What Hiking the Appalachian Trail Was Like
Chris and I did not wake up one morning thinking, today seems like a reasonable day to walk from Georgia to Maine. The idea started smaller than that. For me it was three random miles of trail in Pennsylvania. Three miles that felt oddly connected to something much bigger. I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that those few rocks and roots were part of a continuous footpath stretching halfway up the eastern United States. Once that thought got lodged in my brain, it never really left.
Chris had his own trail exposure in Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Every time he finished a hike, he wanted to go back. We were both in college. We both had a summer. And instead of internships or normal jobs, we decided the correct move was to walk 2,178 miles as fast as our bodies would allow.
Most thru-hikers take four to six months. We wanted a challenge. We wanted to see what would happen if we treated the trail like an obsession instead of a stroll.
Georgia: Immediate Regret
We took a Greyhound bus to Gainesville, Georgia, then piled into a taxi that drove us up a winding mountain road to Springer Mountain. The anticipation was unreal. The second we stepped onto the trail, the fantasy cracked.
Georgia wastes no time. The climbs start immediately. The trail is steep, green, humid, and unforgiving. Our packs felt enormous. Our shoes felt wrong. Our feet started hurting on day one and never fully stopped for the next three months.
That first week was a blur of shelters, sweat, and learning how to exist outdoors. We learned how to hang bear bags badly, then slightly less badly. We learned that everything gets wet and nothing ever truly dries. We learned that you can eat an unreasonable amount of food and still be hungry.
We also learned that wildlife does not care about your plans. Turkeys chased us. A rattlesnake nearly ended my summer in about half a second. Bears showed up early and often. One night a bear chewed Chris’s trekking poles like they were toys and punctured his water bottles for fun.
Somehow, instead of scaring us off, it all made the trail feel alive.
North Carolina and Tennessee: Pain, Beauty, and Bad Decisions
The balds in North Carolina were our first real reward. Max Patch felt like standing on top of the world. You could see forever. You could also see storms rolling in from miles away, which is not comforting when you are standing on an exposed mountain with nowhere to hide.
In the Smokies we dealt with crowds, shelter regulations, and our first real sense of how long this was going to take. Then, just as we were settling into a rhythm, we both got sick.
Not normal sick. Trail sick.
We were throwing up, dealing with stomach issues, and still trying to walk twenty-plus miles a day. At one point the goal wasn’t “get to Maine,” it was “don’t vomit while climbing this mountain.” We pushed through because stopping felt worse than continuing. That decision probably makes no sense to anyone who hasn’t been there, but it felt completely logical at the time.
Damascus, Virginia finally gave us a reset. Real food. Showers. Town energy. The trail runs straight through it, which makes you feel like a celebrity for about five minutes. We ate everything. Subway. Ice cream. Anything not dehydrated.
By then, something strange had happened. Our bodies had adapted. The pain didn’t go away, but it became familiar. Hiking twenty-five miles started to feel normal, which is alarming in hindsight.
Virginia: The Longest State of Your Life
Virginia is endless. Beautiful, but endless. It messes with your head because you keep expecting it to be over and it never is.
Shenandoah was surreal. Tourists everywhere. Wayside food stops. People offering snacks in exchange for stories. We walked past picnic tables carrying backpacks that smelled like sweat and regret, and somehow people treated us like heroes.
We crossed the thousand-mile mark yelling like maniacs on bridges while cars drove by. At Harper’s Ferry, we felt like we had crossed some invisible threshold. Halfway was close. Maine no longer felt imaginary.
We also started meeting the same people again and again. Trail friendships form fast. You see someone one night, disappear for days, then randomly share a shelter again a hundred miles later. Our closest bond was with two hikers named Camel and Fungi. They were the only other pair moving at our pace. We shared miles, jokes, misery, and some truly terrible quotes that only make sense if you were there.
