The good news is that you can now see the Nolichucky River sooner.

Since my first thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail in 2019, I’ve often thought about a cliff edge just above Erwin, Tenn., where the woods open to reveal the Nolichucky rushing from a gorge below. It is one of the AT’s pure postcard moments, a spot for which I even advocated . More than once, I’ve seen it in my dreams.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I was dropping into Erwin along the AT in April and saw the wide brown river roaring through the valley floor nearly a half-mile ahead of that memorable vista. I shouldn’t have been shocked: In the last 140 miles since leaving Newfound Gap in I had seen hundreds of ways that Hurricane Helene had altered the trail. So many trees had fallen between where I stood and Erwin that less of them simply blocked the view. It was gorgeous, and it was sad.

But that was, after all, why I was there, to see how the trail had changed and was still changing after Helene. Before the flood waters even receded from Western North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee last fall, handwringing about the state of the trail in 2025 and the concomitant thru-hiking season were rampant. In the days after the catastrophe, I saw videos about how 500 miles of the trail were “obliterated” and read reports about how people intended to forego the AT in years to come.

In the months since, though, I had read very little about how the trail was doing and how passable it might be come spring. I lived for many years along the parts of the trail that Helene hit hardest and consider the area one of the country’s most wondrous expanses. So I asked the trail family I formed back in 2019 if they wanted to have a reunion, to walk 140 miles together and see how our old friend was faring. Two said yes—my wife, Tina, and our best friend, Ben. They joined me for the first three days, or until we reached Hot Springs, NC. I continued to Erwin solo, hoping to cross the Nolichucky and then go home.

So how is the AT right now? The short answer: As of April 2025, the AT in the Southern states is like a horrific multi-car pileup on the interstate that happened hours ago, just long enough that the wreckage has been moved to the side of the road to allow for cars to pass. The way is mostly clear, but the work is far from done. The very long answer follows, in the form of my trail diary for those six days.

Wednesday, April 2 (Northbound Mile 208.0–223.7)

On a northbound trek of the AT, there’s no early landmark as critical as Newfound Gap, on the Tennessee border. When hikers reach it, they’ve arrived at their third state line, crossed the 200-mile mark, and passed the halfway point of one of the journey’s most arduous stretches through Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The weather can be terrible, the climbs severe, the resources limited. At Newfound Gap, folks often hitch northwest down U.S. 441, toward their first day off in Gatlinburg, Tenn. Some get lost in that tourist trap town and never return to trail.

Newfound Gap, then, felt like the natural start of our journey. After reading so much about and consternation about whether or not the season would happen, I knew it would offer an instant read on the trail and how Helene had changed people’s plans. Would there be hikers there at all?

Before we could even park the car, we saw two of our kind—a tandem ripping open Priority Mail boxes of groceries atop a stonework fence and stuffing them into their already-swollen Hyperlite packs. Tourists stopping for pictures at the cloud-shrouded pass peppered them with questions about when they had started and when they might finish. Elsewhere, families posed with a sign that read, “Katahdin Maine 1972.0,” grinning like that was the silliest fact they’d ever seen. Yes, it seemed, thru-hiking season was on.

Our original itinerary involved an ambitious first day: 23 miles from Newfound Gap to Cosby Knob Shelter, with several thousand feet up and back down. But a park ranger had warned us against it: A five-mile expanse of fallen trees had slowed even the , the trained professionals who shuttle along the trail to (sometimes overzealously) educate hikers about safety and Leave No Trace practices. “You should do a shorter day, 15 miles,” she said. “Spend the night at Tri-Corner Knob.” We agreed, deferring to the expert.

Perhaps it was the sheer adrenaline of three thru-hikers reuniting on the AT, but we soon knew we’d make our destination long before sundown. We raced through the first 10 miles, the air perfectly cool as the clouds closed in tight on the thin ridges the trail follows through the Smokies. The trees on trail first seemed like a nonissue, only slightly worse than any other year. There were a few blowdowns and freshly busted logs, their splinters cast across the trail like confetti. A few dead trees were suspended high above the trail, too—too high for a saw to get, a problem for the future. Maybe twice during those first 10 miles, we had to navigate somewhat tricky sets of blowdowns by stepping a few feet off trail, climbing down and then up to avoid some imposition. Still, if it slowed our pace, I didn’t notice.

