Datto
01-13-2013, 15:00
Writing an on-line thru-hike trail journal, one that is written on a daily basis, is a significant undertaking and commitment for an AT thru-hiker.
Heh, as if an AT thru-hike is not enough of an undertaking and commitment all by itself.
Reasons: As you progress northward on your AT thru-hike you may lose, particularly on a daily basis, the ability to concentrate and focus on specific non-hiking tasks as your aperture opens wide. I call this losing mental acuity as the aperture opens. The loss of mental acuity has happened to me on every single long-distance hike I've ever undertaken and happens to many AT thru-hikers. It's both enjoyable in certain ways - a relaxing, worry-free experience - as well as quite frustrating when you're forced to take on a task during a long-distance hike that requires great focus. Finding things inside a backpack during the beginning weeks of your thru-hike for instance. Now what was it that I was looking for? I can't remember. Oh yeah, I was looking for toenail clippers. Right. So the frustration builds as you're rooting around inside your backpack until you finally have to do en entire pack explosion just to find... now what was it I was looking for?
Additionally, the rigors of an AT thru-hike make it such that pretty much all unnecessary actions, on a daily basis, tend to be discarded quickly in order to just get the daily thru-hike activities completed for the day. You're tired, and beat and sore and you have to descend some big steep cliff just to get water for the evening. You'll probably just want to get dinner done and lay your head down and go to sleep most nights.
So, it takes dedication and commitment to writing a daily on-line trail journal describing, in your own particular manner, your thru-hike of the Appalachian trail. Most do not have that commitment just as most who start an AT thru-hike don't have the necessary commitment and discipline to finish their thru-hike.
The benefits:
If you do choose to write an on-line trail journal of your Appalachian Trail thru-hike, years later it may become one of the most treasured elements of your life. It's amazing how one can re-live their AT thru-hike in such great detail from just plain text written on a daily basis. You may find that some days in the future you'll look to see what you were doing on your AT thru-hike on that particular same day - just to see how your life has changed since then. It's a reference point I suppose - something that tells you at this particular moment in time, your life was like "this" and you'd described and had recorded what it was like at that particular moment in time in your life. The time in your life where maybe you were the happiest in your entire life, the most peaceful, the most frustrated.
Invaluable.
The other part of writing an AT thru-hike journal that is on-line - it can have considerable impact outside your own life. The words you write can cause the course of others to change and for them to take a fork in the road they might not have taken otherwise had it not been for the words you have written about your experience.
So, in case you haven't realized it by now, the on-line trail journal of an AT thru-hiker can be potent. Even though you might not realize anything about that power while you're on your thru-hike and writing your daily on-line journal. I can tell you that others, many or few, may wrap their life around the experiences you are encountering, that you write about and portray.
Powerful. That's the primary way I can describe it. Powerful.
The phrase, "The power of the pen is mightier..." is oh so true when you write an on-line Appalachian Trail thru-hiker journal. And then - people may drive all the way out to the Appalachian Trail and hike themselves up to a spot where they don't know for sure but they ask around of other hikers so they can meet you on the Trail in-person as you're hiking past.
That had happened to me many times on my AT thru-hike. People going to great lengths to meet me on my AT thru-hike. People who I'd never met before in my life. Standing in the middle of the Trail, way out in the middle of nowhere, many times in the rain, with a big smile on their face asking, "Are you Datto?"
I'm glad to say that some of those people went on to complete their own thru-hikes of the Appalachian Trail during the next year or even years later.
So, if you're currently considering an online trail journal for your AT thru-hike in 2013, here are some suggestions:
Top Five Suggestions For Writing An On-Line Appalachian Trail Thru-hiker Journal
5) Write a journal entry each and every day of your AT thru-hike, regardless of how tired or sore or hungry or frustrated you've become. Just write something even if it's only to say that you're too tired to write anything of importance and you'll write something tomorrow in more detail. It's the continuous, daily experience that becomes so valuable to you later, as well as valuable to those you don't even know, have never met, who are following your daily path and experience via your trail journal.
4) Do not include names of people on the Trail, or even their trail names, within your on-line trail journal without asking them first. I can tell you that there will be some hikers you'll encounter on the Trail who simply do not want their name put into your on-line trail journal. Personal privacy reasons, they're running from something and they don't want people to find them or simple paranoia. For whatever reason, do not be blase about this or you could find people may be upset with you on your hike and you don't need that burden unnecessarily.
