are we done?

we’re done!

it’s over.

it’s over?

*confused crying*

*happy crying*

that feeling you get on the very last day of senior year in high school when you have your first-ever conversation with that quiet metalhead guy who sat two desks down from you in Western Civ all year and you realize a) he’s really nice and kind of cute and b) you’ll probably never see him again, and that’s not actually sad because whatever, you only ever had one conversation, but like, whoa!, so you sob quietly while unloading the dishwasher until your mom comes and gives you a hug. Except you’re in front of a trail sign and it’s windy.

let’s get married!

The first few hours:

I’m hungry

am I hungry?

*being in a car makes you uncomfortably sweaty for some reason*

there are so many things to do! (excitedly)

there are so many things to do. (exhaustedly)

hotel room feelings

I don’t want to eat pizza anymore but also I don’t want to make decisions

INTERNET

naptime

The first day:

hotel is house?

where is house? want house!

*avoiding bank account*

i do not like any of these clothes and yet i am powerless to resist the urge to buy them

why do so many people want to talk to me?

quiet panic attack in the shampoo aisle at Target

I’m not overtired, you’re overtired!

oh I was just hungry

The first week:

Excitedly making plans to do things - but later, when we get home.

I’m not going to do things now, are you crazy? We’re not home yet.

I’ll have energy when we get home, I promise.

I’m excited to go home.

(whining) wanna go ho-o-o-ome!

Home:

is it over? are we really done?

we’re really done!

house house house house house

the house looks slightly different than I remember it. UNACCEPTABLE.

surge of joy expressed through frantic but haphazard organizing

my pots! my pans! dinner! television! laundry!

where did all the forks go?

why am I tired?

do you know where I put my robe?

i want to do things but i also do not

*blog guilt*

obsessively researches vaccuums, does not buy one

oh right I’m supposed to shower

why did I buy all these clothes?

Work:

how do you do, fellow kids?

mhm. hmmmm. interesting.

please don’t ask me about the trail

the trail? It was… long.

(with secret joy) sorry i missed your text, i was in a meeting

oh right, I’m good at this

cannot feel blog guilt because I am at work and therefore busy

this is fun!

you mean I gotta do this again tomorrow??

The first day off after being back at work (today):

Sure, but let’s cuddle first

I just need a cup of coffee

I just need to drink my coffee and then I’ll get up

I’m getting up at ten-thirty, I promise

Let me finish reading this article

I’ll get dressed in ten minutes

Since you’re up, can you get me another cup of coffee, babe?

But bed is so cozy!

No, I’m really getting up in ten minutes.

I mean it this time

Okay just one more article

Fuck, it’s noon.

(to myself) I’m UP! I’m UP! Jeez!

Okay, I’m not technically up, but I’m thinking about it.

Okay, now I’m up.

We’ll get going in half an hour, I just need to write a thing real quick.

Oct 20: absolute misery, 2°c and sleeting, called it early in town of Colfax when it was too dangerously cold to hike more

Oct 21: good 35 mile day, mostly off road which I wasn't expecting, felt some despair in the morning but as the day warmed up it turned out to be good. Nice trail through Sheyenne National Grassland, nighthiking with cows - cows look kinda creepy at night with their eyes, but big golden harvest moon. A little frosty snow after the sun set, definitely right around freezing, eyelash frost. Didn't pack enough hipbelt snacks, starving waiting for dinner.

Oct 22: grassland morning, windmill pump, dogs!! Had to call sherrif because friendly dogs followed us wanting to play for 10 miles, fun but stressful when we realized they couldn't figure out how to get home. Dogs ended up being ok, their owner came to get them.

Oct 23: flustered at the gas station in the morning, long but pretty road walk, trail magic from Matt and family, first pointless loop of North Dakota was a real doozy, mice scurrying from headlamp beam on paved county road (weirdly a lot of mice out), bad trail down big escarpment at night, not ideal. Made all the dogs bark in Kathryn.

Oct 24: day into Valley city, last nearo day. Bad weather forecasted, made it to town just in time, around 2:30 weather miserable

Oct 25: full breakfast buffet, nice roadwalk, Lake Ashtabula absolute shit, feeling PMS-y & grouch. Trail magic for dinner

Oct 26: finish with terrible trail near Ashtabula, forecast calls for rain overnight so we stay at a motel in Cooperstown

Oct 27: unexpected zero because of bad weather. Frustrating - we're full of energy and restless and all we want to do is finish this thing. Nothing good on TV either, so we watch way too many hours of a bad Discovery show.

Oct 28: gotta do a 40 today so we can make it to the New Rockford post office in time to pick up Constantine's passport tomorrow. Sunny, cold in the morning and the cafe isn't open so I'm tired and grumpy when we leave town. After a couple right-angle turns we get to the road we'll follow for the rest of the day, and some of the day after. Not quite dead straight, since it has a few bends in it to go around lakes, but it might as well be. Turn off the brain and walk, no navigation to speak of. The wind is hard and constant and becomes annoying, pushing my pack against my back at an angle that torques my shoulder, and there's nothing I can do except suck it up. At least it's a pretty warm day. Hiked 1.8mi off trail to get to legal camping in Grace City, saw a meteor explode in a shower of sparks. Didn't get to camp until 9:10ish, stars are unreal out here. Can see the milky way and everything, so gorgeous.

Oct 29: birthday! Turned 29 today - I'm old. Day started early to make the post office in New Rockford, didn't feel like much of a birthday. Rushed, cold, tired, yawning all the way through the sunrise at 7am. Straight dirt roads, uneventful, made it to town around 2:40pm & made a gas station pit stop for pizza. C's passport arrived, no problems. Have to resupply for 4 days, last major section, last week of trail and last heavy pack for this whole adventure. Surreal. Checked messages and drank an iced tea, caffeine rush plus happy birthday messages make me happy. Do a little dance and sing silly songs with C and actually feel like it's my birthday for a minute, despite meager resupply lunch and the rushed day. For the rest of the day I'm happy, it's warm enough to take off puffy and we hit a canal trail where we can camp wherever we want. Stars are amazing again. Wish my shoulder wasn't so painful but otherwise, no complaints. A very thru-hiking birthday but a pretty good one after all, even if low-key. I realize we're really low on fuel in camp, only 3-4 boils left in the can, and start to worry about where we'll buy more, until C points out that we have only 4 more nights left after tonight. We don't have to buy more fuel. We can just do no-cook dinner the last night. Only four more nights! Wild. Suprise birthday cupcakes. Coyotes howling and yipping in an uncharacteristically still night.

Oct 30: didn't take notes

Oct 31: what looks like a white pebbled shoreline from a distance is actually thousands of migrating birds. Wow. Nice trail

Nov 1: can't get warm for hours in the morning, so cold that we break out the chemical heat packs and discover that half of them don't work. Only becomes a reasonable temperature at 11am. Canal all day, and most of tomorrow. A newer canal, full of water, surrounded by high banks on either side. From the service road at the bottom we can't really see out much, so it's a dream landscape; perfectly straight water, perfectly straight road to either side, perfectly even grass banks extending straight on forever, with the silhouette of bare trees breaking now and then against the sun. All we can hear is the wind rushing overhead and the distant sound of geese. I use the world surreal too often but it's truly an unreal place.

Nov 2: hands too cold to type. Almost done. Just imagine the word "surreal" typed over and over. Don't think I would be capable of even another week on trail, body broken down. So tired. So ready to be done. What does it mean to be done?

Nov 3: done! No notes.

Oct 13: rain forecasted, C preemptively sad (half a joke). Mega grasshopper on tent, almost looks like six legged lizard from below. Blustering rain arrives at 11, more wind and drizzle than soaking but still dreary. No cell service even tho I can see two towers from the top of this hill - trail puts us on the only bumpy hilly stuff for miles, seemingly on purpose. Frustrated. Injured vulture fell out of a tree, nearly fell on my head! Couldn’t figure out what it was at first, took me aback like "huh?", couldn't make sense of the outline. For a second thought it was a porcupine or a housecat. Poor thing, missing wingfeathers, couldn't fly and had trouble walking. Hop-shuffled down the trail the same way we were going so we had to scare the vulture more by following it, it was terrified but couldn't move fast. Finally shuffled off the side of the trail and looked pathetic and confused as we walked by and didn't attack it. Sort of wanted to stop and give it some of my salami, but too wet and and cold to stop and you shouldn't feed wild animals anyway. Reminded me of when a panicked songbird flew straight into me on the PCT, then surprised I couldn't remember more details about the songbird incident. Got wetter and colder, camped at surprise shelter after only 25 miles but still feel good about that

Oct 14: sometimes I wonder if thru-hiking is just an elaborate procrastination method so I don't have to grow up. 29th birthday coming up :/ day started misty, dreary and cold but gradually dried up and became pleasant, though still chilly. Didn't take puffy off all day. Trail improved significantly at Itasca state park and stayed broad and easy, night hiked until we did 33 miles.

Oct 15: raining and cold. Wasn't supposed to rain but it's drizzling and miserable all morning. Eat terrible lunch of terrible Aldi food underneath the only pine tree we can find - everything else is shelterless sticks. The one trailhead without a little roof obviously is where we planned to eat. Pass through a tornado path, huge trees torn up by the roots and thrown everywhere, like an avalanche path but messier and less defined. Gets warmer and drier in afternoon, see a beaver close-up when we get water for camp, sleep beneath an owl tree with a loudly calling owl. Finally not overcast, we can see it's a half-moon. Phone screen sorta wet, hard to type

Oct 16: last bit of trail for a long time. Cold but mercifully dry and sunny in the morning, found two bags of trail magic and munched on candy through the fields until we got to the roadwalk. Seeing fast food trash on the side of the road always gets your hopes up - interesting thought to pursue later in writing, how you start fantasizing based on a Taco John's cup on the side of the road and how it doesn't really mean anything since cars can go so unfathomably far compared to pedestrians. Hard to imagine how fast cars go and what a reasonable driving distance is when you've been walking for six months. From looking online, Frazee doesn't seem to have any motels, so we have to eat, resupply and go, two more days. Makes more sense with the miles but I do sort of wish we could stop today anyway. Warm enough not to wear puffy for the first time in five days. Lost my lip balm and my nose is getting chapped from being cold and drippy. On the road walk, these are at last the flat lands I expected in Minnesota - I can see the water tower and steeples of Frazee from over five miles away. I hope they have food there.

Later, got pizza at gas station (the only food in town) after being welcomed by locals with free farmer’s market apples and water bottle refills. Saw the world's largest turkey (fibreglass structure, pretty big), then roadwalked to Vergas, home of the world's largest loon. Camped somewhat short of the loon. Still no cell service even though I can literally see a cell tower; really scraping the bottom of the barrel, podcast-wise.

Oct 17: get woken up at 2am by a duck party - sounds like dozens of ducks landing in the pond we're camped near, all honking and flapping. Lasts about half an hour before the ducks move on, impossible to sleep through. Up at 7am, freezing cold morning but dry, walk a mile into town and have breakfast at the Loon Cafe. World’s Largest Loon is pretty big, concrete structure and very 1960s. Vergas is a smaller town than Frazee but somehow has more services. Snuffly nose all day, even after it gets hot. Thinking about all the weird spirally passages and mucousy nightmare meat lurking under my face behind my eyeballs. Internal structure of noses! Lunch at Maplewood state park and it's hot, drying out party and chat with a couple locals. Nervous heeler dog fake-charges our feet but then slinks back up to say she's sorry, cute but wow, those teeth. Tons and tons of ladybugs drifting through the air like confetti on the roadwalk. Still no cell service, even though I walk under multiple cell towers and try restarting my phone so I'm really getting to the podcasts I don't care about and downloaded just in case. 13 miles before Fergus Falls, walking past a marsh, there's a huge flock of migrating songbirds and the noise is incredible. Can't really see a huge mass, just handfuls flying over the marsh, but they make a huge racket and you know they're in the reeds everywhere. 37ish mile day to outskirts of Fergus Falls

Oct 18: very quick nearo in, no cabs running so we walk two miles off trail to motel. Really good rest day, and only two weeks left on trail!

That's a wrap, folks! After 187 days and roughly 4,830 miles, we arrived at the Western Terminus at 5:38pm on November 3rd. My parents made the complicated trip down from Winnipeg to pick us up, and now we’re sitting in a Grand Forks, ND hotel room waiting for our Covid test results so we can drive back to Canada. The real world still feels overwhelming - too much internet, too much to do, and a lot of logistics to manage for getting back home. I've fallen behind on posting my daily diaries, though I'm not too far behind on writing them, so the remaining installments will be scheduled over the next few days. I'll have some more substantive thoughts for you after that, when we've had a chance to rest and get settled. What an adventure, and what a challenge. I'm tired, and I'm proud of us, and I'm going to take a nap.

Talk to you soon!

-Magpie

Sept 28: didn't take notes

Sept 29: expected to hit northern terminus of SHT today but the trail was pretty chunky, slowed us down somewhat. Met 3 good dogs including a very wiggly happy Lab puppy!!! Hit sub-1000 miles on the NCT, camped at Andy Creek camp and finally had a site to ourselves for the last night on the SHT.

Sept 30: Finished off the SHT, a thru-hike within a thru-hike. Not feeling in a rush on the Border Route Trail, last 65 miles of difficult trail before the Kek and then only 39 on the Kek to the roadwalk. Was worried that the little-used BRT would be a bushwhacky, blowdown mess but so far it's pretty good. Obviously not as maintained as the SHT but the tread is in good shape and it's not terribly overgrown, just some overhanging branches here and there and a blowdown or two. We can see Canada from our lunch spot, just across the Pigeon River

Oct 1: overcast, warm and still. Only crows. Got super hot later in the day, bad pack chafe. So sweaty, relieved by small drizzle in the afternoon but still was so sweaty and hot phone screen won't let me type. Old burn area near end of day, great views but got absolutely beaten up by thick stands of young, head-height trees. C can't stop hiccuping and it's driving me nuts along with glitchy humid phone screen

Oct 2: drizzly morning, getting drenched by saplings as well as beaten up by them, trail turns into two-track near Loon Lake. Lunch on overlook of Cross River, fingers still too waterlogged to type. End of BRT in a couple miles. end of BRT, Kek fire damaged and trashy for first twelve miles, camped early because rain is miserable and we'd rather do two extra dry road miles tomorrow than two wet bushwhack miles today

Oct 3: Kek improved to what I thought it'd be after Agamok Bridge, making good time, saw Apple Pie going other direction around when we were planning to have lunch. Another hiker! So good to stop and talk to someone doing the same trail as you. Spent nearly a full hour but that's ok, only have to finish the Kek before nightfall and then its wide open road miles, easy to nighthike. Too bad the NCT is so long, makes us rush though the beautiful stuff and there's not enough beautiful stuff to enjoy to make up for town rush. Will have to come back to the Boundary Waters and do it at a more relaxed pace. Camped in National Forest off the road after having to get really nasty swamp water cause I forgot to grab good clean stream water before we left BWCWA

Oct 4: woke up early, road miles in the dark reminds me of bike trip, having the highway to myself with my big powerful bike light was so cool. Pausing occasionally to listen for C's pat-pat-pat of altras on pavement to make sure he's doing ok, out of sight behind curves in the road. So still and silent I can hear him from far behind. 17 miles, should get there at 11am. Got period overnight (good timing, only a few hours away from a shower) - last period of trail, hopefully!!

Oct 5: highway and paved bike path out of town. So tired yesterday that we resupplied in the morning, then got going around 9:45. Telephone wires and transmission lines make interesting shapes against the sky. Walked through a cloud of ladybugs. Enjoying the easy miles but keep reminding myself that this will be my life for the next month, until I finish the trail. Little garter snake crossing a quiet highway, but very slowly, and I worry about it getting creamed but don't want to get bit trying to help. Hurry, little snake, hurry! Then, I spot two or three teeeeeeeny tiny snakes (skinnier than pencils, just wee babies) hanging out on the side of the warm bike path pavement, thankfully safer. The marshes next to the road must be good habitat for them, and they're about to hibernate. Still lots of ladybugs too.

Oct 6: bald eagles over the stream, intermittent chunks of bike path interspersed with road walk. Cloudy, overcast, crows calling and geese honking. Ate lunch near Biwabik, sandwiches from the gas station back in Ely, but they were unexpectedly tiny and we were still starving. Ran into Biwabik and ate Subway, then were still hungry and got gas station pizza. Finally full, too full, actually kinda burpy and sleepy after that but we're aiming to hike 40 miles and had to go. After long, crappy, busy highway miles with small shoulder, at 4pm fnally got to the continuous portion of the Mesabi bike path, off the highway all the way into Grand Rapids. Settled on doing 36 or 37 tonight, camping on public land outside Iron Mountain, on account of our extra lunch break in Biwabik and still being sleepy from the bad pizza. Weird temperature, can't decide whether to take off my midlayer - too hot and too cold at the same time. Wish I had a Segway so I didn't have to walk pavement

Oct 7: woke up only a few miles from Mountain Iron, looking forward to coffee, but it's so tiny it doesn't even have a gas station. Ok, only 8 miles to Buhl, which looks bigger. But the gas station there is permanently closed and has been for while. none of these towns have food! We're packing light so we have a very sad lunch of leftover tortillas and candy. Also the bathrooms at the park outside Buhl are locked - wish we had got more food at the Lucky Seven gas station last night but we really thought we'd be able to eat all day. Trail skirts around Hibbing but we might have to go into there anyway because we're both totally out of dinners and almost out of snacks. C only had jawbreakers,I have a couple bars and that's it. Car with a flat tire and the rear bumper hanging off hauling ass down the bike path. What the fuck?

Oct 8-11: forgot to post from Grand Rapids and then didn't take notes.

Sept 18: I hate how the superior hiking trail maps don't have mileages on them! They have dots so you can count up, one by one, the miles, but the dots aren't labelled. Therefore I have no idea how far we've gone tonight, only that it's not good enough. I thought we would be through Duluth and past it tonight but no, we have to camp super early on the bluffs or night hike until ten or eleven pm to get to a paid campground on the university's forest study grounds. I want to push late but C is scared to walk through downtown after sunset, even thought it's a cute bougie downtown, and so we’re having another horribly indulgent, short day, and it's all my fault because I slept in and he let me because I was awake all night the night before. I feel awful. I want to punish myself for this laziness by not eating, but I know I won't be able to crush miles tomorrow if I don't eat. I need to do some kind of penance. Failure failure failure, we're never going to finish this stupid trail and it's all my fault for not pushing us harder and keeping our laziness in line. I hate myself.

Later, feeling a little more calm because I'm deliberately distracting myself from the miles we didn't do. Ate a home-dehydrated meal sent by C's mom, which was... spinach-forward let's say. Very liquidy and spinachy, except where it was unpleasantly crunchy. I forced myself to eat the entire thing, so penance achieved. Time to make a spreadsheet and try not to panic because we only did 23 miles.

Sept 19: takes forever to get through the ups and downs and around of the bluffs of Duluth. Severe thunderstorms forecasted, we're arguing all day about my despair over ever finishing this trail, and the rigid focus on time and miles it's giving me. C hates feeling rushed, I’m afraid we won't finish this trail if we don't rush. In fact, I'm certain we’re doomed to fail and this is all futile. We end up calling for a ride back to Duluth after only 27 miles to zero again and wait out the rain tomorrow. Feeling like a failure.

Sept 20: zero day, sleepy, made decision about arrowhead route

Sept 21: battery not plugged in all night means we get out of town late, big thanks to Caroline for providing an emergency back-up ride. Constantine turned himself into a pumpkin by eating too much. We hiked 24 miles and felt fine about it, figured out how to add my own pins with mileage markers to the SHT maps.

Sept 22: very pleasant morning through red maples and fall colours, much cruisier terrain than around Duluth - big relief. Reroute around gun club had me on edge, some guy shooting off a big loud gun at a sniper target. At the same time, two large aggressive dogs come running at me. I put my pepper spray away in a dumb spot thinking I wouldn't need it, oops, so I stand there on the road fumbling as a big growling mastiff-mutt comes barreling towards me. Fortunately he stops at the road and I don't end up needing to use the spray. It takes me a full 30 secs to get it out, much too slow. On edge as the sniper fires another round, making me yelp. Other than that, a good day. 34 miles and got to camp late but felt good, fairly easy walking in the afternoon, last 4 miles bike path. Relaxing now that we've accepted the inevitability of night hiking, we can chill for five minutes here and there instead of racing to beat the sunset

Sept 23: amazing views but you've gotta earn 'em. Pushed hard all day and only got 26.5 miles in but I am not upset about it, we did our best on super tough terrain. Amazing amazing amazing campsite on a cliff overlooking the valley, the river, the fall colours coming out, beautiful orange sunset. Part of our slow pace was the punishing hills but part of it was having to stop to take it all in - the SHT is like the AT if the AT had views. Rocky, rooty, straight up straight down, chunky boulder hopping, ankle breakers everywhere, but it's all worth it. My legs are actually tired for the first time in ages. Like, muscle-tired - I got a workout from all the stepping up and jumping down and balancing and not-falling. Too tired to write more. Nice to finally feel relaxed abiut this trail, this and the Kek are the last major obstacles between us and the terminus.

Sept 24: nice day, too tired. The leaves changed to orange overnight. Maples are too red to be real. Amazing.

Sept 25: didn't take contemporaneous notes this day. It was pretty cruisey, lots of colours, very busy campsite when we got there. Surprise bonus miles around Cascade river, will have to watch video to remember this day in detail. Saw an owl.

Sept 26: also forgot to take notes today. last day before Grand Marais II, aka Grand Marais, Minnesota (as opposed Grand Marais, Michigan). Still feeling good and grounded and in touch with trail. Thought it would be super bumpy & tough hiking like the day around Silver Bay but turned out to be pretty easy. Leaves have mostly fallen, we're back in stick season.

Sept 27: nearo day! Best nearo in a long time. Stayed at the campground in town and actually got to walk around doing Real People things instead of holing up in a strip mall motel and watching bad tv all day. Awesome little town, actually feeling revived and ready to go after this nearo. Almost sub-1000 miles left to go on this trail, and only ~140 miles left of difficult terrain. C had to go to the dentist, poor baby

Sept 10: mostly in the woods all day - short dirt road walk and then more confusion about old route vs new route. Stayed on old route to be consistent and it was of course longer and involved paved roadwalking but whatever. All my goddamn podcasts are about 9/11, no thank you. Got surprise trail magic from Bob and Susan who C met on Ice Age Trail 2 years ago, such kind people. Breakfast sandwiches and chocolate milk, and a promise to meet up later at copper falls. Copper falls was farther than anticipated but they still stuck around and gave us a sort-of dinner. Between the two trail magic breaks, we didn't have time to take lunch but felt well-fed anyway. Felt sad for no reason walking through the woods after roadwalk but pulled myself out of it. Fall colours just starting. Didn't think too much today, hard to write a full diary entry. (Added later: realized I felt sad because it's around the second anniversary of my dear friend Hayden's death. The fall colours reminded me of them.)

Sept 11: peaceful woods morning, having a nice day until we run into a non-fan in the middle of the woods, who seems to have gone out for a hike specifically to insult Constantine to his face. Unsettling - being the object of a parasocial relationship is strange. He seemed to think we would know who he was? Oh well. Saw lots of gigantic frogs today. Getting super tired and achey with bad shoulder chafe in the evening, just as the mosquitos were coming out. Terrain just up and down enough to be tiring with a heavy pack, but not truly steep - just consistently not flat. Micro-hills can be more exhausting than big ones cause at least you're up and over and then get to go down for a while on a big hill. Still beautiful terrain. Lots of people out and about enjoying it, including a group of 20+ college kids with massive packs on an outdoor leadership course. Caught a glance at their papers while we walked past them all taking a break on a bridge. I always always wonder what is in packs that big for a weekend. Like how do you do that?? My warm weather weekend setup would probably fit in a 20L daypack. Later, a guy from a local hiking Facebook group sticks a camera in our faces and tries to delay us at sunset! Doesn't even ask if we're ok with being filmed or interviewed, doesn't seem to know who we are or what we're doing aside from that we're hiking fast and hard. Bad vibe, if I was hiking solo I would have night hiked for an hour or two to get significant distance away from where he knows I am. Such weird interactions today.

Sept 12: rooty, toe-stubby trail all morning, lots of info signs around Owen Lake. Lunch - C packed out 1lb of cheese for some reason, so his sandwich was "cheese forward" (half a pound of cheese in a tortilla with hot sauce). Later, trying to access something like that fierce meditative joy of motion and mostly failing to find the flow state. Trying alternatively to tap into the "almost done" feeling of being near the end of a trail, and it's close, but we're still slightly too far away to find that motivation. Tired of this hike being a math problem; this much motion plus this many breaks equals sucess. Tired of doing averages, tired of the calculator being the third-most-used app on my phone. After today, less than 1400 miles to go, assuming the Kek opens and we don't have to take the Arrowhead cutoff. If the Kek stays closed, it's less than 1000 miles to go. Tired of not knowing how long this goddamn trail is. Rainforesty vibe, ferns and moss and sunshine. Trying to appreciate it but mostly I wanna be done so I can go home. 1400 miles is about 466 hours of walking. We walk about 11hrs a day so that's 42 days. We have 47 days left until our target finish date, so that's five rest days. We can do this.

Later, same day, after leaving Chequemegon National Forest and walking the last few miles through gorgeous sunset-lit birch, felt like I did find the flow and the peace of it after all. Got to Erick Lake campsite but it was already occupied by section hikers so after grabbing water we moved on to Morris Pond campsite. 34 miles today, and we still made camp before dark. Reassuring that we still have it in us and can crush miles when the terrain is cooperative. Absolutely stunning sunset, Morris Pond so clear and still that it reflected the trees like a mirror, crickets and frog calls through crystal-cool evening air accompanied by honks of migrating geese. A perfect pine-duff campsite under birches and large firs, and even a picnic table to eat dinner. This is what normal people picture when you say you camp every night, I wish we got to do it more often. Pleasantly tired, ate enough food out of my pack so that it finally doesn't feel too heavy and painful by the end of the day. Mashed potatoes for dinner. Ended up being a really nice day.

Sept 13: Should have double-checked the maps rather than believe section hikers. Water was 19 miles away, not ten. Day started out pretty cruisey, up on the edge of a bluff. Views would be pretty in winter but right now there's too much foliage. Back into summer, very few autumn leaves to be seen. Lunch on a bench in the sun, gave C some water to get through the next ten miles. Then it was a very old clearcut, mostly healed but still hot and exposed. Didn't mind - open oak/pine woodland is my favourite kind of trail I think. Dry sweet-smelling grass and furled ferns and the dappled shadows of branches and gnarled old shaggy tree bark, smells like happiness, the light tinted with a special saturation you only get in these places. Then it got even hotter and thirstier, still smelling the pine duff and grass but rationing water as the trail loses shade and the sun starts to make my face too hot. I can feel the salt leaving my body. The stillness starts to feel oppressive. So beautiful, so tough. Wisconsin in a drought year feels like northern California - who knew? Get to the water tap with only a sip left and we take a break. Despite my urging to get going, it extends to twenty whole minutes as Constantine is desperate to rehydrate. I want to push, we can still make our target 33 miles before dark if we go NOW, but he just can't, feels rushed and pushed by me and my reliance on the time as a motivator. I think we wouldn't be having this argument if he wore a watch. I see the time with every footstep as my arms swing for balance. I track our pace constantly, except for when I get in a fast rhythm. That's the only time I don't worry about minutes and miles and finishing this trail, when I hit a fast stride and just cruise on the pleasure of motion. After our water break I overcompensate and my pack is too heavy for speed, and I relent on the goal. We'll camp outside of Solon Springs instead of at the fairgrounds, saving us two miles and 40 mins of walking tonight. We would have gotten to our original camp at 7:30pm if we had kept to my estimate in camp, but now we'd be getting there at 8:15. I still kinda want to push there but C is feeling annoyed by my militant focus on finishing. Lots of pretty peaceful woods but I tune out for most of the afternoon, last three miles to Aden Creek are a roadwalk where C gets service and sees a storm coming starting at 8pm. I concede, we set up camp at 7:20 and are smugly dry in the tent when it starts raining.