It was the wind that finally made the peril clear. All day long, the breeze was intense, even blowing the usually surefooted Tina off a rock and to her knees. A half-dozen times, the wind gusted, and we noticed the earth heave from the trail, gaps of several inches sometimes appearing near our feet. Just below the catwalks we traversed, dozens of trees had been lifted out of the ground on all sides but one, a quarter of their root balls clinging on for dear arboreal life. As the wind roared and they swayed, you could watch their connection get evermore tenuous, like a piece of wire you repeatedly bend until it breaks. These were not our problem at the moment, but after a few severe summer thunderstorms, they would become a hazard for other hikers. It wasn’t hard to imagine the AT sliding off the face of, say, Raven or Katalsta ridges.

When we reached our shelter around 5 p.m., we again saw that thru-hiking season was indeed on. Tri-Corner Knob has two wide sleeping levels, meaning it can hold two-dozen hikers each night. The park prefers that thru-hikers stay in shelters to minimize impact and bear encounters. Folks had started claiming space for the night three hours earlier, hoping to escape the wind and threat of rain, and we were the last three to find some room that wasn’t just the ground. People traded tales of their first 200 miles like baby stories, proudly detailing the origins of their trail names or what gear they’d already sent home. Every now and again, someone would pass a video of a tree “yawning” in the day’s wind—that is, the roots separating from the soil. It was wild to see, maybe even funny, but I couldn’t help but wonder how much post-Helene damage had still yet to manifest itself, more than six months after the storm had passed.

Thursday, April 3 (Northbound Mile 223.7–244.1)

Boy, did I eat it.

When you leave the Smokies, you drop 3,500 feet in less than 7 miles, setting up a racecourse of sorts to Standing Bear Farm, a famously rowdy hostel with fridges full of cold beer for hikers who have just endured one of the AT’s great gauntlets. I love elevation changes in either direction, so I was locked in with the work of my quads as I began the great descent. And then, the sensation of my ankle twisting too far to the left jolted me from that flow, followed in short order by the thud of my body hitting the ground.

After more than 11,000 miles of hiking, I believe , able to reorient myself just before impact. But this year, the AT—forever and always, a series of roots and rocks stretching out to trip you like the feet of a grade-school bully—feels different. Just yesterday, Tina, who once patrolled these woods as a park ranger, called it “junky.” The water moved so fast during Helene that the roots and rocks now feel more ubiquitous, making each step a negotiation. That’s compounded by shattered logs and fallen branches, debris too small (or too new) for any trail crew to fix. The trail simply seems more hazardous right now, and my ankle wanted a brief word—with me or with the trail, I can’t really say.

This morning, at least, the obstacles were a little more conspicuous. When we left the shelter, the clouds still cloaked the ridges, reducing visibility to a few hundred yards. But it didn’t take much to see the graveyards of trees that lined and occasionally still covered the AT. Only an hour into the day, we encountered a section where a hundred trees seemed to have fallen in a few hundred yards. Some leaned cattywampus across the trail, root ball and all, while others jutted shattered-end first onto the treadpath like swords. Climbing up, over, and through a thicket of damage, I caught a shin on several branches that had turned into natural shivs and spent the rest of the day trickling blood from my war wounds.

The ranger’s warning that this would slow us down, though, felt like a cautionary dose of old-fashioned AT fearmongering; this looked like fallout from meteorological microbursts, not the aftereffects of a sustained storm marching up the trail. The larger concern, once again, were the trees alongside the trail whose roots had largely been ripped from earth and now pointed down the mountain, ready to slide given the right squall. We made a sport of climbing into some of the city-bus-size craters those hulks had left behind.

Just before you begin the big drop that leads out of the Smokies, there is a final steep climb, like the last boss of the video game, from an intersection with the aptly named Low Gap Trail to the top of Mount Cammerer. It was the day’s most dangerously mangled expanse, with a dozen trees and innumerable branches crowding an already-thin bit of trail bordered by a rather precipitous drop. In 2,200 miles, the AT offers little in the way of rock-scrambling, but this felt like tree-scrambling, as I held onto branches while looking for places to plant my feet.

Just as I made it over the last hurdle, I spied a , three pale yellow flowers balanced above three brilliantly speckled leaves. A few miles later, I met a hiker from Indiana who, while taking a smoke break, spotted two morels, some of the first of the season. “These won’t be showing up at home for a few weeks,” he said, holding them in the palm of his hand. “It’s cool to be here. I’m going to try to go all the way.” He’d have more logs to climb than I did in 2019, but I assured him he could, then headed north again.

Friday, April 4 (Northbound Mile 244.1–267.8)

Soon after I turned 21, I participated in a collegiate bacchanalia called the Hillsborough Hike. It was an end-of-semester bar crawl for students at N.C. State, all stumbling from one end of our university’s main drag to another. I don’t remember how the night ended, but I do remember my phone waking me up sometime early the next afternoon. I was four hours late for my Saturday morning record-store shift, but I was there, green and groggy, 15 minutes later.

