Reflections on the AT—2025 Edition

In 2017, when I first started my (now defunct) blog, I had such high hopes of writing and reflecting on my journey on the AT. Back then, my 23 year old self had dreams of discovering new meaning to my life—some concept of a plan for my future—in my time spent on the Appalachian Trail and sharing that with an audience that could find something meaningful in my journey as well.

like, ok, girl.

In 2021, when I started this website, a brief viral moment on TikTok scared me away from any desire for an audience, but I still held onto a hope to render some sort of understanding of my feelings through a writing exercise.

I should’ve known better by that point in my life. I wasn’t going to follow through on a “writing exercise.” I was going to get back to work and grind. I always felt most at home in “survival mode.”

But, over the last four years, my life has shifted. I no longer need to hover in “survival mode” to make sure the bills get paid. I choose it, sometimes, because it’s a familiar coping mechanism. Something something, the devil you know…

This shift has brought me back to the AT—not as physically as I’d prefer (lets be real, I’d ALWAYS rather be on the AT… except maybe when we’re on day 9 of rain during a cold, but not THAT cold, spring, and the thought of my nice… clean… dry… home with wifi and all of the Netflix and beer a girl could dream of………. okay ANYWAY) but, in my heart.

Y’all, the world is kind of a strange place to live right now. (It’s always been strange, maybe I just feel stranger in it right now.) My mind wanders late at night, early in the morning, on my regular commute, while I’m cooking dinner… to where it was on the AT, particularly in 2021. I walked away from 2021 feeling like I figured something out and then I went right back to my old job (listen, this bitch was broke and that check was fast), fell back into old habits, and never really articulated to my soul what that something was that I “figured out.”

(This isn’t even getting into 2020, my whole career being put on pause, my little artistic heart floating in purgatory, and working literally only the side gigs for a few years.)

I want to “figure it out.” I think I have to go all the way back—to the old blog posts, the drafts, the pictures never published, the I thoughts I put down in my notes app—and really write the damn thing.

It’s been done before—there was nothing special or particularly interesting about my journey on the AT. I think it was the pretty standard experience. You can buy any number of books that’ll tell the same story.

But it was mine and I’d like to do this for me.

When I started my mental health journey earlier this year (LONG overdue, I’ve known since I was 13, but… sometimes it takes a while to ask for help.) my therapist asked me what I took from my time on the trail that I could carry with me through all my walks in life.

I struggled with that—mostly because I felt that my challenges in life OFF the trail is what gave me the mental fortitude to finish it. The trail was a vacation I went on—I hated my job, I worked a lot (like A LOT a lot) for years to save up for my 2021 LASH, and the pandemic putting my desired career on hold just made the right storm so… I went on a extended vacation. It wasn’t that deep. It was just a fun thing I did.

I felt embarassed that I couldn’t answer her. That I went on this bucket list adventure in my 20s and I couldn’t name a single real thing that I had learned from it.

I rambled for a bit before a particular morning in southern Maine crossed my mind.

After crossing the border into Maine (a notoriously tough and technical section of the trail) I felt compelled to completely abandon my itinerary and milage goals and sloooooow down. I fell into a group of folks with the same mentality. We’d often just hike 5 miles a day just because there was a good view we wanted to soak in for hours or a lake with a great campsite and canoes we could borrow. Why rush? The beauty of it all wasn’t the finish line or Katahdin’s summit. It was the dirt under our feet and every extra sunset and sunrise we could witness along the way. This was my favorite time on the whole trail.

So, with that in mind, when I woke up at Speck Pond and found the campsite’s caretaker and another hiker in our bubble, Michigan Millie, just chatting, shooting the shit, and laughing, laughing, laughing… I immediately made the obviously correct choice to abandon all plans of an early start and a long day of many miles to join them in a yap session.

(People often think the AT is this grand lonesome retreat into the wilderness, into a “place untouched by humanity.” Nope. Humanity is ALL OVER that shit. My love of the AT is also born out of my love for people and storytelling. The conversations you have along the way, chefs kiss, good shit.)

After a lengthy discussion over whether the poutine at a bar in Gorham was actually good or if we were just really hungry when we tried it, we got on the topic of what the hardest section of the AT was.

Michigan Millie’s answer? “What you do after you finish.”

(Important context: MM started her hike in 2020, pandemic happened, she ended up flip flopping/finishing in 2021 and this particular morning… it was her last morning on the trail. This was the last section of the trail she hadn’t walked. After this conversation, we walked down the mountain to the parking lot where her car was parked, and MM was a 2,000 miler and thru-hiker.)

Michigan Millie wasn’t talking about work or getting back to “everyday life.” What’s really hard? Learning how to take what you learned about yourself on your walk—learning how to be that person you discovered you are on the trail, in your life afterwards.

Sure, on the trail I was Little Bug and I loved Little Bug. But do I love Sarah? I have been struggling to love Sarah since I first gained consciousness. The hardest part of the trail? Going back to being Sarah but bringing Little Bug with me—learning how to be both together.

I still don’t know how to do that. Four years later, I haven’t figured it out.

But I have a thought.

It’s not about seeing “Little Bug” in myself off the trail. She’s here—just like Sarah was with her when I was hiking the trail. It’s about finding “the Appalachian Trail” in the world off-trail.

I think there’s this idea of the trail as this otherworldly, special place where the normal rules of our scary, modern society don’t apply. Where people are just happy and big problems like racism, paying bills, and politics don’t exist (this is so wildly wrong, as a former kid from a trail town, so wrong, but that’s a WHOLE OTHER post). There’s this idea that the AT and its community exists outside of society as it’s own magical other place.

I reject that—don’t get me wrong, the AT Community IS something special, but it’s not unique to the AT. It’s in my neighborhood, the bar down the street, in theatres across the country… It’s in office breakrooms and community gardens. It’s in libraries and schools. It’s in the cracked sidewalk that connects my neighborhood to a bike path and town after town beyond that.

There’s no such thing as wilderness when we’re wild ourselves.

I’m going to start there—finding the AT in the rest of the world.

—LB (aka Sarah)