3) Do not write about food and being hungry. No one cares and you won't care about it later. Even though satisfying outrageous hunger may become one of your great passions along the way, minimize that subject within your on-line trail journal. Easy for me to say while I'm sitting here indoors near a refrigerator, not near as easy to do when you're writing your on-line trail journal.
2) If you have a transcriber arranged, make sure they understand they'll need to do proofreading of your text prior to posting your entries onto the Internet - that many misspellings may occur and to not post those in raw form on-line without corrections being made first. Make sure they also understand there is a fine line between editing and removing important content and that you are counting on them to use good judgment about what may become illegible and what is content to be kept and deciphered from your notes and/or scribblings.
1) Write much more about what you are thinking than what you are doing during your AT thru-hike. Anyone can bang out a bulletted list of things they did for the day during their AT thru-hike. That's not near as interesting as it is to write about what you are thinking on that particular day of your AT thru-hike.
If you don't think what you write in an on-line AT thru-hike journal will be important to others and couldn't have much impact on others, consider this:
An on-line trail journal written by an AT thru-hiker before me played a major part in me thru-hiking the Appalachian Trial.
I'd had a job at a Fortune 1000 company where I was learning new things at an extremely rapid pace - which was what I was wanting - while at the same time the job was abusing my life. Sometimes I would get called four times in the middle of the night to handle some type of emergency someone else (not me) thought was enough of an emergency to call and wake me up from my greatly desired and required beauty sleep. It would happen on vacation, weekends, all the time. I don't know how one can immensely enjoy a job at the same time as one despises that same job but that had been the case for me for years prior to my AT thru-hike.
One of the more menial tasks I had to do every day at work was to scour through the logs of Internet access by employees and block bad Internet sites. Quite a few of the executives in the company were visiting the bad sites and charging their access to those sites on company credit cards. Of course, the auditors weren't happy about it but there wasn't really any automated method back then to stop it -- back in the Wild West days of the Internet (that would be the 20th century).
One day I came upon a particular word in the Internet logs, a particular website, that looked suspicious. So I'd investigated and discovered the website was the on-line trail journal of a northbound AT thru-hiker. The suspicious word I'd pursued was that of her trailname.
My dad had taken me out to the Appalachian Trail one time when I was a little tyke. On a vacation trip to Gettysburg he'd stopped the car, had me get out and told me what he'd known about the Appalachian Trail. Told me it was a trail that had gone all the way from Georgia to Maine. I'd was in elementary school at that time and had been amazed that someone could actually walk that far. On a trail. I'd walked trails back in the woods quite a bit when I was in elementary school so hearing about a trail that went that far without dead-ending was mind boggling to a kid.
So when I'd come upon this on-line AT trail journal of someone who was intending to walk the entire distance, which I would discover was more than 2,000 miles, I certainly became intrigued by the tale she was telling.
At first, on the day of the discovery of her on-line AT trail journal, I'd started out in the middle of her journal and then and had decided that I'd look it over from the beginning later on when I'd had more time. Well, as things happen in a busy life, that "more time" was a couple of weeks later when something had bounced off my brain and had reminded me that it might be an interesting diversion to read up on what that girl on the Appalachian Trail was doing.
And so it would become a daily activity of mine - come into work, boot up my computer, find out what that girl on the AT had been doing - find out what had occurred on her thru-hike since the last time I'd read her on-line AT thru-hike journal.
And I'd discovered it was so interesting. A great daily read. At that time it was one of the very few things about work that I'd enjoyed on a daily basis. It made coming to work worth the effort to get up out of bed every morning just to drive through rush hour traffic and be abused for the day and night.
I'd become immersed in her thru-hike through just plain text that she would describe about her thru-hike. For much of the time when I was reading her on-line journal I didn't believe a person could walk and carry a backpack for more than 2,000 continuous miles. It just hadn't seemed doable to me. Of course, the more I'd read, the more I'd discovered others had actually done it and here was this girl doing it. In the rain and snow and mud and wind. I remember thinking to myself one day "Wow". That's what I'd said to myself out loud. Wow. This AT thru-hiking thing has got to be the most interesting challenge to take-on, the biggest, most immense pursuit a person can undertake.