“Grayson! Well, how the hell are ya?” the store’s owner, Mike Phillips, said to me with a smirk later that afternoon. “I heard you were out a little late, son.” Twenty years later, the tone of voice he used that day still stings from memory.

Imagine my terror, then, when I heard the exact same sound a mile south of , one of the most iconic balds in the Southern Appalachians and arguably the most beautiful place in all of North Carolina. “Grayson! Is that you?” a man in a tennis ball-colored shirt exclaimed from beneath the low brim of a baseball cap. “What the hell are you doing, son? Are you doing this shit again?”

It was, indeed, Mike Phillips, who retired long ago from record-store life to manage triathlons and eventually join the , a largely volunteer-powered nonprofit that maintains 94 miles of the AT. I’d actually been thinking about Mike all morning, wondering if he was responsible for any of the sawdust I’d seen on trail. Not long after we slipped out of last night’s creekside campsite, I began to notice that the trees that had fallen on the trail had been cut so recently that the air still smelled like pine or poplar. Deep Gap had looked like a log graveyard, pines spilling across and above and alongside the trail in every direction. But the trees had been bullied aside enough to make room for whoever passed that way. Thanks, Mike and friends.

“It hasn’t been too bad,” said Ron, the first member of the Carolina Mountain Club I saw that morning, minutes before I encountered Mike. He’d put down his axe (labeled “RON”) to cut a little rut for runoff, hoping to prevent more topsoil from washing far below the trail. “It will get really bad when you get just south of Erwin, though. For every one tree left standing, you’ll see 20 that are down.”

All two-dozen members of the Carolina Mountain Club I saw in a 2-mile stretch were digging in the dirt. Mike was shoveling a rut like Ron. Two other men sat directly in the trail, cutting errant roots with oversized shears. That was a good sign, as Mike told me: “We just finished clearing our 94 miles of trail of trees. There were a lot,” he told me. Now it was time to tend to the trail itself, to manicure and maintain it like they would do every year.

Our trio rendezvoused on Max Patch in time for lunch, the bald rimmed perfectly by stratus clouds in every direction. As we ate, families crisscrossed the mountaintop, easily accessible from a parking lot a mile below, while two young lovers made out on a picnic blanket. A string of thru-hikers said hello as they ambled past. And when we finally left, we ran into four men in their early 30s—all wearing all-camouflage everything, like they’d just raided an Army surplus store—who were a day away from finishing their first section of the AT. “We’ve loved it,” one of them said. “I’ve never done anything like this.”

We made camp that night in a grove of rhododendron bushes, having climbed 6,000 feet and descended 6,000 feet in 23 miles. The sun had set long before we sat down to eat in a semicircle amongst our tents. It struck us how normal our day had seemed, how much of it mirrored what we’d done on our first AT thru-hike. In fact, the whole day—from the trail crew tending to the dirt to the section hikers who seemed so supercharged by their new hobby, from our big miles to the long lunch in the sun—felt like it was trending toward normalcy, a welcome commodity on the AT in 2025.

Except seeing Mike. That was weird.

Saturday, April 5 (Northbound Mile 267.8–281.1)

A decade ago, turned me into an AT hiker. It was June 2014, my first wedding anniversary. I’d started running to shed pounds for the ceremony and accidentally become obsessed with endurance. The idea of climbing mountains had become a long-distance daydream. So when Tina and I found ourselves in a remote cabin near Hot Springs, NC, one of the few towns the trail bisects, we had to get on the AT, on top of its old mountains. On our last day there, we climbed into a dirty van outside of Bluff Mountain Outfitters for a nauseating, hairpin shuttle to the top of Max Patch, then hiked 23 miles back to town. It felt like climbing K2. Four years later, we moved to Hot Springs; a year after that, we thru-hiked the AT.

It felt like a personal tragedy, then, seeing Bluff Mountain Outfitters on the national news, its rugged old brick frame ripped open by the rise and rush of Spring Creek, just feet away. It also made me worry for budding thru-hikers, since it’s an essential depot for supplies and intel from Wayne Crosby, who landed in Hot Springs after bailing on his own AT trek decades ago. How would newbies fare without him?

