Advice

Thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail, Pacific Crest Trail, or Continental Divide Trail is hard. Most fail. I met many successful pilgrims on the trail, and I tried to look for a common thread. Here are some characteristics I thought they would share:

• Wealth: I figured you might need the financial wherewithal to support the multi-month journey. Wrong: one guy (Cheapo) hiked from Georgia to New York on $20.

• Good gear: Those who travel with shoddy equipment are surely at a disadvantage. Wrong: A man from Concord, California thru-hiked with the same old, decrepit gear he had 35 years ago.

• Superior nutrition: Poor nutrition would certainly catch up to you during the hike and hamper your ability to finish it. Wrong: A few thru-hikers survived mainly on Snickers and other junk food.

• Excellent cardiovascular conditioning: Thru-hiking is the ultimate endurance sport, so surely cardiovascular fitness is paramount. Wrong: In Virginia I met George Ziegenfuss who blew that theory—he was in his sixties and hiked the AT with only one lung.

• Disease-free: Your body should be healthy and free of debilitating diseases. Wrong: Sticks and Stones, two ex-military men, thru-hiked together to raise money for Leukodystrophy, which Sticks battled. Although Leukodystrophy is a progressive disorder that affects the brain, spinal cord and peripheral nerves, it did not stop Sticks from thru-hiking the AT.

• Youth: I initially thought that being young and strong was a common denominator. Wrong: I recalled the first female thru-hiker I met (Jean)—she was in her sixties. Others have completed it in their seventies. In 2004, Lee “The Easy One” Barry became the oldest person to ever thru-hike the AT: he was 81. The fastest thru-hiker our year was Linsey, a man who biked from California to Georgia, hiked up to Maine in about 72 days, and then biked back to California. He averaged about 30 miles a day on the AT and never took a day off. He was 63.

• Sight: OK, at the very least, you should be able to see the trail! Right? Wrong again: a blind man, Bill Irwin, hiked the whole trail with his trusty Seeing Eye dog named Orient. It took him nine months (50 percent longer than average) and he fell hundreds of times, but he made it.

I was dumbfounded. I couldn’t seem to find a common denominator among all the successful thru-hikers. Yes, the majority was young, strong, ate healthy food, carried lightweight gear, and could actually see the trail, but there were so many exceptions. It wasn’t until I hit Georgia that I figured it out.

Imagine kissing your job and your friends goodbye to thru-hike a long trail over six months, then quitting the trail in just a couple of days. As loony as that sounds, it is what happens to hundreds of people every season as they are surprised by the reality of a thru-hike. About one in five prospective Appalachian Trail thru-hikers quit within the first week!

What's even more surprising is that most of those who quit don't do it because they suffer an injury. In fact, most who quit have no ailments and they adore backpacking. Their love for the outdoors is what motivated them to thru-hike a trail in the first place. They love backpacking and figure a thru-hike is a natural extension of that love.

Such reasoning is flawed, because backpacking and thru-hiking are different species.

People don't discover this pre-thru-hike because they simply rely on their limited backpacking experience, their gut instinct, or Uncle Harry who supposedly knows everything. This article is for people who are considering thru-hiking a long trail and want to make sure they know what they're getting into.

Wherever I travel in Europe (or elsewhere), there’s a widespread belief that war is all about money and that war is good for business.

• Many argue that America attacked Iraq only to get access to cheap oil, even though the US was already buying Iraq’s oil before the war and it became far more expensive to buy that same oil after the war.
• America attacked Panama in 1989 for the money received from controlling the Panama Canal, which, come to think of it, the US was already getting (and would give up a few years later, as promised).
• America went into Somalia because, well, we’re not sure why, maybe sand is valuable.
• America attacked the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada because, well, there must be some vast economic interest there too.

If war is just about money, these cases struggle to prove that. It's overly simplistic to say, "Money explains everything."

Why do we go to war?

Nations go to war for many reasons. Money usually is a major reason, but it’s often not the only reason or even the main reason.

There are other factors, such as:

• Religion
• Ethnic hatred
• Language issues
• Settling an ancient score
• Stopping a genocide (or some other injustice)
• Having a disproportionate number of unemployed (and angry) young men in a society (i.e., a youth bulge)
• The “he-hit-me-first” excuse
• Getting back territory “that was historically ours!”
• Having politicians with big egos and small penises.

Kimberlie Dame and I connected on Facebook. She is an experienced backpacker who is planning a three-year hiking trip starting in the spring of 2012. I asked her to share what she has learned so far from her journey so far. She listed 28 things. She'll share them after I ask her three questions:

Francis Tapon: How did you learn about Hike Your Own Hike?

Kimberlie Dame: It was recommended to me by my primary support person for the Arizona Trail who had finished the Appalachian Trail. After asking around about it, turned out almost all of my hiker friends had read it and were just keeping me in the dark about it. So I gladly picked it up!

FT: What was your biggest takeaway of the book?