Sept 14: a cold damp day and a late start, spent some time reconfiguring logistics in Solon Springs after we get an accurate distance for the Wisconsin border to Duluth. It's longer than we thought, so we arrange a ride in for the 15th and change our hotel. Only about 12 miles of trail today and then it's all dirt road so I'm not too worried about time. Overcast, sky is pewter and heavy and chilly. I don't mind - open scrub plains again, sparse trees and small beaver lakes. There's a cabin from 1920 that you can go inside and explore, but the floor creaks alarmingly and we're in a hurry so I just poke my head in. Headphones out as we dip into a stand of pines, listening to the hush of wind on branches, examining how the hues of the leaves change when the light is cool-toned and silver rather than gold. Vivid lime greens pop against russet bark. A broad, peaceful, soft path. It's calm in a different way than the still, hot afternoons, and more soothing, lulling me into quiet rather than fierce appreciation. Wisconsin is gorgeous, the sleeper hit of the NCT. Roadwalk for the rest of the day. Towards evening, saw a small animal wandering around on a road. Not moving like a squirrel, so what is it? Is that ... is that a rat?? It was a rat! A plain old regular rat. Just hanging out, crossing the road from one marsh to the other. Just realized this is the first time I've ever seen a wild, non-city dwelling rat in its natural habitat. It amuses me that I have only in this moment realized that a rat's natural habitat is not a subway tunnel. Obviously! Rats evolved before subway tunnels, of course there are wild rats. But it was a surprise. Also it was a really big rat. Bedtime - ducked off the road into state game land following what we thought was an informal hunting trail but must have been a very well-used deer path, because the woods were super active all night long. Sticks breaking, deer huffing in surprise as they saw our tent. I think I heard an owl kill something - a breaking of branches, a whomph noise, and then squeaking that was suddenly cut off. Didn't get much sleep - adrenaline shots kept waking me up as my ancient prey-animal instincts reacted to the presence of large animals in the dark.

Sept 15: roadwalk all day, only 1.5mi of trail in the 28.5 before we get picked up. Meditating on the word "peregrine", why I like it so much. It occurs to me that one reason I feel so dissatisfied with this trail is its lack of contact with the divine. On other trails you are free to wander, and it doesn't take long when you are entirely removed from human constructions to wander in a spiritual direction. You cannot avoid being moved when you are small in the midst of mountains, or traversing austere desert, or alone in an endless woods. The NCT is too long to allow for wandering if you're trying to do it in a single season - it's an extreme marathon, the ultimate expression of thru-hiker-as-athlete. You've gotta have a goal and hit your goal every single day if you want to finish, and it's so frontcountry that you see roads and humans and pavement every day. You cannot lose yourself or your sense of time within even the most remote section because winter is coming and you are on a schedule. Even the GDT, brutal and life threatening as it constantly was, was also a revelatory and ecstatic experience. It was a revelation of a raw, harsher divinity than I had yet known, but it was divine nonetheless. Romantic, in the art history sense of the word - human overwhelmed by the vast power of nature. I have not been propelled into spiritual flight on this trail, and that is a real loss. I now realize that a huge part of why I thru-hike is to connect myself to the animate earth, to experience what I think of as my religion of movement.

Sept 16: errands errands errands errands, stupid American War on Drugs means I spend a total of seven hours trying and failing to get my mental health meds re-prescribed. The Kek is open - we have to do the whole damn trail, as I suspected we probably would. It's 3am, I'm still too awake with all the stress of trying to wrangle my way through a bureaucratic nightmare. I've gotta hike tomorrow and I need to sleep, but first I need to read one more article about how climate change will kill us all. Can't forget that I need to post this in the morning, and clean my water filter too - there was too much shit to do yesterday, I have tasks leftover for the morning. Didn't rest for even an hour, I was so anxious about attempting to obtain drugs to alleviate my anxiety. Ugh!

Aug 31: got out of bed late and felt behind the ball all day. bumpy but pretty forest, had to stop to answer work emails when we got service on a ridge, putting us even more behind. 20ish miles of roadwalk. Ran into Lost Larry who was chatty, long distance hiker going from Western terminus to wherever he could get in Ohio before winter. Intended to make lunch quick but ended up sitting an hour, this after talking to Larry for 20 mins or so, despite trying to get away several times. Constantine unconcerned about time as usual, even tho we have to hit a specific target tonight to meet up with people tomorrow. Saw pontoon boat/raft thing next to road by the lake; poontoon boat that was just a platform with a slide mounted to it. Seemed fun. After leaving roadwalk trail was beautiful but slow, very steep and rocky, bouncing up and down felt like real hiking but unfortunately I was in such a rush, miles ticking up and up, can't use speed to compensate for late start and too many breaks. Saw a porcupine. Gotta wake up earlier tomorrow, got so time-stressed that I started catastopizing and had short anxiety spiral. Didn't even get to 30mi before it got too dark to keep hiking, and today's goal was 34. Fighting feelings of failure and self-loathing but managed to calm myself down fairly quickly. Only started eating at 9:45pm, ugh. Gotta wake up earlier and be the breaktime police again tomorrow.

Sept. 1: chilly in the morning, feels like fall. Enjoying the quiet and the crickets, nice early lunch on picturesque bridge that actually managed to be only 30 mins. Secluded two-track roadwalks, perfect temperature. Very flat and peaceful but with enough elevation variation to feel like real hiking. Craig Lake State park - closed?? There was no sign but the DNR workers said it was, but let us go through anyway. Golden eagle eating dead deer. Paved roadwalk blazing hot, picked up by trail angel Keith and brought to campsite with pasties and Finnish turnovers and lots of food and a good fire. To bed at 10pm, freezing cold.

Sept 2: got going by 8:30am after quiche breakfast, amazing. I like the sound of my own footsteps on the crunchy pine duff when I'm just alone and everything is silent and still except the clicking of grasshoppers. Feels as if even the too-hot sun is part of it, drenched, saturated orange light. Orderly rows of red pine - still exposed but getting less hot as the day wears into evening. Set an unambitious revised mileage target for the rest of this section after our plans collided with reality - only 30 or so miles per day, giving us an extra hour and forty five minutes of leisure to work with. Nice to be relaxed during the day and take five minute breaks now and again without worrying that we'll pay for it later by hiking in the pitch black. Big dens dug into the sandy soil beside a logging road - I wonder who lives there? Fox? Badger? Maybe tortoise? Good cell service let me download a new audiobook about the deep ocean, with a soothing British narrator. Fascinating - I wonder why I always go for deep sea stuff on trail? Last year it was a book about cave diving. Sandhill Cranes with their kooky laugh again, and the smell of warm pine mulch and blueberry leaves. Delicious; love the smell of a grassy, scrubby plain. Crunchy white horned mosses (lichens?) underfoot, blueberry leaves turning a bold vivid red, ferns furling into a perfect rust orange. Ahead of the game when we make our mileage goal - only 7:20 when we hit the water cache and camp a half mile later in full sunlight. Finally not feeling time stress! Trail Angels gave us backpackers pantry meals and desserts!

Sept 3: up all night with stomach pain - too much food, maybe too much vegetable fiber? Could be preservatives in freeze-dried desserts triggered IBS. Not great. Raccoon or maybe a small bear came snuffling around tent last night around midnight. Slept in til 8:30 but whatever, we only have to do 30 miles today. Saw squirrel running with pinecone bigger than its whole body. Cloudy, sky full of smoke from the Boundary Waters fires, forecasted to rain tomorrow and C is already in his wet-cat mood about it. Jokingly grumpy, but he really does hate getting wet. Buggy, trudgy hills with many trip-wire branches, muggy cloudy weather. Stepping out the routine miles without much attention - I have to try to awaken myself to the peacefulness and beauty of the woods, but trying gets old and eventually I tune out. This hike is too long, trail is easy to take for granted. Watching a woodpecker tap tap tapping on a tree, not drilling but sounding for bugs. Featureless forest, no landmarks to say where we are, no gps signal, mosquito driven sprint.

Sept 4: gloomy rain morning, overgrown trail. No motivation to hike in the rain so wbstayed in bed to 9:20(!) Met Josh, chatted for 20, then early lunch after only 4 miles, lazy gloomy wet morning. came to a shelter at 13mi around 3pm, debated the merits of trail nearo and reluctantly decide against it. Good choice - surprisingly beautiful overlooks and clear weather. Was going to camp on a topo-indicated overlook but it turned out not to be one, then mad dash trying to beat rain and darkness to camp and failed. Bad end to beautiful day that also started badly, ruined good mood and we didn't even make our revised goal.

Sept 5: trap hills pickup day (This day was so rushed and busy that I didn't take notes at all - after crush-crush-crushing 33 miles through some of the steepest terrain we've had in months, we met an amazing trail angel named Nick who drove us alllllll the way back to Mackinaw City to walk the bridge. He picked us up at 8:30pm and we got there at 2am! We stayed up most of the drive talking about everything from the trail to annoying former co-workers to deep personal struggles. It was honestly the best ride we could have asked for. The next day he drove us all the way back, and we got to spend time with Nick's equally awesome partner Kristen and their cute baby Raven. I can't thank you enough!)

Sept 6: tired zombie brain, bridge walk, not ready to be around so many people being so close to me, long drive back, more Meijer grocery store thoughts, so tired I could barely walk right miles into trail, shoes are absolutely toast. huge 3am lightning storm so fast and bright that it was a strobe light, rained so hard that mud splattered two feet up the tent walls.

Sept 7: last three days have been the most beautiful section of the trail so far. Fall colours and waterfalls all day, Northern California vibes with pines and overlooks. Perfect weather, lunch on big sandstone cliffs overlooking whirlpools. Teeny tiny ski hill, one double chair and one ski jump run that I can see. A single-run ski hill! So cute. Evening roadwalk, big gorgeous deep textured clouds like a Dutch landscape painting. Cool air, crickets. Got the rain jacket on with seconds before it rained, booyah. Nine days without a shower.

Sept 8: time zone change to central means an extra hour of sleep before we leave to meet our ride into ironwood, and still got out early. "Warning: call before you dig" signs have a great font - US Government has a great font game. No matter what else you wanna say about the gov't, it can't be denied. Paved roadwalk immediately makes knees and hips ache, but you only notice how much worse pavement is when you have trail to compare to. No wonder Ohio was so hard on the body, couldn't figure it out when it was all road all the time. Imagining city with mostly dirt/grass streets for walkers/cyclists and only a few paved back alley routes for public transit & emergency vehicles. What a reversal, an eco-utopian fantasy. Great ride in with Russ, even waited for us while we got groceries Horrible rude man at motel made us wait two hours to check in just to torture us, smirking the whole time and promising it was almost done, even tho the rooms were all empty and already clean. Eventually offered to let us check in early for $25 cash, which, fine. Asshole. Never trust anyone who says “one hand washes the other", like he was doing us a favor by ceasing to be cruel. Tried to get me to go pick up his prescription at Walgreens for him, “since you're going that way to the laundromat anyway". The audacity!!! Spent whole nearo day stewing on anger and anxiety.

Sept 8: still anxious about mean hotel man, so anxious I almost wanted to leave via the side door. Didn't do laundry last night because I was too scared to walk past the front desk and tell him that no, I would not go pick up his prescription because a) it's illegal and b) no! So we're sitting in the laundromat now instead of enjoying being in a hotel room for another hour. Packing out pizza, got too many town snacks again.

Aug 19th: running to meet guy at 5 at bridge, big hotdog-shaped hotdog stand, headache and ankle pain, didn't wanna be hiking, conversation about negativity despite good trail, wanted a rest day but it didn't feel like a rest in St Ignace

Aug 20th: late start, guilt over writing, miscommunication with Tree b/c I don't check my voicemails. Feeling anxious and then feeling even worse for not appreciating gorgeous trail, panicky about writing, felt so bad only did 20mi and now we have to do 35mi every single day ahhh time stress

Aug 21: camp in gorgeous pine barrens

Aug 22: came out into a prairie like the west, lonely firs and grasshoppers floating away from every step, Yorkie puppy and trail magic, can't camp by river

Aug 23: lake superior views, frustrating podcasts wouldn't download, sparkling Tehquamenom river, coffee can of trail magic at lunch (perfect because I was running out of food), 35s every day and in a rush. Pine smell, thinking about music, found sound. Musical idea: I went out walking song remixed with first two lines and my own voice layered in harmony, which inevitably leads to thinking about The Books album Lost and Safe. GPS not working which means I am free from worrying about miles for at least a little while. Seems like it's been weeks since I was lost in my own thought

Aug 24: wake up to hounds baying in the distance, misty morning, wild blueberries in orange dawn. Lake Superior views all day, deep sand torn up by orvs. Like going uphill except its flat, or like Timberline Lodge approach on the PCT. So many horseflies. Shoreline sunset camp

Aug 25: stable flies in the morning, Sandhill Cranes like Dr Seuss characters, sound like broken cuckoo clocks. C slow walking and texting, because he has a life big enough that he can’t just put it on hold for 8 months. I made my life small enough fit in the cracks between thru-hikes. Tradeoff, I get to disappear and enjoy my hike. Sticky morning where the phone screen is too damp to work, thinking about all the complex biology happening on my skin, microbes and their waste products. Lazy lazy 5hr break, had 3 campsites in town unoccupied and moved from shade patch to shade patch while charging electronics. feeling human after laundry and shower, sad grocery store so decided to resupply in Munising and rearrange miles to zero in Marquette. Needed that long break, 27 miles today but felt like nothing. Pictured Rocks, not actually as pretty as the superior shore we just walked yesterday. Can't believe we camped overlooking the sunset just this morning, feels like a few days ago. Felt like a real hiking day where we could just do whatever we wanted again

Aug 26: lots of regular backpackers. what is in those giant packs? Smells like autumn. Reached the stage of a thru-hike where my shoulders hurt all the time and all I want to read or listen to is food porn. Fantasizing about the eating scene in the beginning of crazy rich Asians and really wanna go to Singapore. Also, olive garden. Gimme that endless salad and red sauce Italian carb overload goodness. Munising: checkout clerk treated us like dirt because she thought we were homeless which bothered both of us immensely - even if we were, homeless people don't deserve to be treated like shit. Loud road walk out, couldn't hear each other because cars were hauling ass. definitely rode this road on my bike trip. camp at Wagner Falls, frustrated C because we couldn't find a flat spot anywhere but good talks and cuddles over chicken&bagel sandwiches in camp. So good, so snuggly. Good to wake up early today. Felt more like a hiking day

Aug 27 mostly flat roadbed, cool morning with threatened rain, thinking how this is possibly a Walhalla situation where promised heavy rain just keeps getting pushed back and never appears. Easy steady walking, bike trip memories. Rain, lunch under bridge, sitting quietly saw a weasel run all along the bank on the other side, silent and quick.

Aug 28th: 20 mile run into town, hectic right at trailhead and mix-up with hotels but relaxing after

Aug 29th: that's today! I'm caught up! Spent all day doing chores, had awesome trail angels and talked gear over ice cream after they gave us a ride to go resupply. I gotta go eat pizza and my phone is about to die because the outlets are too far from the bed in this motel. But I get to write nice little paragraphs from now on, and that's so exciting. Talk to you soon!

Aug 7th: first peace and quiet in a long while, could hear myself think and let my mind wander contemplatively instead of anxiously

Aug 8th: camp at Bowman lake, seeing Alan again with his camper

Aug 9th: rain storm forecast, went to Walhalla but no rain storm of course. Alan the trail angel saved the day, tiny motel with RealTree camo sheets, didn't do writing. Unplanned nearos always feel so weird

Aug 10th: super silent forest, weird day, baby raccoons. Tempted to eat all my candy.

Aug 11th: just as soon as we sat down, the sky closed over with clouds and with them, stifling humid heat. Short lunch, packed up in a rush as rain looked more and more likely. Temp increase but no rain. Ridgeline snowmobile track, pop up camper. Thinking about next year's road trip. What if we took the Subaru? Elevated rib of land hardly wider than the trail, remnants of an ancient sand dune. Cool geography

Aug 12: hike along riverbank, very peaceful with big oaks and viewpoints over oxbow loops, manitoba-like. Tired and cranky Constantine, nice Michigan guys offered us food, best campsite of whole trail, eating goldfish and watching meteor shower, milky way

Aug 13th: chipmunk in pack, trail magic bucket, slow because it's too awesome

August 14th: missing - here's what I would have written: Got into Kalkaska and heroed it, awesome day with Lisa, new sleeping pad!!!!

Aug 15th blowdown every 10ft near sand lake, strong desire after relaxing non-nearo to not hike, sit in lawn chair by lake and hang out playing board games all day, pleasant flat forest hiking with dry heat. Ideal summer day, Jordan River Valley beautiful, very day-hiker territory but gorgeous. So much variety of habitat in this section

Aug 16th: first schwaky section, dirt road walk through swampy area, feeling tired

Aug 17th: this day is entirely missing in my notes and I have no memory of it whatsoever. I think we walked a lot of flat logging roads??? Unclear. Would have been one day outside of Petosky. The next post should catch us up to the present, I think.

Undated: Watching bats go overhead outside defiance

Undated: Why paved bike path also feels pointless in a different way than the wilderness loop. Trail chapter head gave very helpful notes, missing them once we actually got to MI. Organic farms better about mosquitoes, dragonfly memories from Winnipeg. Good podcasts are all on a break, so passed time thinking about next house and cute guest shed. Wabash cannonball bike path. Amazing trail that you can actually walk on, hard to define difference but has to do with going the correct direction (even when there's a detour, trail is worth it and also fairly direct). Hot, still afternoon in the corn.

Somewhere in here, we took a nearo in Hillsdale, which threw off our miles so that we were always hitting towns at bedtime.

Undated: Feeling like we're really in Michigan, subtle differences like the tendency to plant a lot of trees along roadways tell you you're in another state

July 31: woke up at horrible Days Inn in Albion, 2mi walk back to utterly deserted downtown. No coffee. bumping along roads, mileages messed up because each large town is roughly 30 miles apart, can't avoid town stays. Meeting Larry while taking a break on road

Aug 1: Michigan became differentiated from Ohio surprisingly quickly, which perhaps shouldn't have been a surprise, considering that Ohio had plunged us into subtropical Southern heat within a couple of days of leaving Pennsylvania. Maybe it was just that we were travelling north in a reasonably direct way, but the scenery changed fast into the forested, slightly boggy northern cottage country I expected to find based on my previous adventures. Long quiet gravel roads surrounded by woodlots, fields and the occasional cabin made for peaceful walking - finally, we wouldn't have trouble finding a place to camp. It also helped that the private property signs were no longer bloodthirsty - some of the no trespassing signs in Ohio had been outright terrifying. The NCTA chapters here were really great with signage, and were in the habit of providing county-by-county map pamphlets at their information boards. These mainly gave the locations for restrooms and parking areas, as designated campsites were non-existent, but their brief descriptions were still more helpful than the NCTA-provided Avenza maps, which only had basic icons sprinkled along the route. The local NCT chapters also provided the names of the volunteers that maintained whatever short sections of trail we were on, something that would never be done on the Buckeye. With the state of the trail maintenance in Ohio, nobody would want to be associated with any specific section - they'd get too much hate mail.

Aug 1: Great sleep, sad coffee, city roadwalk with deserted downtown, ice cream lunch, meeting Sophie the puggle. Picnic bench sleep

Aug 2: PB & J trail angels, Barry game area, hounds howling at night

My notes for August 3rd, 4th and 5th are just outright missing. On those days we made our way to Lowell, the NCTA's headquarters, where we were treated to lunch by some folks from the NCTA. The same day, we walked to the turnoff for Grand Rapids and got a ride in for our nearo with Ken, the NCT director. The next post is scheduled for tomorrow - we'll pick back up on August 6th.

We made it! Just about two weeks into Michigan and the entire vibe of this trail has turned around. As I write this from a motel bed, I am actively looking forward to getting back to trail and hiking tomorrow. What a concept!

The change, however, was not immediate. For the last five hundred miles into Defiance, the “trail” had been a mix of roads, cycling routes, and canal trails, with paved bike paths predominating as we made our way north from Milford. We didn't really have to resupply, as the bike paths took us through two or three towns per day, and we didn't use our water filters once. When the towns were at an inconvenient distance, we'd simply hit the closest grocery store and pack out pre-made sandwiches for lunch the next day. While this made for light packs and allowed me to restore some much-needed bodyfat, it’s a peculiarly difficult way to hike. You'd think it'd be luxurious (and it is for a day or two), but town every day reminds you what you're missing. It doesn't really feel like hiking, and you feel self-concious in a city with a pack and sweaty clothes. On top of that, we were often next to loud, busy roads, which meant we could barely hear ourselves think, let alone talk to one another. It was great to have a physical break and to gain some weight, don't get me wrong! I'd spent the entire Buckeye Trail wishing that the roads had more towns and that the trail sections were actually roads, but it wasn't the most thru-hike-y section of this thru-hike, and the luxury and boredom both wore away at my resolve.

This state of affairs continued as we left Defiance and finished up the last little piece of the Buckeye Trail en route to the Michigan border. The northern bit of the state was more rural than what we'd just come through, and though we were still hitting town twice a day, we spent most of our time following the bed of the old Miami-Erie Canal. In classic Buckeye fashion, there was a land dispute between the trail agency and a cantankerous landowner over a weedy patch of towpath, and we had to take a road detour to avoid him. According to comments on the Guthook app, he'd told one previous hiker that anyone looking “suspicious” was “liable to be shot”! That was quite enough warning for us, even without the handmade “No Trespassing" signs threatening various bodily harms. As I trotted down the public road past his driveway, the man popped out from between junked cars and grumbled something at me, but I had one headphone in and didn't hear him clearly. I'm sure it wasn't compliment.

That seemed as good a farewell as any, and shortly afterwards we left the Buckeye behind for good and turned up the road on pure NCT route. It was straight as an arrow, due north. Michigan bound! We were so excited that we didn't even stop for gas station pizza on the way to Liberty Center, opting instead to do a mini-resupply at the Dollar General in town. I deleted my Guthook Buckeye app with glee. Buh-bye, Buckeye! It might have been partly my imagination, but even the roadwalk had a different feel to it. It was truly the NCT after all, and for this summer, the NCT is our whole world. After five long weeks away, we were home.

The maps for this last section of Ohio were a little tricky to get ahold of. I'd had to work some magic in Gaia to get an approximation of the mileage, but we'd been able to connect with the NCTA manager for northern Ohio. His name was Ryan, and he'd sent us a long email with information on towns, water access, and potential camp spots along the ~60 mile chunk between the Buckeye and Michigan. It was a huge help; there were a few spots along the trail where the legal camping was not obviously marked. Just outside of Liberty Center, we'd join up with the paved Wabash Cannonball bike path (where we were allowed to camp), cut north through Oak Openings Preserve (where we counterintutively weren't), then get back on the Cannonball and follow it for almost 30 miles before making our final turn north towards the state line. Though we passed through several named places that looked like towns, there were no businesses in them and nothing to buy. For the first time in three weeks, we had to carry our food. You’d think that would be a disappointment after all that town food, but honestly, it came as something of a relief. There were fewer logistics to manage, and we could have lunch any time we pleased.

That night, we camped on a secluded section of bike path in a swarm of mosquitoes, only to watch with delight as a flock of bats rocketed back and forth over our heads. Drawn by the cloud of hovering insects, they swooped down within feet of the tent roof, wheeling and dancing in the last of the setting sun. It was extraordinary; they came so close that we could hear the beats of their wings. I watched their silhouettes against the backdrop of the setting sun, until my eyelids grew too heavy and I had to fall asleep.

Written August 29th:

And that's it - that's all I've managed to write and edit since we entered Michigan a month ago. It's not for lack of trying. I've been agonizing over the blog for weeks, feeling guilty and stressed about it every single day as our miles stacked up and I fell farther and farther behind. As you can probably tell, I'm an incurable perfectionist, and I'm loathe to publish anything that doesn't meet my high personal standards. It's been an issue on other trails before, but those trails were shorter and didn't demand such high mileage or so many logistics in town, so I was able to buckle down and write no matter how tired I was. The NCT is a different beast - we've been hiking mid-thirties nearly every day for the past month, sunrise-to-sunset with barely any time to take notes. Writing polished, introspective personal essays is absolutely out of the question; I can hardly form sentences by the time we get to camp.

Torturing myself about it is obviously not the answer, but it is now mathematically impossible for me to catch up with the time we have in town. For each post, I have to collect my notes, copy and paste them into a document, review video footage and photos to refresh my memory if it's been a while, read my previous posts to find narrative themes, write an outline, write a rough draft, polish the quality of the writing and edit for clarity and word choice, fact check it against the maps to make sure I didn't elide or omit miles, paste that document into Substack's buggy mobile editor, copy-edit for typos and formatting issues (there are always formatting issues), and then do a final pass to make sure I haven't done something annoying. For example, in the first draft of this paragraph I used the word “polished” four times in five sentences, which nobody else would notice but I absolutely can't abide. I actually have a pinned list of words I frequently overuse, so I can do a find-and-replace search more easily (“Actually” is one of those words, as is “absolutely” - I am entirely too fond of an emphatic adverb. See, I just used one now!) (I'm also way too fond of parentheticals). I know that my readers won't care if my writing is comma-spliced all to hell, but I care. I care a lot! From start to finish, a post takes me between six and twelve hours to complete, sometimes even longer if I'm behind and we've been doing high miles. I am now 700 miles behind, or roughly four blog posts, and there's no way I can find 48+ uninterrupted hours to sit and write in town. I need to download maps and respond to emails, I need to do laundry and resupply, I need to sit in bed and eat pizza while watching HBO. Rest is a necessity on a trail of this length, and writing is so intellectually intense that it does not count.

Posting crappy excuse updates doesn't work for me either - I want to be able to tell the story in a timely manner, and being behind stresses me out. This last section, it actually got to the point of a panic attack (I hate that I used “actually” again there, but I'm practicing letting it go). I thought about quitting, and I thought about letting my rough drafts out into the world, but both of those options felt like failure. When it comes to narrative essays, I've painted myself into a corner. In order to get out of this trap, I need to do something else.

