So clearly, I didn’t finish my Colorado Trail thruhike and my blog concurrently.

On trail, my poor choice of external battery was to blame – between opting out of a couple of resupply stops and using my phone as a map and a camera and a blog-posting machine and and and, I couldn’t get everything typed up at night and make it into towns with battery remaining. I took notes at night in a Rite in the Rain notebook – sometimes extensive, sometimes skeletal – by headlamp light, until I could no longer hold my arms up or sit propped all weird-like, but it wasn’t in any sort of final form.

Off trail, I was initially so caught up in filling my work schedule, catching up with friends/imgur, and generally avoiding the fact that I wasn’t hiking anymore, that I didn’t have the mental energy to hunt through my photos, to force myself to see what I was missing by being broke but juuuust busy enough to be unable to go camping. I reconstructed days here and there using the notebook and the guidebook, but it was more painful than I thought it’d be. That depth of emotion felt like enough to drown a person who wasn’t ready for it. I pushed it down though, like ya do, and for the longest time after I got home all that pushing left me short-tempered, low-energy, fun-time avoidant, generally not the type of person I like to be around. But eventually, imperceptibly after a lot of work, I got to the point where it was time.

So in the middle of finding a new place and moving and working a whole helluva lot, I made time to write. And write. And write. It was time. And just before I finished Day Thirty-Six, I went back to the beginning, read every day of the hike, made sure I felt all the feels I was feeling so I could finish it right.

It felt like standing at the Junction Creek Trailhead all over again – exuberance, exhaustion, and a rewarding kind of heartbreak. But I wouldn’t trade either finish for the world.

I’m not exactly finished with the blog, though – I’m working on updating the FAQ and writing posts that talk statistics, what’s next, and what I’ll do differently next time. Even so, I’m happy to be looking forward to more adventures in the new year and years to come.