You start out filled with dreams and plans - you hit the road. In the beginning, it's just physically hard. Muscles and feet that are in such intense pain that despite your exhaustion, you don't sleep; blackened toenails; blisters that fill your socks with blood. You eat horrible food, and hike through rain, cold, snow, and heat. You keep going: you have a dream. Despite the agony, you're thrilled to be there, doing the trek.
Gradually, your body adjusts. One day, after trekking for several weeks, you realize that you can actually hike up a steep mountain and think at the same time. It sounds absurd, but it's the first time you've been able to do anything but concentrate on just breathing and getting up the hill. Your feet are toughened, the blisters are under control, and you're in incredible shape-you can backpack 10 hours a day, for 20 miles, and still have energy left when you get to camp. Your heavy pack has become such a familiar extension of your body that when you take it off, you can't balance as well as you can with it on. And you're used to the harshest weather: you can still hike when it's 95 degrees with 100 percent humidity.
Right about this time, though, a strange depression hits. On the Appalachian Trail, we called it the "Virginia Blues," because it hit most hikers as they entered that state - after walking over 400 miles through the mountains of Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee.
By that time you've been sleeping out in the woods for six weeks, the novelty of hiking and camping all day every day is gone, and when you look at the map, you realize that although you've walked 400 miles, the end of the Trail is still 1,600 miles away. You've been dirty, wet, exhausted, and hungry for all that time, and the thought of doing this for four or five more months is staggering.
Many hikers, who've made it through the physical rigors that made so many others quit, decide to leave the trail. "I'm just bored," a hiker told me just before he backtracked to a road crossing and hitchhiked out to civilization. "Bored with hiking, bored with camping, bored with eating mac and cheese, bored with hanging up my food every night to keep it away from bears, bored with mice trying to chew into my pack and steal my snacks at night, bored with crossing rivers, bored with sweating, bored with walking." Others said they had lost the point of their journey; one woman I ran into compared it to listening to the radio in your car, singing along with the beat of a song, and then suddenly you go under an overrpass and the radio goes dead, and you lose the beat. "I've lost my song," she said, "I've got to find it again or I'll never make it through to the end of this trip."