Here's the new plan: for the rest of the trail, I'll just be posting my daily notes. I was going to say “unedited” daily notes, but we all know I am constitutionally incapable of not editing. Still, they're going to be different - much, much, shorter, edited only for typos and the most generous definition of clarity. Some days will be a paragraph, and some days might only be a sentence or two, especially as I catch up to the current date. The notes from earlier in Michigan were strictly for my eyes only, and they resemble stream-of-conciousness rambling more than a daily diary. This new format will be titled differently as well. To differentiate between the polished (ugh!) essays and the rough notes, each short-form post will be titled NCT Daily Diary: [date] to [date]. When I get home and have the luxury of time, I’ll go back through everything I've missed and reconstruct the essays I would have written. These posts will be available for paid subscribers, and will cover Ohio through North Dakota. I expect the process of catching up to take me several months, but one post per week in regular life is a much more reasonable deadline. Thank you for your patience and understanding while I sort this process out. I started this blog as an experiment, and I suppose the experiment continues. It’s a lesson in realistic expectations and self-forgiveness; our pace is just too demanding to keep up with my usual rigorous routine.

Daily Diary posts will start coming out tonight, and I warn you that the first couple of them are going to suck. There are some days missing from the older notes, and they're in not complete sentences, but I hope you’ll still get some of value from it. Since I settled on this course of action last week, I've gotten into the habit of writing a short, lightly-edited paragraph each night, so they should get more interesting as we go.

Okay. Whew! I gotta stop giving disclaimers and apologizing. Imagine Bart Simpson writing on the blackboard, “I will not beat myself up” over and over. New format starts tonight, and I'll schedule them to post over the next couple of days. I'm in Marquette right now, so the first contemporaneous Daily Diary will go out from either Ironwood or Duluth. Fingers crossed that I'll feel less stressed about it by then.

Yours anxiously,

Magpie

Yes, we made it! A little less than three weeks ago we walked out of Ohio and into the great state of Michigan - and we pretty much haven't stopped walking since. We're doing long sections between rest stops and frequently heroing towns (resupplying without staying the night), so there hasn't been a natural break for writing in what seems like a long time. When we do get to town, all we want to do is rest and eat, and it seems like there's a million little chores. While I'm working on the big posts, I thought I'd let you all know where we're at.

Here are the quick facts:

-According to the maps, we've done almost 2700 miles and have 2112.5 to go, putting the actual length of this trail at close to 4800. That's ~100 miles longer than this trail is said to be, which seems about par for the course with the NCT. It's hard to tell how many miles we've done exactly because the Eastern NY maps are inaccurate, there are four different map systems that overlap imprecisely, and some of the Gaia GPS maps don't have mileages on them.

-Michigan has been an improvement in every way over the previous half of the trail, and keeps getting better. I'm actually enjoying hiking, and we’re actually hiking again. Like, in the woods and stuff. On trails that go somewhere!

-Our sleeping pad, which was defective and splitting new pinholes at the seams every time we inflated it, finally got replaced in Kalkaska. Big Agnes sent us a new one, it got delivered to the wrong place by FedEx, and then an amazing and fabulous trail angel named Lisa drove an hour and a half out of her way to pick it up for us. I am eternally grateful; the last two nights are the first uninterrupted sleep I've had in over a month.

-We're currently in Petosky, MI, two days away from crossing the Mackinac bridge into Upper Michigan, a part of the trail I've been looking forward to for a long time. Right now, the movie Deepwater Horizon is on TV, and it's very good, and I have pizza.

So that's all for now. I realize this is the second time in a row that I'm giving you a non-update update, but I'm chipping away at my writing and hopefully we'll start getting to camp earlier so I can make faster progress on trail. Normally, I write at the end of every day, but on this trail we've been getting to camp so late that I don't have the energy. It's hard to hike 30+ every single day for weeks and keep up an artistic practice, it turns out!

So, I'll talk to you all soon, and I hope you're doing well. I'm gonna keep watching Mark Wahlberg be a hero and edit during the commercials. Bye for now!

-Magpie

And then it happens again. And again. Life gets busy and challenging, and the longer you go, the harder it is to just get the thing done - it takes more and more time to remember where you left it. And then your flexible due date has extended all the flexibility it can, and your essay is officially Late. And now, because your essay is Late, it also has to be Perfect (to make up for the Lateness). The pressure to be Perfect means you want to write it even less, and you find every excuse not to do so. You are now actively procrastinating, and you know it.

Meanwhile, your other work is piling up, and unfortunately, some of it relies on what you've said in The Late Essay to make sense, so there's really no point in trying to work on anything else until you've finished The Late Essay. But you can't finish the essay! It has to be perfect, and perfection is stressful, and you are now so behind on everything else that finishing The Late Essay will force you to emotionally confront your backlog of work, and you just can't handle that right now, okayyyyy?

And you keep on stressing yourself out and feeling badly and distracting yourself on purpose until it's the end of the semester, and you're forced to write five half-assed term papers in an overnight blitz of anxiety and caffeine, and accept a C+ grade on everything so you don't fail your whole degree.

No? Just me?

Needless to say, this is not one of the perfect, brilliant essays I've written a hundred times in my head. It's not even the rough draft of one of those, though I may post a couple of works-in-progress for premium subscribers. I'm gonna half-ass us right past meeting Dan the Trail Angel and our awesome evening with Steady. I'm half-assing it through my epic IBS attack that derailed us from reaching Zoar, which meant we got even more hospitality from Dan despite the fact that it was Father's Day and he totally didn't have to help us out. Because I'm writing this at the end of the Ohio “term” and totally okay with a C+ grade, I'm not gonna go into detail about the maddening thicket of thorns that was Clendenning Lake, an 11.5mi stretch of bushwhack hell described on the Buckeye maps as “a pleasant dayhike loop”. We're going to zip right past the shirt-drenching, skin-destroying, heartbeat-in-ears heat that dogged us all the way across Southern Ohio, and zoom over the demoralizing pointlessness of a 167-mile loop that took us the wrong direction. Let's not get into the fact that there were somehow no towns despite being almost entirely on roads, and how badly malnourished we got from the food at gas stations and Family Dollars.

The truth is, Ohio was extremely hard in a way I wasn't prepared for. While the extreme heat and humidity conspired to make the flat terrain much harder than it ought to have been, the real difficulty was mental. We'd been expecting smooth sailing through the state, thinking it was mostly rural highways and smooth asphalt bike path. It would be a bit boring maybe, but we'd be hitting town every other day, and the easy miles would let us make up time. Light packs and fast miles are their own kind of reward, and would make up for monotonous scenery. Of course, Ohio wasn't like that at all, not until the last 200 miles when we joined the Miami River bike trails. The incorrect expectations were as much to blame as the bad trail conditions, but I was miserable nonetheless.

The first 800 miles of Ohio were a slog of brutal heat, poorly maintained trail, and rugged backwoods roadwalks made dangerous by aggressive dogs. Most of it goes the wrong way - giant loops and zig-zags seemed to take us every direction but westbound, and the repetitive rhythm of bad trail/hot road all day, every day, made it feel like we were making no progress at all. To make matters worse, Constantine and I took turns getting sick during our first week in Ohio, which absolutely killed our momentum and made the state seem even more endless. Unplanned zeroes for injury or minor illness are just something that happens on trail, but the timing could not have been worse; we were derailed three seperate times in the first two weeks, first because of his waterborne illness, then because of my IBS, and then because of heat exhaustion that put us both in danger. It was a rough introduction to a rough section of trail, and I spent the rest of the state anxiously re-calculating our averages and castigating myself over every rest day and every break. It was an obsessive, unhealthy habit, and I convinced myself that we were hopelessly behind schedule and would never be able to finish the trail. Some days weren't that bad of course - you can't be miserable every moment of every day - but by and large, by the time we got to town, the very last thing I wanted to do was painstakingly relive the last section. Writing my usual detailed essays is a marathon effort of memory - to write vividly, I need to remember in vivid emotional detail, and all I wanted to do was forget. So I didn't write anything!

I would try to catch up on trail, writing up the day as I settled into the sleeping bag, but we were pushing hard for miles and often got to camp late. I wasn't sleeping very well, either; the sleeping pad had sprung a bunch of inexplicable holes, and with no access to larger towns, we had no way to patch it. Waking up four times a night with my butt on the cold ground meant it was hard to get up in the morning, and I fell asleep immediately every night. So no time to write there either, and as I fell more and more behind I gave up on trying. By the time we got to Milford and started walking the right direction again, my writing was over a month overdue, and I had no desire to revisit the awful trail we'd just left.

We think the sleeping pad is actually defective, and now that we can accurately forecast when we'll get to town, I'm going to email Big Agnes and try to replace it. In the meantime, I was finally able to get some Aquaseal glue in Milford, and I've been patching the seams every night as new holes appear. So far, we’re up to 18 seperate leaks, which is just ridiculous. The last week or so on trail has been everything we expected Ohio to be - just smooth, cruisey bike path interrupted by occasional towns, and we've more than made up for our slow pace in the beginning. Sitting in a motel room in Defiance, OH, it looks like we'll get to North Dakota after all. We only have two more days left in this state, and I hear that Michigan is awesome.

So that's Ohio! Not the most detailed or well-written update, I know, but done is better than perfect at this point. I might try to go back and recreate the skipped sections in detail after we're off trail, as I have a reasonable amount of drafts and notes, but for now, I'm ready to move on. I'm ready to move on from Ohio in general! So it's a clean slate for Michigan. On we go!

Yours Lazily,

Magpie

Is this blog going to stay one section behind for the remainder of trail? Perhaps. Despite my best intentions, I have not managed to write very much on trail thus far, so some of what follows is less detailed than I'd like. Ohio is so different from PA that I can barely remember it, even though it was only a week ago. From now on, I'll spare you the disclaimers and just get on with things.

Clarion, Pennsylvania: Our best zero day ever quickly lost its shine. About four hours after receiving the vaccine, Constantine and I started to feel off. "It's not that I feel sick, it's just like... it's like someone turned up the the gravity by 10%," I said.

"It's like the air is made of Jello," said Constantine.

"It's like I'm hungover but I didn't even get to party."

By 4pm, both of us had ferocious headaches. By six, we were flushed and sweaty, chugging through cans of seltzer and barely able to focus on a TV movie. We made a valiant attempt at eating pizza, but we were both feeling so flu-ish and gross that we couldn't get much down. By eight o'clock we were as weak as newborn kittens, reduced to plaintive moans and feverish giggling fits. The night passed uncomfortably and mainly without sleep, one of us or the other always needing to get up to pee as our immune systems tried to flush the phantom enemy. "There's too much jello." Constantine mumbled blearily.

"What?" I said.

"Jello. There's too much jello in the air."

"Oh. Yeah. My gravity went up to 20% I think."

"Ughhhhh."

We woke up the next day feeling slightly less miserable, but there was no real possibility that we'd be able to hike. Just switching hotel rooms was a monumental effort. I ran down to the front desk hoping we'd be able to stay put, but the two-queen room we had was booked, so we had to move across the hall into a room with a king bed. Even though it was only ten feet away, cleaning up and putting our packs on left us exhausted, and we collapsed into bed as soon as the door swung shut. Hiking even one single mile was completely out of the question - I ran downstairs again for coffee and my legs felt as rubbery and sore as if I'd just hiked forty. We spent the rest of the day dozing and watching bad reality TV, and after a long afternoon nap our condition began to improve. I felt a little guilty about the double zero, but I was in no shape to worry about our pace. Getting vaccinated was more important than miles.

On the morning of the 10th, we finally felt well enough to go. The forecasted thunderstorms hadn't materialized, and the air felt hot and close, with humidity at 90% all day. We got a ride back to the trail with a guy we'd met on our way into town. His name was also Dana, and he'd thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail all the way back in 1988. When he saw us waiting for our taxi outside the post office, he pulled over and gave Constantine his number. He was an incredibly accommodating guy - we'd had to reschedule with him twice due to being too sick to move, but he was happy to give us a ride back to trail anyway. He even gave us mini-cheesecakes for breakfast!

At the trailhead, I stood around and signed the trail log while Constantine darted back across the road to connect the footsteps. Setting foot on trail was an instant relief. Two days in a hotel room gets boring, no matter how sick and exhausted you are. Our first few miles were shady and well-constructed, looked after by a local troop of Eagle Scouts as well as the trail association, and the tree cover combined with a breeze brought the temperature down to tolerable levels. I was happy to be stepping no matter how bad the trail was, but the cool shade made it especially welcome. It was still humid and sticky, but at least I wasn't going to overheat.

We wound through a state-managed game reserve through thick groves of flowering bushes and young leafy trees, then met up with an overgrown forest road. After about an hour, my joy at being back on trail began to fade. I wasn't feeling one hundred percent better yet, and perhaps the clinging humidity added to my sense of fatigue. There was nothing really wrong that I could pinpoint; I just felt "off" in some undefinable way. Irrelevant insecurities and memories of embarrassment began to nag at me, and I had to work hard to stay in the present. Breathe the scent of the flowers, listen to the songs of birds! I tried my best to focus on my senses and come alive to the animate world, but I lacked the energy to control my anxious thoughts. I popped in my headphones and zoned out, walking at a good pace but still feeling sluggish despite the easy miles.

We turned a corner to cross a creek, and lo and behold, there was a hiker on the other side. He was wearing an ultralight pack and holding a pair of Altras in his hand as he stepped across barefoot. Another thru-hiker for sure! We were so excited to meet him that we stopped to chat in the middle of the shallow stream, and he was happy to stop and talk too. His name was Hot Wheels and he'd hiked the PCT the same year I did, although we'd never met or heard of each other before now. He was just doing the Pennsylvania section of the NCT, but he had plans to finish his triple crown sometime soon. After our knee-deep conversation, we wished him a good hike and continued on our way.

What else is there to say about this day? We spent a while on the brushy forest service roads and old rail trails, which turned to open two-track as we made our way farther west. Around four we had a little roadwalk through the tiny village of Kossuth, which boasted about fifty houses and an ice cream shack. Obviously, we couldn't let the opportunity for on-trail ice cream pass us by, so we stopped and ate our treats in the shaded gazebo. The road took us back up through a sleepy hamlet called Kline, and then we took a pipeline access road to the start of the Sandy Creek Rail Trail.

Hot Wheels had told us about the paved bike path in our future, so we weren't surprised to find ourselves treading asphalt. The shelter one mile into it was a surprise, but it was too early to camp, so we kept on hiking. It was still good to see the shelter there, though. It meant that camping was allowed on this rail trail, so we weren't limited to the tiny patch of state land that abutted the trail in four miles. I was still feeling fatigued, although I'd determined that it was more mental than physical exhaustion. My legs were strong and moving at their regular speed without a problem, and my body wasn't really hurting in a particular way. I just felt wiped out.

We decided to look for camp at the state game preserve anyhow, since it would give us a 27 mile day, but when we got there we could see that there was no suitable place to camp. The game preserve was bordered by a private fishing camp festooned with "No Trespassing" signs, and the only flat spot on public land was right next to their picnic shelter. It wouldn't have been illegal for us to set up there, but the owners probably wouldn't see it that way. We hiked on.

A mile later, we spotted a few nice flat spots set back into the trees, but it was really close to a public parking area. Though it was seven o'clock, the sky wasn't dark enough yet for us to feel comfortable in full view of people returning to their cars. We hiked on.

The topo lines up ahead showed a steep climb, with a perfect flat spot on top. Excellent! Nobody would want to climb a hill at the end of the day, and we'd be out of sight from the nearby road. When we got there, we laughed. It was a tunnel through the steep hillside! Of course it was - the GPS line went dead straight across the elevation, and this was a rail trail. A train couldn't climb that hill without switchbacks, so obviously it had to be a tunnel. It was damp and full of graffiti, and tunnels are creepy at night. We hiked on.

This game of “the next campsite will be better” is one I play with myself frequently. It's kind of a trick. I know that there probably won't be a perfect campsite in the next mile, but I tell myself there will be. Just past the next turn, just over the next hill, once you cross this road there will be an even better campsite than the one you're looking at now. And then of course there isn't, so I trick myself into hiking three or five or six more miles when I would rather just stop. When my legs have energy but my mind doesn't, it keeps me going. When my body is truly tired or the light starts to fail, any reasonably decent campsite will do, so the game naturally ends. I do this with break spots and lunch spots too. I usually have physical capacity long after my brain gets whiny and wants to stop, so I tell myself that I'll rest at the next perfect log, or the next spot without ticks, or the next excellent sitting rock, and then find reasons to disqualify any potential resting spot until I actually need a break and don't just want one.

On this night, we found our reasonably decent campsite just after the tunnel, and set up camp around 8pm. The Perfect Campsite Game had pushed us an extra three miles, a thirty mile day on the dot. I didn't think I had the energy for a full thirty that day, and trying to bully myself into it had just made me miserable. I was pretty pleased that I'd managed to trick myself into it anyhow. We ate our dinners and set up just in time - after a short debate about whether to set up the fly, we decided that the clouds looked just threatening enough that it was worth the extra stuffiness in the tent. Not even five minutes later, it poured. Another check in the win column!

The next day brought us yet more bike path. Getting up early to avoid the morning joggers, we broke camp at 6:30am. By ten, we'd already done a healthy fourteen miles. The bike path continued on in much the same way as the day before, a flat strip of pavement running along the river bank. It was a bit dull, but at least the easy walking made for fast miles. In fact, we were making such good time that we decided to hike all the way into Emlenton for a late lunch. It was 23 miles from camp, but I needed to stop there anyhow to supplement my resupply, and I had plenty of hipbelt snacks in the meantime.

By far the most interesting part of our day was the train tunnels. There were two of these en route to Emlenton, and they were both incredibly long. The first came around 11am, and was nearly a full mile. A bend in the tunnel meant that we couldn't see the other side - once we stepped away from the entrance, we were plunged into complete darkness. I took out my headlamp, but the distance was so great and the walls so wide that the narrow beam only illuminated the white reflectors lining the asphalt path. Our voices echoed oddly against the high, curved ceiling, but the sound of our footsteps was swallowed up in the vast cavern, whisked away by the wind that flowed from the invisible exit. It was trippy. I lost all sense of spatial awareness, of how my body was oriented or how fast I was moving. All I had to guide me were the white reflectors, which seemed to hover and dance in the enveloping black. It gave the illusion of walking through deep space. I couldn't judge how far away the reflectors were or how long the tunnel went on, and near the end, real fear began to intrude on my awe. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up; I had to force myself not to imagine all kinds of hideous creatures and malign forces gathering in the dark. I didn't run or look behind me. I knew that if I did, I'd reinforce the idea that there was something to be afraid of, and I absolutely did not want to have a panic attack in this lightless place. Time stretched and warped. It seemed I had been walking in this tunnel forever. I had the creepy thought that perhaps this is what death felt like: a tunnel of nothing that goes on and on to eternity. Maybe I really was dead. I thought of a sequence near the end of Miranda July's film Kajillionaire, where the characters take shelter from an earthquake in a blacked-out public restroom, and the screen slowly fades into the image of a galaxy. The characters' ultimate fate is left ambiguous in the movie, and I was feeling rather ambiguous myself. Don't panic, I scolded myself. You're almost there. I took a deep breath and called out to Constantine. “How you doing babe? You still good?”

“This is awesome! I can't see anything!” came the response. Well, at least he hadn't been eaten by monsters.

The curve in the tunnel was quite sharp near the end, so the light was a suprise when it came. I saw green, and that was my cue to run and escape - I could make it, if I just made it back to the forest, then the demons couldn't get me. I bolted, and when I finally emerged into the daylight, the fear melted away. I felt a bit silly. It was a perfectly ordinary train tunnel, after all. A historical plaque detailed the process of its construction, and I stood and read it as I waited for Constantine. Just a tunnel. Just a tunnel. We had to walk through another one in a couple of miles, and I was already dreading it. It wasn't the darkness that scared me; I was anxious about the possibility of feeling afraid.

We sauntered on, headphones in ears. I wanted to stop and eat some hipbelt snacks at the next public shelter, but there was another hiker there and I didn't feel like conversation. I walked on, waving to the occasional flocks of cyclists as they passed and playing the Perfect Break Spot game to keep myself moving. We'd been hiking at a fast pace for about five hours now, and I was really starting to need a break when I spotted a picnic table. Finally! The tables and benches on this route were unpredictability spaced, sometimes very frequent and sometimes none at all. I'd pushed myself an extra three miles past the shelter, and I scarfed down two packs of Ritz crackers in record time. The second tunnel was only a mile away, and I procrastinated by checking maps and fussing over data for Ohio, which wasn't relevant for three more days.

We were both getting pretty hungry for lunch though, and we had an hour and a half of hiking before we got there. I couldn't avoid the tunnel forever. This one wasn't nearly as bad though - it was just over half a mile, and nearly straight. Two people with headlamps were coming from the opposite direction, and a cyclist with a powerful light rode past us just as we reached the deepest, darkest point. The presence of other people brought me back to earth, and I explored the sensation of being disembodied without the existential dread. It was still trippy and cool, but the perceptible halo of light at the other end kept me safe and in control. Constantine had loved the last tunnel experience, and this time he went even further by putting on his sunglasses. "I keep getting this crazy feeling that I'm about to walk into a wall! But I know I'm not! It's wild!" He was stoked on it, but his not being able to see made me nervous, especially once we got near a water leak that made a weird echo.

"That's just water, right? Baby? That's water dripping, yeah?"

"I don't hear anything. You're ahead of me though."

The 'I don't hear anything' made me think of every horror movie trailer in the history of the world, and once again I had to force myself not to run for it.

"Oh," he said, "I hear it now. Yeah, that's just water."

"Cool." I replied tersely. We were close enough to the exit that I picked up the pace and hustled for it, confirming as I passed the leak that it really was only water - it dripped directly on me.

"It's raining in here!" I said, with a note of false cheer. I reached the sunlight a little wet but undevoured. Another historical plaque graced the side of the tunnel, and I imagined the workers blasting and digging to calm myself down. Humans made this, with human hands and human tools. It was just a tunnel, just another human thing. I am never, ever going spelunking.

We we starving when we reached Emlenton, and our restaurant options were few. We could try Otto's Tavern, a ramshackle bar with great-looking burgers on their website, or Little It Cafe, which looked like it maybe only served ice cream and coffee. We tried Otto's first. As soon as we walked in, ten large men in Harley Davidson logos and bandannas turned to look at us, staring us down from the corners of their eyes as they pretended to go back to their beers. Um, okay. Not so friendly! It was clear we weren't welcome here. It was the kind of bar that had a cigarette vending machine right next to the entrance, and the entire place reeked of smoke and machismo. We turned right around and walked out the door.

Little It Cafe didn't seem promising either. All we could see at the front was an empty refrigerated counter and a few sad slices of pizza in a case behind the register. A woman in an apron came out, and I asked her if they served food. “We have a dining room through that door if you guys want to sit down,” she said. Oh yes we did! The restaurant was empty and had a general atmosphere of dust, but our server was friendly and brought us two giant glasses of ice water along with the menus. It was American Italian food, and after some hemming and hawing we both ordered enormous calzones. They were like entire pizzas folded in half, delicious homemade dough wrapped around fresh vegetables and mozzarella, then brushed with Parmesan and garlic butter. It was gloriously excessive and we ate every bite, dipping each piece in marinara sauce and washing it all down with Cherry Coke. It took us exactly seven minutes to demolish our meals, and afterwards we sat for half an hour in a nearby park, totally unable to move. I couldn't have imagined anything better.

We left the bike path for a few miles after Emlenton, as the Allegheny River Rail Trail was not yet complete. I'd been bored of walking the river bank, but I missed it immediately when I saw the roadwalk. It was a wildly dangerous stretch of road, a twisting narrow highway with no shoulder and the only route into or out of town. Tanker trucks came barreling over the hills as we crushed ourselves as tightly as possible to the barrier, their cargo coming within a few feet of our fragile squishy bodies. Yikes! No! I'll take the boring bike path any day. Thankfully, we left the scary highway after only a mile, and joined a gravel backroad to get through the town of Foxburg. Foxburg was the touristy cottage town I'd been expecting to find in Emlenton, and after a quick jaunt through the square we found the Allegheny Rail Trail again and followed it over a bridge to Parker.

Parker was a milltown, its primary aromas being sawdust and hot dirt. We trudged uphill through steamy evening heat, making for the state game lands just outside of town. As we passed the VFW hall, a beefy older man and his wife asked where we were hiking to, and to my great surprise they knew exactly what I was talking about when I answered "North Dakota".

"Oh, the NCT!" said Beefy. "I guess you're camping on the game lands? I used to do search and rescue back there, and in Moraine State Park when I was a firefighter."

We chatted with him for a minute or two, but the evening was getting on and I was eager to get to camp. We'd done about 34 miles at this point, and I was ready to lie down. We climbed the road onto the main thoroughfare and found that the NCT had installed giant maps and signs declaring Parker a trail town. Our last mile was weirdly suburban. I couldn't quite believe that we could be so close to state land, but as we passed the last house, the road abruptly turned into a dirt two-track and we were surrounded by trees once more.

About that last house though - they had a huge, tree-lined property with the building set way back from the road, and behind the house we could see a complex of large enclosures. "Did you see that?!" Constantine was pointing at the cages.

"No? What is it?" All I could see inside the fencing was something like a large doghouse.

"Those people have WOLVES in their backyard."

"No way!" I squinted through the trees at the enclosure and made out a canine form, but I didn't trust my observation until we saw the number-plate on the driveway. Stenciled on a rock above the surname and house number was the figure of a wolf. From this angle, we could see into the cages better, and there was no doubt about it - these people had at least two actual wolves! Even at a distance, we could tell that they were glowering at us. Wolves do not move or stand like dogs - their posture is unmistakably that of a wild animal. What kind of person owns a goddamn wolf? What kind of person owns TWO WOLVES?!

Apex predators aside, we picked up the trail just inside the state land boundary and made it to camp without incident. A small tributary stream gave us water for the night, and the sky was so clear that we judged it safe to leave the fly off for a breeze. Still full from our gargantuan lunch, we opted not to cook dinner and instead sat and ate candy next to the tent, listening to hoots and laughter from a redneck ATV party somewhere below. As the sun set and the air began to cool, we slid underneath our quilt and slept, tired and satisfied after a 35 mile day.

The next day started pleasantly enough. The trails and ATV roads through Pennsylvania's State Game Lands are generally well-maintained, and our morning miles were no exception. After forty minutes of pretty forest walking, we popped out of the bush to join our first roadwalk. It was just after 7am and the heavy heat of the day had yet to descend, though I could tell it was on the way. A warm mist smeared the landscape into grey haze, and I was already drinking the air more than breathing it. Right now it was tolerable, but I knew I'd be drenched in sweat by noon.

