Someone’s alarm goes off at 5; someone else is already packing up under the large open-faced tent I called home last night, so there’s no getting back to sleep for those last five minutes before my own alarm goes off. I feel like I should mind more, but it is what it is, and so I’m up myself, unplugging and packing and doing a million idiot checks1 before Frodo calls us all in for breakfast.
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I barely get any sleep – my mind’s constantly bouncing from one incidental to another, and it’s hard to get it to calm down. I know it’s really just avoiding the real start of my journey – leaving Colorado, leaving Spesh, leaving home. Another thought crosses: maybe if I never go to sleep, then tonight will last forever! But I don’t want that, I want to go, want to hike, even if it’s throwing my life into a shambles to do so. Or, at least, the state of my apartment, all a-covered in gear.
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For future thruhikers, here’s the Too Long; Didn’t Read version of my Colorado Trail thruhike. Your mileage, pun absolutely intended, may vary. Continue reading
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.
Two cars don’t run us over in the morning, when it’s too cold and we’re too half-asleep to have done much of anything about it anyway. One flashes its lights and hollers a greeting, and we’re forced into consciousness sooner than we’d like.
This is it. The last day. Both Crankster and I can feel it. My entire body’s thrumming, all the pain from yesterday evening forgotten at the prospect of devouring the last twenty miles; it’s slavering for the pain, the pleasure, the sheer unbridled joy that is simply walking, one last time. I’m both anxious to have finished my first thruhike and woefully ill-prepared to face what that means. Continue reading
Crankster and I wake at our accustomed hour, aren’t outside for more than a minute before a biker rides up from Durango-way, asking about water. Lucky man, water’s less than five miles from here for you. Us, we’ve got about fifteen-ish miles to the next source. He thanks us and rides on, and I fret about my water situation. As the idiot who ate an entire package of jerky last night, I also drank an entire liter of water to rehydrate said jerky in my stomach, so I have two liters and a full Gatorade bottle to make it fifteen miles. Should be fine. Should be. Continue reading
It’s the first of our three twenty-mile-a-day attempts to get us to Durango, and we’re rearing to go. I’ve gone and shocked myself by actually looking forward to it, wanting to see what a month of walking can do for my ability to walk a lot in a little bit of time. So we’re up and out early, carpe diem-ing and all that. Continue reading
I pass a fitful night in Silverton – Crankster sleeps with the TV on, and after thirty-odd days of having little noise about when I sleep, it’s distracting, and eventually I get up and watch, HGTV’s House Hunters my guilty pleasure. I finally think she’s been asleep for long enough (and that I’m ready to go to sleep) at 1am; she turns on the TV again at 1:30. I put my buff over my eyes and manage to find unconsciousness.
We wake around 8, and Crank tells me she turned on the TV after hearing yelling in the hall – the ghosts supposedly lurking in our residence, perhaps. She’s not too keen on this whole “consciousness” thing, and after last night’s lack of sleep, I’m not too keen on this “hiking out today” thing, but both of us manage to get in the shower and, after securing a late checkout, out the door to do town chores. Continue reading
It rains, sleets, hails all night, but we sleep warm and cozy save for moments where the wind pushes the sides of the tent down on top of us. It’s hard to get up in these conditions, but I pack up inside the tent and wait for a break in the action before daring to brave the outside. Continue reading
The rest of us are hardly stirring when BlueJay gets up and out – he’s ready to be done with his triple-crown adventure; we all wish him well, and hope he makes it. As for the rest of us, we dawdle, for various reasons: it’s still too dark to see outside, NoDay doesn’t want to leave us, it’s supposed to be wet today. Also, this is really-really the last time we’ll see each other, and we’re gonna stave off those goodbyes as long as possible. Continue reading
Brown Girl on the NST 