About a week ago now I made a decision that starting next summer my family would start "section hiking" the Appalachian Trail (AT). A section hike of the AT is the term that is used for when you don't hike the entire trail at one time, but instead hike several sections over a period of years to complete it. While I would absolutely love to thru hike the AT and will do so someday, right now it just isn't something I think is realistic with the kids. It's not that I don't think the kids are tough enough it's because they only have a summer vacation to hike in and even a fast thru hike takes about four and a half months, so for now I will just have to live with section hiking.
It may seem like I am talking about the hike a long time before I actually go, but this is because I plan to do nearly three hundred miles of trail our first AT hike and that takes prepration. In the next ten months I have to get gear gathered, money saved up, bodies whipped into shape, dust off my old wilderness skills, teach my kids some wilderness basics, and even then there isn't a promise of sucess. That is actually quite a lot to do in ten months but I am sure we can as long as we don't lose focus on the bigger goal.
I will be using this blog to chronicle the steps I take to prepare for the hike and evnetually as a place to record the adventures of our hike. I started something over at trail journals, but want to save posting there for the actual hike itself instead of leaving behind what will be hundreds of posts on the challenges of preparing for a hike. This of course begs the question of why I am keeping a blog about prepration in the first place.
The answer as to why I am keeping a blog comes down to a few things. First, as I have started to look into preparing for the AT I have found that there isn't a lot of "family" friendly information out there. Most people who have information about their AT experiences are adults who have done the trail either solo or with a small group of other adults. This means that I will be kind of figuring things out as I go. While there are people who have done the trail with their children (the youngest thru hiker on record was six years old), it's not a commo practice so this blog will hopefully help ther parents someday.
The second reason for this blog is it gives me a single place to store information that will be useful as time goes by. Becuase I will be without computer acess for a lot of the time on the AT having a place I can get to with a smart phone that has the information I want in one place will be very useful.
Finally, I am blogging about all this because I like to write and I want friends and family to see what I am up to. I hope you all feel like you are part of the journey that will eventually end when me and the kids finish the hike in a few years.
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