Somewhere about the time she was in Virginia a seed was planted in my head that I could do this - that it would be such a grand adventure. It was the romanticism as well as the daily trail life that this girl thru-hiker had written that I'd become so enamored with - that it just seemed to be so interesting of a challenge. And no one would be calling me at night for what looked to be maybe five or six months. Ha, yeah, that was the way I was looking at a thru-hike at that time in my life - how much time could I get away from all this abuse I was undergoing.
Of course, while I'm reading her on-line AT thru-hiker journal I'm sitting in a warm building with all the amenities of modern life so I'm not understanding why she is doing certain things on her AT thru-hike. Like why she isn't just concentrating on her hike instead of getting wrapped up with what appeared to me to be "side ventures". Ha, things like romances and trips to places off trail, taking whole days off that I would eventually figure out were called Zeros. Doesn't she know there's only a certain window of time for her? She had taken a leave of absence from her job and the leave of absence was for six-months.
Even though she seemed to be having the time of her life, I started to see somewhere along the time she had reached Pennsylvania and the rocks there-in that her timetable was shortening to get to, what I would figure out, was a place called Katahdin. She'd brought her dog along with her on her AT thru-hike and she was immensely attached to her dog - a German Shepherd as I remember. The dog was beginning to have problems going into Pennsylvania, maybe before that, and it wasn't long before I started talking to my computer screen as I'd read her new updates. Starting to say, "you have got to send that dog home." Me sitting in complete comfort could begin to see she was not going to make it in time - that she was not going to reach Katahdin before her leave of absence ran out.
It wasn't a week later that I would almost yell into my computer screen - "Dump the dog! Dump the dog!" But this thru-hiker didn't have the handy calculator available on a side credenza to easily compute the time and miles and determine what needed to happen in order to not miss the ending of her window.
Ha, then she had what I'd thought was another romance along the way and I found myself saying "Dump the guy! Dump the dog!" to my computer screen.
Then - the day it dawns on her. The day you, as a reader, know is coming. The day she realizes the predicament of her time window shortening versus the pace she had been keeping for daily trail miles. Oh she is upset with herself. The "if onlys" start - if only she hadn't wasted so much time in Virginia, if only she hadn't wasted time doing this or that.
So she started hustling north - trying to make Katahdin before her leave of absence closed. Me, as well as pretty much everyone else in a mailing list group that I'd discovered on the Internet, had already done the calculations and had figured out she would never make it to Katahdin in time. But that didn't stop her from trying. It took a while for her to call some people back home to come pick up the dog - who's paws by now had begun to deteriorate rapidly from the increased pace.
And so she would crank out mile after mile every day from that point on - busting out way more miles per day.
To no avail though - she was, as I remember, 95 miles short even with the breakneck pace she had tried to maintain after the dog had been sent home. And she was so disappointed, so depressed that she'd not hiked to Katahdin. She'd had her parents come and pick her up at the end of her leave of absence window and drive her to Katahdin. She would write and beat herself up about the disappointment.
The next year she would come back and finish the remaining miles and would write about that some. I don't think, to her, it was the same. Those 95 miles had haunted her.
I couldn't stand not knowing what had happened when her thru-hike had ended prematurely when the leave of absence had closed. It was months later I'd decided to write to her and ask what had happened.
She was just the nicest person. Honest about what had happened.
As I remember, she'd summitted Katahdin the weekend that her thru-hike had ended prematurely, then went to work the following Monday morning. Right off the Trail, into rush hour traffic, arriving at her desk. Trail to office life in a matter of hours as I remember.
She told me she was in tears for a week after her thru-hike had ended and that it had taken everything she would muster within herself to get in the car and drive to work for the following weeks after her thru-hike. That the people in cars on her drive had been so mean to her, that the usual office politics at work had come to bear on her. That the world wasn't at all like the life she had experienced on the AT and she'd become so sad about that recognition.
But she'd made it through all that and had come to some kind of resolution about the world in order to keep on with keeping on.
I'd meet her later -- a year or two after her thru-hike at a hiker get-together and would speak briefly with her. It was something to meet the actual person who'd written about the experience. Photos only go so far and they're different when you actually meet a person you admire.
Somewhere after her thru-hike was over, I'd said to myself, "When this job is over, whenever that is, I'm going to go and do that. I'm going to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail."
