Hiawassee, Georgia

It's raining.
A lot.
So we're in the Budget Inn airing out our gear.

Springer Mountain, Georgia

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan- like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

- Thoreau, Walden

 

The human mind struggles to grasp astronomical scales of distance and time. The Appalachian Trail spans 2,100+ miles from Springer Mountain, Georgia to Maine's Mount Katahdin, a distance that is too great to fully comprehend. Such commitments can only begin with half serious talk, only to be followed up the next day with a more serious discussion that can be summed up by, "did we just agree to hike the Appalachian Trail?" So here begins the result of months of planning and preparations. We have shed our normal routines of life, but sometimes we'll keep in touch along the way---

 

- Scott, Trent, and Kyle