I binge-listened to an entire podcast series about the 2001 Dot Com bubble as the road wound through the farming communities, growing narrower as it neared the trail. It was a nice roadwalk, not too busy with a lot of pastoral views. A hunter's parking area marked our turnoff to the second section of trail, and we were pleased to find it was a good two-track road. This alternated with short spurts of singletrack, some of them somewhat muddy and squishy, but overall in excellent shape. The trail took us past bogs and through large open fields, but the grass was recently cut and there was boardwalk bridging the swampy parts. We only had to do thirty miles today, and we'd made such good time in the morning that we'd make it to camp by 6pm, even with an hour long lunch break and plenty of lazy moments. I didn't really feel like hiking today - I wasn't sure why, but I was a little sleepy and bored. I was glad we could just loaf our way down the trail. We stopped for lunch in the middle of a shady wooden bridge to avoid the ticks and laid out the tent fly to dry out. I'd managed to score some mayo packets at the Wal-Mart in Clarion, so my bacon sandwich was much improved.

But the trail didn't stay good, not at all. We walked past Glade Dam Lake on a trail so wide and well-mowed you could practically play croquet on it, and then started down a section of private land. The trail didn't deteriorate immediately. Instead, it devolved by degrees, first narrowing, then losing its lawn-quality grass, then growing rocky and broken up until we were just walking a skid track through vacant, logged-out land. It didn't inspire confidence for Ohio. The trail's routing was ridiculous too - we zigged half a mile out of our way just so we could look at two rancid, swampy ponds. That was the only reason I could figure for the detour, anyway. The sharp turn looked like a switchback, but it was on totally flat land. The NCT works in mysterious ways.

I was aching for the second roadwalk, but first we had to find water. The sources in the forest had all been stagnant and rotten, and the heat was now bearing down with force. As predicted, I was soaking in sweat, and I was down to just a couple of sips in my water bottle when we came to a flowing creek before the road. It wasn't great. The rocks were bright orange with rust, and there were puffs of white bacterial foam anywhere the water slowed. Still, it was the best we'd seen since we left camp, so we didn't really have a choice. We sat and filtered, and I was so thirsty that I didn't notice the metallic taste until I'd chugged half a litre. The water was so extremely ferric that it was almost like drinking blood.

"Bleh! Do you think this tastes like chemicals, or just iron?" I asked Constantine. I was worried it was farm run-off, or leachate from a nearby coalmine. "I hope we're not in a Superfund site or something."

"What's a Superfund site?" He asked. "Anyway, I put drink mix in mine already, so I can't tell you."

I couldn't believe he'd never heard of a Superfund site! "You know, like on the CDT near Anaconda. You're not supposed to drink the surface water there, it's all contaminated with arsenic from the iron smelter." He blanched. Turns out, he somehow missed the gigantic warning signs around Anaconda and drank from the streams without noticing anything wrong.

"Anyway," I said, "Superfund sites are like, industrial pollution zones that the government's trying to clean up." I gave him a sip of my water to try. "Does that taste like cancer to you?"

"Just tastes like iron. I've drank lots of water like that, and I'm fine." Given that he'd just confessed to drinking arsenic-water, I wasn't entirely reassured, but I tried to put the possible carcinogens out my mind. It was the only water I had, and I was thirsty.

Constantine had been in contact with Apple Pie, a seriously accomplished hiker who was also about to complete her eleventh National Scenic Trail. She was section hiking the NCT eastbound, and today was the day we'd cross paths. When Constantine got cell service at the road, he checked in with her, and found out that she and her partner Greenleaf were planning to camp at Arthur Family Campground. It would add three miles to our day, but she'd be able to give us the data on Ohio, so it was worth it. Still, I'd been pacing myself for an easy thirty, and the idea of hiking three extra miles on top of it made my mood collapse. I was so hot, so sweaty, so tired, and my hiking boner was already limp. Three more miles?? Nooooo.

The roadwalk into Moraine State Park was blazing hot, a completely exposed stretch of pavement with wheat fields to either side. I suffered through it, slurping a melted Snickers in a vain attempt to cheer up. It didn't help much. I was trying to drink as little of the questionable water as possible, so I was only taking small sips when I couldn't tolerate my thirst. And I was so, so thirsty. It felt like my shoes were going to melt into the asphalt, and the wet air clung to my lungs and skin. It was so thick with humidity that I felt like I could choke.

A few miles from the entrance to the park, a silver pickup truck slowed and rolled down the window. “Magpie and Constantine?” It was Greenleaf, running support for Apple Pie. She was just ahead, so we made our hellos quick and hustled down trail to meet Apple Pie. A scant moment later, she appeared at the side of the road, and the three of us stopped right there in the shoulder to exchange greetings. Constantine had been texting with her on and off all trail, but she and I had never interacted before. It didn't matter. In true thru-hiker style, we were instantly comfortable with each other, as only like-minded weirdos can be. I'd missed the camraderie of thru-hikers over the past two years, and we happily confirmed our plans to camp together after spending a few minutes swapping stories. Ohio was bad, she said. There were aggressive dogs, endless roadwalks, rough overgrown trails and difficult resupply. I was not looking forward to Ohio before this, but now I was downright dreading it. I was glad we could give her good news. Pennsylvania is great, we told her. It only gets better from here! After a few minutes, we said a temporary goodbye and hiked off in opposite directions. She would get a ride with Greenleaf back to their camp, and we would meet them there.

At the entrance to Moraine State Park, we passed a little information kiosk. It was titled “Wetlands Restoration Project”, and detailed all the volunteer efforts that went into remediating old coal mines. The pictures of polluted coal water looked exactly like the stream we'd had to drink from. Fabulous. I vowed not to touch one more sip of that water, no matter how parched I got.

I was utterly exhausted when we reached the turnoff to the campsite road. I was whining miserably to Constantine about the extra miles, when we came around a corner and were greeted by a cheerful Apple Pie. Oops! I didn't want to seem unfriendly, so I mustered up a smile and hoped she hadn't heard me bitching about how much I hate trying to meet up with people. I do actually like meeting other hikers, I just don't like surprise bonus miles when I've been pacing myself for an easy day. I shouldn't have worried though. Greenleaf met us with the truck at the trail crossing and drove us to their spot at a developed campsite, and both he and Apple Pie were fabulous hosts. It was just like being on a popular trail again, if only for an evening; both parties gave enough space and silence for all the chores to get done, and we swapped trail data and stories around the picnic table as we ate our dehydrated dinners. It just felt so normal, so much like trail. I was physically and mentally sore, and retreated to bed as soon my social batteries were drained, but that choice didn't feel weird at all.

Thunder was our alarm clock the next morning. We awoke to a rumbling grey sky, and hastened to pack up before the rain hit. We just about made it too - I was tying my shoes when the first fat drops splattered down. Hurriedly shoving the last miscellaneous items into my pack, I raced from the campsite and threw myself into the truck with the others as the drizzle turned into a downpour. Greenleaf drove us the mile back to the trailhead and we sat for a while until the rain eased, then said reluctant goodbyes and headed out in opposite directions, Apple Pie going east and the two of us heading west.

Moraine State Park was well maintained and cruisey, and the rainburst didn't last long. After an hour, we sat down at a bench to shed our rain jackets and ate a snack on the banks of a sparkling lake. The storm had relieved the humidity, and now the weather was fine and clear. We bounced along on excellent singletrack all morning, aiming for Duck Point in Sharwood Park for lunch.

It was a little bit of an awkward lunch spot. Sharwood Park is within driving distance of Pittsburgh, and this was a weekend afternoon. Pounding down a gravel bike path into the recreation area, we pushed past many slow-riding weekenders as we made our way to the picnic shelter. This proved to be full, booked by an organized learn-to-kayak group, so we kept on going until we came to a seemingly unoccupied bench next to the lake. Just as we scoped it out, a kayaker pulled up on the bank, arriving seconds before we could claim the sunny spot. He was friendly enough, and his first question, “Where are you guys hiking to?” gave me enough of an opening to pull rank with the answer of, “North Dakota. We've hiked about a thousand miles from Vermont. You don't mind if we eat lunch here, do you?”

He might have minded a little, but he wasn't going to say so after that. Our lunch break became a game of chicken - he was waiting for his wife to catch up in her kayak and clearly wanted the break spot for himself, but we were hungry and had claimed the bench before he got out of his boat. He was friendly enough and asked a few questions, but he was really just waiting for us to leave. We were waiting for him to leave so we could actually relax instead of being Thru-Hike Ambassadors. It was all extremely polite and civilised, but the tension was there. After half an hour, we were done eating and let him and his wife have the bench, and I was mildly amused by my own irritation. Non-thru-hikers should bow to my superiority, obviously! How many miles had they hiked this month? Very silly and entitled of me, and I could only laugh. Talking to a normie for half an hour wasn't the worst price to pay for a place to sit.

We left the recreation area and embarked on a short roadwalk into the next state park, McConnell Mills. It was a long, narrow path through a gorge, and Apple Pie had nothing but good things to say about it. We availed ourselves of the parking area privies, disappointed that they did not have indoor plumbing, and dropped down into the park in search of water. The steep, shady trail was deliciously cool, though clogged with meandering dayhikers, and Constantine decided to go fill his bottles from a tributary stream. “You're going no filter, no problem on that? The parking area is right above us.” I said, with a skeptical eyebrow raise.

“I'm pretty sure it's a spring. It's fine. Stomach of iron!”

I was positive that it wasn't a spring, and declined to drink it. Five minutes later, we came across a shallow cave echoing with trickles. Now that was definitely a spring! I pulled out my headlamp and dropped my pack to search for the source, finding it all the way at the back in a narrow cavern. “I can fit through there for sure,” I said. “Hand me the bottles, I'm going to have to crawl.”

It was spidery and dank, but I could just barely squeeze through the tiny gap. Constantine definitely wouldn't have been able to fit. With my headlamp on, it wasn't at all scary. Daylight peeked through a hand-size opening at the top, and I managed to obtain three litres of fresh spring water by contorting myself around the rocks. The water was delicious, and it was well worth the effort. I crawled out muddy and giggling with glee, having gotten an up-close look as some very cool amblypygids. I don't know exactly when I got over my fear of them, but in the last few years I've gotten really interested in rare arachnids, and whip-spiders are the most mysterious and ugly of them all.

McConnell Mills State Park was excellent. The trail was rocky and rooty and full of adventure, demanding our attention as we scrambled up and around and leaped over mud puddles, pulling ourselves up with the trunks of small trees. Colourful kayaks graced the rapids, and we passed many groups of picnickers lounging on sand bars. Once past the tourist area, a large sign warned us that the trail to Hell's Hollow Trailhead was 6.5 miles one way, and we should give ourselves at least eleven hours round trip. We laughed at this. How irritating it must be to be a ranger our here! There were no side trails or bail points once you got into the section, so I suppose it made sense to dissuade overconfident dayhikers, but the trail past the sign was actually better and easier than the rocky steeps next to the beaches. The trail ascended the ridge with long, lazy switchbacks, and I found myself in the rarest of trail moods: euphoria. The birds were singing, the weather was perfect, the trail was kind and interesting in equal measure. My body felt strong and in sync with the environment, and I just felt so good. It was beautiful out here in Pennsylvania! Who knew? I sang and whistled along with the birds, and after the trail descended we stopped for a snack break at Walnut Flats.

Another good surprise: just as we were getting ready to go, a hiker ambled past in short-shorts and Altras. Her daypack was tiny, but I know a thru-hiker's gait when I see it. She recognized us too and stopped to chat. Her name was Black Widow, and she’d completed her AT thru-hike in 2019. She sorely missed the companionship of thru-hikers in her urban Pittsburgh life, and we cast around to see if we knew anyone in common that we could connect her with. “Who do we know who did the AT in ‘19?” I said. We spent a few minutes rattling off names before I realized. “Oh wait! I did Maine southbound in 2019. I knew you looked familiar! When did you finish?” Based on the dates, I had definitely met Black Widow before, but I'd been pushing so hard that I'd barely even said hi. We exchanged information before setting off. Thunder was beginning to rumble overhead, cutting the interaction short, but it was still awesome to meet another thru-hiker on this lonely trail. Two hiker friends in two days! Was this even the NCT?

The thunder intensified as we pushed past another group of dayhikers. They were wearing trendy sneakers with barely any traction and were really struggling in the mud, but of course after we passed them, they picked up the pace. For whatever reason, dayhikers really hate it when they're outpaced by hikers with loaded packs, and we had to jog to stay ahead. There's nothing worse than leapfrogging people who slow down as soon as they're ten feet away from you, and it feels rude to repeatedly ask to pass. It was starting to spit, and the sky was a threatening grey as we raced down the slippery trail. Branches creaked in the wind, and in the distance we heard the echoing boom of a falling tree. Oh, shit. We were about three miles from the trailhead when the heavens opened. Within seconds, we were soaked to the skin, the rain lashing down so hard that my contacts were swimming around in my eyes. Then the downpour turned to hail, and the wind was quickly becoming dangerous. Acorn-sized chunks of ice pelted my head and raised bruises on my arms, and a gigantic branch crashed down mere inches from face. Another dayhiker was cowering under a big rock, and he yelled at us to take shelter as the sky turned black and lightning flashed overhead. We did not heed his warning, but at least we knew we didn't have to worry about the annoyed slow dayhikers behind us anymore. Still we were running, jumping over swollen creeks and pushing hard for the trailhead. A gigantic branch crashed down mere inches from my face, and all of a sudden I was laughing hysterically, fight-or-flight pushing my euphoria to giddy heights. The thing was, it was warm rain. Warm rain! Whoever heard of such a thing? It was exactly the temperature you'd want for a shower after a sunburn, and I was struck by the sheer novelty of it. The hail stopped and the wind lessened just after the branch came down, and so my adrenaline had nowhere to go. “This is awesome!” I yelled at Constantine. “Woohoo! Yes! Thunder!!!” I was totally high on endorphins, and when we finally got to the sunny trailhead, I was still whooping and hollering. “Wow! The ground is steaming! That was amazing.”

My South Carolina boy had of course experienced warm rain before, so he was less than enthusiastic about it, but I was stoked all the way down our roadwalk, marvelling as the sun raised puffs of vapour from my clothes. As we got close to our destination that day, a semi-secret shelter called Sankey Hill, Constantine got a text from none other than Munch. She was out hiking for the weekend with Davy, and was planning to camp at the very same shelter. Looking at our tracker, she’d seen that we were nearby, so did we want salad and sodas? Yes!

It turns out, we'd just barely missed each other at Hell's Hollow Trailhead, so we ended up getting to the shelter first. We'd expended so much energy during the storm that we cooked and ate a trail dinner before they arrived, then lazed around in the shelter drying out. Forty-five minutes later, Munch and Davy showed up with coolers and big smiles. It was another massive feast. Munch is a trail mom extraordinaire and always travels well-supplied, so we were treated to a huge spread with every salad ingredient we could possibly want, and then fresh blueberries, watermelon, cold drinks, and coffee cake. It was nice to relax without the whole crew, just one-on-one with the most dedicated and keen hikers of the Munch family. Davy, also known as Hank the Mountain Man, is a seasoned traveller himself, and his low-key outdoorsy energy was perfectly suited to thru-hiking. We invited Munch to stay with us in the shelter for the night, which she excitedly accepted after making absolutely sure she wouldn't intrude, and we settled down for the night with trail stories and good feelings all around. She would hike five miles with us to Wampum in the morning, then get picked up by Davy after breakfast in town. We drifted off to sleep in the firefly glow, thrilled to have the company of a new friend.

As it turns out, Munch can really move! She's a fair few inches shorter than me, but I didn't have to pull back my pace at all on the roadwalk the next day. I don't know how she kept up with my long legs, but we left Constantine in the dust as we chatted and laughed down the trail, only letting him catch up when we paused to sign the trail logs. We got to Wampum in the blink of an eye, and sat with Davy and Munch over coffee and breakfast sandwiches. I wanted to get going, but I also wanted to stay. The tension between needing to do miles and wanting to spend time with generous friends had never been sharper, and I felt badly as I fretted over maps and looked constantly at my watch.

The problem was Ohio. The maps we'd been able to find didn't have half-mile markers, so we didn't know precisely how far it was to Lisbon. We also didn't know how far it would be until we hit public land again, so today we were playing it safe and camping at a shelter four miles short of the PA/OH border. I also had to make sure to get to Darlington before the post office closed to pick up Constantine's birthday presents, and there was a brand-new trail section south of Wampum that added unexpected miles to our day.

We bid Munch and Davy goodbye around ten o'clock, and I found myself anxious about the post office. I couldn't stop checking my phone every half-mile, obsessing about our pace and feeling behind schedule. The trail was well-maintained and cruisey in this section, weaving as it did past ATV trails and forest service roads, and I wanted to relax and enjoy it. It was probably our last taste of decent trail for a while, so I finally forced myself to put the maps away. Fifteen miles was going to pass whether I worried about it or not.

It all turned out just fine in the end. We made it to Darlington around 2:30, and Constantine was thrilled with his presents. In addition to a new, more functional food bag, I replaced his broken shoulder pocket so he wouldn't need hold four different things while trying to film. “But baby! What am I gonna complain about now?” he joked.

“Oh, I know you'll find something. I believe in you!” And I gave him a kiss.

After a few more easy miles, we arrived at the shelter around five o'clock. It was nice to get to the shelter early, and we'd even packed out some cold pizza from Wampum. While paging through the Ohio maps and worrying, I discovered that the long, featureless GPX line was actually made up of smaller segments. By using the edit function of Gaia and doing a little math, I could figure out the exact mileage to Lisbon and even drop some waypoints. Referencing this against the resupply data we'd gotten from our friend Buck-30, I verified that we had only about thirty-two miles to Lisbon from this camp, and eighty-three miles to the start of the Buckeye Trail. The Buckeye Trail is covered by a Guthook map, so once we got there, we'd have accurate mileage again.

This was great news. We'd been conservative with our mile planning, intending to camp early in Ohio's Beaver Creek State Park and nearo into Lisbon the next day. After my Gaia math, we could see that it would only be a twenty-two mile day to Beaver Creek, so we decided to push all the way into Lisbon and turn our nearo into a zero. We wouldn't even lose any time! Munch and company live near Lisbon and had offered to help us with errands when we got to town, and now we would be able to spend a whole morning with them without feeling rushed.

We woke early the next day, eager for town. The difference between Pennsylvania and Ohio could not have been more stark. Even on our maps, it was obvious. We had four miles of trail through the game lands, then abruptly switched to highway as soon as we hit the border. I was going to miss Pennsylvania! I hadn't really known what to expect, but I'd unexpectedly fallen in love with the place, and now I was sad to see it go. The last four miles of PA were excellent and cruisey as always, though somewhat bittersweet. Just as soon as we were getting into the groove, we were unceremoniously dumped into a busy highway, greeted by a great big OHIO sign. So this was how it was going to be, huh? We signed the trail log and set off again into blazing heat, holding our noses as we stepped past rotting roadkill.

The first day in Ohio wasn't actually so bad. After that first carcass-strewn highway, we popped onto a quick stretch of rail trail, then followed sleepy rural roads into Beaver Creek State Park. Beaver Creek was another irritation - the NCT took us ten miles out of our way just to route us through this patch of public land, only to drop us off on the exact same highway. The trails through the state park were fine, even pleasant, but it wasn't ten-mile-detour good. Our maps for it weren't even accurate, so we muddled our way through by following blazes and eventually got back to the highway.

After that it was just roadwalk. Narrow shoulder, blazing heat, bloated roadkill, empty pack. We roadwalked past barking farmhouse dogs and bemused porch-drinking people, past truck scales and pipeline valves and industrial-scale feedlots. It was loud and stinking and not at all designed for humans, just a hot pavement habitat for cars. We roadwalked past the cute touristy town of Elkton and half-heartedly snapped a photo at “The Shortest Covered Bridge in the United States”, then roadwalked on past the dead possums and decaying deer right into the Days Inn parking lot. I cannot possibly overstate the amount of roadkill on this highway. It was such a busy route, I worried I might become roadkill myself.

After dinner at the motel restaurant, I ran across the parking lot to the world's saddest convenience store for snacks. It was a concrete gas station kiosk that mainly sold beer and cigarettes, but I was able to scrape up a few dusty candy bars and some bottled sports drinks. Constantine wasn't doing too well. He was coming down with a fever, and had barely managed to eat a few bites of burger before retreating to shiver in our room. When his fever swung hot, I checked his entire body for Lyme rash and persuaded him to drink a litre of Gatorade. We eventually chalked it up to a waterborne illness from his no-filter escapade at McConnell Mills, but on this first night I was quite concerned. This is how we ended up taking a double zero in Lisbon - though he woke up the next morning feeling better, he had a milder run of fever that afternoon, and we decided to play it safe and rest for an extra day.

We spent our first zero with Munch and SOS, and though I had be mindful of time to get my writing done, I actually managed to relax and enjoy myself for an hour or two. After an enormous buffet breakfast and resupply chores, they took us out to an ice cream store with a giant chess set out front. SOS and I had been having a great time talking all day, so after we got our ice cream I challenged her to a game. The first game, I won with checkmate in five, but after a little coaching from Constantine, she totally kicked my ass in the second. It took us nearly an hour of tight play, but she doggedly forced me into sacrifice after sacrifice, until I was down to two pawns and king and had to resign the game. It wasn't the most productive hour of my day, but it was very well spent - SOS is an awesome teenager.

So that's the end of Pennsylvania, and the beginning of Ohio. You already know how our second zero day went, because I spent the entire day doing internet chores. We're now about to start the Buckeye wilderness loop, so I'll talk to you again next week. I hope this was worth the wait!

-Magpie

We’d been hoping to get an early start out of Ellicottville, but the town gravity was too strong. At 9:30am, we were still fussing around with internet chores and trying to pack our packs. It took me ages to figure out where to send Constantine’s birthday presents, and I couldn’t get them shipped in time to arrive for his actual birthday in Clarion. I sent them to Darlington instead, and then wasted more time ordering new shoes. By the time we got going, it was already past ten. No matter - we only had to do twenty miles to get to the next shelter, and we’d been in the habit of lazy days out of town. The only thing that was stressing me out was the timing. For a couple of days, we’d been texting back and forth with our friend Enigma, who’s now living and working in western New York. He doesn’t own a car, but he’d been trying to coordinate a ride to come meet us on trail and hike some miles together. The night before, we’d finally managed to settle on a tentative plan, so now Constantine and I were hiking against the clock. We had to make it to our goal tonight, or we’d keep Enigma waiting a ridiculously long time the next morning.

The western part of New York is fairly flat, but we still had one climb that day, and it came at the very beginning. After a short roadwalk out of town, the trail turned and took us up, up, up a closed ski hill. We were following the easiest possible line up the cat-track road, but it was still incredibly steep. The sun was fierce, and I sweated and puffed under my six-day load of food. It was hard to believe that we’d be out for a full six days, a real trail section in a real National Forest. After we left New York, we would walk on no roads and receive no cell signal, and would not encounter a single convenience store. I felt surprisingly nervous about it - most thru-hikes I’ve done are made entirely of sections like this, but every NCT section so far had included at least one major roadwalk. I’d forgotten what good trail was. The singletrack trails on the FLT had been such a mixed bag that I was almost dreading 160 miles of pure trail. My most recent experiences of “trails” were mainly of brushy, mowed paths rather than constructed singletrack, and I’d found myself looking forward to the roadwalks. What would a six day section even be like?

That was a problem for future-me though. Today, we would be walking straight through the little town of Salamanca, giving us one last chance to charge our batteries and pick up any forgotten necessities. Our climb topped out after three miles, and we found ourselves in a municipal park. It was a surprise to find the picnic tables there, but it seemed that the ski hill in summer was actually quite popular with locals. Though it was only 11ish, we decided to make it our lunch spot, as we were unlikely to find a better place to stop on the road and we hadn’t eaten breakfast in town. As we lazed in the sun, I idly clicked around on the maps for the section and discovered that I’d made a huge mistake. When I was organizing our meeting with Enigma, I’d forgotten to include the map we were on in my calculations. It wasn’t 20 miles to the shelter as we’d told him, it was 32! Oh, no! There was no way we would make it there now - we couldn’t hike 29 miles starting at 11:30am! Fortunately, I still had LTE service, so I sent him a message as quickly as I could, explaining the situation. Maybe it would work out for the best - we wouldn’t be getting to Salamanca today after all, so he might be able to meet us in town? Maybe it was a better place to be dropped off? I felt horribly embarrassed, and flipped my phone into airplane mode immediately afterwards so I wouldn’t have to read his response. I hoped he wasn’t mad at me.

“Magpie, he’s a thru-hiker, he knows that’s how it goes. And he still needs to finalize his ride anyway, I promise he won’t be mad.” Constantine reassured me.

“I know, I know, it’ll probably be fine…. I just get anxious. Ugh, let’s go.”

We dropped some elevation as we entered Rock City State Forest, and stopped to filter water at an old Civilian Conservation Corps camp. The CCC camp had picnic tables and stone benches, and we took another lazy break since we had less than fifteen miles left. Reluctantly, I flipped my service back on. When my Canadian phone plan connects to Verizon towers, it gets LTE data but not any calls or SMS messages, so this entire conversation with Enigma was happening over messaging apps that neither of really use. I guess I’d had the notifications turned off, because it took me a while to see his reply. He was fine with the change of location, but now his ride had possibly fallen through, and he’d have to let me know later. Since my service was so unreliable, I told him to text Constantine. We hiked on. (As an aside, this quirk of my roaming cell plan and the ubiquity of Verizon towers in the northeast means that I haven’t received a single text message or voicemail since my plane touched down in Vermont. I promise I’m not just ignoring you!)

The trail past the CCC camp was pretty mellow - a grassy climb, then good-quality singletrack through the woods. I’d noticed a weird hairpin turn in the map the day before and chalked it up to yet more FLT loopiness, but when we got there, we figured out why. Little Rock City was amazing! The trail wove us through a collection of gigantic glacial erratics, a complex of boulders so densely packed that it was like walking through a maze. White blazes painted directly on the rocks guided us through narrow chutes and around sharp corners, at one point ducking us directly under the rocks where two boulders leaned against each other. It was the first place on the whole NCT that I genuinely wanted to spend more time exploring, the only place so far that I would go out of my way to visit. The FLT route only went through a small corner of the park, and it was clear that there was way, way more cool stuff around here. We spent as much time as we could spare playing around and taking photos, and when we got to the end of the rock maze, we were astonished to discover that the boulders were completely invisible! We’d been climbing until we were level with the top of the complex, and from that vantage, it just looked like ordinary forest.

I was in the swing of things now. If this is what Allegheny National Forest would be like, I was stoked! We’d be off the Finger Lakes Trail and through to a real hiking destination, a place that people go on purpose to experience the outdoors. No more wheat fields! No more crappy trail! I was excited to finally be out of New York.

After passing an appealing new shelter (that we regrettably could not stop to enjoy), we left Little Rock City and dropped our remaining elevation on an overgrown forest road. The mosquitoes were buzzing and the sun was hot, and I was once more looking forward to the short stretch of roadwalk before the shelter. I flicked a crawling tick off my wrist and shuddered, pounding down the final stretch to the roadside parking area.