And so it was.
Datto
Heh, as if an AT thru-hike is not enough of an undertaking and commitment all by itself.
Reasons: As you progress northward on your AT thru-hike you may lose, particularly on a daily basis, the ability to concentrate and focus on specific non-hiking tasks as your aperture opens wide. I call this losing mental acuity as the aperture opens. The loss of mental acuity has happened to me on every single long-distance hike I've ever undertaken and happens to many AT thru-hikers. It's both enjoyable in certain ways - a relaxing, worry-free experience - as well as quite frustrating when you're forced to take on a task during a long-distance hike that requires great focus. Finding things inside a backpack during the beginning weeks of your thru-hike for instance. Now what was it that I was looking for? I can't remember. Oh yeah, I was looking for toenail clippers. Right. So the frustration builds as you're rooting around inside your backpack until you finally have to do en entire pack explosion just to find... now what was it I was looking for?
Additionally, the rigors of an AT thru-hike make it such that pretty much all unnecessary actions, on a daily basis, tend to be discarded quickly in order to just get the daily thru-hike activities completed for the day. You're tired, and beat and sore and you have to descend some big steep cliff just to get water for the evening. You'll probably just want to get dinner done and lay your head down and go to sleep most nights.
So, it takes dedication and commitment to writing a daily on-line trail journal describing, in your own particular manner, your thru-hike of the Appalachian trail. Most do not have that commitment just as most who start an AT thru-hike don't have the necessary commitment and discipline to finish their thru-hike.
The benefits:
If you do choose to write an on-line trail journal of your Appalachian Trail thru-hike, years later it may become one of the most treasured elements of your life. It's amazing how one can re-live their AT thru-hike in such great detail from just plain text written on a daily basis. You may find that some days in the future you'll look to see what you were doing on your AT thru-hike on that particular same day - just to see how your life has changed since then. It's a reference point I suppose - something that tells you at this particular moment in time, your life was like "this" and you'd described and had recorded what it was like at that particular moment in time in your life. The time in your life where maybe you were the happiest in your entire life, the most peaceful, the most frustrated.
Invaluable.
The other part of writing an AT thru-hike journal that is on-line - it can have considerable impact outside your own life. The words you write can cause the course of others to change and for them to take a fork in the road they might not have taken otherwise had it not been for the words you have written about your experience.
So, in case you haven't realized it by now, the on-line trail journal of an AT thru-hiker can be potent. Even though you might not realize anything about that power while you're on your thru-hike and writing your daily on-line journal. I can tell you that others, many or few, may wrap their life around the experiences you are encountering, that you write about and portray.
Powerful. That's the primary way I can describe it. Powerful.
The phrase, "The power of the pen is mightier..." is oh so true when you write an on-line Appalachian Trail thru-hiker journal. And then - people may drive all the way out to the Appalachian Trail and hike themselves up to a spot where they don't know for sure but they ask around of other hikers so they can meet you on the Trail in-person as you're hiking past.
That had happened to me many times on my AT thru-hike. People going to great lengths to meet me on my AT thru-hike. People who I'd never met before in my life. Standing in the middle of the Trail, way out in the middle of nowhere, many times in the rain, with a big smile on their face asking, "Are you Datto?"
I'm glad to say that some of those people went on to complete their own thru-hikes of the Appalachian Trail during the next year or even years later.
So, if you're currently considering an online trail journal for your AT thru-hike in 2013, here are some suggestions:
Top Five Suggestions For Writing An On-Line Appalachian Trail Thru-hiker Journal
5) Write a journal entry each and every day of your AT thru-hike, regardless of how tired or sore or hungry or frustrated you've become. Just write something even if it's only to say that you're too tired to write anything of importance and you'll write something tomorrow in more detail. It's the continuous, daily experience that becomes so valuable to you later, as well as valuable to those you don't even know, have never met, who are following your daily path and experience via your trail journal.
4) Do not include names of people on the Trail, or even their trail names, within your on-line trail journal without asking them first. I can tell you that there will be some hikers you'll encounter on the Trail who simply do not want their name put into your on-line trail journal. Personal privacy reasons, they're running from something and they don't want people to find them or simple paranoia. For whatever reason, do not be blase about this or you could find people may be upset with you on your hike and you don't need that burden unnecessarily.