Turns out, they wouldn’t. After a gargantuan breakfast at the steadfast Smoky Mountain Diner, which rode out the storm like biscuits atop a raft of gravy, I was shocked to see the Bluff Mountain Outfitters insignia atop the old library building. I was more surprised to see how fresh and inviting it was inside, the cramped but lovable old store transformed into an airy space chockablock with more shoes and hiking food than I remembered at the former location. Crosby showed me how little bits of the old building, likely slated to be demolished, had been incorporated into the architecture—the salvaged counter used for storage, the rescued dressing room door. He’d spent the winter building this new space and reopened only in mid-March, just in time to usher the Class of 2025 northward. He exuded the pride of a single parent who had found a way to make life work.

That is the spirit I encountered time and again in Hot Springs, a town I left two years before the floods but feels sacred to me, nevertheless. There was the library, tucked temporarily beneath a former Methodist church, and the artisanal grocery store and sandwich shop in a pine outpost next door. There was Vinyl Pies Pizza, where a construction crew worked on rebuilding inside until they lost their Saturday evening daylight. Spring Creek Tavern had left its Halloween decorations clinging to the building where its porch once stood, before the waters swept it away. “Damn
We miss you,” read a note in the window of the Iron Horse Station, where I’d inhaled a mountain of fries after that formative 2014 hike. Like so much of Hot Springs, that message felt like an act of resilience, a promise to come back.

When Covid-19 decimated the 2020 thru-hiking season, the worry was that potentially sick hikers could overrun a town like Hot Springs, where resources are low and hospitals are an hour away. That is not the worry now. Every business owner or employee I spoke to said some variation of the same thing, from the bartender at the recently reopened Big Pillow Brewing to Big Kat, a thru-hiker who is running the hostel this year: Send everyone, and tell them to bring their money. That’s what we need to continue rebuilding.

Sunday, April 6 (Northbound Mile 281.1–302.1)

There was little rush to get out of Hot Springs on this stormy Sunday morning; overnight, the wind whipped the rain so hard that Left Field, the one hiker who had opted to spend the night camped on my hostel’s porch, retreated inside just before sunrise. Indeed, one of the hardest lessons that first-time thru-hikers must learn, especially somewhere as perpetually moist as the AT, is when to forge through the rain and when to take a day off. Today, at the start of two days of expected downpours, almost everyone decided to take the latter option.

Not me: I was too eager to see how the trail functioned after to sleep in, so I caught a ride to Tanyard Gap above Hot Springs just after 8 a.m. The AT is almost always rooty or rocky, uncountable footsteps during the last century having kicked away much of its topsoil. Helene inarguably made that worse, turning parts of the trail into a rushing little river and sweeping whatever dirt remained into gaps and creeks and streams. While moving uphill, as I did leaving Tanyard Gap bound for the Rich Mountain observation tower, that was barely a problem.

Dropping down into the aptly named Hurricane Gap, though, I proceeded with extra caution, grabbing the occasional rhododendron branch to balance myself on particularly onerous sets of roots and sometimes trying to find the edges of my Topo shoes like they were downhill skis, slowing my slide . Someone had passed that way on horseback the night before, it seemed, the horse’s hooves exposing just how vulnerable the trail remains—each print resembled a crater, especially along the softest shoulders.

As with my march into Hot Springs, the trail itself was remarkably clear of debris, thanks to the Carolina Mountain Club’s recent efforts. Trees, though, don’t fall only during a storm; they fall for months or even years afterward, compromised roots finally giving way with time, wind, or rain. The volunteers hadn’t gotten to some new ones.

And that’s the real danger when the trail is wet—climbing over, under, or around fresh deadfall when going downhill on slippery ground. More than once, I grabbed a branch, clambered over a fallen tree, and simply let my feet give way until my rump met the dirt, almost like I was creeping down a slick snowfield without spikes. Given the way the AT winds around valleys and gaps in slow semicircles, one side often offers a long drop into the woods below. Avoiding those took a little forethought.

The folks who stayed in town made a mistake, though. After the overnight downpour, occasional showers drifted through the hills, keeping the trail skiddy but not making the day miserable. It was cloudy and cool, perfect for big miles into and over several steep gaps. Indeed, in one such gap, a neon pink paper sign pointed to the Southern Cookie Lady, a retired Ohioan named Peggy who settled into these woods three years ago. Most days, she sits on her porch and listens to hiker tales while serving up bagged apricot cookies and warm cobbler. The first cookie is free, but money from anything else goes to the , still in the process of rebuilding after losing thousands of volumes in the flood. Peggy only lost power and a few trees in Helene, but she was using the good fortune of her relatively calm quarters to help her community, tucking all donations into a Cool-Whip jar.

