be open minded. I was correct in this assumption. Whenever I discussed my orientation with fellow hikers, it never was an issue. If anything, a few hikers were astonished, yet supportive, that a young gay man was out here … in the middle of nowhere, dirty and smelly, hiking from Georgia to Maine. However, I’m unsure if I broke anyone’s perceived stereotypes about gay men. But by deciding to be open and honest about my sexuality, there was a sense of pride in being accepted into the hiking subculture in which masculinity is such a huge factor. 

In another aspect, I found trail romance to be quite abundant for the heterosexuals. But being gay, I’m always asked about my experiences of romance or hookups. Honestly, it wasn’t something I sought out because I didn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable. I am uncertain if I would have accepted even if the opportunity did present itself—all the dirt, smells, and muscle cramps would likely make for an unpleasant experience. Plus, I felt that the odds were stacked against me … you don’t go fishing in saltwater for freshwater fish. I was primarily focused on hiking and just being out there. 

Being a gay thru hiker never put a damper on my hiking experience. In fact, I think it helped me create special bonds with other hikers since I often revealed a piece of private information about myself.

In addition to wanting to write about LGBT issues on-trail, I also wanted to tackle the idea of hiking as a couple, which I've never done. The first thing I always think of when this topic comes up is Mitch Hedberg ...

“I got into an argument with a girlfriend inside of a tent. That's a bad place for an argument, because then I tried to walk out and slammed the flap. How are you supposed to express your anger in this situation? Zipper it up really quick? Zzzip, zzzip ... 'Fuck you!'”

But I decided that, as authoritative as Mitch can be on some issues (koalas and acid come to mind), I'd better get a second opinion from my college friend Eva, who tried to thru-hike the AT with her boyfriend in 2011, the same year that I did. Things were going well for them until her knee cartilage began to demonstrate the structural integrity of Jello and she had to leave the trail. But I asked her to say a bit about what it was like to hike as a couple, and this is what she wrote:

I've almost always hiked with friends, so I don't feel like couple-hiking was anything special. For me, hiking the AT as a couple didn't seem like a departure from the norm so much as a continuation of what I've always done. This sense was reinforced by the fact that Ben and I met and became friends as counselors, leading hikes for kids in the ADKs. 

I also think of my AT arrangement not as Eva and Ben the pair, but as the trio of Eva, Ben, and Glide. Ben and I met Glide, a middle-aged, former Ford employee from Detroit, on the Approach Trail. The three of us became instant friends based on our mutual longing for switchbacks and blistercare. Glide, Ben, and I hiked together for essentially my whole time on the AT. Glide was hilarious and also interesting in that he was really the first friend that Ben and I had made as a couple. Before, I had become friends with Ben's existing friends and vice versa, but on the AT, Ben and I entered as a pre-formed unit. In some way, that made me think of Ben as more a part of myself than I had before. Of course, Ben's refusal to take a trail name was a constant source of disappointment, especially since I had the best ideas for sickly-cute, matching aliases: Zenith and Nadir, Crescent and Gibbous, Apogee and Perigee, etc. (oddly, they were all astronomical, I'm not sure why).

I can't really think of any witty/interesting/telling couple-moments. I think that hiking as a couple must be very similar to hiking with the people you become friends with on the trail. One benefit of starting the trail as a pair is that everything (food, shared gear, shared beds in towns) is cheaper, which is nice. And hiking as a pair was convenient when one person could hang a bear bag while the other primed the Whisperlite (yeah, no JetBoil for us). But yeah. No grand insights. Honestly, I would be more interested to read about what it's like to hike alone. Sex on the trail was like sex in civilization: more tasteful in private and I'd be more likely to acquiesce if I weren't in the middle of cooking dinner. Also note that I also lost my virginity in a tent, so, the woods are familiar territory for me. To directly address some of your questions: I personally didn't feel the need for privacy—during the day, we didn't see many people. There was plenty of time for hiking in silence or conversation or singing or "having a moment," etc in the privacy of the the vacant forest. And I don't feel like people treated Ben and me differently than they would have had we been hiking as friends or separately. Again, unfortunately and all too often, Ben and everything else on the trail felt like an afterthought compared to my knee saga.

Mitch Hedberg jokes aside, I don't see why her experience shouldn't hold true for any well-established couple, especially if they've lived together before (because that's essentially what a thru-hike would be). I think a disparity in the enthusiasm for actually hiking long distances would be more of a problem than just being around each other 24/7. I definitely witnessed this disparity once on the AT: eager woman really enjoying her hike, man just going through the motions tagging along. I've also heard other stories, like a man thru-hiking with his wife's pack on his front, and his pack on his back (presumably the wife carried her own whip). But those people probably have other problems not specific to hiking. I'm guessing happy couples stay happy on the trail, for the most part.