3) Do not write about food and being hungry. No one cares and you won't care about it later. Even though satisfying outrageous hunger may become one of your great passions along the way, minimize that subject within your on-line trail journal. Easy for me to say while I'm sitting here indoors near a refrigerator, not near as easy to do when you're writing your on-line trail journal.
2) If you have a transcriber arranged, make sure they understand they'll need to do proofreading of your text prior to posting your entries onto the Internet - that many misspellings may occur and to not post those in raw form on-line without corrections being made first. Make sure they also understand there is a fine line between editing and removing important content and that you are counting on them to use good judgment about what may become illegible and what is content to be kept and deciphered from your notes and/or scribblings.
1) Write much more about what you are thinking than what you are doing during your AT thru-hike. Anyone can bang out a bulletted list of things they did for the day during their AT thru-hike. That's not near as interesting as it is to write about what you are thinking on that particular day of your AT thru-hike.
If you don't think what you write in an on-line AT thru-hike journal will be important to others and couldn't have much impact on others, consider this:
An on-line trail journal written by an AT thru-hiker before me played a major part in me thru-hiking the Appalachian Trial.
I'd had a job at a Fortune 1000 company where I was learning new things at an extremely rapid pace - which was what I was wanting - while at the same time the job was abusing my life. Sometimes I would get called four times in the middle of the night to handle some type of emergency someone else (not me) thought was enough of an emergency to call and wake me up from my greatly desired and required beauty sleep. It would happen on vacation, weekends, all the time. I don't know how one can immensely enjoy a job at the same time as one despises that same job but that had been the case for me for years prior to my AT thru-hike.
One of the more menial tasks I had to do every day at work was to scour through the logs of Internet access by employees and block bad Internet sites. Quite a few of the executives in the company were visiting the bad sites and charging their access to those sites on company credit cards. Of course, the auditors weren't happy about it but there wasn't really any automated method back then to stop it -- back in the Wild West days of the Internet (that would be the 20th century).
One day I came upon a particular word in the Internet logs, a particular website, that looked suspicious. So I'd investigated and discovered the website was the on-line trail journal of a northbound AT thru-hiker. The suspicious word I'd pursued was that of her trailname.
My dad had taken me out to the Appalachian Trail one time when I was a little tyke. On a vacation trip to Gettysburg he'd stopped the car, had me get out and told me what he'd known about the Appalachian Trail. Told me it was a trail that had gone all the way from Georgia to Maine. I'd was in elementary school at that time and had been amazed that someone could actually walk that far. On a trail. I'd walked trails back in the woods quite a bit when I was in elementary school so hearing about a trail that went that far without dead-ending was mind boggling to a kid.
So when I'd come upon this on-line AT trail journal of someone who was intending to walk the entire distance, which I would discover was more than 2,000 miles, I certainly became intrigued by the tale she was telling.
At first, on the day of the discovery of her on-line AT trail journal, I'd started out in the middle of her journal and then and had decided that I'd look it over from the beginning later on when I'd had more time. Well, as things happen in a busy life, that "more time" was a couple of weeks later when something had bounced off my brain and had reminded me that it might be an interesting diversion to read up on what that girl on the Appalachian Trail was doing.
And so it would become a daily activity of mine - come into work, boot up my computer, find out what that girl on the AT had been doing - find out what had occurred on her thru-hike since the last time I'd read her on-line AT thru-hike journal.
And I'd discovered it was so interesting. A great daily read. At that time it was one of the very few things about work that I'd enjoyed on a daily basis. It made coming to work worth the effort to get up out of bed every morning just to drive through rush hour traffic and be abused for the day and night.
I'd become immersed in her thru-hike through just plain text that she would describe about her thru-hike. For much of the time when I was reading her on-line journal I didn't believe a person could walk and carry a backpack for more than 2,000 continuous miles. It just hadn't seemed doable to me. Of course, the more I'd read, the more I'd discovered others had actually done it and here was this girl doing it. In the rain and snow and mud and wind. I remember thinking to myself one day "Wow". That's what I'd said to myself out loud. Wow. This AT thru-hiking thing has got to be the most interesting challenge to take-on, the biggest, most immense pursuit a person can undertake.