There was someone standing there. Just past the gate, a guy in hiking pants and an ElevenSkys hat was smiling up at me and waving. I stopped and said hello. “You must be Magpie!” he said, “I’m Jim. My wife and I are out here high-pointing and we thought we’d do some trail magic for you guys.” Constantine soon caught up, and he and Jim stood in the long grass and the mosquitoes, talking about how he’d been following Constantine’s quest to hike the eleven national scenic trails. High-pointing, it turns out, is a hobby that involves climbing to the highest point of all fifty states, or the highest point of any geographic category more generally, like all the highest points in Europe. Apparently, the one in Kansas is a random bump in the middle of a field. It has something in common with thru-hiking, and Jim and his wife were big fans. As fascinating as this discussion was, I was growing kind of desperate to get out the bugs and move on, and I turned the conversation to trail magic. It was pretty hilarious - Jim’s “magic” for Constantine was a giant jar of peanut butter and another packet of Spam! Constantine notoriously despises peanut butter, and enjoys complaining about eating Spam much more than actually doing so. They had real magic for us too, and I gratefully accepted some Via coffee packets and the offer of fresh water. Thirty minutes of chat later, we bid them farewell and hit the road. I was ready to get to camp, and anxious to hear about Enigma’s new plan.

The roadwalk went quickly, and we were soon back in the forest on an ATV road. We were shooting for Bucktooth Shelter in the state forest now, and I was still feeling terrible about my mileage calculation mistake. I felt bad about our poor time management too - the day had been characterized by lazy planning and long breaks, and we’d spent so little of our time actually hiking that it took us until seven pm to hike an easy twenty! We had to stop doing these short days out of town if we wanted to get through Ohio, and we had to start waking up earlier and being disciplined with our time. I ate grumpily and went to sleep, vowing to do better.

I woke up feeling sluggish and dull, and Constantine slept straight through his first alarm. As a consequence, we didn’t get going until 7:30am, and I felt even worse about our pace. I hadn’t used the time to catch up on my overdue writing, I hadn’t written any new trail notes, we hadn’t gotten very far down the trail and I didn’t even have cell service to check in with Enigma. I had no idea if he was meeting us today or not, and I paced down the trail in a frantic rush, paranoid that he’d be angry at us for keeping him waiting after I screwed up the plan. Of course, Enigma is not the kind of person who’d hold that against me, and I was fully aware that it was just my anxiety talking. Despite that, I hesitated to turn off airplane mode when I spotted a cell tower, though I did force myself to check. I haven’t seen Enigma in almost two years, and I was eager to hike some miles with him again.

He had responded, but not with good news. His ride had fallen through, and he didn’t know when he could arrange another one. I told him that he was always welcome, that he should pop in on trail any time it worked, and responded to his question about what trail magic we’d appreciate most. Afterwards, I got worried that I was too specific and seemed entitled, and started ruminating on that anxiety. Did I seem too brusque? Too presumptuous when I told him my favourite soda is Cherry Coke, and that I probably wouldn’t drink a beer? Did I come off as demanding when I asked him about possibly bringing me a birthday candle to surprise Constantine? I worried the entire way to Salamanca.

Salamanca is the capital of the Seneca Nation, a member of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, and the purple-and-white flag was flying all over town. Or it would have been flying, had there been a wind. The air was still and dead, and I was already exhausted from the heat. We made our way to the McDonald’s on the edge of town, unpatriotically bypassing the Tim Hortons because it was 0.3mi out of our way. Constantine wanted to go to the casino, but I reminded him that a) he wasn’t vaccinated yet and b) last time we went to the casino, he lost $400 at blackjack, after being up by $800 most of the night. “After I get vaccinated, I’ll always win, right? That’s how that works?” He teased.

“No. But after you get vaccinated, you are allowed to go to the casino.” I replied

“Really? I can go to the casino? I wouldn’t think you’d be comfortable with that.”

“The vaccines work really well, babe! After you’re vaccinated, you can go sit in a smoky room next to strangers and lose money all night long if you want.” This did seem to make him more enthusiastic about the prospect of getting vaccinated. I don’t think it’d sunk in for him that vaccines mean a return to normal, and he’s pretty scared of needles. I promised him that we could even go to Vegas after we got off trail, and he seemed genuinely surprised and cheered by this news.

We spent far too long at the McDonald’s, and we both ate far too much food. Constantine crammed down five breakfast sandwiches while I ate two McMuffins and all of the hashbrowns. My period arrived while we were sitting down, which was fortuitous - their bathrooms were open, so I could pop in there to clean up. It definitely explained my anxiety over the past few days. We rolled out of the restaurant nearly an hour later, both of us asleep on our feet from the sheer quantity of grease we’d consumed. We followed a bike path for a while next to the highway, then turned at a parking lot to follow a rough ATV-track powerline road. My stomach was aching and upset after all that McDonalds, and my head pounded from the salt overdose. What had I done to myself? The overcast sky offered no relief from the heat, and there was nowhere to sit down and rest on the paved road that followed. I unbuckled my hipbelt and did some slow breathing exercises to cope, and over the next hour and a half I began to feel better, just in time for our first glimpse of Allegheny State Park.

Here it was: the beginning of our first real hiking section. We followed a dirt road from the fish hatchery into the protected wetlands area, and I began to get excited again as the hills rose into view. A little dark brown weasel streaked across my path, made eye contact halfway across the road and then zipped back to cover. A weasel! So cute. The trees rising out of the mist made me think of the Amazon rainforest - being from Canada, my platonic idea of a forest is cold and filled with pines or cedars. This was the first big, healthy Northeastern forest I’d ever seen outside of Maine, and it startled me to see an expanse that was warm and crowned with deciduous trees. To me, wet and leafy canopies signify the tropics! We came to the entrance to the State Park, and were delighted to see a gigantic NCT sign at the trailhead. We were almost out of New York, and almost off the FLT!

The New York section of the Allegheny is a State Park, while the Pennsylvania section is a National Forest, but the two parks connect and the trails are maintained to the same standard throughout. We’d been worried about the climb up from the road into the park, but the trail was so well-designed that the 600ft elevation felt like nothing at all. “It feels like this trail actually goes somewhere!” I exclaimed to Constantine. “Like, it was designed for people to actually hike it. They’re thinking about the best route over the next ten miles, not just trying to get you over the next hill. Like, they know people actually come and hike for multiple days! Over long distances even! The trail is built for actual hikers!” We were so excited about the good trail design. We couldn’t shut up about it, exclaiming back and forth all the way to the shelter. It was gorgeous, it was beautiful, it was amazing, it made sense! Five days of nothing but this wonderful, sensible, excellent trail was going to heaven. More than heaven; it was going to be hiking! The signage in the section was specific for the NCT, not the Finger Lakes Trail, and that got us excited too. This trail was maintained and signed just for us! At last, this adventure felt like a thru-hike instead of a fool’s errand.

We were cruising into the shelter, pushing the pace to avoid the incipient rain, when we came across another hiker. I immediately got a weird vibe - he was wearing Altras and had a Granite Gear ultralight pack, but his pack was stuffed to the absolute gills and he wasn’t going more than 2 miles per hour. Unfortunately, he was going the same direction as us, so we had to stop and talk. “You guys doing the Finger Lakes Trail?” he asked.

“No,” I said, “We’re thru-hiking the NCT. Vermont to North Dako-”

“Yeah, yeah, I know that one. I was thinking about doing that, got the maps, but the resupply is tough, isn’t it? Those Avenza maps suck. Yeah, I might do something on the NCT. You going to the shelter in two miles?” (This is paraphrased, but that was his general vibe)

We had to tell him that we were. It seemed like he wanted to talk more, but then he wouldn’t make eye contact and shifted his weird-fitting pack uncomfortably, as if he wanted to go. He didn’t precisely say he was going to that shelter, but it seemed like he asked because that was his destination. We set off at a fast pace, extremely creeped out. Or at least I was - Constantine wasn’t particularly enthused to share the shelter with that guy, but I was full-on paranoid about it. I’d been listening to too many survival podcasts maybe, because my mind immediately went to the 2019 murder on the AT. It wasn’t totally fair to the creepy hiker, because he hadn’t done or said anything overtly threatening and didn’t seem to be carrying a weapon - but then again, his story about where he was hiking and his weird half-knowledge about the NCT was concerning. Nothing he said made total sense, but it wasn’t total nonsense either. It was just really odd and unsettling. “Let’s get to the shelter and cook dinner, and if he shows up and it’s uncomfortable, we can leave. If we don’t set up until he gets there, we can just say we were getting here for a dinner break,” I suggested. “He’s probably not a murderer, right? What do you even do when you’re sharing a shelter with other hikers? Do you have to talk to them? I forget.”

Constantine readily agreed to this plan - he didn’t feel like making conversation with the strange guy either, and we cooked our dinners as we waited anxiously for him to show up. Then we ate our dinners. Then we sat around in the shelter and watched the rain, hoping that we wouldn’t have to set up the tent in it. By 7pm, he hadn’t yet arrived, but we gave him another half an hour to account for his slow pace. At 7:30, we felt confident that he wasn’t coming. “He must have asked if we were staying at the shelter so he could camp alone,” Constantine said. “It’s weird, he seemed like the talkative type.” I was hugely relieved. If he had shown up and given off a threatening vibe, even camping a few miles down the trail wouldn’t have been a guarantee of safety. He had the maps! He knew exactly where we were going, and with no roads and no cell service, we would have had nowhere to run to if he'd been dangerous. I still had the irrational worry that he would stalk us down the trail, but I knew that it wasn’t based on anything. I was just desocialized, unused to seeing other hikers. I realized in that moment that it had been almost two years since I’d hiked a popular trail. Constantine and I had been a team of exclusively two, and I felt frightened by the prospect of hiker company.

The rain slowed and turned to mist as the sun set, and I was given one more “first” in this first real section on the NCT. I saw, for the first time in my life, fireflies. At first I thought I must be about to faint, or hallucinating. Tiny pinpricks of light were moving in my peripheral vision. As I turned my head, I caught more and more glimpses out of the corner of my eye, and suddenly the perspective shifted and I saw them everywhere. They were little fairy lights, twinkling and swirling through the air like magic. They were so beautiful! I had been aware that fireflies were real insects, but some part of my brain had classified them as mythical, and I felt like a child meeting a real live unicorn. Constantine was amused by my wonderment - he’d grown up with them, and had seen them more summer nights than not. I couldn’t believe it. Fireflies are real! I stayed up late watching the show, peering out through drooping eyelids until I literally couldn’t hold them open.

We had yet another late start the next morning, reluctant to break our cosy quilt cuddle and head out into the fog. It was kind of cold out, which should have been good news for me, but the dampness was less than enticing.

We were only a few miles away from the NY/PA border though, and the milestone was enough to lift our moods. We pushed fast once we got going, and in a little over an hour we made our goal. We whooped and hollered when we saw the sign, and sat down on the damp earth to eat snacks and sign the trail log. Pennsylvania! We made it! We got even more excited when we saw the trail blazed in official NCT blue, and the direction signs bearing the trail initials. The feeling of being on a real thru-hike was back again, the feeling that this trail was made for us. It was routed for us, signed for us, intended to be hiked by people just like us! The elation of it carried us through the misty morning as we cruised over supremely well-maintained and cushy trail. It curved where the land curved, following the banks of the Allegheny Reservoir instead of pushing us up and over the hills as the FLT would have done. I was in love with it. We saw innumerable deer, who were wary but not overly scared of people, and even caught a glimpse of a tiny, spotted fawn.

“It feels like a trail that actually goes somewhere!” I said again. We just couldn't stop remarking on it. All throughout the Allegheny section, we marvelled at difference that good trail design makes. It was thoughtful. It was sane. It had primitive campsites situated at appropriate intervals, and though you could wild camp anywhere you wanted, the signed campsites were the places that made the most sense. Every climb was made easy by the trail placement or by generous switchbacks, and we never encountered a truly steep grade.

We ate lunch just past one of those campsites. We'd intended to eat lunch there, but it was occupied by a trio of canoe campers who had taken over the whole space. They had a bit of a weird vibe too, as two of them didn't speak to us or make eye contact. The third man walked out to the trail junction when he saw us coming, as if to head us off, and the short conversation was awkward and strained. He held one arm stiffly beneath his poncho in an unusual posture, and afterwards Constantine and I agreed that it seemed like he had a gun. We clearly weren't invited to sit down, so we pushed a mile further and found a good sitting log overlooking the lake.

It was here that I discovered that Constantine had packed out hotdogs. Again. After they’d gone bad in his pack last section and I'd warned him not to. I'd been so stressed out in the cramped, mask-optional Ellicottville grocery store that I'd failed to supervise his resupply, and he'd ended up with way too much food. His floppy dyneema food bag was the approximate size and weight of a watermelon, and I wished I'd been able to get his birthday present sooner - I'd ordered him an SWD Lunchbox in spiffy teal X-Pac, but he wouldn't get it until Darlington. A large part of the excess weight was the 1lb package of hotdogs that he'd bought but neglected to eat in the previous two days, and now they were definitely inedible. “Ewww, oh my god! You're not going to eat those, are you? They smell like roadkill!”

He was, in fact, determined to eat them. The only other thing he'd packed for lunch was string cheese, and a single cheese laid out on a tortilla just looked sad. He grimaced and groaned but managed to force two hotdogs down, above my strident protests. “You're going to get listeria, baby!” I told him.

“I've got a stomach of iron!” He replied, although he was already turning green.

Lunch accomplished, we set off once more. The foggy damp was coalescing into rain, and we heard rumbling overhead. Just as we began a short climb, the thunderclouds burst with a terrific boom and the rain came bucketing down. We were soaked within seconds, and all thoughts of hotdogs and armed canoers vanished. My legs were running the show, and they were running. Pushing, moving, crushing miles, faster faster faster so I wouldn't get cold. No thoughts, just motion and water and go, go, go. It almost felt good in a strange way; I experienced this urgent and overwhelming desire to get out of the rain as a connection to my deepest animal self. We are only intelligent primates, and it's important to remember that once in a while. That being said, my spiritual acceptance of the situation did not mean I enjoyed it.

A bruise on my hip was causing me problems. About two weeks ago, I'd put an extremely hard, stale protein bar in my hipbelt pocket next to the bone, and over the course of the day it had shifted and pressed into my flesh painfully. Not knowing this was the problem, I'd chalked up the discomfort to hip chafe and toughed it out. I didn't eat that protein bar for a couple of days, and the crush injury got so bad that it swelled into a goose egg. My right hip already has damage from a long-ago bike accident, so any injury on that side triggers chronic pain. Once I figured it out, I loosened the offending hip strap and cinched down the shoulder strap to compensate, but that meant my obliques and lower abs were carrying the full weight of my pack. After two weeks of this, the entire right side of my core was cramping and seizing up, and I now had a choice between wearing my pack properly and enduring shooting nerve pain, or wearing it slightly off-balance and dealing with knife-like cramps. Painkillers weren't helping, and I was fussing with my pack straps constantly as the rain poured down.

We left the lakeshore and dropped our elevation, now following the banks of a flat, meandering stream. The rain slackened and then faded back into a misty drizzle as the canopy deepened its embrace. Shafts of gilded sunlight filtered down through the mist, darkening the shadows and making the place seem enchanted. It felt like a secret world, like a storybook forest. We followed this stream for hours, each bend revealing a quiet wonder. Soft silence came in the wake of the rain, and was quickly filled with birdsong.

The peaceful afternoon could not last forever. Around 6:30, the pain in my hip was so bad that I had to stop and sit down. We'd been hiking non-stop since the rain started, but I felt ashamed of our late start and begrudged even this five minute break. We had planned to make camp in a mile and half, for a total of 29 on the day, but there was another campsite in four miles that I felt certain we could get to. Yes, I was in pain, and yes, I was extremely hungry, but we still had four thousand miles to do! We had to stop being so lazy!

Constantine confessed that the hotdogs had really messed him up. Ten minutes after eating them, his body responded with a high fever, and he'd half-expected the rain to sizzle when it hit his skin. He felt better after an hour, but it had taken a lot of energy to run that hot and now he was feeling fatigued. “I'm pretty sure my immune system killed it,” he said.

“Yeah,” I replied, “but that fever was a warning. Your body was saying, don't ever feed me this again! Next time you'll probably just shit yourself. Or start vomiting and not be able to stop. I don't want to push the SOS button for food poisoning, and I don't want to carry you to a hospital.”

I made him promise that he'd throw away the hotdogs at the next trashcan, and we set off. We'd decided to push for the next campsite and expected to get there around eight o'clock, but the weather had other plans. Not even ten minutes later, a tremendous crash of thunder broke the sky, and the first drops of rain sputtered down. “Shit!” I yelled back to Constantine. “First campsite?”

“One mile left, go, go, go!” He yelled in reply, and the rain was already turning up. Soon, we could barely hear each other over the wind, and as we ran down the trail the rain increased to its most furious pitch yet. We barreled into the campsite and hastily set up the tent, which Constantine unfortunately stored at the very bottom of his pack. I chucked my pack on top of his stuff to try to keep it somewhat dry, irritated by his lack of organization. I scurried around securing the fly pegs as he chucked armloads of wet gear inside, then threw myself in the tent, breathing hard. Impossibly, the rain grew even more intense. What we'd just run through had only been the leading edge of the storm, and now we were in the worst of it. The tent sounded as if a firehose were aimed at every side, a blasting roar that almost obscured the wind. The nearby creek was swollen with rage, and the leaves were in a riot. We could not hear one another unless we shouted, and we sat for a long while in stunned and soaking silence, puddles of cold water everywhere.

“Wow,” said Constantine, when we could hear again.

“Wow.” I agreed. “You've gotta start packing your tent on the outside.”

All my resolve was for nothing. The next day, our start time was even worse, and we somehow got even lazier. The first alarm went off at five thirty, but the weather was still awful and we decided that it wasn't worth getting up. When we woke again at seven, it still sounded like rain, and we were so worried about the weather that we stuck the Garmin outside to get a forecast. It took forever to connect to a sattelite under the dense trees, but we after a while we heard the signature beep and yanked it back in for the bad news. But it wasn't bad news! According to the Garmin, it wasn't really supposed to be raining right now, and it definitely wasn't supposed to rain later. The forecast called for clear skies starting at nine o'clock, with warm temperatures and partial sun all day. In other words, it was perfect hiking weather. Scarred by the GDT, I'd been tempted to take a tent day, but the promise of sun restored my motivation and we got to work packing up.

It was eight thirty by the time we started moving, but the forecast had been right. Aside from the drips off the trees, the morning was dry and blessedly sunny. We were badly behind schedule, but I also really didn't want to hike in the rain, and so the warring impulses harassed me all morning. I felt bad about being lazy, but good about being dry, but maybe we could have gotten up earlier, but also I hadn't wanted to. Back and forth, back and forth, not paying any attention to the beautiful trail, stuck in my meaningless human thoughts about meaningless human constructs, like “time”, and “miles”, and “laziness”.

A mile or so after camp, we came across a shelter. What? It wasn't marked on any of our maps, and the plaque showed it was constructed by Eagle Scouts in 2020. A secret shelter?! You've gotta be kidding me. It was such a classic NCT move, to run across an unmarked shelter one mile away from your storm-tossed campsite. If we had known it was there, we would have make a run for it when the weather got bad. Hell, if we had know it was there, we wouldn't have taken that five minute break and would have gotten there before the storm! But the NCT didn't think to tell us about it, and so now we had to deal with wet gear. It was half frustrating and half hilarious, and we said as much in the log book.

It was a truly fine day, the temperature somewhere around 25 degrees. The trail dropped us off at a trailhead, where we'd walk a few hundred metres of road over a bridge and then join the trail on the other side. We sat to eat a snack in the gravel parking lot and our wet clothes began to steam. “We've got the sun and the space here. I think we should have our drying-out party,” Constantine said. “I know it's only 11, but you've gotta take it when you can get it.” It was true - we'd planned to dry the tent out at lunch to make the most efficient use of our time, but there was no telling what our lunch spot would bring. We'd missed these opportunities before, and it always sucks when you have to set up a wet tent because you were too much in a hurry. I resented the secret shelter even more - it was the shelter’s fault that we had to waste time!

We baked ourselves dry for half an hour or so, and Constantine booked the Clarion hotel and answered emails. I hadn't downloaded a new book in town, partly to encourage myself to write during these breaks, but instead I was re-reading Villette. I idly wondered if Labassecour was a little-known historical country before I remembered that it means “farmyard” in French - Charlotte Brontë was just being snarky about Belgians.

We cruised all the rest of the day, enjoying the sunny miles and the welcoming old growth trees. I wanted to say “untouched” about the forest, but that's not actually true. The Allegheny National Forest is studded with oil derricks and natural gas pipelines, and every so often we'd encounter the incongruous scent of fossil fuels. It was a bizzare contrast to the natural beauty arounds us - I was under the impression that National Forests are wilderness areas, but apparently not all of them are protected that way. There were signs of old logging here and there too, the cutblocks still distinct to my sensitive eye. The undergrowth was thicker in those areas, the trees much younger and of a uniform size. The recovering forests weren't upsetting to walk through, but sight and smell of the derricks was an affront. How dare this landscape be defiled? It didn't make sense to me, and I couldn't figure out what ideology could reconcile extractive industry with protected wildland. One would think that they're mutual exclusive philosophies, and yet here they were in the same place. America is strange.

We didn't come across any trash cans that day, and Constantine made a joke out of offering me hotdogs. “No!” I would say, “I don't want nasty hotdogs, stop asking me!” and he would act offended and sad, then crack jokes about smelly weiners. Thru-hiking can turn you into a kid in so many different ways. On this day, we were two twelve-year-olds in the woods, laughing about poop and body parts and accusing one another of farting.

We did find another secret shelter, which was also in precisely the wrong spot. We came across it late afternoon, and it was just a bit too short of a day to consider an early stop. We really would have changed our miles out of Ellicottville if we'd known it was there, probably pushed another few miles out of town and a few more miles the next day to make it here on the third. As it was, we signed the trail log and hiked on, shooting for the campsite at Messenger Run. For some reason, all the streams in Allegheny are called “runs,” and I meant to google that when I got to Clarion but totally forgot until now. I think I'll preserve the mystery, since it’s survived this far.

The fifth day of our section went much like the fourth, with the exception of an earlier start. The weather was pleasant and the trail was immaculately groomed. It was a Saturday, and I was worried that we'd run into dayhikers out on the trail. I felt so shy; I didn't want unfamiliar humans trampling over my precious brainspace, squishing out the nascent sense of attunement I had for the natural world. I was having more and more moments of genuine peace and harmony, and often felt the unselfconcious aliveness of an animal. People would take that away. They would talk to me with their human words and look at me with their human judgments, and I would become aware of myself once more and become my own chatterbox and my own judge. It was hard enough to empty my mind when there weren't people putting thoughts back into it! Constantine didn't do that to me, because we were always together. His presence was part of my natural environment, his speech was meaningful and interesting because it was relevant to our shared experience. Sure, we talked about pop culture and made poop jokes - it wasn't like we were becoming monks out here. But underneath all the talk was the thread of understanding one another, of getting to take a peek inside the other person's brain. People, as in normal, non-thru-hiking strangers, don't talk to understand each other. They save their inner life for their partners and their close friends, if they ever show it to anyone. I didn't really want to talk in a way that was all surfaces and mirrors, and I was afraid that I didn't know how to do it anymore.

Sure enough, we soon heard voices in the woods. A man with a chainsaw was talking to a hiker over a fallen log. I quickly put together that the chainsaw man was a trail maintainer, while the hiker seemed to be out for a weekend. They were wrapping up their conversation, so I just waved hello and was set to continue on when the hiker recognized Constantine. Chatting ensued. I hung back a ways and let Constantine talk to the maintainer while the other hiker said his goodbyes, but after a few minutes I was drawn into the conversation. Jim was his name, the third Jim we've met so far, and he was the most open and friendly person you could ever hope to meet. He told us all about his hiking goals, the challenges of being a fat guy on trail, the maintenance schedule of the Pennsylvania NCTA, and anything that we could possibly want to know about the Allegheny National Forest. There were no more secret shelters, but he did tell us where to find several unmarked springs. He loved the trail, and he loved hikers, and he asked us many questions too. He was the Allegheny NCT personified, happy and honest and easy to get along with. We didn't want to cut the conversation short, but we had to get on with our hiking and he had to get on with his work, so after twenty minutes we said farewell and walked on.

We ran into more maintenance people at a road crossing a short while later. I heard their trucks pulling up from the trail and initially I was terrified. It sounded like a lot of people, and I really, really didn't want to deal with a load of dayhikers. I hurried to sign the roadside trail log before they got there, and as I approached the line of cars I could smell the laundry detergent coming off their clothes. I don't understand how people can stand to be so perfumed! You can smell daysies coming from half a mile away, although I'm sure they think the same thing about our sweat-smell. When I realized they were maintainers, I relaxed a little. They were busy organizing their work and didn't try to hold us up, and we waved hello and moved on up the trail.

The next section was lush and gorgeous, a relatively open stretch of pine carpeted with brilliant ferns. It was true summer now, fully in bloom, with none of the early bashfulness of spring. The forest scent was strong and robust, bursting with complexity with every velvety inhale. I filled my lungs and felt all the olfactory messages at once, fireworks going off in the memory centers of my brain. Pine, earth, chlorophyll, pollens, warm rocks, cut grass, the sweet honeyed scent of bees. The sun had a smell, the clouds had a smell, the lichens and the dirt and the ants had a smell, and they were all mixed up together in the great big wonderous cacophony of summer. It was a synesthetic heaven of green air, warm currents of happiness washing over my whole body.

Then I got a whiff of diesel fuel, and heard the telltale whine of a weed-whacker. Trail maintainers. They were working in a group of three, and the guy with the machinery had earmuffs on and his back to me. I walked up behind him as close as I dared, and yelled and waved my arms for him to stop. I couldn't pass by on the narrow trail, but he couldn't hear me at all. One of his colleagues waved his arms and motioned for him to stop, and finally he got the message and cut the engine. “Hi!” I said, and he jumped out of his skin. It was his first time out doing trail work, and he didn't quite know how to handle hikers. He was very apologetic for holding me up, but I waved it off and told him I'd only been there for ten seconds. I thanked them all sincerely for maintaining the trail, and went on my way.

Constantine and I were going to have lunch at a nearby shelter, and he wasn't too far behind me. We laid out our sweaty clothes on the picnic table to dry, and sprawled across the shelter floor. The maintainers were close though, and showed up ten minutes later. They mowed all around the shelter while we were eating and then there was an awkward moment when I had to ask if they wanted me to move stuff so they could sit down. One of them, a woman who hadn't talked to me when I met them before, seemed to take an instant dislike as soon as she saw our stuff laid out, as if we should have known they were planning to eat there. She didn't ask outright, but stood there staring at us in a way that felt passive-aggressive. The older guy, the first timer with the weed-whacker, plopped himself down directly in a bush and guzzled water, plainly exhausted. It raised my eyebrows a little; surely he knew about ticks? Their leader showed up a minute later after I'd cleaned up, and seemed like a seasoned outdoorsman. He made an attempt to be friendly, and I could probably have gotten along with him on his own, but the mood of the group was so ambiguous that I just felt uncomfortable. It was obvious that none of them really knew what to do with thru-hikers. Clearly, they had never encountered any before. I felt like I had to perform some specific role, like I was on a stage and had forgotten all my lines. We had wanted to rest longer at the shelter, but the pressure of their presence made me feel it was time to go

The awkward encounter broke my focus, and I walked through the rest of the day feeling blank. The trail was still lovely and the weather was still nice, but I'd lost the magic moment and I couldn't get it back. As we tromped downhill on a rare section of old forest road towards another road-bridge, a small white car pulled up into the turnoff and rolled down the window. “Hi Magpie!” He called.