Chris and I also fought. A lot. Brothers plus exhaustion plus hunger is a volatile mix. But when you share something this intense, you also get closer in a way that’s hard to replicate anywhere else. We ate out of the same pot, drank from the same streams, and sat on the same logs staring into the woods trying not to think about how much farther we had to go.
Pennsylvania: Rocks and Existential Questions
Pennsylvania is rocks. Endless, ankle-twisting, soul-crushing rocks. You stop looking at views and start staring at the ground like your life depends on it, because it does.
This is also where trail magic saved us repeatedly. Coolers filled with soda. Boxes of cookies. Apples in plastic bags left in the middle of nowhere by people we never met. Complete strangers treating us better than most people treat their friends.
We lost weight. A lot of it. Eating half a gallon of ice cream became a normal activity, not a joke. At Pine Grove Furnace we did the half-gallon challenge because it seemed logical at the time. It was not.
New Jersey to Massachusetts: Civilization and Mud
New Jersey surprised us. More bears. Buggy shelters. Unexpected views.
New York was louder and closer to civilization, yet somehow lonelier at night. We could see New York City from a summit and then sleep in mosquito-infested shelters that felt worlds away.
Connecticut and Massachusetts brought rain, mud, and absurd generosity. People let us sleep on porches. Gave us food. Drove us to grocery stores and waited while we resupplied. We stopped being surprised by kindness and started expecting it, which probably changed us more than the hiking did.
Vermont and New Hampshire: The Real Mountains
Vermont felt gentler until it wasn’t. Mud everywhere. Long days. Quiet towns.
Then New Hampshire arrived and reset the difficulty curve entirely. The Whites are steep, rocky, and exposed. Granite everywhere. Huge steps that murder your knees. Alpine zones where trees simply stop growing.
We worked for food at huts, cleaning kitchens or freezers in exchange for leftovers and floor space. Chris cleaned out a freezer. I cleaned cabinets. We slept on dining room floors surrounded by snoring hikers.
Mount Washington was humbling. Not because it was the steepest climb, but because of how raw and unforgiving it felt. Weather changes instantly. The trail there does not care how strong you think you are.
Maine: Everything Hurts and It’s Worth It
Crossing into Maine felt like stepping into another world. Southern Maine is brutally hard. Mahoosuc Notch is less a trail and more a boulder problem that goes on forever. We took our packs off and crawled through gaps filled with ice.
Progress slowed. Doubt crept in. Then the trail opened up again. Lakes. Waterfalls. Solitude. Towns so small they felt imaginary.
We ate constantly. We planned obsessively. The Hundred Mile Wilderness loomed like a final exam you can’t cram for.
Katahdin: The Point of All of It
Climbing Katahdin was the hardest and best moment of our lives.
The final ascent was scrambling, rebar pull-ups, screaming wind, and pure adrenaline. When we touched the sign together, we completely lost it. Crying. Yelling. Laughing. Mucus freezing on our faces. Ninety-six days and change. Over two thousand miles.
Every mosquito, storm, rock, and argument collapsed into that moment.
Coming down felt strange. We were thru-hikers now. Nothing actually changes, except everything does.
Reentering society was harder than expected. Showers felt fake. Grocery stores were overwhelming. People asked what it was like, and we never had a good answer.
What hiking the Appalachian Trail was like for us was simple and ridiculous. Two brothers walking north every day, arguing, laughing, suffering, and trusting that if we kept putting one foot in front of the other, Maine would eventually show up.
It did.
We did not so much begin the Appalachian Trail as we were deposited onto it, like misfiled paperwork, via a bus, a taxi, and a short ceremonial walk up Springer Mountain that felt suspiciously like a warm-up lap for something that was about to misunderstand us completely. The packs were heavy in the abstract way that seems manageable until gravity gets a vote. Chris and I had the confidence of people who had read about things rather than done them, which is a powerful but short-lived fuel source.