That's all for the whole Trail Love deal. Other topics of sex and romance will be touched on in future asides, no doubt. Thanks again to Eva and Soulslosher for their contributions.

Blood and alcohol mix just fine

On the Appalachian Trail, I hiked without a stove for 1800 miles. I had been conditioned to fear stoves, to dread their finickiness, by seven years of hiking with dilapidated, old-school backpacking stoves that almost never worked properly (most of which rhymed with Thisperlite). Every C.A.N.O.E. Club trip I ever went on in college, the stove broke down at least once, and someone had to do field surgery on it, and that person was never me because I am a mechanical retard. I figured that having a perpetually malfunctioning stove just came with the territory of backpacking, and I didn't want to deal with the hassle on the AT. I survived just fine, but also realized that having the ability to boil water really opens up your food options.

I hadn't really done much gear research in those naïve days, so I hadn't realized that you can have a featherweight, failsafe stove for about $3 if you limit your cooking needs to "boil water"—i.e. no simmering, sauteing, etc. Very few long-distance hikers have the patience to do anything besides boil water anyway. So yesterday I made an alcohol stove, the variety that's called the Fancy Feast or the Super Cat stove because they're usually made from tins of cat food.

The concept is devastatingly simple, but I was still having trouble explaining it to my college buddy Jordan over the phone the other day. Jordan is a software engineer living in a Pacific Heights penthouse who is generally quick on the uptake, but even he had been so conditioned by the traditional idea of backpacking stoves (he was an Eagle Scout) that he couldn't understand what I was saying: "You pour denatured alcohol into an empty cat food tin, you light it on fire, you put your pot on top, you set up a windscreen, and 6-8 minutes later your water is boiling." Below is a brief photo record of my efforts in building this stove.

The materials: a tin of Fancy Feast cat food (the food itself is going to Little Jerry Seinfeld, one of my friend's cats, for his birthday tonight); denatured alcohol; a normal old hole-punch; paperclips; a pot; a pot-grip; and some dropper bottles for the alcohol. Aluminum foil should also be in the picture but isn't. Shades optional. First step is to punch 1 1/2 rows of holes around the cat food can.

Next step is, apparently, to slice both your thumb and forefinger open from the dangling chads of aluminum and spill blood all over your new stove.

The gist of the setup (minus the windscreen). I ended up punching more holes in the second row after my first test run, during which I got a hella slow boil time (11 minutes).

The aluminum-foil windscreen. I use one paperclip at the top to clip the ends together and keep the whole thing tight around the pot, about a half-inch off of it around the entire circumference. I use three or four paperclips on the bottom to stand it up a half-inch off the ground so that there's an inflow of air from below the stove to create a more efficient burn, but not so much air that it gets windy and moves the flame around. I've read that, without paperclips, you can use twigs to the same effect in the backcountry.

A lousy picture of the stove boiling water on our porch. You can see the blue flame in the bottom left, warning of the presence of Orcs. On my second trial run, I started with 2 cups of cold water from the faucet and put in about 1 fluid ounce of alcohol into the stove (turned out to be too much ... when this happens, you can't really turn off the stove, so the extra fuel just burns off). The outside air temperature was about 38 degrees. I lit the fuel with a match and got a rolling boil in 7 minutes, 20 seconds. Not bad for a cool night with cool water.

The entire kitchen setup, including pot, pot gripper, stove, matches, windscreen and fuel for 5-6 days, weighs 10oz. It won't malfunction—the potential problems lie in stepping on the tin, mis-rationing the fuel, or having it blow over full of flaming alcohol and start a wildfire (PCT thru-hikers have done all of these before). You can buy denatured alcohol, Everclear or HEET, which is some kind of antifreeze, in almost every trail town, and Yogi's guidebook makes it stupidly easy to ration fuel by saying, "Your next chance to buy alchy fuel is in X miles in X town." Basically, this is about as simple, cheap, light and convenient as you can possibly get regarding backpacking stoves. I no longer walk in fear of being able to boil water for my next meal.

p.s. For an example of an extremely well-thought-out variation on the simple alcohol stove, check out the Caldera Cone Keg-F system from Trail Designs. There is a certain amount of genius in what they've managed to come up with using a beer can and some aluminum sheeting. I wanted to buy one of these because the idea and the execution is so cool, but my girlfriend, ever with my best interests in mind, convinced me that it probably wasn't worth $60 (for comparison: including the pot, my setup cost $20).

Hiking in drought conditions

The New York times had this article slapped on their front page today about low snowpack all over the West. The gist of it is: it's too early to know for sure what the snow situation will be come summertime, because heavy spring storms could come along and make up the current deficit, but for now all signs point to a second consecutive year of low spring snowmelt, and hence very dry conditions. The article is of course focused on crops and the economy (pah!), but all I really care about is the snowpack's implications on the fantasy-world of thru-hiking.

