CJ and the next level of backpacking: the machete weight loss system

I was woken up early in the morning to get ready for my shuttle back to the start of the trail. This was something I wasn't accustomed to yet, seeing as it was before I started going to sleep with the sun and before I discovered the joy of coffee in the morning :). So I was tired.. I finally called home and got pushed into a van and shipped off. Looking back, the advice that Ole Man gave me was backwards to what I wanted out of the trail, but it started me off. He said that alot of people get lacksadaisical out on the trail, It may feel like I'm free or unemployed, but I have a job out here too; My job is to walk all day... That's a very grim way of looking at it. If I wanted a job I'd have stayed home.. or volunteer to set up a festival or something. But anyway I set off, I was almost immediately warned of a bear in the area and with a mystified feeling I walked the ten miles to the last store I'd be seeing for awhile. I had a nice freshly grilled hot dog and while I was packing up my stuff I started talking to the ridgerunner posted in the area who went by CJ. CJ was someone who must have been in his late twenties, but was still living in the body of a teenager and in the mind of a nine year old. This wasn't saying that he was stupid or weak in any fashion, far, far from it. He was instead the epitomy of youth. I talked about somewhere I wanted to go or somewhere I'd been and he knew how to hike it, where to go, local customs and traditions, you name it, he knew it. Looking at my pack setup a shutter must have gone down his spine. Hearing everyone elses thoughts about him later down the line he fits the perfect profile of an ultra-lightweight "nazi" for lack of a better word, but he didn't press, or force in anyway, he just had it down and seemed repulsed by extra weight. He claimed he could drop ten pounds out of my pack right then and there, so me, being all ears at this point in the trip, went inside, got a post box and emptied out the contents of my pack for him to go through. His eyes lit up like a child and it was clear why he had become a ranger, he loved this stuff. The first thing, my beloved machete, he tried to get me to drop, when I refused he set it to work instead. My gators were too long, unecessary, heavy, replaced by taking one of my unecessary extra pairs of socks, and chopping the feet off to form lightweight boot covers.. impressive.Then he started getting on a roll: "Wow is that a hard cover book?" machete. No cover book. "Do you really use this whole toothbrush?" nope, machete. "Are those METAL zippers on this pack?" I guess just the rope works. "Why do you have your sleeping bag stuffed in that?" "It's waterproof?" "Who needs it, just stuff it all in the bottom of your ruck." "Why do you need this deoderant?" "Well if you have to keep it you definitely don't use all this plastic it's in." This went on. His favorite phrase had become "Machete". I was having a ball with it too. It shaved off three times it's own weight, it had earned it's place for the time being and CJ made excellent sense finding a nice external place for it on my pack. He figured "If your actually going to carry this thing you might as well have some conversations about it." After I had finished with CJ I felt great. I had gotten rid of pretty much everything.. we dropped another eight pounds.. that's alot when my pack had already gotten torn through the day before. Yes, I was ready. I made my way too the first lean-to, which is a wooden shelter with three walls a sleeping platform and a flat rail for cooking and such. I had sent my hammock home at Abol Bridge after CJ had gotten me all excited about getting rid of everything. I didn't need it, I didn't really need much of anything. His last words to me were "go get 'em, your indestructible" haha this guy was great. His only warning to me about the hazards of hiking was that you start to realize that you can goof off your entire life. This is true, and quite tempting, but I hadn't seen anything yet...

