Today's Riddle:

D:
What begins in the middle, is the middle at the end, starts over in the middle, and ends at the beginning?

The answer: the way we're going to hike the A.T.

It was after 11 p.m. 3 days ago.  It had been a particularly “busy” and challenging day, when Heather offered a "brain buster". Just the mere mention of the term and being satisfactorily drained for the day, I entertained the notion. "I'm ready" I said.

As a surprise, to both of us really, Heather suggested hiking the trail “out of order”.   When you haven’t done something like this before why not do what is recommended by the experts?  Heather discovered an excerpt at the A.T. Conservancy's website:  http://www.appalachiantrail.org/hiking/thru-section-hiking/when-where-to-start.  You can read the part about half way down the page titled HEAD-START FROM HARPERS FERRY (Recommended by ATC)

A few of the reason’s that appealed to us from the list given on the ATC’s website were:

·         The appeal of starting in the “middle” and hiking North puts hikers on some of the easiest terrain to begin, then progressively gets more difficult to Maine.  After finishing in Maine, where the terrain is most difficult”, the second half on the trail, you will be in excellent shape to return to the middle and hike South. 

·         The weather is the most appealing.  Nice weather to start, no black flies, and fall colors as you hike South. 

But bigger reasons were the personal ones:

·         We need more time to get ready.  While we've been working on getting ready for the trip for the last six months, our life just isn't buttoned up enough to start in a week.  If we hike an alternate thru-hike we can start after a few additional weeks of getting things in order.

·         We have more time at the end than right now.  We can hike into November if we hike South for the second half.  We have no end date we need to return by, we just need to be done when the weather is too inclement. 

·         The last 2 months we haven't walked nearly as much as we would have liked due to working and spending most of our time getting "everything", ready and still trying to have some social time with friends and family, (i.e. we could stand to walk for 3 weeks to get into better shape before we start hiking steeper terrain.)

·         Heather would like to relax before going hiking and several months of stress getting ready needs to be separated from running right to the trail.

·         The “crowds” we will avoid are the people we’d probably want to avoid in real life anyway.  We seek the woods for what the woods have to offer, not what people do.

I was so tired, but from the presentation leading up to starting this topic and the inflection in her voice I thought “I’d better try to listen” but I was also thinking “We’re starting in a week, why are we talking about hiking in ways we had not even entertained up to this point?  We were going to start at the “arch” at the “beginning” and hike ALL THE WAY to the mountain top at the “end”. 

Heather was quick to say “you don’t have to give an answer tonight.”  But as she presented the bullet points of ideas listed above I thought, “If we’re still going to be on the AT, I don’t care where we start.” 

In the end, we are starting in the middle at Harper's Ferry, hiking to Mount Katahdin at the end, returning to the middle at Harper's Ferry, then hiking to the beginning in Georgia.  It’s still all the miles, and we figured if the original designer of the trail never expected someone to hike the whole thing in one go, we were free to do it however we wanted.  When talking about the AT it is said “Hike your own hike.”  And we intend to.