Very quickly the trail made clear that it was not interested in our intentions. It operated on a different logic, one that involved relentless up and down, roots positioned at ankle height with malicious intent, and weather that appeared to take our presence as a personal challenge. Rain on the Appalachian Trail is not rain as commonly understood. It is not an event. It is a condition, like humidity or capitalism, that seeps into every available crevice and refuses to be discussed further.
The days became structured around a few obsessive categories. Miles. Calories. Water. Feet. The feet in particular became a sort of joint venture between pain and denial. Early on we believed in the idea of future comfort, the notion that at some point our bodies would adapt and everything would become easier. This is both true and misleading, which is the trail’s preferred communication style. Your legs do become machines. Your feet do not stop hurting. Both facts coexist.
Bears appeared sooner than expected. One of them chewed Chris’s trekking poles, which felt personal, as though the trail itself had decided to editorialize on our gear choices. Snakes, too, made appearances, including one that hissed at us in a way that suggested it had been waiting all day for this exact moment. Wildlife encounters on the trail are never cinematic. They are sudden, awkward, and leave you feeling like you have interrupted something important.
Shelters introduced us to strangers who immediately knew everything about us because there is no privacy when everyone smells the same and has identical problems. Conversations skipped small talk entirely and went straight to injuries, food fantasies, and logistics. Resumes vanished. People became trail names, which felt less like nicknames and more like necessary simplifications of identity. Out here, who you were before mattered less than whether you were going to walk another twenty miles.
Hunger reprogrammed us. It became a kind of background radiation that influenced every decision. Town food took on religious significance. A blooming onion at a town fair in Virginia was not just food but proof that civilization still existed and might forgive us. Fast food binges were conducted with the seriousness of lab experiments. Ice cream challenges were undertaken not for bragging rights but because the body demanded it with an authority that could not be appealed.
We met Camel and Fungi, the only other hikers moving at our pace, and something clicked. Hiking fast is isolating. You pass people and then never see them again. Finding others who shared the same slightly unhinged approach felt like discovering a language you did not realize you had been speaking alone. Together we moved north, not racing exactly, but with the shared understanding that stopping was harder than continuing.
The trail has a way of stripping away abstractions. Time stopped being a thing measured in hours or days and became something counted in miles and shelters. The past was however far you had walked. The future was the next water source. Everything else receded. This narrowing of focus felt both liberating and unsettling, like discovering how little mental infrastructure is actually required to function.
New England arrived and stopped pretending to be friendly. Pennsylvania’s rocks had already taught us about unfairness, but New Hampshire and Maine escalated the conversation. Granite staircases, mud that swallowed ankles, climbs that felt vertical in ways that challenged basic definitions of walking. Southern Maine in particular seemed designed to question our earlier confidence. We slowed down. Then sped up again. Adaptation became a reflex.
We mailed gear home. Cut weight. Sent away things that had once felt essential. By the time we reached the hundred-mile wilderness, we were operating on something close to instinct. Wake. Walk. Eat. Repeat. The days compressed into a single long effort. Arguments flared and resolved quickly because there was nowhere for resentment to go. We shared a pot. Shared water. Sat on the same logs. The closeness was not sentimental. It was practical.
Katahdin arrived in the early morning, in wind and cold that felt punitive. The climb required hands as much as feet. Rebar ladders. Boulders. Exposure. At the summit, emotion arrived without asking permission. We cried in a way that felt physical rather than emotional, like the body releasing something it had been holding since Georgia. The sign was there. We touched it together. Knees buckled. There was yelling. None of it was dignified.
Walking down was quieter. The trail did not celebrate with us. It simply continued, indifferent and intact. Finishing did not feel like closure so much as being counted, acknowledged, and then dismissed. We had walked the miles. They remained walked. That seemed to be the final transaction.
What lingers is not the hardship or even the scenery, but the recalibration. The knowledge of how little is required to live fully for a long time. The understanding that shared effort compresses relationships in ways normal life never does. We went out there as brothers and came back as something closer, bound by a language of miles, weather, and shared exhaustion that still exists, waiting, whenever we need it.
Jack Maguire 