Materialism: Makes much less sense when you have to carry it all on your back

So, let's see, I finally have a solid chunk of time to sit down and write this thing. When we left off I had just summited my first mountain and realized that I didn't know @#$% about hiking. That's alright though, that's what field experience is for. So I woke myself up and hitched a ride out of Baxter State Park into the town of Millinocket where I was looking for the AT Lodge who I originally had planned to have pick me up at the airport and such, but didn't offer late night shuttling. I got dropped off right on the main strip and started walking; and wouldn't you know the first guy I bumped into was the owner of the lodge who went by the trailname "Ole Man". He took me in and started giving me the rundown of the place. I was directed to the back porch where I dumped out all of my belongings and he assigned an experienced hiker he had on staff to give me "the shakedown". This is going to be my favorite part of taking any of my friends hiking. While I whined and tried to justify the myriad piles of nonsense I was carrying he was going through and proving 90% of it to be unecessary. Cotton, jeans, extra clothing, uncecessary. Extra books, extra first aid, extra double redundency backups of everything, useless. "Why do you need so many books" "When are you going to wear all of these clothes". It was true, half of my posessions were in the send home pile before I had to start applying thought to the process. He was right, I really didn't need all of that stuff at all, but it was happening so fast. The best mindframe that got me through was that I knew nothing about this new life I was undertaking and these people seemed to know everything. I dumped my cup and started filling it with all of these ridiculous little tricks to save weight. Packaging especially adds so much bulk and weight; the solution is to just dump it all out into zip lock bags and sort it by use. I was also given a new hiking style backpack in exchange for my alice pack. It was light and it lacked the bandolier system of a million little pockets all holding loose items. Now I had four bags: hygiene, supply, first aid and smoking. Simple, easy to remember, and best of all I could take everything out of my ruck in short order and not have it scattered all over creation. After I had all of my useless civilian fantasy items removed from my posession it was time to get me some actual gear. The hiker who's name I forget, but translates to "bearded one" in Navaho, and which he was very proud of and seemed to speak in a reverent tone proceeded to take me down the street to the local outfitter who had a small selection. The shopkeeper was an odd enough man himself. Scrawny, Big glasses and the kind of demeanor that was odd at best. His celing was covered in Buddhist prayer flags, he kept on about how even though he was now a businessman money was not the important thing and almost every statement was joined with a yah mahn at the regularity of a grunt adressing his superiors in every phrase. If everyone is crazy in the woods then I guess this guy fit right in, I certainly had no problem with his attitude, especially after he dropped me a 10% discount and continued to be exceedingly pleasant, if not slightly elsewhere. I now had hiking poles which transform a regular human into a spider-like quadriped, a set of new gators to go over my boots, a new light weight water bottle, a stove, purifyers, yata yata. I was all set up, now in what I considered the "realistic" level of pack weight. So I wandered off as my spacey self tends to do, got a last pizza and settled into the hostel for the night. There were two other hikers sharing the facilities, some kid from UF who was going home after getting halfway through the hundred mile wilderness and an older hippy guy who would be joining in more throughout the story by the name of "Dirty" Bobby. That night I got my first introduction to trail philosophy. The former of the two was precise and saught to win by blasting a million details that he had been forced to memorize which I couldn't match on flat Repetoire alone, but his overall philosophy was simple enough, human achievement and possibility, no quantum leaps, no guessing. It seemed like a really slow and tedious approach to learning, but it left few weaknesses. And dirty had a much more intiresting approach to thinking about life. His "affixiation" was death. In his eyes when we fall asleep we die, the only sure thing was death and he had a pretty well built process summing it all up. For the most part he seemed inherently chaotic, he favored capricion and nonsense, and as I had argued before he claimed that his focus and acceptance of death made life all the sweeter. I liked it. My proposal of a thousand parts making a complete and working whole went over well with Bobby, but got lost in semantics with the first guy. It was a fun time, I was starting to settle into this new life and the next morning I would be entering the hundred mile wilderness. That's about a week, with nothing, no supplies, and the start of the "real" trail experience. Usually the final crucible for the northbounders finishing up their hike, but my proving ground. I would survive, my comfort was not as assured. I was ready.

Zen and the art of beginning the journey of a thousand footsteps:

Preparing for the trail you start to realize how much stuff you use on a daily basis. In the last few weeks you scramble between different outfitters buying way more stuff than you'll ever need. Your attempt is to create the most civilized, overprepared experience for yourself that you can. Your little mind is freaking out as it tries to try to cram your pre-existing life into a little green bag. This is not the right way, but it's the first step. The first shock for me came when I actually had to lift this monster of a pack which probably weighed around sixty pounds before food or water... not optimal for climbing up and down mountains, but it was what I had, and it was time to go. So I slung the beast on my shoulders, said goodbye to family and friends, and set out to the airport. I flew into Bangor, Maine and got a cab to the closest hotel. I smoked out with some sketchy kids and took apart my pack to resecure everything; It seemed excessive as a package, but I couldn't figure out any way around it.. I thought that I needed extra notebooks, changes of clothes, heavy metal carabiners, a hammock and a tarp, full packages of medical supplies, extra, extra, extra. I had no clue, but I'm tenacious. I threw the beast back on and got a ride to Baxter Park where my preconceptions were further picked apart. I had to wait a day to hike the mountain, then come back down on the same side, to stay at the park again, and THEN I would actually be allowed to start. Alot of regulations for the middle of the woods, but I didn't care. I would take any obstacle as it came. It seemed nice enough, I had a place to hang my hammock, a place to start a fire and a stream to drink out of. The rangers were even helping me out wherever they could, I fell into this laxadaisical little daydream.

Until: I actually had to start camping. The hammock did it's best to keep me out, while the bugs faught me back in. Black flies make mosquitos look like little bitches, sometimes you don't notice them until they fly away and theres just a little spot of blood on you where they bit through.. there was alot more than one of them.. My initial idea for food was pasta and red sauce; and rice and beans; plus a jar of peanut butter. I had no stove and all the wood was wet.. Eventually, and I mean eventually, past the charred fingers and the burnt eyes I had a servicable pasta dish, but no fork.. So my first night in the woods, here I am, sitting at a picinic table, covered in bug bites, eating pasta with my fingers and drinking half muddy water.. I was suprisingly happy at the fact I wasn't starving, but there was definitely room for improvement. It was at this point I decided that I knew nothing and I was prepared to accept a completely new model for life.

The next morning I climbed Katahdin, usually the blissful last climb for northbounders (nobos) , but as a sobo It was just the beginning for me. It begins as an unassuming dirt path with a slight elevation and continues to escalate to greater and greater slants, until the trees begin thining out and boulders take their place. Hand over head climbing is an essential skill here. Up and up and up until the peak is within sight. I charged the last twenty feet and pulled myself over the top with a sense of accomplishment. "Hell yeah I just climbed that bitch!" But no, I was greeted by other hikers preparing for the second half of the climb.. which happened to be a pile of rocks resembling a spine at about a sixty degree angle straight up to the flat tableland and then a slight elevation up to the peak which was now within sight in the distance..fml. However hard, however deceptive, and however unprepared I was, there was no lying about this mountain. It was beautiful, it towered above Everything, and it was infinitely greater than I. This little I standing on the mountaintop, amidst the angels, amidst the heavens and completely untouchable by worldy concern. I became Zarathustra, the one who has descended from the mountain. And my legs had done things they had never imagined.

I didn't have enough cash for a regular tent sight, so the ranger set me up in The Birches, a camp usually reserved for nobos finishing up their hike. The veterans I met helped me out with some tips, began painting the picture for what this trail was really like and even gave me a fork and a weather cover for my pack. I decided to head into town and stay at the AT lodge for a night to drop at least half my weight. Field test complete, now it was time to learn the most important lesson that seperates camping from backpacking: The differance between what you think you need and what you really need.

What this is:

After a few requests to start a blog, and my abundance of free time while in town I thought that it might not be a bad idea. So, to begin, what is the Appalachian Trail? It is a 2,200 mile stretch of wilderness that extends from Katahdin Mountin, Maine to Springer Mountin, Georgia. As you'd probably expect, it's a tiny path through the woods that goes over mountains, rivers, bogs and just about every time of terrain possible. It's marked by white "blazes" or spray painted rectangles on trees and rocks and such; and cairns, little piles of rocks that extend into the distance. Following such a route you apparently get extremely strong legs, an appetite that I have never imagined, bug bites, rashes, a little insanity, self reliance and a pretty zen vibe. Everyone seems to be out here to help everyone else. The monotony of walking forward is broken up by hostels, shelters, all you can eat buffets and that view from the top of the mountain where everything suddenly becomes ok and your newly inspired to hit the next one. Most of it is rather indescribable, but in this blog that will be just my pursuit. I hope I can capture at least my trail experience, and maybe give you some inspiration to try some part of it or a similar journey yourself... At least a good read. Let's get started then: