There is No "Done": Reflections on a Completed AT Thru-Hike - The Trek

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Sep 26, 2022 : Emilee Hackney

Appalachian Trail

There is No "Done": Reflections on a Completed AT Thru-Hike

I  woke up this morning and, by habit, clicked the weather app on my phone. I blinked at the blue light and sighed: four of the next ten days promised rain. On this trail, nothing is as disheartening as a weather forecast punctuated with rainclouds and lightning bolts. Rain means that my tent will flood. Rain means that I will be walking on shriveled feet in squishy socks for hours on end. Rain means that everything I own will smell like a wet dog until I can dry out at my next town stop, which is likely days away.

How many days? I wondered. I blinked, stretched, and tried to calculate; tried to remember where I was and where I was headed next.

And then my ceiling fan came into focus. I realized I was sleeping on an actual mattress with actual sheets, and I realized that the farthest I would have to walk today was across the street to my mailbox. I realized that I had summited Katahdin, finished my thru-hike, and flown home to Virginia, and that, blessedly, I would never have to hike in the rain again if I didn’t want to. (I certainly do not want to.)

But you wouldn’t know any of that, would you? The last time I updated this blog was four months and eighteen hundred miles ago. I was in Tennessee. Tennessee! At that point I had walked less than a fifth of the trail. I was still so enthusiastic about hiking that rain didn’t bother me: it was a challenge – a novelty, even – rather than a major inconvenience and discomfort.

Oh, to be so young and vibrant again.

When I hit Virginia, I started hiking seventeen to twenty-two miles a day. My mornings began at five and I rarely got in bed before nine. I took very few zeroes, too antsy to just sit around. On the zeroes I did take, I did little more than sleep. I pitter-pattered around with a few blog post ideas, even wrote a couple paragraphs here and there…but y’all. I was just worn out All. The. Time. I realized somewhere around New Jersey that I would not have the time or energy to type out a coherent thought until I was done hiking.

But now that I’m back home, basking in the luxury of four walls, dry feet, and not having to hike every single day, I can finally spin my experiences into words.

Well…maybe.

Yesterday I bumped into an old friend at the grocery store. “How was your hike?” she asked me.

“Uhhhhhhh…” I floundered. The best I could do was offer up a bunch of single words that, even in context with each other, were entirely insufficient in describing the past five-and-a-half months: “Hard. Fun. Rewarding. Scary. Wild. Amazing.”

What could I say? How could I articulate the breadth of physical, emotional, and spiritual breaking and healing? How could I explain the misery and ecstasy, the baffling paradox of joyful suffering, that comes with hiking a 2,200-mile trail? I cannot describe the agony of walking twenty miles through driving rain to someone who has not walked twenty miles through driving rain. I cannot explain the awe of waking up to a rainbow mountaintop sunrise to someone who has not woken up to a rainbow mountaintop sunrise. I cannot talk about the magic of the trail – how I always made it to shelter just before it started raining, or how my friend Red Panda found cash on the ground every time he was running low, or how my dead Dad visited me every night as owl, hooting softly in the trees above my tent until I fell asleep –  without sounding like I’ve been in the woods way, way, waaaaay too long.

I just can’t explain it. I can barely make sense of it myself.

A fter Dad died, life seemed to follow a different order. His loss was a tsunami-sized dismantling of what I believed, what mattered, and what I thought I could control – a complete reversal of my previous notion that life was stable and secure. It was a terrible, and necessary, awakening. Grief taught me to live by a different set of rules: to not only expect, but accept, the unexpected.

This lesson prepared me for the trail more than anything else could. Every day brought something I didn’t want to face – weather I didn’t want to hike in, terrain I didn’t want to hike over, mountains I didn’t want to climb up or down. Sometimes I got sick, sometimes I got injured, and almost all of the time I was exhausted. My gear broke. I ran low on food. Plans came together and fell apart constantly. I had to make concessions to the forces of the trail every day. It was bend and flow, or break.

I think that the greatest challenge of both thru-hiking and grief is accepting what is rather than what could or should be.

Don’t get me wrong: there was resistance. I grouched and whined and moaned and shed a LOT of tears. I spent a solid week before Mahoosuc Notch panicking about how I was going to make it through the mile-long boulder...