“Hi! Constantine's just behind me. Who are you?” I asked. His name was Ian, and he was a fan of Constantine's. He had watermelon and salad for us at the nearby campground, if we wanted some. It was half a mile away and right on trail. Constantine pulled up mid-conversation, and and initially misunderstood. “We've got to do five more miles before dark, I don't know if we have the time.”

“He's got watermelon, babe.”

“Yeah, but … he's gonna drive us somewhere?”

It was uncomfortable to have this debate right in front of Ian, who after all was being quite generous and had driven far out of his way to get here. After we sorted the communication, Constantine was of course excited to hang out and eat salad, and Ian drove off to meet us at the campground.

I was a little antsy about the miles and the timing, as it was past six o'clock, but we could spare twenty minutes or half an hour. It was June 5th, the day before Constantine's birthday, so the timing was excellent. We told Ian as much as he fed us, and hung out for a while with him and his young daughter Brigid. She was sweet, happy to show me her Frozen dolls and excited that my pack was her favourite colour. After a quick explanation, we all mostly recovered from the initial misunderstanding, but soon enough it was time to go. We could have camped there, but we really had to get moving to make the miles work. Tomorrow we were leaving the Allegheny National Forest, and could no longer camp anywhere we wanted to.

Our camp that night was definitely on the outskirts of the park. The trail, which had been so reliable, turned a little brushy and indistinct. You could tell that most people didn't get more than three miles from the developed campground, and there wasn't great road access from the other side. It wasn't bad trail, precisely. It was just little-used, and therefore harder to maintain. The camp itself was just big enough for a single tent, parked on a weed-whacked and gravel-strewn outcrop next to a stream. Still, we found a flattish spot and settled in. The fireflies were out again, but more astonishing was the incredible number of moths attracted to our campsite. There were dozens and dozens of them, crawling on the tent and alighting on our packs, so many moths that in the morning, the tent mesh was speckled with their droppings. I'm pretty freaked out by moths, and I even find butterflies kind of unsettling when they get too close to me, so I was not an enormous fan of that. I turned my light off and closed my eyes so I wouldn't see them, not even risking a hand out the tent door to retrieve my pocket snacks.

And then it was Constantine’s birthday! I’d intended to pack out cupcakes and a birthday candle to surprise him, but our resupply run was so stressful that I just plain forgot. “Good morning, birthday boy! You want a melted breakfast Snickers?” He did not! I was secretly glad he’d turned down my improvised gift - Snickers are precious, and it was the last one I had. At least we’d be getting into Clarion tomorrow, where I’d managed to ship a new, more protective phone case as his first gift. We were only a couple of miles away from the limits of Allegheny NF, and I was sad to say goodbye. The National Forest had been so good to us! We were re-entering the patchwork NCT of state and private land, so our mileage for the day was limited to precisely 30.7 miles. We’d actually managed to wake up at a normal hour for once, so we had the entire day to bang out miles.

The brilliant trail design was lacking in this remote area of the National Forest. Part of it couldn’t be helped, as the trail had to bounce over a series of small, sharp glacial hills to stay within the forest boundary, but there were also some unnecessary steeps. As we bid the ANF a fond goodbye and crossed the boundary into State Game Land, it became obvious that this trail was mainly used in winter. It was well-blazed and had a defined tread, but the track was overgrown and rocky with a few large blowdowns. After a short gravel roadwalk on private land, we crossed into another game reserve and flopped down for a late lunch at Maple Creek Shelter. The trail to the east of the shelter was a bit of a nightmare - choked with brush, washed out and sometimes hard to follow. It seemed like pretty much nobody went there. The easiest access was from the western side, and the shelter itself was clean and well-used, so we expected the trail to improve as we got closer to Cook Forest State Park. We lazed around in the shelter and remarked on how nice it was to wake up early. It was 1pm and we only had about sixteen miles left, so we were able to spend a full hour relaxing.

Two o’clock rolled around and it was time to go! We’d used up most of our break time for the day with our long lunch, but that was fine. The trail was pretty much flat all the way to Highland Shelter, and we were ready to get serious and hike. As we thought, the western side of this little park was in much better condition, and soon we hit a little roadwalk. It was just a 0.8mi connector between Maple Creek and the larger Cook Forest, and we didn’t expect anything especially exciting. It was so small and residential that the pavement didn’t even have paint lines, but as I turned the corner to Jack’s Hollow Road, a large blue truck parked in the shoulder started to slowly reverse. Either they were trying to back into a driveway, or this was trail magic, and I was pretty sure I knew which. Oh, no. We’d literally just left the shelter! We couldn’t afford the time to take trail magic now, but these people had driven out to the middle of nowhere. We had to at least say hello.

Sure enough, a family piled out of the truck, and we were greeted with an enthusiastic chorus. “Constantine! Magpie! Oh my goodness, this is so exciting. I bet you’re wondering who we are, hello!” The mom, whose trailname was Munch, was a Constantine superfan, and she’d brought her whole crew out to meet us. Her 14 year old daughter SOS was pretty into hiking, too. Munch’s husband John was along for the ride, and a close family friend named Davy had followed with his truck-camper and adorable dogs. It was a full-on trail magic party! They had chairs, they had sodas, they had watermelon and fresh berries and a dozen donuts. Munch had packed out all the fixings for sandwiches, and SOS had thoughtfully decorated a dozen hard-boiled eggs with magic marker, in reference to Constantine’s running joke about eating an egg per mile. They had two or three coolers worth of food, and we could have all we wanted it. I’m not exaggerating when I say that we could have resupplied for an entire week out of their truckbed - they had Complete Cookies and MetRX bars and Constantine’s preferred brand of electrolytes, tons of my favourite bacon jerky, just an astonishing amount of food. It was incredible! I wished we hadn’t stopped for lunch already, because they were the friendliest, kindest people we could ever hope to meet, and we really wanted to repay their generosity with our time and attention. I hated that I had to keep an eye on my watch. I wanted to hang out and swap hiking stories, chill out in their thoughtfully-provided lawnchairs until there was no creator/fan divide and we just became friends. SOS seemed like an awesome kid, and Munch was the ultimate trail angel. John and Davy had pulled Constantine into a conversation about maps before he even reached the truck, but I could tell Munch was dying to talk to him too. When I told her it was Constantine’s birthday, she did a little jump from happiness at the good timing. At last, Constantine was able to turn his attention to the feast and Munch gave him a great big “Happy BIRTHDAY!” and a cold soda. It was trail magic beyond our wildest dreams, and I felt like a real jerk when I had to call it off after half an hour. It was almost 3pm by now, and we still had fifteen and a half miles to a legal campsite. We couldn’t even pack out food, since we’d be getting into town tomorrow. “Oh, hey, there’s a road right near the shelter,” I said, sending a meaningful glance at Constantine. He caught my drift, and continued. “Oh yeah, you guys could meet us there if you wanted to. We’d get there at… I guess around 8pm?”

“Are you sure?” said Munch. “We would absolutely love to, but we don’t wanna impose on your time, and we know you guys have to get going. But if you’re sure it would be no bother…”

It would not be a bother at all. We told them as much, and then reiterated on our side that there was absolutely no pressure for them to show up. It was a politeness showdown, Canadian & Southern vs. Midwest, but eventually we each figured out that the other party genuinely wanted to meet up, and the plan was set. We’d have to push hard through the State Forest to make it on time, but after our extended rest break we were ready to go.

Now we were really against the clock. Cook Forest Park was popular and well maintained, the trails as wide as avenues. It was gorgeous hiking, and I was glad for the shady tree cover. We had two minor climbs, refilled our water bottles at a public drinking fountain near the picnic area, then pushed up our last major elevation of the day to an old firetower viewpoint. It was steep, but we had the promise of sandwiches to keep us going, as well as the fear of being late. As we dropped from the top of the bluff, we passed dozens of families out for an afternoon, and I felt their eyes burning into me as they took in our packs and filthy clothes. This part of Cook Forest didn’t even have a campground, so we must have been a truly strange sight. The area was beautiful though, and after a set of steep stone stairs we were down to the edge of the Clarion River, which we’d follow all the way to the shelter. I was feeling fatigued, but we’d be late if we took a break, so I popped my headphones in and dug deep for a fast pace.

We stopped for just a second to sign a trail log at the park boundary/ Highland Shelter was actually just outside of Cook Forest State Park, tucked into a yet another miniature game reserve. Opening the trail register, we found a surprise: “Happy Birthday Constantine - Ian and Brigid”, dated yesterday. Aw, that was nice! We only had a moment to enjoy it though, because it was 7:53pm and we still had a mile to go. We were gonna be late! It had given me major anxiety all day and now we were really going to be late by ten minutes. “Magpie, it’s fine! They know it wasn’t an exact time, I’m sure they’re just chilling out at the shelter.” I knew he was right, but after five straight hours of hiking, I didn’t have the energy to be rational.

“You’re going faster than me, you go ahead. I’ll meet you there on my own time, my legs don’t have a higher gear right now.”

And that was that. I was miserable and exhausted, but I got to the shelter only five minutes behind Constantine. And there were our new friends! Constantine and Munch had hiked up trail a little, as we’d cut into the shelter at a sooner point than she’d expected and hadn’t seen her homemade Happy Birthday sign on trail. I said hello to Davy and SOS, who were drinking sodas, and plopped myself gratefully into a chair. A cold gatorade was pressed into my hands. “Ahhhhh, chairs. Marvelous invention.” I was too worn-out to be polite immediately, but after a moment I remembered my manners and thanked them. Munch came back with Constantine and the party got going. Once again, the sheer quantity of food was staggering, and we stuffed ourselves silly while constantly asking if they minded. “Oh yes!” said Munch. “Eat as much or as little as you want, it’s all for you! And don’t let us disrupt your routine or feel like you have to entertain us. We’re here to help so just do whatever you'd normally do.” Her attitude was so awesome. She really understood what hikers needed, and didn’t want us to feel obligated in any way. There was excellent, easy conversation and a relaxed vibe, a perfect on-trail birthday. They had to drive back an hour and a half to their farm in Ohio, so around 10pm we made moves to go to bed and helped them pack up the food. I think they would have hung out all night if we hadn’t been tired, but we were still keeping hiker’s hours, and didn’t want to keep them up too late either. Davy was staying at the trailhead in his truck-home, so we could get water from him in the morning on our way into Clarion. What a day!

We should have woken up raring to go. After all, yesterday had been spectacularly great, and today we were gonna get to go to town! We were even planning to take a zero the next day, so we should have been fired up and full of energy. Instead, we woke up at five with zero motivation. “Why doesn’t cuddling count as doing miles? Can we fix that? Can we just cuddle our way down the trail?” Constantine complained. I smooched him and snuggled deeper into his chest. It was too comfy and cosy in here! The double sleeping set-up was a wonderful mistake. Twelve miles to town was just a little bit too much to run out in a snap, and the weather was overcast and miserable. We did not have the town gravity pulling us inwards, not yet.

We did get going by six, though. After saying good morning to Davy and greeting his sweet curly dogs, we left the game reserve and started down a complex of trails on private property. Some of it was garbage, but a lot of it was well-used horse trail, so the quality was surprisingly good for privately-maintained singletrack. I got a little bit lost when we passed through an area that was all marked up for timber felling - they were using blue spray paint to indicate something other than the NCT, and I ended up on an ATV road that took me steeply uphill for no reason. I only realized my mistake when I spotted Constantine far below me, as my phone GPS couldn’t get a signal though cloud cover and dense trees. We had just nine miles to go when the town gravity kicked in. Sub-ten miles is usually when it happens, and I was more than ready to be drinking coffee in two and a half hours. Then we crossed a road and came across a trail closure. No! The land was being actively logged, and it was unsafe to walk through, so we reluctantly turned and took the 2.5 mile road detour. Now we had ten miles to go again, and both of us felt our energy take a nosedive. To make matters worse, the detour took us tantalizingly close to the main road into Clarion, but to count as an FKT, we had to take the official route and do the extra miles. The detour did take us past a farm with miniature horses, and I considered it a worthy consolation prize. They were so tame and used to people that they let me pet their silky noses, sticking their heads through the fence and snuffling in search of treats. I also learned that Constantine’s fear of horses is not solely because of their size. He was nervous even around these dog-sized little ponies and told me they were “ugly and too small”, which I find hilarious. He did not want a pony for his birthday!

It was nearly noon when we reached the highway. Clarion was a mile away on this busy thoroughfare, and there was no trailhead for a cab to park and pick us up. We had to walk. It was blazingly hot outside, and the humidity was unrelentingly brutal, the worst heat we’d had since Eastern NY. Constantine had stubbornly refused to change out of his thermal, so he was melting in the reflected heat from the asphalt. There was no shoulder and construction all over our side of the road, so the walk in was harrowing, especially as it seemed to be a trucking route. At long last, we reached the sidewalk and made our way to the post office to wait for our cab. All the motels were two miles away down the interstate, so we weren’t allowed to walk there even if we had wanted to. I ran in to the PO to check for my Amazon package, but they didn’t have it in yet, so I just took Constantine’s shoes and sat outside to wait. The cab took forever, and while we sat sweating and hungry on the benches, we were approached by no fewer than three friendly locals. One of them, a man coincidentally named Dana, would have given us a ride to the motel, but our cab was due to show up any minute so he just gave Constantine his number and told him to call if we needed anything.

And that’s that! You already know that we got our vaccines, but if you don’t follow me on Instagram, you may not know that we got knocked out for two days with side effects. We ended up double-zeroing in Clarion, and I’ve got a bunch of those details coming for you in the next post, which is already half-written. We’re on another double-zero right now, this one taken out of sheer laziness, but I still might not get the whole thing done before we hike out tomorrow morning. I’ve got a pizza in the hotel room that’s calling my name!

Best,

-Magpie

Right now we're in Clarion, PA, but let's rewind. The day we left Hornell was an absolute non-event, even while it was happening. The taxi picked us up promptly at 8am, and after a short ride back to Swain, we hiked out into the drizzle for a casual 34 miles. Here are my complete notes from that day, verbatim:

-cold morning, still raining but no thunder

-stupid loop not so stupid, kept us out of train yard (thanks)

-roadwalk, blah blah blah

-why are we going through farmer's fields when the road is right there?

-headphones broke

-boy scout camp

As my lack of observations indicate, pretty much nothing happened. We met some dogs on the Genesee Valley Greenway, frightened some more deer, and mainly trudged along in silence as the cold rain sputtered out and the day warmed. My cheap headphones burst into static and died with all the moisture, but I had a freshly charged battery so it wasn't a terrible inconvenience to use my phone's speaker. It was pretty much all road anyway, so it wasn't like I was disturbing anyone's nature hike with my podcasts. Still, I always feel self-concious when I'm being “that guy”, so I kept my selections limited to uncontroversial interview shows and turned it off when we reached the public fishing trail to Sixtown Camp. I couldn't wait to get to Ellicottville and get new shoes and headphones - my Altras were pretty much slippers by this point, and I ached to immerse myself in a private audio world.

The Sixtown Camp was built and used by Boy Scouts, so there was an excellent picnic table and a piped spring. We were greeted in the morning by sunshine and warmth, and packed up in high spirits. Just an easy 35 miles today, and then a quick jaunt into town! It was May 30th and the trail before Ellicottville was closed for turkey hunting season, so instead of hiking a long curve north of town and then backtracking east over a ski hill, we'd get to walk straight in on the highway.

Our morning started with another long dirt roadwalk, but I didn’t really mind. I was ready to make miles, and eager to do laundry and eat in a real town. I was pacing ahead as usual, tuning out the road with the low murmur of NPR, when Terry Gross was suddenly interrupted by an explosion of furious barking. A farm dog came tearing across the road, snarling and snapping with serious intent. This was not just a protective canine - this dog actively wanted to bite me, and it was close. By the time he had noticed my presence, I was a scant five feet away from the porch. A spike of a adrenaline shot through me and I dropped into a protective crouch, shuffling sideways into the middle of the road. You don't want to run away from a biting dog - they can run faster than you, and running activates their prey drive. I should have kept my body language calm and spoken assertively to try to get him to back down, but instinct overrode logic and instead I found myself facing off with the hound and shouting “Hey! No!” with an aggressive forward-leaning posture. This only agitated him more, and all the fur on his hackles rose as he continued to growl and lunge. I was dancing all over the road to try to keep out of his reach when the owner noticed the commotion and came out of his house to call the dog. The dog, still porcupined and snarling, reluctantly backed off and let me go unbitten. “Don't worry, he's friendly! He just likes to bark,” called the owner. Yeah, right, I thought, but all I said was “Thanks!” as the owner grabbed his slobbering angry beast and physically restrained from going after Constantine.

We left the road not long after that, winding through shady woods on private hunting trails and old ATV tracks. The storms had done nothing to lessen the humidity, and the day was sticky-hot and sleepy. Even the birds and insects seemed to be napping; only we two foolish mammals were stirring in the midst of this roasting afternoon. The soft bed of pine needles beckoned me to lie down, to nestle in their warm fragrant embrace and dream. My eyelids were drooping, my breathing slow and languid with the heaviness of heat. We had seventeen miles to go and we had to keep hiking, but the spell of sleep was so strong. As we grew closer to our next section of road, my brain gave in to the suggestion and switched completely off, even as my legs kept going. I have almost no memory of those hours - it's as if I truly had laid out and napped beneath the trees. Eight miles passed by in a dream, and when I “woke up” again at the road, I felt just as rested as if I'd slept.

I was in a good mood for the rest of the day, relaxed and loose and smiling as the sun drew down and the heat slackened. Cool breezes washed across our skin as we left the road and tackled our final few miles to camp. Dropping out of the forest, we walked a pasture road and came upon a herd of riding ponies. They were a beautiful sight, glossy chestnuts and bright bays and a paint with biscuit-coloured spots. Their king was an imperious red roan, tall and gracile with a haughty look in his eye. His skittish subjects danced away as we approached, but the roan came forward proudly and tossed his mane, curious about these strange people with the packs. He seemed friendly as he leaned his head over the fence, so I reached out my palm for him to sniff and inadvertently spooked the rest of the herd. The nervous paint, who'd been hanging right by his side, jumped three feet straight up and kicked the air, which caused the roan to shy and wheel around. A small bay mare let out a shrieking whinny and all the rest of the ponies bolted, leaving only the roan and the worried paint pacing back and forth with anxious eyes. Oops.

“I hope the owners weren't around to see that,” I said to Constantine, embarrassed. We seemed to be in the clear, but I still felt bad about scaring the horses. I really shouldn't have tried to touch them, but the roan was just so gorgeous that I couldn't resist. I glanced back at the pasture and they all seemed to be fine, having gone back to grazing in the opposite corner.

We were on the same property for a while before we'd cross a road and ascend a small hill to the FLTA-owned campsite. The pasture road dropped to a stream bank and into a shaded area, and as we crossed the driveway onto a mowed path, we entered a secret world. The people who owned the horses loved the Finger Lakes Trail! The well-maintained trail through the grass was lined with many varieties of maple, each bearing a plaque with its species and the name of an FLTA donor. Lilacs and honeysuckles perfumed the air, and the bushes were bursting with wildflowers and fragrant plants. Further on, we found a stacked-stone fireplace and a picnic area with benches, with chunks of fossil-bearing rocks on display. We left our thanks in the trail register and continued to camp, buoyed by the unexpected beauty. We hit a quick roadwalk, then turned off at a trailhead into yet another secret world.

It was just a 1.7mi loop, but it was immaculate. The trailhead itself was plastered with huge signs for the FLT and North Country Trail, and proudly told the story of the Boy and Girl Scout troops who had constructed it over a summer. The last mile to camp featured educational signs about the ecology of the forest, and a gushing natural spring. It felt so good to be taken care of in this way - if this little section hadn't been here, it would have been impossible to camp anywhere between the morning's dirt road and Ellicottville.

The morning into Ellicottville was cold and misty, and we hustled out of camp at 5am in the dim chill. It was the kind of weather that reminds you that you don't live under the sky, but inside of it. The clouds were clinging to the tops of the marshes, and the rising sun coloured them pink and gold. I was cold and damp and eager for town, but I felt the beauty despite it all. Once we hit the highway, the morning passed in no time, and soon we found ourselves in town.

Ellicottville was very cute and very little, and very busy with the long weekend crowd. We ate breakfast at a cute little diner and found our room at a cute little motel. The outdoor store was cute and little too, and though the owner was incredibly friendly and gave us free bagels, they did not have any Altras. Our battered shoes would have to get us to Clarion after all.

And that's that - now I'm only one section behind. I'll see how much I can get done tonight, but most likely you'll hear from me in a day or two. We’re out of the Allegheny National Park and should have good cell service as we pass through a few small towns, so I'm gonna use the rest of this zero day to relax and chow down.

Talk to you again real soon!

-Magpie

Our nearo in Watkins Glen was perfectly timed, as the heat-powered thunderstorms chose that day to hit. Curled up in our hotel room, we watched with smug satisfaction as the rain and lightning lashed down.

The next day was absolutely beautiful - around 25°c, not humid, stirred by a whispering breeze. We set off with light packs, finally cured of our GDT over-resupply habit, and practically bounced uphill with a minimal four days of food. We were planning to hike all seven days to Ellicottville before we took a rest, but the trail took us through or near a couple of small towns, so we'd supplement our resupply en route. I was feeling strong, and our planned pace of 30 miles per day seemed easy, even a little indulgent. There was a race at Watkins International Speedway that week, and as we climbed the manicured tourist trail out of town, the sound of engines floated up with us through the gorge.

“What’s that noise?” Constantine asked.

“Formula cars! Sounds like they're running practice laps or time trials. If it was a race then you'd hear them all shifting at roughly the same time, but right now they're pretty evenly spaced.” The whine of racecar tires was the music of my childhood, and to me it was unmistakable. These were Formula IV or Formula V cars - it was tough to tell, as the gorge amplified only the high frequency tones. Still, I knew the sound of practice laps when I heard it, and I spent the next hour explaining the strategy and physics of high-speed driving to Constantine.

After a while, I fell silent and settled into the rhythm of things. The engine hum droned on and on, dim but constant, and became a sort of atonal accompaniment to the chaotic chiming of birds. I dreamed of French horns and bassoons and improvised percussion - with this as my formative soundscape, it was no surprise that I'd gone on to study experimental music at university. And really, was it any wonder I loved slow, droning metal? I'd been listening to the sonic equivalent of Sleep in the womb.

Around noon, we left Watkins Gorge and found ourselves skirting around the edges of farmer's fields. The engines were suddenly cut off, and in their absence, the silence of the woods felt shocking and profound. Shortly we came to a little waterfall in a pocket-sized state park, and I skipped over the rocks easily, keeping well clear of the lip. Constantine had been teasing me about jumping down a “waterslide” all morning, and he continued the joke with this one, enjoying the look on my face as he danced back and forth along the edge. I knew he actually wouldn't jump off a waterfall, even a five-foot one, but the rocks were slick with algae and I was starting to get sick of the joke. Even though I know he's just kidding, the idea of him stepping off a deadly falls makes my heart skip a beat, and I was having none of it. “Just hurry up, I want to have lunch at the shelter in a mile!” I shouted. But he insisted on drawing out the charade, and sure enough, he got his poetic justice. He slipped and then quick-stepped on the algae, and in the process was forced to let go of his phone to steady himself. Fortunately, the phone bounced across the shallow stream and didn't go over the falls, but unfortunately, it popped out of its case and landed smack on the rocks. “Oh shit!” He scrambled for it and lunged out of the water to the other bank, where I was trying not to smirk. “What's that we were saying on the PNT? Always listen to Magpie?” I said.

“Yeah,” he mumbled, shame-faced.

There was a picnic table nearby, so we stopped there for lunch a little earlier than planned. Poetic justice aside, Constantine's phone is the only one we have that gets consistent cell service, and we needed it working. He dried it out and assessed the damage, which was minimal - the glass backing had taken the brunt of the fall and shattered, but the aluminum body and screen were miraculously intact. We were in business! We both breathed a sigh of relief and set off as the distant engines resumed. Apparently, the racers had only taken a lunch break.

I couldn't tell you exactly when the drone faded out, only that it eventually did. It was a gradual thing, only observable in retrospect. The trail was changing too, and like the engines, I couldn't identify the moment of transition. The land was opening up into rolling country, the hills getting lower and father apart the further we travelled west. And we were actually travelling west now, not playing connect-the-dots between miniscule state parks and patches of forest land. Somehow, the trail had become sensible while I wasn't looking, and I was glad for it. As the day stretched on into evening, we found ourselves in a shady paradise of switchbacks, all deciduous trees and soft delicious air. It smelled so good. I really wish English had better words for smell; it was like the texture of fine chamois leather, buttery-soft and luxurious and intoxicating. The sun came slantwise over the hill and illuminated the translucent spring leaves from within. It was the very definition of the word “dappled”, and I was struck in equal measure by the romance and hilarity of it all. What was I doing? Just walking! I had all the freedom in the world and I was spending my time walking to nowhere, for no reason, just because someone before me had the idea to walk there too. How ridiculous! How sublime. The motion felt effortless, and I reveled in idiosyncratic joy. Why was I hiking? Just because I loved to, and what a pleasure it was to do something for the love of it.

Constantine was high on endorphins too, and we both felt so good that we ended up camping a few miles farther than planned. We found the perfect spot on a softened old two-track in a state forest, and went to sleep feeling happy and well taken care of. At last, this trail was loving us back!

I’m struggling to recall the morning of the next day. Dawn was cool and shady, with a bit of a humid chill in the air, and I have the vague impression that we did a fair amount of climbing. I wasn't exactly tired, but I think I was somewhat sleepy. I certainly wasn't paying too much attention, and all I can pull from my memory is a fuzzy picture of maple trees and moderate hills. I was still in that flow-state I think, but my senses were not sharpened by hunger or beauty, and so the scenery vanished in a blur. We took lunch at Bird's-Eye picnic shelter in a state park of the same name, and lazed around in the shade for a while. It was by then quite hot outside, and I looked eagerly at the gathering clouds, hoping for a mild rain to cool things off.

After another sleepy, lazy hour of walking, my wish was granted. A gentle spattering of rain made freckles in the dust, but it was only partially overcast so we stayed nice and warm, and we didn't bother to pull out our rain coats. We were walking a road, a gently winding rural track through Amish country, and we stopped to admire a trio of especially gorgeous horses. They were glossy and dark bay, and the two geldings were imposingly large. The mare was slight and skittish, but the males looked down on us with a calm, steady curiosity and followed us along the fence-line hoping for treats. They were draft animals, working horses that their owners depended on and valued, and you could tell from the gleam of their coats and their soft, trusting eyes that they were well-loved. It made my heart happy to see it. Not even a mile down the road, we were greeted at the fence by a playful Jersey calf. She was frisky and overjoyed to see us, and was clearly an adored pet. When we walked past the farm without petting her, she stuck her head out over the corner post and lowed once, petulantly, then romped back over to her lean-to to eat some hay. These people loved their animals!