It wasn’t the only thing that reaffirmed the trail’s spirit for me today. With a new wave of storms expected overnight, I stopped at Jerry’s Cabin, a shelter perched in an idyllic clearing at 4,000 feet. In 2019, it was the first place my class of thru-hikers encountered Sovereign, a man who went on to stab a fellow hiker to death a few hundred miles up trail. I was feeling anxious until Thunder Lizard—a 25-year-old musician from Vermont who forages for ramen garnishes while he walks—began playing a few songs on his ukulele. He did some serviceable Dead and Vampire Weekend before playing by an old friend of mine called the Mountain Goats. It’s a song that’s kind of about the last tendrils of desperate hope in very desolate hours. Thunder Lizard’s shouted rendition felt a little like a hug and a lot like the kind of necessary magic the AT can deliver with suspicious regularity.

Monday, April 7 (Northbound Mile 302.1–327.7)

Today, a tree almost fell on top of me.

I was 10 miles into an aspirational trail marathon, my start slowed by torrents of rain that kept everyone in their sleeping bags until the hour started to feel absurd. I worried that I’d run out of daylight, and I had also run out of water. I climbed out of Devil’s Fork Gap—in spite of the name, an absurdly bucolic patch of farmland and forest on the North Carolina/Tennessee border—until I reached the last point where the trail crosses Sugarloaf Branch, just above its first little waterfall. I was dumping electrolytes into a bottle of perfectly cold water when the woods ruptured.

My first thought was that some wild animal was bounding through the branches. But as I scanned the brush, I watched a tree 20 feet away explode, its 20 feet of solid wood bursting into a half-dozen bits on contact with the earth. I had a little moment of gratitude for sitting here, not there, kept drinking and then continued climbing.

There is no real way to know, of course, if that tree had been damaged by Helene, hanging around through six months of limbo, just waiting to interrupt my water break. Trees fall, and blaming each one on the last big storm is like blaming every summer rain on climate change. But it did reinforce the vague feeling I had so many times during these 140 miles—that the woods were slightly more dangerous now, from the broken branches that snagged my bare calves to the extra patches of exposed roots that threatened my ankles. I made an extra note to check above my tent for any potential deadfall (always the right idea, anyway) and, in the meantime, to move swiftly, staying aware of big falling sticks.

That rain stuck around all day, bands shuttling across the ridges and into the gaps every hour or so. But I was heartened to see a group of a half-dozen hikers with daypacks, smiling as they climbed out of the gap while I descended into it. I wondered if perhaps AT guru Warren Doyle was around, leading them through a that allows beginners to knock out a chunk of trail efficiently. Doyle was fiercely critical of early efforts to keep people off the trail after Helene, insisting that reports of damage were overblown. (He was, I believe now, at least half-right.) I knew that Doyle himself would be near the trail come hell or, well, high water. But if others trusted trail conditions enough to join him, I thought it must be another sign that the trail was coming back online.

That’s not to say, of course, that everything was copacetic. I passed several spans where the sawdust of the Carolina Mountain Club was again fresh, relics of their work to bring some order to the chaos Helene had left behind. What’s more, I encountered a half-dozen dead trees in the span of a few miles that bore the AT’s signature white blaze, a 2-inch-by-6-inch strip of white paint. A hiker, it seemed, was carrying a Sharpie, maybe to turn roadside trash into hitchhiking signs every time they needed to get to town or graffiti their names onto shelter walls. On the blazes that belonged to those fallen trees, they’d drawn little frowns, black eyes peering up from the side of some wounded oak. The first time I saw it, I chuckled; I’m not ashamed to admit that, the sixth time I saw it, I got all verklempt.

I finished the marathon, rolling into Bald Mountain Shelter—at more than 5,000 feet, a relatively high one for the East Coast—just after 7 p.m. I’d crossed Big Bald, an exquisite bit of trail, in a cloud, the wind whipping against my headphones as I listened to Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s first album. Some bit of political news had inspired the choice, and I’d wanted to hear its spoken-word prologue:

It felt good to know, at least, that people were taking care of the Appalachian Trail, whether or not they were being paid to do so. As I fell asleep that night, I thought about how lucky I was to be there, nestled in bed alongside a half-dozen other hikers. It is the country’s trademark trail and, I think, still its best—a resource worth all the work.

Tuesday, April 8 (Northbound Mile 327.7–344.5)

I began this 140-mile sprint with one very specific goal: to cross the Nolichucky River in Erwin, TN. During my first thru-hike, in 2019, my mother-in-law scooped me and my wife outside of , the legendary hostel along that wide river’s banks, for a funeral in Indiana. She dropped us off several days later on the bridge across the Nolichucky; that was the last time we’d see family for months, and I always saw it as a pivot point in our hike, the moment we cut the cord of possibility that we could just head home.

