mykdavies

Originally Posted by map man

Your question intrigued me enough that I decided to spend some time going over the data I gleaned from studying 240 completing NOBO thru-hikers in the classes 2001 to 2010 who kept thorough journals at trailjournals.com for my article here at WB on hiking rates. I divided them into five groups and here's how many hikers I have for each time period for hikers leaving Springer:

Jan. 1 -- Feb. 24 (22 hikers)
Feb. 25 -- March 10 (51 hikers)
March 11 -- March 24 (78 hikers)
March 25 -- April 7 (56 hikers)
April 8 -- May 20 (33 hikers)

Here's how many mean zero days and mean total days to complete each group took:

Zeros~~~Total Days~~~Departure Date
26.0.............170.2..........Jan. 1 -- Feb. 24
23.3.............174.2..........Feb. 25 -- March 10
21.1.............173.2..........March 11 -- March 24
18.4.............167.4..........March 25 -- April 7
16.1.............151.0..........April 8 -- May 20

As you can see, the earlier hikers started the more zero days they took. Also, The earlier that hikers left the longer it took them to get to Katahdin (as a group) with the exception of that very first group. It's my guess that the early group has many experienced hikers that know they can handle winter conditions and that these hiking veterans would tend to hike a little faster than others. I'm curious what others think.

You also speculated that later departing hikers would do a fair amount of catching up to other earlier hikers as they made their way north, so here is another table. It's got the mean departure date and arrival date for each of these five groups:

Departure~~~Arrival~~~~Departure Range
Feb. 13...........Aug. 2...........Jan. 1 -- Feb. 24
March 3..........Aug. 25.........Feb. 25 -- March 10
March 17.........Sept. 6.........March 11 -- March 24
March 31.........Sept. 15.......March 25 -- April 7
April 21...........Sept. 18........April 8 -- May 20

In my earlier study I found that women keeping a journal just for themselves, or those hiking as part of a male/female pair, took almost two weeks longer to complete the trail on average than men keeping a journal just for themselves. So I looked at these departure groupings to see if gender composition could have anything to do with the differing hiking speeds. I found that the first four groups were fairly similar in percentages of females in the group, but that the very last, late leaving group had significantly fewer women in it, for some reason -- only about 12% of the group rather than the 28% to 37% varying compositions of the other groups. Nevertheless, I'm guessing that only partially accounts for the speediness of the latest leaving group (who only took an average of 151 days to complete).

There are some limitations to the group I studied. Since no one who dropped out along the way is included I have no way of answering your question about whether earlier starters are more likely to quit. Also, I don't include flip-floppers so anyone seing they are going too slow to complete by the middle of October but who complete the trail by jumping to Katahdin partway along and going south are effectively selecting themselves out of my study group. And that phenomenon might also help explain why the "days to complete" are so much lower for the later starting hikers in my study.

Anyway, I thought it would be useful to introduce some quantitative evidence to shed some light on your question.