Many happy farms later, we left the road and walked back into the embrace of trail. The rain had washed away the humidity and left a lingering freshness. It was cool, the air silky and minty and floral with a hint of warm earth, and the colour of the evening was silver. The trail was level and flanked by firs and pines, occasionally nudging up over the shoulder of a hill to walk next to a freshly-mown hayfield. I was cheerful but moving slowly, a little tired at the end of a thirty-three mile day, so I gave Constantine my blessing to hike ahead. He was energized and crushing miles, so I'd hike at my own speed and meet him at the lean-to. And just like that, I was completely alone.

It's a strange thing, how alone you can be on a frontcountry hike. He was maybe five or ten minutes ahead of me, but once he was out of sight, that was it. You don't have cell service or internet on a thru-hike, and it makes you aware of the limitations of the human body. Every communication must be conducted face to face, or at least within shouting distance, and when you're alone, you are truly, totally alone. It was getting dark out, but I wasn't nervous or scared - it was just novel, and a little bit exciting. Last year, the conditions on trail had been far too dangerous to be out of one another's sight, so now I found myself luxuriating in the unfamiliar solitude. I was listening to an episode of Here Be Monsters that prominently featured Wagner's Parsifal, and I felt invincible as the heroic music swelled. I hiked quickly, but as I walked I started to dance with my arms, swooping them up in the air and around in arcs, back down in giant slow swimming motions, twisting and flowing my hands in complicated patterns with the violins and flutes, and then slowing and reaching up, up, up as the horns returned triumphant. It felt graceful, although I have no idea how it looked - it probably looked a little crazy. I didn't care, as there was absolutely nobody to see me. It was the unselfconcious dance of a young child, just a pure expression of feeling, and it felt indescribably good. Even after the music ended I kept dancing, gesturing out all my un-nameable animal happiness to the silent forest.

It was drawing near to nine o'clock, and the light was fading rapidly. I watched with interest as my vision slid into greyscale, first losing the browns and oranges, then the yellows and reds, and then I began to worry as the greens desaturated to an indistinct blue. I had to be close to the shelter by now, but I didn't want to look at my phone and ruin my night vision. I put my dancing arms away and hiked even faster, serious and focused as the last tinge of evening gave way to true night. It didn't take long - I exited the woods at precisely nine, and came upon the shelter in a magical moonlit clearing. It was bright with silver and grass, and filled to the brim with long-stemmed dandelions puffing out to seed. They looked like little moons themselves, round and white and glowing all around the dark shape of the shelter. I could see by their absence the path that Constantine had taken, and I followed his trace, calling out joyfully. We ate our dinners and set up on the nice clean shelter floor, just tired enough and supremely relaxed.

That cool silver evening had been a warning, but we didn't know that until the next day. We woke up and it was… cold? I shivered reluctantly out of the quilt and munched down a Complete Cookie in my puffy, mock-scolding Constantine for getting up to pee and taking my heat away. What was this thing, this “being cold”? We were pretty close to the town of Bath, so once we gained a small ridge Constantine had service and was able to check the weather.

“Scattered thundershowers. First one starts at 3pm, it says.”

“Yep,” I replied. It was nice to have a precise time, but I didn't need a forecast to tell me it what was coming. The air felt heavy and thick, and I could see dark ridges forming in the skies. The morning warmed up quickly with all the moisture in the air, but the south wind was chill and smelled of ozone. Big storms on the way, no doubt about it. We discussed our options - since the FLTA maps are structured for dayhikers going eastbound, it's sometimes hard to know exactly where you are on the PDF maps when you're going westbound, and they don't completely line up with Gaia GPS. We thought we were maybe 20 miles away from the town of North Hornell, and we had about five hours before the storm hit. It's not impossible to hike four miles per hour if you're really motivated, but it was unlikely that we could do it in this hilly, muddy terrain. And it might have actually been 23 miles away, we couldn't tell. We decided to hike fast to the shelter at Burt Hill, eat lunch, and push on if the rain wasn't imminent.

We crush, crush, crushed, but we couldn't outrun it. The route was an even mix of trail and dirt road, alternating about every two miles, and it frequently had us skirting the edges of wheatfields through tall grass. Constantine kept checking the weather, and the storm kept moving faster - first it corrected to 2:30pm, then 2, then 1:30. We would be able to make it to the shelter if we kept going fast, but there was no way we would get all the way to Hornell. There was a black mass of clouds ahead of us and an equally threatening one behind, pressing us onwards as we pushed west and then cut south on the flank of a large hill. That southern turn slowed us just a little too much, and the edge of the rear-ward storm caught up. Within five minutes the temperature dropped ten degrees, and a ferocious blast of rain roared up out of nowhere. It was torrential and freezing cold, and I stumbled into the lee of a spreading oak to pull on my jacket. Hell! The storm was an hour early. We ran through the fields and crashed back into the brush, dashing as fast as we could through the poorly-blazed, overgrown windbreak to get to the road. We were only three miles from Burt Hill, and it was basically all roadwalk after this farm. A pair of thick-set Rottweilers barked furiously from behind a fence, but we paid them no mind - we just had to get to the shelter!

The road took us more or less directly west, and ten minutes after the downpour began, we were out of it. The humid heat was just as intense as the rain, but I kept my jacket on and resigned myself to sweating. Behind us, the long trailing finger of storm was gaining ground, and I stayed fast and tenacious as we climbed a steep gravel farm track. One more drop down and we'd be there, thank god.

At last, we entered the state park, and I felt safe enough to take off my jacket. The shelter was nestled into a little valley, and we couldn't see much of the sky. It was deceptively warm and sunny, just as it had been for the last forty-five minutes. Maybe that was it for the storm clouds? The trail here had been re-routed and the blazes were confusing, but eventually we found the shelter and grabbed some water for lunch. Of course, being tucked into a gorge, Constantine had no service, and my weather intuition was thrown by the lack of sight lines.

I sat down to filter my water in the shelter, but after a minute or two I was dive-bombed by a bird. I yelped, and the bird swooped away and sat chattering at me in a nearby bush. I stood up to move, and it swooped at my head again! “Okay! I'm leaving!” I told it, and relocated my stuff to the picnic table. It was a small thing, about the size of a robin and dusty brown with a creamy white breast. A similar bird was fidgeting anxiously in a tree, and as I pulled out my lunch they flew around the site in circles and fluffed their feathers. Looking into the shelter, I could just make out the contour of a nest in the rafters, and upon closer inspection, I saw half of a tiny eggshell on the floor. It was perfectly smooth and the same shade of cream as the parent birds’ breast feathers, no bigger than the tip of my thumb. Constantine seemed to be safe on the other side of the shelter, but as it was warm out, he came and sat on the bench with me as we ate. Eventually, the birds calmed down enough that one of them flew into the nest, and I considered the matter solved. I couldn't hear any baby birds, but I worried a little that we'd kept them away from their eggs for too long.

In any case, we didn't trust the weather, so after we ate Constantine set off up the hill to try to get service. It was about half a mile to get out of the gorge, and as he walked away I tidied up his stuff so I could grab both our bags if it started to rain. If it didn't seem bad in ten minutes, we'd hike on and try to make it to Hornell. Exactly ten minutes later, the wind picked up and came whooshing down the valley, and the smell of rain came with it. I didn't need to wait for Constantine's weather report - I hauled up the stuff and darted into the shelter on the opposite side from the birds. Just as the thunder cracked, Constantine came flying down the hill and jumped into the shelter next to me. “Weather forecast says: it's raining! I didn't get to the top before it started, so I couldn't get an updated forecast, but the last one said the storm should move on in an hour.” We settled in to wait.

The birds seemed to have accepted us as a non-threat and stayed cuddled in their nest, though I did sense them watching us. The cold rain poured down, the thunder boomed, and I laid on my back on the hard floor and stretched. Around 3pm it slackened off and stopped, and as we stood to leave I risked a closer peek at the nest. The parent bird stared back at me with a steely look in its eyes, but I could hear soft little cheeps coming from beneath its breast. There were baby birds after all! No wonder the parents were so anxious to get back there. “Thanks for sharing your house with us,” I told them.

The rest of the day was road, all the way to Hornell. We had planned to hike past the town and camp at Kanakadea Park, a developed campground with showers, but the storm had delayed us and now we wouldn't get there until well after 9pm. North Hornell was our best chance to re-up on food too, as the tiny town of Swain had nothing and the next option in Dalton required a detour off trail. I was sorely tempted by the prospect of a hotel stay, especially after a third stormburst rolled through and soaked us on the road, but I was too far ahead of Constantine to say so. And we were only three days off a nearo! What laziness.

Constantine caught me on an uphill as we got closer to Hornell and the weather turned foul once again. He was shouting something, and I took out my headphones to hear. “There's a severe thunderstorm warning!” he said. “I think we should stay in town.” I looked at the weather map on his phone and sure enough, there was a huge angry blob of storm hovering over Lake Kanakadea. We'd have to cross over a 2,000ft hill with a radio tower to get there, and I could see the lightning from here. “You're okay with staying at a motel tonight? That's only thirty miles,” I said.

“Yeah, are you not? I guess we don't have to, but thirty is still on schedule and the weather's miserable.”

I definitely wanted to, and I gave in to comfort with a minimum of guilt. Thunderstorms were no joke on an exposed hill like that, so I told myself it was in the name of safety and called it a smart decision. It was still pretty early when we got to the Econolodge, only seven o'clock, and we had time to run to the Dollar General and supplement our resupply before getting takeout hamburgers. It was a gritty industrial area, and the motel was so cheap and run down that the wifi didn't even work. The shower made a whistling noise and TV only had twelve channels, but it was warm and dry and sort of clean, so that was enough for me. I washed my socks in the sink, watched half of Tombstone on Turner Classic Movies, then abruptly fell asleep.

The next day was perfect weather again, and we set off in high spirits. We'd booked the motel in Ellicottville for the night of the 31st to avoid the long weekend pricing, so we had to cut miles somewhere if we didn't want to be a day early. Getting out of town at a leisurely hour, we set our sights on Bossard Cabin, only twenty-two miles away. It was almost all trail instead of road, and though we were headed primarily north instead of west, it still made sense for the trail to be routed this way. The parks were large enough to be chained together with a minimum of private land in between, and the FLT used long sections of pre-existing trail networks rather than sending us all over the place. It was flat and easy and gorgeous, and I was glad we'd waited to hike it on a nice day rather than struggling through it in the rain. Bossard Cabin was a hunting camp on private land, but a note on our PDFs said that hikers were welcome to use it if the landowner wasn't there. We bumped gently up and down the hills, squishing through the muddy spots and scaring the living daylights out of deer, which were everywhere. It was an actively hunted area, so they were clustered up for safety in the state parks and were plainly terrified of people. Every twenty minutes or so, we'd hear the CRASH-galumph-galumph of a cervid running for its life and catch a flash of white tail. It made me paranoid about ticks - white-tailed deer are a reservoir for Lyme disease, so more deer means a higher concentration of Lyme-infected ticks. There wasn't a lot of tall grass, but I checked at every break spot just to be sure and lamented my numerous freckles.

It had been a beautiful day, pleasant and peaceful and warm, but it grew overcast and chilly as we reached the cabin. It was unoccupied and unlocked, so we walked right in and made ourselves comfortable. The logbook inside made it plain that hikers were indeed welcome, and I settled into a rocking chair at the long hand-hewn table. It was a cosy little place, built for function and warmth rather than beauty, but it was made charming by the ornately moulded woodstove and homey furniture. There was a basin for washing up, a three-burner propane stove, and a set of homemade bunk beds against the wall. We used our own supplies and sleeping pad, naturally, but it was obvious that the landowner used the place often and kept it in good repair. With the temperature steadily dropping outside, I was grateful to be surrounded by four insulated walls.

“Ohhh, fuck. Oh no.” Constantine had service and was looking at his phone.

“What is it? What's wrong?”

“The forecast. Oh, shit.”

“What?!”

It was rain. It was 24 hours of solid, soaking, pressurized-garden-hose levels of rain. Starting at 8am tomorrow and continuing until 7am the day after, it was set to pour bucket after bucket of freezing cold water on our heads, and the high would be 6°c. Good god, no. Oh dear. Oh, shit. “What do we do? I guess we have to walk through it, to make our miles.” I was determined to be tough about it, but ohhhh god, I so did not want to.

“Well, we might be able to call a taxi from Swain. There's nothing there, but there should at least be an awning or a porch to sit under. It's like a ski resort or something.” Constantine is never worried about being tough, as he'd much rather be happy. A wise man.

“What, and go back to Hornell? Again?” Two unplanned stops in the same town felt like a lot. It felt lazy. And we were only four miles away from Swain! And we'd lose time getting out of town, we always did. What about our miles? What about our motel reservation?

We went back and forth on this for a little while, but deep down I really did not want to walk in that rain, at all, so it didn't take much for Constantine to convince me. If we hiked two thirty-fives and nearoed in with twelve, we could still make it to Ellicottville on the 31st, and our camping options would be much better. We'd just have to wake up super early to beat the rain, and cross our fingers that the cabs would come get us.

The dust in the cabin drove my allergies nuts, and around midnight I resorted to taking a Benadryl to get to sleep. When Constantine smooched me awake at 4:45am, my nose was still totally clogged and I flailed him away groggily so I could breathe. A lovely start to the day! It was GDT-cold even inside the cabin, and the outside world promised to be worse. A layer of frost had accreted onto the windows overnight, and I grumbled mightily when Constantine put the quilt away. “No! Too cold. I don't want to go to school today!” But you can't play hooky from the rain, so I gathered my stuff up quickly and we ran out into the cold.

It was freezing. The sun wasn't yet awake, but it wouldn't have made much difference. The sky was a solid mass of dark grey overcast, and at 5:30am the first fat, cold drops were already spitting down. The trail wove us through cow pastures and fields, then pulled us up a ridge to follow an old rail grade all the way into town. We hustled, we pushed, we shivered and cursed in our puffies and rain jackets, and finally we clanged up and over a cattle gate and into Swain. It was just about 7am and the first drops had turned into a consistent drizzle, but the forecast said there was worse to come.

Swain was indeed a ski town, and everything, but everything, was closed for the season. We took shelter on the porch of the Sierra Inn (which is actually a restaurant) and I snuggled down into my puffy to wait. It was so cold! Constantine had to wait until 7:30 to call for a cab, and finally got through to a company from Hornell that could pick us up. They wouldn't be able to come get us until 10, but that was ok. We were dry.

At 8:30, they called back to cancel. It was a busy long weekend day, and one of their drivers had called in sick. They wouldn't make it. No! He started looking for cabs in Bath, and ended up calling Village Taxi for a second time. They were listed in two cities. The dispatcher laughed kindly, and sympathized with our situation. “I'll call around and see what I can do for you,” she said. “If nobody else can come get you, I'll drive out there myself. We're not too busy today.” Our hero! Ten minutes later, she called back to say she was on her way. By 9:45am we were warming up in the lobby of the Days Inn in North Hornell (neither of us wanted to stay at the Econolodge again!). I only had seven dollars to tip her with, which felt horribly rude and inadequate, but we made a reservation with her for the next day and promised to leave them glowing reviews.

Constantine worked his charm on the suspicious front desk lady, and after a short interval we were given a freshly-cleaned room. I think she thought we were drifters, but he has a way of indirectly telling hotel staff about hikers without seeming to ask for special treatment. Once she figured out we weren't on drugs, she was much friendlier and even gave us an upgrade to a queen room. Our unexpected nearo day began, and we did absolutely, totally nothing for the whole day. It was glorious!

The next day out of Hornell, the weather broke, and our cab driver showed up right on time. That's a story for another day though - right now I've got to get going!

We've got seven days to Clarion, PA through Allegheny State Park. That's right, we're almost out of New York! There's no cell service at all in this massive wilderness area, so it will be about another week before you hear from me. Fingers crossed that our current weather holds.

Later!

-Magpie

I didn't get to sleep until nearly 3:30am, so the 7am wake-up call came far too early for me. I stumbled around woozily, chugging motel room coffee and cursing my habit of procrastination. If only I had started writing earlier in the day! At least I had gone to the trouble of creating a total-mileage databook, so I knew exactly how far we were from Watkins Glen - 110.4 miles. Our camping options forced us to stop about 7 miles short of Watkins Glen if we wanted to nearo into town, so we had some flexibility. We could do a little less today and still be on target to hit our resupply, and I wasn't feeling ambitious after three and a half hours of sleep. We settled on Foxfire Shelter as our destination, 18 miles away, which would have us arriving at 4pm. I'd have the time to finish writing and potentially the cell service to post it.

Catherine arrived precisely at 8am, as promised, and we thanked her profusely when she dropped us off at the highway pullout. Our next couple of miles were a gravel roadwalk, and despite my sleep deprivation I was out ahead and crushing. The day promised to be hot, and I pushed as hard as I could to make it to the shady trailhead. A short, steep climb brought us into a mellow softwood forest, all pine-duff and rolling hills, sheltered from the rising heat of the day. Surprisingly, I wasn't in a bad mood at all, and the morning sped by under our feet as we made our way over Snyder's Hill and back to another gravel road before Greek Peak Ski Area.

Stopping at a roadside stream to refill our water, we chatted with a new mother who was out taking a walk with her three-week-old baby, a precious little guy with a headful of brown hair. “He was early!” She said. “Friday is actually his due date.” We wished them an early Happy Birthday and set off up the climb. We took lunch at Woodchuck Shelter and I was tempted to take a nap too, but we heaved ourselves up after forty-five minutes and paced out the last ten miles to Foxfire.

I'd intended to write when we got there, but I found myself staring off into space instead. It was a beautiful lean-to, spotlessly clean and furnished with a fire ring and benches. A clear spring was gushing water 250 feet down the trail, and Constantine filled our bottles while I sat in the shelter and contemplated my toes. A small movement on the logs drew my attention - a giant, winged ant. Huh, okay. I scooted away from it and right into the path of two more massive ants. Looking deeper into the shelter, I saw a ominous shadow clustered in the corner. Just as I feared, it was a swarm. Dozens and dozens of enormous thumb-sized ants were crawling all over the corner where the roof met the shelter wall. Ew! I scrambled out to the picnic table with my pack and set myself to the task of starting a cooking fire. We hadn't been able to get any fuel in Cortland, so the majority of our dinners were mashed potatoes, which are good to eat cold. We'd banked on staying in at least one shelter though, and I was looking forward to hot ramen. Constantine had packed out frozen microwave burritos for tonight, and as my water started to boil he had the brilliant idea that he should toast them over the open flame. He even had an extra one for me! The flame-cooked burritos were delicious, and I ate my bonus dinner with gusto.

By 6pm the ants had disappeared in the mysterious way that ants do, so we relocated our stuff to the shelter and broke down the tent. Constantine had set it up to stay away from the mosquitoes until the cooking smoke chased them away, but when the fire went out, they were back in force. At 6:30, we lugged all our gear back out of the shelter and set up the tent again to sleep. I hadn't written a thing, but my mind was so fuzzy with sleep that I didn't even bother to try.

The next day dawned hot and got hotter. The trail smacked us in the face with a steep uphill first thing, but after some rest and a hearty protein-bar breakfast, I was ready to go. We cruised along a flat hilltop, dropped, cruised back up, and made our way through a warren of dense mountain bike trails before we descended for the first of many roadwalks that day. Many parts of the Finger Lakes Trail are on private lands, and many of those private lands are periodically closed for hunting season. Fortunately for us, the worst of these road re-routes are only an issue during deer hunting season in the fall, but we still had a few closed sections to deal with. And was I crazy, or was it unbelievably hot for May? “What temperature do you think it is?” I asked Constantine.

“I dunno, high 70s? 80s?”

Farenheit means absolutely nothing to me, so I tried again. “Don't you think it's really hot out? I'm sweating like crazy.”

“I love it!” He replied “This is like, autumn temperature in South Carolina. It's perfect!”

My boreal constitution begged to differ. I was soaking wet with sweat - my shirt looked as if I'd just jumped in a pool, and drops were rolling down my nose and streaming off the ends of my fingers. If this was winter in South Carolina, I now understood why his work wardrobe consisted exclusively of polos and business shorts. The reflected heat from the asphalt was searing, and the humidity rendered all that sweating useless. I could actually feel my blood vessels dilating, and I watched as my hands turned from pale to pink to scarlet red as my body desperately tried to dump heat through my extremities. The thick arteries in my wrists got so swollen that I had to loosen my watch. My ears itched. I couldn't stop sneezing as my nostrils dilated with heat, and every outgoing breath felt hot as a fever, misting over my face in a plume as the saturated air rejected it. It had to be over 30°C, and I was betting that it was much, much hotter on the paved roads. I wrote a few posts ago that I'd forgotten what it was like to experience summer - now I remembered that I hate summer. That’s why I spend the season at high elevation! Why, oh why, did I decide to hike the NCT?

“You guys sure picked a hot day to go for a hike!” shouted a highway maintenance worker as we passed by.

“Yep.” I replied, a little more tersely than I intended. I gave him a wave to make up for it and showered myself with droplets. Ugh.

“Gotta be over ninety degrees out there!” he said, cheerful next to his air-conditioned truck. Farenheit means nothing to me, as mentioned, but I do know that 90°F is about the same as 30°C. Vindicated! I felt a little bit less like a wuss as I chugged water and swore under my breath at the heat. I found out later that that day was 33°C with 60% humidity. I was immensely grateful when we got back on trail, and could breathe a little more freely in the shade.

“I stink,” I told Constantine.

“You're so pretty, baby.” He replied.

“You're saying I look pretty so you don't have to say that I smell really bad.”

“You're soooooo pretty.”

Aside from the heat, the trail was being pretty nice to us. There was no more nonsense with nine-mile loops or unnecessary climbing, and we were able to cruise steadily all day. It was a Friday and we were in an area with easy road access, so we decided to bypass the Shindagan Lean-to in favour of Braley Campsite (which, in defiance of the FLTA naming conventions, did not have a picnic table). A bunch of college kids were at Shindagan for their graduation party, so we gave them a wide berth and just waved hello. Weirdly, at least one of these weekend hikers was setting up an ultralight Six Moon Designs shelter, so maybe they had plans for the Appalachian Trail.

Braley Campsite was almost precisely thirty miles into our day, and it was still so sticky-hot when we arrived that I was happy to have my mashed potatoes cold. Despite the hateful weather, I was feeling pretty good. My tendonitis was 90% healed with only some lingering stiffness in the ankle, and I had the pleasant tiredness that's appropriate for an easy thirty. An easy thirty! That's how I knew I was back in thru-hiking shape.

The next day, Constantine happily informed me that the temperature was forecasted to be 94°F - in Ithaca. Which is on a lake. With a breeze. He had cell service, so we could convert that to Celsius and get an intelligible temperature reading: it was expected to hit at least 35°C with peak humidity topping out at 80%. Holy fuck. “Nooooooo that's too hot!” I whined.

“It’s awesome! Solar power!” He was pumped. He was also extremely sweaty.

“You're so pretty, babe.” I told him.

“We're gonna get even prettier today! Salt stains incoming!”

35°C is only two degrees lower than average body temperature. Thanks to working in public during Covid, I've had my temperature taken every work day for months, so I know my personal average temperature is more like 36.5. The air was only one degree colder than my actual blood. NO!

The morning was blessedly still cool, so we set off fast to make the most of it. The miles were pretty mild today, just a baby rollercoaster of hills before we’d descend to Treman Gorge. Before the heat set in, it was pretty unremarkable, and that's remarkable in itself - just an ordinary day of hiking, which meant that hiking felt ordinary. A few miles into our day, we came across a piped spring at Taramack Shelter, and I took the opportunity to douse my shirt and hat in the powerful flow. It wasn't flowing into a basin that people would have to drink out of, otherwise I wouldn't have done it, but as it was my sweaty residue would wash away down the slope. The spring was bracingly cold, and for a few short minutes I enjoyed the sensation of shivering before the sun steamed it away.

I was sweating like a pig again, and instead of evaporating, the water in my shirt grew increasingly hot. For the first time ever I wished I was wearing a bra on this thru-hike, so that I could hike topless along the hot roads. The bugs were too thick to free the nipple on trail, and by 3pm I had chugged three litres of water and still hadn't had to pee. The sky was overcast and grey, but it didn't help - the thick blanket of clouds only seemed to hold in the heat. It was the kind of weather I associate with tornados in the prairies, a staticky menacing simmer slowly building to thunderheads.

We dropped our elevation in Lickbrook State Park, and here we got a reprieve. After a short, sharp descent through lush hardwoods, we were treated to the coolness of a truly stunning waterfall. The fast-falling water created its own breeze, and a kind of natural air-conditioning. We luxuriated in the freshness for a few long minutes, then set off for camp.

Normally 3pm is the hottest part of the day, but at five the mercury was still climbing. I was concerned about Constantine - he seemed a bit disoriented and he had very little water left to drink. There was a spigot at a developed campground on the other side of Treman Gorge Park, and he hates filtering water so much that he was determined not to refill until we got there. He said he had ringing in his ears, and that he'd stopped sweating, so I forced him to take half of my limited supply. I was worried he had heat exhaustion. He loves the heat so much that he forgot what a toll it could take, and now in the thick of it, he was suffering.

We pushed on. Treman Gorge State Park has a developed campground of its own, but the Finger Lakes Trail kept us high on the rim for five miles, avoiding all spigots and water sources. I'd been fantasizing about yogi-ing a hamburger for several hours, but it was clear that we wouldn't be getting close to the weekend crowd. My time-tested skill of looking pathetic and hungry near car campers wouldn't be of much use. We inched closer to the Parkview Campground, and Constantine's situation seemed to be getting desperate. I knew he was thirsty when he stopped making jokes. I knew he was in trouble when we crossed a tiny stream and he suggested we stop and filter water! We were both dizzy and exhausted with heat, so I said yes to the break and we slopped the meager trickle into our bottles. Our camp that night was Locust Lean-to, which was noted on our maps as “dry”, so we'd need to find a better source or take a detour to the spigot. Only three miles until camp - we could do this.

We didn't end up going into Parkview Campground. We were both so tired that the extra half-mile to the spigot was more than we could bear, so we filled up for camp at a wide brook and pushed on. I felt like a wrung-out rag, like the kind of crispy old towel that hangs under your sink pipes and stays bent in a “U” until you drench it again. Any water that went into my body was immediately pushed out as sweat, and drinking only seemed to make me sweat harder. Finally, finally, we left private land and got into the tiny pocket of forest owned by the FLTA. We'd actually met the farmer whose fields we'd walked through near the campground, but we were so dead-set on rest that we didn't stop to chat for very long.

Locust Lean-to was on a modest hill overlooking the farmland. It would have been beautiful if we'd had the energy to look. The dense storm clouds had faded, their approach merely a bluff-charge, but their disintegrating forms coloured the sunset red and gold. We collapsed gratefully onto the sleeping pad and completely ignored the spectacle. “That thirty felt like a forty,” Constantine said, and I could only agree.