Somewhere about the time she was in Virginia a seed was planted in my head that I could do this - that it would be such a grand adventure. It was the romanticism as well as the daily trail life that this girl thru-hiker had written that I'd become so enamored with - that it just seemed to be so interesting of a challenge. And no one would be calling me at night for what looked to be maybe five or six months. Ha, yeah, that was the way I was looking at a thru-hike at that time in my life - how much time could I get away from all this abuse I was undergoing.
Of course, while I'm reading her on-line AT thru-hiker journal I'm sitting in a warm building with all the amenities of modern life so I'm not understanding why she is doing certain things on her AT thru-hike. Like why she isn't just concentrating on her hike instead of getting wrapped up with what appeared to me to be "side ventures". Ha, things like romances and trips to places off trail, taking whole days off that I would eventually figure out were called Zeros. Doesn't she know there's only a certain window of time for her? She had taken a leave of absence from her job and the leave of absence was for six-months.
Even though she seemed to be having the time of her life, I started to see somewhere along the time she had reached Pennsylvania and the rocks there-in that her timetable was shortening to get to, what I would figure out, was a place called Katahdin. She'd brought her dog along with her on her AT thru-hike and she was immensely attached to her dog - a German Shepherd as I remember. The dog was beginning to have problems going into Pennsylvania, maybe before that, and it wasn't long before I started talking to my computer screen as I'd read her new updates. Starting to say, "you have got to send that dog home." Me sitting in complete comfort could begin to see she was not going to make it in time - that she was not going to reach Katahdin before her leave of absence ran out.
It wasn't a week later that I would almost yell into my computer screen - "Dump the dog! Dump the dog!" But this thru-hiker didn't have the handy calculator available on a side credenza to easily compute the time and miles and determine what needed to happen in order to not miss the ending of her window.
Ha, then she had what I'd thought was another romance along the way and I found myself saying "Dump the guy! Dump the dog!" to my computer screen.
Then - the day it dawns on her. The day you, as a reader, know is coming. The day she realizes the predicament of her time window shortening versus the pace she had been keeping for daily trail miles. Oh she is upset with herself. The "if onlys" start - if only she hadn't wasted so much time in Virginia, if only she hadn't wasted time doing this or that.
So she started hustling north - trying to make Katahdin before her leave of absence closed. Me, as well as pretty much everyone else in a mailing list group that I'd discovered on the Internet, had already done the calculations and had figured out she would never make it to Katahdin in time. But that didn't stop her from trying. It took a while for her to call some people back home to come pick up the dog - who's paws by now had begun to deteriorate rapidly from the increased pace.
And so she would crank out mile after mile every day from that point on - busting out way more miles per day.
To no avail though - she was, as I remember, 95 miles short even with the breakneck pace she had tried to maintain after the dog had been sent home. And she was so disappointed, so depressed that she'd not hiked to Katahdin. She'd had her parents come and pick her up at the end of her leave of absence window and drive her to Katahdin. She would write and beat herself up about the disappointment.
The next year she would come back and finish the remaining miles and would write about that some. I don't think, to her, it was the same. Those 95 miles had haunted her.
I couldn't stand not knowing what had happened when her thru-hike had ended prematurely when the leave of absence had closed. It was months later I'd decided to write to her and ask what had happened.
She was just the nicest person. Honest about what had happened.
As I remember, she'd summitted Katahdin the weekend that her thru-hike had ended prematurely, then went to work the following Monday morning. Right off the Trail, into rush hour traffic, arriving at her desk. Trail to office life in a matter of hours as I remember.
She told me she was in tears for a week after her thru-hike had ended and that it had taken everything she would muster within herself to get in the car and drive to work for the following weeks after her thru-hike. That the people in cars on her drive had been so mean to her, that the usual office politics at work had come to bear on her. That the world wasn't at all like the life she had experienced on the AT and she'd become so sad about that recognition.
But she'd made it through all that and had come to some kind of resolution about the world in order to keep on with keeping on.
I'd meet her later -- a year or two after her thru-hike at a hiker get-together and would speak briefly with her. It was something to meet the actual person who'd written about the experience. Photos only go so far and they're different when you actually meet a person you admire.
Somewhere after her thru-hike was over, I'd said to myself, "When this job is over, whenever that is, I'm going to go and do that. I'm going to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail."
And so it was.
Datto