Helene decimated that bridge, sweeping it downriver in gargantuan slabs that are still stuck there like roadblocks. When people spoke of the potentially dashed chances for a 2025 hiking season, that was a point of consistent concern: How would hikers get across the river? There was the promise of a long road detour or the prospect of a dangerous railroad crossing. And then, as Uncle Johnny’s worked to rebuild, they hatched a plan alongside the Appalachian Trail Conservancy to , operated by river guides out of work due to Helene’s aftermath. It’s how hikers in Maine cross the Kennebec River, anyway, so why not here?

But there was no boat to be found beneath the vinyl “A.T. Hiker Ferry” banner, its schedule disrupted for the day by a river that was raging a little too hard. When I asked Terry Wise, the long-distance hiker who bought Uncle Johnny’s in 2021, about the ferry, he vented about the U.S. Forest Service’s refusal to put the launch pad on their land, a parcel that offered a safer ride even on rough days. A cavalcade of dump trucks doing road repairs rolled by constantly, making it clear how perilous the road walk was. The best thing hikers could do, he thought, was wait until tomorrow.

But my trip was done, and my ride was waiting in the Uncle Johnny’s parking lot. As I moseyed toward an old friend’s car and, in turn, to a , I realized there were worse fates for the AT hikers of 2025 than waiting for tomorrow. That morning, I’d passed through the most severely damaged sections of trail I’d encountered, half-mile spans in which the Carolina Mountain Club had cut hundreds of trees and forced the remnants just off the trail. It often felt like walking through endless cords of firewood, the gap between the logs barely wide enough to offer safe passage.

When I first saw the way the trail wove through those seemingly endless debris fields, especially above the deep drop of Spivey Gap, I thought of it as a miracle, an act of divine intervention. And then, of course, I realized that such an idea undermined the exhausting and dangerous work of the volunteers, like my old boss Mike, who had done what no government or god had bothered to do: save the 2025 AT season by putting their own lives on pause.

The feeling was reinforced several miles later at Temple Hill Gap, a relatively high slit in the ridge. In every direction, the trees were scattered like carcasses in a slasher film, covering nearly every square inch of the holler below. I had just left the jurisdiction of the Carolina Mountain Club, and I suddenly saw what Ron, that volunteer I’d met nearly a hundred miles earlier, meant when he said, “For every one tree left standing, you’ll see 20 that are down.”

Here was that scene of near-total devastation, where the woods were a little more than a jumble of matchsticks. I stood there for a long time, trying to remember that wonderful bit of forest as it had been in 2019 and trying to imagine it as it would become—debris at best, landslides and forest fires at worst. I was thankful for the present passage and anxious for what was to come. I turned and headed for Erwin and the Nolichucky, toward a river I would not be able to cross, at least not today.

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When Teresa Martinez was a mountain-bike racer, she suffered a recurring anxiety dream. Days before any competition, Martinez would envision herself woefully unprepared, five minutes before the start. First, her shoes would go missing, then her bike, then her water bottle, then her gloves. With her gear finally gathered, she still had to find the starting line. “And then, you wake up in a cold sweat,” she told me recently. “And think, ‘Oh my god, that was crazy.’”

Martinez doesn’t need to sleep to feel that way these days. Now the executive director of the Coalition, the nonprofit that supports and sustains the 3,100-mile trail across the country’s rocky spine, Martinez has spent the last four months navigating the administrative roller-coaster of edicts and executive orders from the Trump Administration and its Department of Government Efficiency that have gutted public land agencies.

She has seen staff cut at partner agencies, wondered if the CDTC would be reimbursed for money it had already spent with prior government approval, and fretted about changing plans to balance the books for this fiscal year. It’s neither a dream nor a nightmare, just reality. “It’s like the racecourse is being built while we’re riding it,” Martinez said. “It’s like you’re waiting for the next shoe to drop as we continue down the path, not knowing if we’re going to get there.”

Throughout the spring, I’ve had similar conversations with the leaders at four other iconic American trails—the Appalachian, Colorado, Ice Age, and Pacific Crest—about how federal uncertainty has hamstrung them. The nonprofit groups that manage these trails all depend, to varying degrees, on federal funds and symbiotic relationships with federal organizations such as the United States Forest Service and National Park Service.

Their concerns, of course, varied: The Pacific Crest Trail Association had just cut six expert trail workers and more than a year’s worth of trail maintenance to be done by youth crews when I spoke to leaders there. The Colorado Trail Foundation worried about water spigots and pit toilets at trailheads. The Ice Age Trail Alliance paused registration for its trail-building season.

