How far out is too early to plan
2020 here....
I can't stop thinking, researching, reading, watching videos...
Thru Hiking is all I can think about!
Never too far out as planning is a good part of the fun! Seriously, it is fun. For some, at least.
Never too early. Work on your gear choices. The luxury of time allows you to research and wait for the best deals on the stuff you want to bring on your thru. Maybe, more importantly, it allows you to narrow down your stuff so you don't bring heavy stuff you won't use or need.
Also, it'll allow you to do lots of shakedown hikes to give you a feel of what you're getting into.
Planning is half the fun! However, I will warn you that your significant other will eventually start to feel neglected if you frequently become immersed and detached from the here-and-now for long periods of time.
GA←↕→ME: 1973 to 2014
Tip: do as much or more planning for what you'll do and how you'll live after your thru hike...this is the best advice you'll ever get.
That depends entirely on you. Have your finances in order? Know where you'll be working? Can you take a leave of absence? Have the gear already? Do you hike now? Camp now? Do you often get excited about a new venture, plan it to death, and then move onto another venture before starting the first one? Is it the planning you enjoy, or the actual activity? Special dietary needs? What kind of physical condition are you in?
If you have the gear and the time off, the experience, and the money, you can plan the whole thing in a weekend. If you're ordering customized gear, you might need six weeks for it to be delivered. I suspect most people overplan when they don't have the experience. Myself included.
I worked out the food, the stops, the distances, travel arrangements, shuttles, lodging, etc for the first three weeks of my trip. I had never camped before, but had extensive hiking experience. Turns out once I hit the trail, it all came easily and I tossed those plans out the window. I attempted a thru this spring, and only made it 600 miles. I'm heading out again in the spring of 2017, the only planning I'm doing this time is to keep healthy over the winter and to buy a plane ticket.
However it turns out, you're in the right place. Lot's of experienced people to learn from here, they sure helped me out.
2020??? Dangit that's too long. In the meantime start sleeping in your backyard or start doing weekend backpacking trips or a section hike or a week in a wilderness area or something. Take some vacation days and hit any trail of your choosing and start living outdoors. No sense in waiting 4 years. By then every wilderness area could be a golf course and every national forest logged and filled with fracking pumps and bulldozed roads.
So, have any recommendations for good lightweight golf clubs? Can we use the fracking pumps as charging stations for our electric scooters, to zip along the forest roads? I'm going to have to rethink my gear if I want to break par.Originally Posted by Tipi Walter
How on EARTH did golf, the greatest game ever invented, become part of this thread? Well, since it is.... laugh away, but some of us golfers choose to walk our courses, rather than ride in those silly little carts. And the courses I play have huge ups/downs.... walk 7-8 miles up and down big hills, yeah, you actually DO want fairly lightweight equipment!
I'm probably 2020 also for my thru. Maybe we'll meet on the trail. I agree with others who posted...shakedown hikes are the best! I've gotten my initial gear based on what I thought was best a year ago, and have been using, evaluating, and switching out for what works for me. Right now I want to trade my JetBoil in for a MSR multi-fuel, I want a lighter puffy jacket, and a quilt and underquilt for my hammock. I love my hammock, though.
Just about every hike I go on, and I'm back to just about every weekend, all year long, I wear my full pack. I'm training! I get some strange looks if I'm on a 3 mile suburban trail, but I return the weird looks with a smile and a quick "training for the AT" and almost always get a smile and a wave back, and sometimes half-hour conversations. So get your gear on your back, get out there and explore your local trails. Use them to train. You'll find that there are some unforgettable people and places out there, and you'll decrease the learning curve when you arrive at Springer.
never too early to learn, which is what you probably mean.
I'm waiting for my dog party to die. 18 most likely. But it could be 20
Hiking the AT is “pointless.” What life is not “pointless”? Is it not pointless to work paycheck to paycheck just to conform?.....I want to make my life less ordinary. AWOL
I heard about thru hiking the AT about 25 years ago. Ever since then it's been on my mind, then coming closer to retirement, became a reality. Started "really" planning about a year out. I made it just past Roanoke about 750 miles in before I decided to throw in the towel. That another story though. But still planning on another attempt next year so we'll see if life works out that way and I can have another go at it. Good luck and it never hurts to plan and be prepared, no matter how long it takes. Do a lot of shake down hikes in the meantime for gear and yourself.
- Trail name: Thumper
Been planning for 50 years, 5 more to go - give or take
Im a big fan of planning. The seed to hike the AT planted 15 years ago...then marriage, kids and a professional job.......
Now I'm looking at 2019 or 2020 myself. I have however, been buying gear as I'm leaving next spring. The up side is that I will have enough time to completely figure my gear and system before I show up at Springer looking like a fool.
Plan and dream about a future hike or watch TV? It's never to early. One thing may lead to another that you never planned on.
You can plan all you want but it won't change your odds all that much one way or another.
Hostels, services and accommodations will certainly change between now and 2020. Gear, and the trail itself, probably less so.
Don't bother planning. Just hike. A lot. Go hike the Long Trail as a practice run.
Funny, I considered the AT to be a practice run for the LT !
My remark was in ref to Jan Liteshoe, who did the LT in '02 to see if she might enjoy an AT thru hike. Which she did, the following year. Wrote a journal of her LT journey, "The Ordinary Adventurer." A good read.
My personal experience is that the northern half of the LT makes the AT in the White Mountains feel like a walk in the park. In any case, you begin to appreciate the incredible effort it takes to maintain a trail through dense eastern forest -- and what the trail looks like when there's just not enough volunteers to go around.
The LT is the Readers Digest version of the AT. All of the hard and none of the easy
As for planning, no sense in getting into any nitty-gritty detail about it 2 years out. But it is time to start getting ready for it by collecting, and then using, the required gear.
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