KD: My biggest takeaway was to learn how to apply the major lessons I was learning about trail walking to my life in general. Trail walking is an action-packed educational lab applicable to an earnest quest for happiness. The book guided me into thinking that way, and transposing the wisdom into every day!

FT: How has being on a long-distance trail affected you?

KD: Walking paces your mind like breathing paces survival. Often, “going for a walk” can diffuse an attack of temper, foster creative ideas, provide an opportunity for intimacy, or reset a frustrating day. For many of us, it is also the relating link to nature and to pure happiness.

Walking long enough, over a period of days, months, or as I’m about to attempt, years, removes it from the realm of an “activity” and places it into a central way of being, with your mind in continuous rhythm.

I didn’t know the real effects of this until I had walked the full 819 miles of the Arizona Trail in the spring of 2010. It was a choice that was the start of an entire new string of choices that were hiding behind it, the largest being the decision to do 3 years of continuous walking beginning in the spring of 2012.

What could possibly have happened on the Arizona Trail to bring me to such an enormous decision? I’d love to tell you.

28 Things That I Have Learned On The Trail So Far by Kimberlie Dame

1. Modern civilization is but a tiny colonization of an already established culture of nature. We are strangers here.
2. Planning is just sheer entertainment for the brain. Real life contains events.
3. Being focused on survival relieves a person of petty anxieties.

In the 1800s, scientists inadvertently learned something about frog psychology when they conducted two experiments.

In the first experiment, they threw a frog into a pot of cold water and raised the temperature quickly. The frog jumped out.

In the second experiment they put the frog into a pot of cold water, and then very slowly began to raise the temperature. The frog showed stayed in the pot. After two hours, the frog never moved and died a horrible death.

Are you suffering from Frog Psychology?

Are you (or someone you love) in a situation that is progressively getting worse, and yet is doing nothing about it? Lousy situations are sneaky because they usually don’t get that way overnight; instead, the process can be a slow and steady decline. And like the frog, before you know it, you’re dead.

Unfortunately, for many of us, our passions don’t lead us on careers that can easily lead to big bucks. You might have a passion for writing, acting, or gardening. How are you ever going to make money doing that?

I couldn’t wait for success, so I went ahead without it. — Jonathan Winters

Think about the top of your ideal profession

No matter what profession you pick, think about the individuals who have made it to the pinnacle of that profession. Are they poor?

Let’s examine a few professions that most people think are doomed to poverty, and let’s see how those who pursued them to the top fared. These are professions that your parents would probably tell you not to pursue because “You’ll never make any money that way!” Let’s see what a few rebellious kids (or some with encouraging parents) did with their lives:

After backpacking about 240 miles through the green mountains of Vermont and the hot fields of Massachusetts, I came up with five questions you can ask yourself to help figure out what is your passion.

#1: The “Billion Dollar” Question

One of the best ways to determine your passion is to find out what you would do if you had tons of money.

Write down what you would do with the majority of your waking hours if you had a billion dollars in the bank.

Obviously, with a billion dollars you wouldn’t have to work, although some lunatics might. Don’t worry about how you will spend the money. Yes, I’m sure that you’d donate 99 percent of your wealth to the poor and needy. Great. That’s nice, but the goal here is to find out what you would do with most of your time. Clearly, there are many things you might do with your hours, but what would consume the bulk of your time? Would you travel? Teach? Write books? Help the sick? Build homes? Trade stocks? Collect meat cleavers?

Sometimes people read Hike Your Own Hike and they actually like it. When I find these freaks of nature, I like to profile them. In this article, I interview an oxymoron: an adventurous family-man. See how Damien Tougas lives the paradoxical life.

Francis Tapon: Give those who don't know you some background about who you are.

Damien Tougas: I am a husband, a father, a techie, a writer/blogger, and an adventurer. I am a believer in integration, which means that I pursue creative ways to bring together those diverse aspects of my life into a cohesive whole. As a family, we have been working towards pursuing our passions full-time rather than just as hobbies.

Although I enjoy receiving email from my friends, some of my favorite emails are from strangers. These strangers have read Hike Your Own Hike and are writing to tell me the positive impact it had on their life. Such emails are more rewarding than seeing a boost in sales (OK, except for really big boost).

Below is a excerpt from Hike Your Own Hike that spurred a reader to write how it impacted her. First, the excerpt:

When you’re good, you’re good

When good events happen or when you perform well at an activity, you should attribute it to your inherent skill. Do not attribute it to luck. It’s possible that a thru-hiker may believe she’s lucky to have hiked 20 miles of trail. Indeed, it’s possible that she was lucky. Maybe she was blessed with great weather, or a friendly Trail Angel who gave her some food and encouragement to press on. On the other hand, walking 200 miles of trail isn’t about luck—it’s skill and determination. Finally, when a thru-hiker has walked over 2,000 miles, clearly luck had little to do with her success—she accomplished that feat because of her pure will.

Most thru-hikers have a good understanding of their expenses, know how to control them, are good at saving money, and know how to resist upgrading. Successful thru-hikers usually follow four steps to prepare for and complete their journey. Let’s look at each step and how we can apply it on and off the long distance trails.