But they all agreed on one partial remedy: Ordinary people donating their money or volunteering their time could not only help plug some gaps created by federal instability but also bolster the spirits of those still left to do hard work with less resources. Too, it’s a way for those frustrated by the administration’s decisions or indecision to feel a little less helpless.

“We’re in an unprecedented time, the middle of this dust storm, so we’re not exactly sure where our needs are going to fall. But I have no doubt that they’re going to grow,” said Sandi Marra, the ever-candid head of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy. “We’re going to need skilled volunteers. We’re going to need people in numbers that we haven’t needed in the past, because we’re not going to be able to rely on the federal support we’ve had in the past.”

At the Colorado Trail Foundation, for instance, executive director Paul Talley was looking for a few people who could wield a chainsaw. Cutting trees on trail is subject to a series of byzantine regulations and certifications. If a downed tree can’t be handled with a handsaw and requires either a crosscut saw or a chainsaw, volunteers have to be trained and approved by forest service personnel. But since the Federal government began slashing jobs at the Forest Service, many people with the power to vet amateur sawyers have been let go or accepted buyouts. So Talley is working his connections in Colorado and networking with other organizations to find folks who have already been certified that simply might not know about the Colorado Trail’s needs.

“We’re making a call list: ‘Hey, can we call you?’ We need help with this big tree,’” Talley told me. “We’re also developing a process where trainers can come to our facilities to get people certified. If we’re just relying on the Forest Service at this point, it’s a multi-year wait.”

All volunteers, of course, don’t need to be highly specialized. Megan Wargo, who leads the Pacific Crest Trail Association, listed a half-dozen ways folks who couldn’t wield a chainsaw might help. Each year, the trail must be “brushed,” essentially meaning someone walks it to clear it of any overgrowth. Others lead mules to remote trail work sites, literally taking the loads off the backs of other volunteers. Some still command the kitchen, cooking for trail crews on sites, while others can help with administrative tasks and educational outreach from the association’s Sacramento office. Still, there is a catch.

“New volunteers and existing volunteers putting in more hours can make a big difference, but they can’t close the whole gap of not having federal funding,” Wargo said, noting that the PCTA’s federal funding of just less than $700,000 has remained flat for a dozen years even as material and labor costs have risen. “The PCTA can help provide training to get those folks on the ground. But if we don’t have staff to do that, it’s hard to increase those volunteer hours.”

And so, of course, it all comes down to money. Most trail organizations told me they’d found ways to mitigate their dependence on federal funding. The Colorado Trail, for instance, has built a sizable emergency fund through 20 years of compounding interest on a surplus. The Appalachian Trail intentionally diversified its revenue streams after recognizing that their federal partners were chronically understaffed, anyway, even before the genesis of DOGE. The Ice Age Trail reinstated its trail-building season not only after most of its funding finally started to trickle in but also when private donors stepped up to help because they cared about the work. The Ice Age, after all, hopes to finish 15 new miles of trail this year.

As questions loom about if and when money will arrive, such contributions mean that work that’s already been planned and authorized can proceed for now, that the effort of building and maintaining the country’s hiking trails doesn’t end with any specific administration. “As we have funding uncertainties, private money can either step in and cover some of the costs that aren’t being covered by federal grants right now or provide us with stability when we’re asking for federal reimbursements that have been paused,” Wargo, at the PCTA, said. “That gives us flexibility to be able to continue our operations.”

But times, of course, aren’t only tight for trail organizations. Some estimates, by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, say 60 percent of Americans now live paycheck-to-paycheck; new tariffs will compound that problem, because, as The New York Times recently noted, “[they] will touch almost every aspect of American life.” While hiking across the United States multiple times, I’ve seen at least a half-dozen trail crews consisting only of white-haired retirees. I don’t think that’s because older Americans have some special relationship with civil service and volunteerism. They, instead, have more disposable time and resources than most Americans cannot afford. Trails need help—money, time, energy—that many working Americans do not have the ability to spare.

But Martinez reminded me that there are ways to assist that don’t cost much at all. You can call American officials, both elected and appointed, and tell them that supporting trails matter to you. You can drop caches of water off at trailheads where there’s no working spigot. (Remember to pick up the refuse.) You can deliver a box of donuts to an agency’s office, whether it’s the headquarters of a trail coalition or park rangers, and tell them you support the work they do for public lands. See a forest service crew at a bar? Buy ’em a beer and say thanks. That’s all, Martinez said, volunteerism.