Last year was extremely dry over the entire area that the PCT covers. Here where I live in Oregon, there was measurable precipitation on only two days between July 1 and October 10. Almost everyone who's ever thru-hiked the PCT northbound has had to hike in significant stretches of snow in California's High Sierra, but last year, no one did. I ran into one of the earliest NOBO thru-hikers last year and he said that the biggest patch of snow he had to cross in California was a hundred yards or so on the approach to Forester Pass, the PCT's high point at 13,153ft. Later thru-hikers last year, like my friend Spins, literally did not have to hike over snow once in the Sierra, which must be unfathomable to the people who have done it in high snow years and spent days without setting foot on solid ground.

Is it easier to thru-hike the PCT in a low snow year? I guess I don't really know, having not thru-hiked it in any type of year. I admit that the thing that instinctively scares me most about the PCT is traversing the Sierra in snow. From everything I've read, the mental and physical effort expended is incredible: the trail is invisible, requiring you to have strong map-reading and navigation skills (which I don't); stream crossings are flooded with snowmelt every afternoon; mosquitoes are breeding in impossible quantities on the melting snow; and postholing for miles on end is a massive undertaking that slows your pace, increases your calorie consumption, and drives you insane.

So let's say it's another dry year, and I get off easy and don't have to hike on snow very much or at all in the Sierra. Unfortunately, the tradeoff is the potentially more life-threatening problem of waterlessness. This doesn't instinctively intimidate me the way the prospect of a snowy Sierra does—but it should. In wet years on the PCT, such as 2011, I've heard that there are enough seasonal water sources flowing in the desert that one rarely has to walk more than 10 miles without seeing a source—it's almost like the AT. On the other end of the spectrum, I've read Scott Williamson mention packing 15 liters of water for a 65-mile stretch without reliable water sources in SoCal in 1992, which was a drought year. That's 33 pounds of water (1L=1kg=2.2lb). These days, volunteers leave water caches for thru-hikers in the desert, but those don't count as "reliable sources," as they can't be restocked as often as hikers drink them up. Nobody wants to show up empty to a water cache, and find that it's empty too. I'm a pretty heavy drinker (of water), so I bet I will be staring at situations in the desert, and possibly NorCal and Oregon, where I need to pack 8 liters of water or more.

Wildfires are also an issue in drought years, although as far as I know they don't threaten the physical survival of thru-hikers the way that dehydration does. What they do do is mess up hiking schedules and routes. By mid-August last year, 13 separate sections of the PCT were closed due to wildfire, which meant that there was an official re-route for every one of those places, and most of the time, the re-route was walking down a road, which is a lot shittier than walking through the woods. Hikers converge on towns waiting out fires, which honestly sounds miserable to me. I would have too much energy and too little patience with crowds of people to make that a happy situation.

Basically, I have to keep reminding myself that even though it appears I'm facing a dry, low-snow year, this doesn't mean that I'm getting an easier trail experience overall. Looong waterless stretches are tough, and wildfires are tough, and I have to be mentally ready to confront those challenges the same way I'd be ready to face deep snow and bad early-season weather.

In Pursuit of the Hirsute: Part one in the Trail Love series

Part one of a three-part series on sex, love, romance and everything in between on the trail. In this part, I'm covering the lay of the land regarding the physical appeal (or lack thereof) of hikers and the age/gender ratios one comes across in the woods. Part two will be about hiking with a significant other—whether they're with you or at home. And part three will cover the rest: the not-so-committed trail relationships that spring up, the need for occasional self-appreciation, and LGBT issues on the trail.

Attractiveness

The common perception of and among thru-hikers is that the women look closer to men, and the men look closer to wild animals. It's true that standards of physical upkeep necessarily decline when you spend 4-6 months in the woods. Almost all the men grow beards without trimming them (see my friend Soulslosher in part three for an exception), because hey when are you going to get to do that again? Some people start six months early on the beard and have some truly impressive growth by the time they're in Maine. I didn't cut my hair once on the AT, which I regretted because it was stinking hot most of the time.

Magnum slug

As a recent arrival to the Northwest, I have no way of knowing if this is a normal size for a gastropod in these parts. I should ask Kristin, who probably used to befriend hell-beasts like this in the family garden in Portland when she was a little tyke.

But speaking for myself, I can say with conviction that this is the largest slug I've ever seen in my life. I hope my training hikes continue to provide such rich wildlife interactions.

UPDATE: My girlfriend, as predicted, turned out to be a fount of information about slugs. She says that this is a banana slug, that yes this is a normal size, that you can tell it's moving because its antennae are out, and that these are an "integral part of Northwest forest ecosystems."

And lest anyone be tempted to crack wise about my foot size, I'll have you know that's a size 10 for scale.