Our next day had a ton of flat roadwalk, and the temperature was a relatively cool 27°C. The humidity was still ridiculously high, and the sense of a gathering storm was stronger than ever. We left early to take advantage of the cool morning and soon found ourselves crushing miles. The trail was weird - frequently, it would pop us off on pointless half-mile sections of blazed single-track trail, then drop us back off on the exact same road. I couldn't make sense of it. Trails are an act of communication in some ways, and through the passage of many footfalls they take on an intelligence and character of their own. I couldn't feel any kind of communication from the Finger Lakes Trail - I was mostly getting to know the Finger Lakes Trail Association, and the character of these pointless off-road jaunts felt petty and bureaucratic. No thru-hiker or collective of thru-hikers would ever choose to hike this way, and there was no emergent intelligence embedded in the route. The message I was getting was, “We had to tick these boxes and have this exact percentage of miles on single track, and we did. So there!” It kind of felt like the FLTA was having a joke at our expense.

I was starting to get pretty frustrated when we at last popped up on a consistent stretch of road. A truck pulled up behind us, then rolled down the window. “You guys hungry?” the driver yelled. It was Jim and Alizabeth again! They'd brought us breakfast sandwiches from McDonalds as a surprise, and we pulled off into a side road to feast. It was so good to see them again! We spent maybe twenty minutes talking and eating, and then bid them a fond farewell as we set off to crush more miles.

It was easy walking for the first part of the day. The minor decrease in heat was just relieving enough that my circulation could disperse it properly, and for the first time in two days, I wasn't sucking down water. We ate lunch at a picnic shelter in a tiny unnamed hamlet, and chatted with the caretaker as he went about his work. I was grateful for the privy - something about my McDonald's breakfast hadn't completely agreed with me, and I'd been fighting nausea for an hour or two. The scenery had been lovely, the trail a pine-softened railroad grade along a wide brook, but I'd had to keep my headphones in and fight my stomach all the way to the park. After lunch, I felt much better, but the heat of the day was now building and we had long ascents on exposed roads.

“It's so hot out!” I whined to Constantine. “I'm so sweaty!” He was back in fine form and luxuriating in it, even asserting at one point that it was “cool” and “breezy”. There was a breeze, I'd give him that, but as we got on to the heat of 3pm, the wind stilled and died. The clouds were looming overhead once more, a smothering green-grey haze that promised a monster storm. It felt like we were walking in the mouth of some great beast, the storm breathing down our necks with its hot, wet, stinking breath. Or maybe that was just me stinking - I couldn't tell. As we slogged up our final gravel climb, the air grew so thick with moisture and charge that I was almost pushing into it, as if walking through weak Jell-O.

Our campsite was obligatory again - a small patch of FLT-owned land seven miles north of Watkins Glen. It was the last public land we would see until we were through the town, so we had to find camp there or get all the way to town tonight. Both of us would rather walk into a town in the early morning instead of taking a zero, and we'd especially rather do that than stay in a tourist town where hotels are $200/night. Booking for Sunday was cheap - trying to find last-minute accommodation on a Saturday would not be. This little patch of public land was gorgeous, but it was not especially great to camp on. The trail took us around the shoulder of a little marsh, and wove through dense stands of honeysuckle and tall grass. In other words, it was tick heaven. It also wasn't flat, except right at the summit of a hill where it met the road. After our experience at Tromp Pond with the ATVs, neither of us wanted to camp right next to a road again, so we settled on the flattest and least tick-infested-looking spot we could find.

It was definitely sloped, and we found a tick in the tent almost immediately. Constantine crushed and killed it, but in reaching out of the tent for my Oreos, I discovered that my pack was covered in slugs. I hate slugs. I accidentally touched one, and in my panic I flailed the tent door wide open and let in another tick and a spider. In trying to rescue the spider, I lost track of the tick, and a frantic hunt for arachnids kept us up later than we planned. We eventually did find and kill the second tick, but since I don't believe in killing spiders, I probably let even more ticks inside during the evacuation process. I also injured the spider, so it may have been for nothing.

We woke up at 5am, to my equal delight and dismay. I love early morning hiking after I'm awake - it feels great to get your miles done early, and I like to watch the sunrise, but I don't like the process of waking up. I grumbled crankily at Constantine and then, seized by the terror of slugs, insisted he get out first and check my pack thoroughly before I would even consider getting up. There were no more slugs on my pack, or at least that's what he told me. I assumed there were plenty of ticks in residence, but I couldn't see any and forcefully decided to ignore the possibility. Ticks have to be latched on for 24hrs before they can give you Lyme disease, and I'd be able to have a shower and check in just a few short hours.

Our walk to Watkins Glen was almost entirely road, and I hadn't looked at it too closely. It was downhill on paved rural routes for the most part, and as we got close to the highway we saw the sign declaring that it was only one mile to to the town limit. The FLTA had other plans for us though - another totally pointless little loop of singletrack! This one was especially egregious, as it was uphill and through a dense, brushy, tick-y forest with no views. A mile and a half later, we emerged from the singletrack, and I could actually see the junction we'd come from. They made us do a mile and a half loop to get 0.3 miles down the highway. That's less than 2,000ft! Now that really felt like a mean joke.

Our cheap motel was far enough away from the Wal-Mart that we decided to resupply on our way in. Usually, my advice is to never resupply when you're hungry, but today it worked out surprisingly well! We were so starving for breakfast and so ready to get to the motel that we shopped in record time, and I managed to keep Constantine from buying anything truly disgusting. It was his most efficient resupply ever, I think - we were in and out in twenty minutes, so fast that we forgot to turn off the GPS tracker. As a consequence, you can see our exact path as we walked through the aisles, which I find deeply amusing. I think I'll end up doing early-morning resupply more often, now that I know it's a good strategy. It feels good to knock one town chore out before you even get started, and as a result, our rest day has been so much more relaxing. We had breakfast and lunch and ice cream and showers, and watched TV for a while with no stress. I've only been writing for four hours, and I still have time to eat a second dinner and watch a movie before bed.

Oh, and I did find three ticks on me - I'll let you know if I get Lyme Disease.

https://open.spotify.com/track/4chhvf3zSf6TCppovdoGpT?

(For some reason Spotify doesn't want to embed properly, so go listen to the song “Bad Fever” by The Asteroid's Galaxy Tour if this doesn't show up)

Bye for now!

-Magpie

I can't believe it's only been five days since we last left town. We're in Cortland, NY, sixty miles short of our original goal of Ithaca, and it's been a bit of a hectic nearo. I'm struggling to recall the first couple of days in this section, since the trail has radically changed in character since we left Rome.

After our deeply relaxing nearo we left town at 9am as usual, and set off for our roadwalk down the highway in high spirits. Constantine breezily assured me that the trail to Ithaca was only about a four day section, maybe five, and he sounded so confident that I didn't think to check his math. I don't know why I keep taking his word for it - his mileage estimates are almost always wrong, and usually they're somewhat short. He finds it motivating when his estimates are off, but I need to know exactly what I'm in for so I can pace myself correctly, and I can't survive entirely on water and caffeine like he does. We were a bit low on fuel so we'd packed out ramen for every dinner, which requires only hot water and not a hard boil.

Leaving the hotel, we were greeted by an unusual sight. We were next to a major thoroughfare, and traffic was stopped in all four directions. As we reached the crosswalk, we saw the cause of the disruption - a woman had parked her car in the middle of the intersection and was shepherding a line of ducklings across the road! The mother duck was flapping anxiously on the sidewalk, attempting to hurry her brood along, but the littlest one was having trouble getting up the curb. The woman chased him along, then finally scooped him up in her hands and carried him over to the sidewalk. The mother duck honked in thanks and the family waddled off into a nearby park. The most astonishing thing was, nobody else honked. The entire line of cars, including traffic going the opposite direction, had decided as a group that this was worth being late for work and were waiting politely. Her task accomplished, the woman ran back across the lanes and slid into her parked car, beaming. I applauded and gave her a giant thumbs up, and she gave me one in return before she drove off. It left both me and Constantine with a smile that lasted all day.

We had a few miles through a neighbourhood and a short mile of highway before reaching the Erie Canal Towpath that would be our trail for the next two days. As we headed west from the major road, the feeling of Rome changed. We left behind the tony suburbs that had me feeling so out of place the day before and walked instead through the stages of gentrification. At first, I was reminded of my old neighborhood in Winnipeg's West End, where streets of tidy lawns and coffee shops alternated with blocks of ugly townhouses. I used to live in a tumbledown rental like that, and the sight of art-school sidewalk chalk and anarchist flags brought back good memories. As we progressed further into the outskirts, the buildings were increasingly abandoned and derelict, and the businesses turned into cheque cashing services, pawn shops, and dusty convenience stores. Here, the newly restored houses stuck out like a handful of sore thumbs, and there was the definite odour of a grow-op. Still, the lure of cheap real estate could not deter the yuppies, and one house sported a large yard sign alleging that their neighbour was a convicted felon. I'm sure he was, but jeez, leave the poor guy alone. The last few blocks were straight out of Gran Torino, with fallen-in houses and chained-up dogs. One car's bumper was decorated with what looked like real bullet-holes. As we crossed a boulevard over to the highway, a cop made a hard left turn and screeched off in the direction we'd just come from.

The highway was terrible. It was a concrete wasteland of mattress stores and HVAC repair, dominated by the acrid chemical reek of a nearby cement factory. There was no sidewalk for much of the mile-long walk, and we had to watch for semi-trucks backing into the driveways. Finally, we found the turn, which was mercifully located at a crosswalk, and darted across the road into an entirely different world. I couldn't understand why the NCT was routed this way - a spur of the Canal Towpath joined the main trail not even half a mile on, and that section of the bike path would have taken us through downtown and past a bunch of little parks. I figured it was because the highway route was longer than the Canal spur trail, and the NCT likes nothing more than to make their route longer. Either way, the Canal Towpath was a refreshing change from urban sprawl. As soon as we set foot on the gravel path, the trees closed in and shielded us from the highway noise. Birds chirped, ducks paddled, and dozens of turtles lounged in the sun atop the floating logs in the canal. It was lovely and fresh, and even the stench of the cement factory seemed a distant memory. I removed my headphones and walked along happily in the growing heat of the day, waving greetings to the stroller-moms and dog walkers who were also enjoying the refuge.

By mid-afternoon I was hot and cranky. After we ate lunch at a picnic shelter, the leafy shaded marsh gave way to a long, exposed section of mixed gravel and roadwalk, and it was clear that this part of the canal path was very rarely used. It wasn't used by hikers, anyway - two people passed us on loaded touring bikes, and I sorely missed the Surly LHT sitting at home in my garage. I now understood why I'd used the NCT so much on my bike trip in 2016 - most of it is cycling path! Now, cycling path does make for nice, easy walking most of the time, and I don't generally find it objectionable. It's not even that I was particularly bored; the route continued through interesting little neighborhoods and there was plenty of waterfowl to observe in the canal. It's just a bit... same-y. The closest comparison I can think of is to listening to classic rock radio all day. I like classic rock just fine, but it's the same few songs on rotation and the same old commercials. After a couple of hours, I start to crave a different sound.

Around 5pm we went through the town of Canastota, where I got attitude from a very snarky gas station clerk when I asked for water and ended up having to buy two bottles of Poland Spring. I was also annoyed that we'd chosen to resupply in Rome rather than looking ahead and hiking to Canastota with light packs, but I was very much in a “you made your bed, now lie in it” type of mood and shot down Constantine's suggestion that we get dinner here anyway. We hadn't done enough miles yet! I didn't deserve town dinner, and besides, our packs were way too heavy for only four days. We had to eat some of the weight out them, and I was still deeply stuck in my anxiety about looking lazy to those watching our GPS tracker. I paced out of town feeling tired and slow, and we soon left the town sprawl and made camp on a secluded patch of the path between farmer's fields.

We had plans to meet up again with Jim and Alizabeth the next day, so we woke early to run out the ten miles between our campsite and their parking spot. They'd brought two vehicles this time, so they could hike with us for most of the morning. We'd originally planned to camp near what we thought was an old quarry, but stopped short when we found a nice site around 7pm. It was a good thing we did, because the quarry was still active! It was a Saturday, so the rock crushing equipment was shut down, but there were No Camping signs all around and work trucks parked on the access road. Still, the trail continued to be soft and shady, so we were in a good mood when we came upon Jim and Alizabeth at their truck.

It was good to have their company again. They'd actually gotten married in the little town of Cazanovia that we'd be passing through, and had their first kiss on a trail nearby. We chatted and made fun of Constantine's weird self-imposed challenges on trail, and when we reached Cazanovia we popped our heads into the cute historic inn where they'd held their wedding. They brought picnic blankets, and we ate our trail lunches at the Art Park just outside of town, which was scattered with large metal sculptures and abstract installations. It was a very pleasant morning, but when we bid them goodbye at a trailhead parking area, I found myself anxious about miles once more.

Constantine had the great idea that we should hike the entirety of the Finger Lakes Trail, just to check another one off the list, and at first he said it was only an extra 80 miles or so. That didn't sound quite right, so at a break I sat down with our FLT data and the calculator app to figure it out. If the trail was 4,600 miles long and we'd spent 15 days hiking 320 miles, how much would we need to average to smooth out an additional…. oh. The extra length of the FLT was actually 120 miles. Oh no. “Babe, how did you decide that it was just four days to Ithaca?”

“Just guessed. Gaia says it's like 60 miles from here as the crow flies, plus I added a little extra for twists and turns.”

OH NO! I looked through the data sheets and added together all the map sections that would bring us to the Ithaca turn-off. The FLT maps are organized for dayhikers, so there are no total mileages on them - instead, each map section starts from zero miles and counts up to the end of the map, anywhere from 17 to 26 miles. Ithaca was on M16 - we were not even at map O2 yet, the beginning of the NCT's spur to the main FLT. “Oh my god, Ithaca is over 130 miles away! What the hell!” We had slightly overpacked for a four day section, but now we were looking down the barrel at six full days and the food bags suddenly seemed light. And we were nearly out of fuel. “Oh no!”

There was nothing we could do about it, so we just hiked. After some more mental math, I put my foot down hard and was able to convince Constantine that we absolutely could not spare the time to hike an additional 120 miles. My visa runs out in mid-October, so to accomodate an extra four or five days, we'd have to average about 34 miles per day from now on, without zeroes. That's aggressive, even if we hiked 40s through the flat roadwalk sections. With the mileage we have left, we only have to average a 28 mile per day pace, which we can do. For every day we hike 30 miles, we earn 10% of a nearo.

Towards evening, we at last came to FLT map O2, the beginning of the Onondaga Trail. We'd been fantasizing about the moment we could leave our camping worries behind and just hike whatever distance we wanted, but a closer inspection of the maps had quashed that hope. The FLT is much like the rest of the NCT, in that it's a patchwork of state forest and private land. We could make camp 28.5 miles into our day or at 32 miles, but nowhere before, after, or in between. We'd started late the day before and taken a leisurely pace all morning while walking with our friends, so I was determined to punish myself for the indulgence and push for the 32 mile camp spot. My body had other plans, however, and at 5pm sharp my energy cratered. I don't quite have the hiker hunger yet, so I'm chronically deficient in calories, and my medication can cause a blood sugar crash when it wears off. Five o'clock had been my cue to start struggling for two weeks now, and this was the day I put the pieces together: meds wearing off + skinny Magpie = exhausted crying. I unwrapped a Snickers, and felt a surge of energy the moment the chocolate hit my tongue. I imagined all of my red blood cells whooping with delight as the sugar fizzed through my system.

The light grew thick and gold as the sun began its slow descent, and I was still feeling pretty wiped. Stablilizing my blood sugar had stabilized my mood too, and I was able to forgive myself for the slower pace of the day. 28.5 miles was right on target, and a totally acceptable day, so I called it at the Tromp Pond Bivouac Area. “Bivouac area” is the weird name that the FLTA has for a primitive campsite with no tables, to distinguish it from a primitive campsite with a picnic table. If it has a picnic table, they weirdly call it a “campground”, even if it's one site. An actual campground with electricity they call a “private campground”, I think, although we haven't run across any of these yet. Anyway, neither of the names made sense here, as Tromp Pond was more of a mud puddle and the “bivouac area” was just a chunk of dirt track separated from an ATV road by a bulldozed pile of gravel. We managed to find a flat spot to one side of the old track and went to sleep after a meal of lukewarm ramen.

We didn't get to sleep for long. Deep in the dead of night, I awoke from a dream where I was trying to sleep in the middle of a busy highway. Or that's what I thought - but the headlights just kept staring me in the face. Engines revved from all directions, and a painfully bright beam lanced through the tent as a vehicle rumbled by. What was this nightmare? I wrestled my brain awake and gradually realized that the noise and light was coming from an ATV. Blearily, I checked my watch - 11:30pm. What? Another ATV growled up out of the mud puddle and disappeared behind the gravel barrier. Okay. That was weird, but it seemed to be over. The engine noise rip-roared away down the road, and then - no! - multiplied and came roaring back! An even bigger ATV with a roll-cage and rack-mounted spotlights hove into view beside the barrier, followed by two more massive beasts and then three regular ones. It looked like dads and kids going for a joyride, but it was nearly midnight. What was going on?! During a lull in the engine noise, I heard one of the men say “There's a tent there!”, and all six ATVs crawled slowly around the gravel pile then revved into the puddle, passing inches away from our tent. They didn't want to run us over, but they weren't going out of their way to avoid making a scene. It was a frightening couple of minutes, but soon they'd all splashed through the mud and were safely on the other side. Then, to our mutual horror, Constantine and I realized that they were turning around. Six sets of headlights and three excruciatingly bright spotlight bars were now trained on the tent, blinding us as the redneck motorcade reversed course and thundered past at high speed. We just lay there, transfixed and trembling like proverbial deer. “Good night!” one of the dads yelled as he passed our tent, and the whole noisy troop broke out laughing. Or at least I think they did; I could barely hear anything after all of that. “What the fuck?” I said.

“What. The. Fuck.” Constantine replied.

“What the actual fuck.”

Engines revved up again, then receded.

“Are they leaving?”

“I think they're leaving. Nope, they're playing around on the road.”

“I don't think they're coming back here.”

“No, they're not. They're leaving now. What the fuck?”

“Yeah.”

It took us a while to get back to sleep after that, and it was well after midnight when the last of the ATVers got bored of ripping up and down the road and drove away. As a consequence, we slept in a bit the next day, and only got to hiking at the extravagant hour of 8am.

It felt excellent to be back on a real trail after all that bike path, and the day was sunny and clear. The morning had us running over little hills, popping in and out of pocket-sized state forest lands and across farmer’s fields. After the unmarked, inaccurate maps of Eastern NY, the Finger Lakes Trail Association's attention to detail was greatly appreciated. We couldn't go ten feet without walking past a blue blaze, and in the span of three hours we signed at least four trail registers. Constantine got his daily dose of cows to admire, and I amused myself by listening to the counterpoint of the birds. Different melodies bounced off one another, as if in call and response: tiu-weet, toodlayooda, whee-da-dit, toodlayee, tiu-weet-weet! The pattern repeated and changed, no iteration quite the same as the last, and each time it was newly punctuated by the honk of migrating geese and the squabble of jays. It was a puzzle for my musical brain, and together with the morning sun, it was wonderful. We crossed the day-hiker threshold into Highland Forest Park and suddenly we were surrounded by runners, dog-walkers, and families out enjoying their Sunday. We were being a bit lazy, stopping often to take breaks and equally slowed by the sheer number of trail registers we had to sign. There were benches and picnic tables everywhere in the state forests, and as the day grew warmer we got even more tempted. It was humid, and by lunch my shirt was sticking to my back. The number of trail registers was really kind of absurd - in the first day alone, we dutifully signed into eight seperate State Forest logs and an equal number of random NCT, FLT, or Onondaga Trail “passport books”.

Knowing that we only had to average 28 miles a day to finish, I was finally feeling relaxed about the miles. We could just hike our normal pace, and that would be enough! I had it in my head that any kind of FKT attempt had to include monster miles from the very beginning, but of course, as we've been saying, the NCT is a different animal. You can hike something like 50 miles a day and run yourself into the ground on a trail like the PCT. That's only two months of hiking at that pace, and you can rest at the end of it. As Constantine had been telling me, you literally cannot do that for 4,600 miles. You'd just die. Our 28 mile per day target was on par with what the most elite and famous thru-hikers do for a Calendar Year Triple Crown, and thinking about it like that made me feel better. I was good enough.

As I mentioned, the FLT is really oriented to serve day-hikers, and that was made extremely obvious on Sunday afternoon. After a long, winding climb up the shoulder of Morgan Hill to 1,600ft, the trail dropped us straight back down the other side, then straight up to 2,000ft on Jonas Hill to a scenic overlook, and then down, and then up again, and then down again, bouncing us over the same knee-breaking descents and lung-crushing climbs until we finally regained our original altitude of 2,000ft at the top of… guess where? Morgan fucking Hill. Yep. The Finger Lakes Trail and NCTA really needed us to see all the perfectly average waterfalls they have to offer, and unnecessarily added thousands of feet of climbing and nine miles to our day. Oh yes. NINE ENTIRE MILES. There's a three mile trail that goes directly over the summit of Morgan Hill, and it's in serviceable shape with only 400 total feet of elevation gain, but of course the FLT is for day-hikers who want to feel like they accomplished something, so they took us on a pointless loop. A third of our day was spent getting almost precisely nowhere! Can you tell I'm still mad about this? Oooh, when I figured it out that day, I was so mad. I dutifully ate my Snickers bar at 4:45pm to avoid the sugar-crash blues, but I was still fuming as we left Morgan Hill State Park and set off on our final roadwalk before camp, on an obligatory patch of public land 29 miles into our day.

Written May 20th, 2021

I cheered up a little when we hit the road, as the day had finally cooled down and my body no longer felt like a microwaved burrito. To my further delight, we got to pass by a herd of recently sheared alpacas! Alpacas are so bendy and incongruous that they they don't even look real - they should be pretend-animals, or fanciful puppets, except they actually exist. "They're like sheep from the moon!" I told Constantine. He does not find alpacas very cute, so I spent the last mile of the day extemporizing on their merits. Our roadwalk turned from paved highway to rural road to rough gravel track, eventually terminating at a concrete block and sign proclaiming the road "Abandoned as per the NY Highways Act". This was our home for the night. Just past the concrete barrier, we entered the state forest once again and found a comfortable place to set up camp.

Neither of us woke with much energy the next day. Something about the oppressive humidity and the complete absurdity of our nine mile loop the day before had robbed us of motivation, and we were now officially out of fuel. I had one ramen, some extra lunch food, and a bag of combos, so I technically had enough food to make it to Ithaca, but I wasn't thrilled about three days of cold meals. Constantine was in even worse shape; all he had left after today was a couple of protein bars and way too many Slim Jims. My equanimity about the mileage had vanished overnight, and I spent the entire morning trying not to obsess about numbers. Hard as I tried to tune into birdsong and the scent of the trees, I couldn't escape my relentless inner critic. You're failing, you're lazy, you're slow, hissed the serpent, and the more I argued the worse it got. Be present, breathe in the good smells, look at the plants! It's so peaceful and pleasant here! Come on. My better angels did their best, but I couldn't let it go.

"We could go to Cortland tomorrow," Constantine chimed in. "It would be ten miles or so, then we hit Highway 11 and I bet we could call a taxi." It was a sensible suggestion, practical even. I had thought of it myself and then pushed the possibility away as too indulgent. I responded to him waspishly, then caught myself and told him it was a good idea, that I was feeling stubborn and mean, and that I'd consider it and decide at lunch.

I feel guilty about putting in my headphones on nice singletrack trail, but sometimes you really just need to get out of your own thoughts, so I turned on some music and trudged dutifully through the idyllic woods. You should be enjoying this more! Why are you so tired? Lazy, selfish, taking the trail for granted! My inner critic would not shut up, so I ate some Ritz crackers and drowned it out with a podcast on the American temperance movement. The trail itself was shady and cool, and didn't seem to be winding around in pointless directions. We ran along the flattish tops of hills and only went up and down as the actual topography demanded, with no more day-hiker funny business. By lunch I was considerably more cheerful, and eagerly perused the PDF data to get a sense of our options for Cortland.

Resupplying early seemed to be the right call, as it would set us up perfectly to walk straight in to Watkins Glen four days later. With our revised plan, we could aim to stay at the Hoxie Gorge Shelter tonight and thereby cook our ramen at the fire ring. Hot dinner! It would be a four day section after all, and knowing that gave me a boost. It was as if I'd been trying to make one day's worth of energy stretch to fill three, but now that I no longer had to make it last, I was free to spend it on happiness.

The rest of the day felt especially cruisey after that. The trail was genuinely easier than it had been the day before, but there was also the unexpected pleasure of The Last Day Before Resupply. We'd both been super sluggish and quiet all morning, but the afternoon was full of jokes and chatter and fast miles. We walked through stands of young maples and doomed chestnut saplings, at one point crossing through a mile-long stretch of trail that was carpeted with white trillium flowers, as thick on the ground as snow and stretching as far as the eye could see. Yellow warblers flitted about while chipmunks zipped by like furry lightning, and the sun's fiery gaze was tempered by a cooling breeze. Even a 1000ft climb we'd been dreading turned out to be better than expected - the trail had changed slightly from the mapped route and now featured moderating switchbacks. Just before we reached Hoxie Gorge State Park, the trail took us across a long stretch of farmer's fields. They were lying fallow that year and were full of tall grass and dandelions, which only made the view prettier. Constantine collected an impressive assortment of burrs while I somehow escaped with none. "It's the pants," I told him smugly, but I also had the advantage of hiking behind him, so I knew which weeds to avoid. We dropped, dropped, dropped to the shelter and found ourselves wrapped in the wide embrace of Hoxie Gorge. A stream trickled cleanly over geometric slate rockforms, and the shelter itself was well-kept and stocked with wood and a bag of dryer-lint firestarter. It was seven o'clock, and the sky was just shading to a darker blue as the sun took on the glow of evening. Beautiful. Our house in Pemberton is heated by a woodstove, so I've had months of daily practice at starting fires, and I got our cookfire going with only a single match and a handful of kindling. Constantine couldn't believe how fast I got it done, or how I estimated the amount of wood perfectly. It snuffed itself a few minutes after our water boiled, though I did pour some excess ramen-water on it to douse the last embers. Proud of my prowess, I didn't even mind that I melted the handle of my pot a little bit. We slept soundly in that shelter, and the morning run to Cortland went by so fast that I barely remember anything.

I'm finishing my writing on trail, two days out from Cortland. As I said at the top, it was kind of a hectic nearo, and I didn't get started writing until nearly 7pm. I wrote steadily until midnight, then frustratedly until 1am, and then lay awake for two hours castigating myself for not finishing the post. Drinking a caffeinated soda at 6pm probably didn't help matters, so if this post is a little light on details, that's why. As I finish tapping in my notes app, the full moon above is shining bright, the nearby stream is burbling, the mosquitoes are whining outside the tent, and my sweat has finally dried. It's still humid but no longer hot, and Constantine is snoring gently next to me. I've eaten my dinner, and my feet have the satisfying ache of an easy thirty miles. My tendon has healed, I still haven't gotten a tick, and I have absolutely nothing to complain about. It's been a good day, and now I am going to have a good sleep.

Best,

Magpie