“Whether it’s picking up trash at a trailhead or leaving water or setting up a feed station for volunteers, if it’s something somebody wanted to do, we could say yes and support that,” she said. “It’s an act of kindness, and right now, we need to be reminded of how kind we can be.”

The post Do You Love Hiking Trails? It’s Time to Donate and Volunteer. appeared first on čúČúłÔčÏșÚÁÏ Online.

Ever come across an incredible hotel that stops you mid-scroll and makes you think, Wow, wouldn’t it be something to stay there? We do, too—all the time. Welcome to Friday Fantasy, where we highlight amazing hotels, lodges, cabins, tents, campsites, and other places perched in perfect outdoor settings. Read on for the intel you need to book an upcoming adventure here. Or at least dream about it.

Standing on the black-sand shore at the edge of Iceland’s Troll Peninsula, Jay Sweet tapped the top of his head twice and laughed when I stood up and returned the gesture, signaling I was fine after being walloped by a little wave I’d attempted to surf in the Arctic Ocean. Actually, I was much more than fine—for the second day in a row, in February, I was surfing (or, you know, trying) a dozen miles beneath the Arctic Circle. I was ecstatic.

Back in the States, Sweet is the executive director of the , the vaunted American institution where, yes, Dylan went electric six decades ago but has also long worked to expand the definition of what American folk can entail. But on the north shore of Iceland a few weeks per year, Sweet is also a de facto surfing instructor for , a 15th-century sheep farm that’s been converted into a boutique luxury resort and extreme adventure outpost 15 miles inland from where we sought our break.

Shuffling out of the water, with my entire body blanketed in borrowed neoprene, I could see , the Arctic recording outpost owned by Deplar’s parent company and the space I’d come to tour. (Sweet is a consultant there.) It is an isolated artist retreat where musicians look to go inward. My wife, Tina, and I clambered into a Toyota truck with Sweet, heat cranked and our boards hanging out of the back. We headed to the studio to prepare for the next journey. We had, after all, come to Iceland to go outward.

Indeed, during the 48 hours since our party of six had arrived, our lives had become a toggle between indoor comfort and outdoor escapades. As soon as we’d stopped surfing the day before, we’d retreated to a massive hearth in the recording studio’s lounge with warm bowls of soup. We’d then toured the valley on small but sturdy Icelandic horses renowned for their idiosyncratic and smooth gait know as the .

When that was over, we returned to the Farm itself, an unassuming black house with a living roof planted with tundra grass that unfolds in several levels and wings of luxury that are almost impossible to see from the road. I showered in my room, which instantly felt like home and headed for an enormous geothermal pool, slipping like a harbor seal beneath a glass wall to the heated outdoor half. I cycled between the pool, a sauna, and a hot tub for hours—or until it was time for dinner—a three-course meal of elegant updates to classic Icelandic fare like cod, lamb, and Icelandic Happy Marriage cake, all at a communal dining table that seated two-dozen. During those two hours, strangers from several countries became friends, the mood collectively enhanced by the realization that we were in a corner of wintry heaven, here at the end of the earth. As everyone drifted to the bar or their bedrooms, I stepped on our little porch and looked up, waiting for the Northern Lights to dance.

čúČúłÔčÏșÚÁÏ IntelÌę

When that second day of surfing was done, we had an appointment to keep—a group sauna session in a round house built into the side of the hill, the roof covered with towering grasses. Inside, a tattooed sauna keeper with muscles that looked like bundles of paracord talked us through the history of the Icelandic sauna, then snapped a towel in front of each of our faces to direct the heat toward us like a fireplace bellows. One by one, she marched us outside to a cold plunge pool dug into the hillside, with a spotlight aiming up from the bottom. She timed us before returning us to the sauna, repeating the process until we all relented.

That was supposed to be the end of our adventures, after the horses and the surfs and the hikes, and after we’d turned down chances to take fat bikes onto frozen lakes and go ice fishing. But ever since we’d arrived, Tina and I had eyed the tall ridges that surrounded Deplar Farm and talked (furtively, at first) of climbing one. When we finally broached the subject with SĂłlrĂșn—the knowledgeable and funny guide for our group, who insists you call her Maria if her real name is too difficult—she enthusiastically agreed we should give it a go. And since we’d be leaving in less than 16 hours, we knew this was our last chance. So we met her in Deplar’s gear barn, a cathedral of skis and poles and paddles and clothes and crampons. She would be watching us by GPS, she said, but we were free to go on our own with the help of the ice axes and spikes she’d supplied.

We ascended the steep face 2,000 feet until we realized we’d soon lose the battle with daylight, especially since the farm below had already disappeared behind a whiteout. We picked our way back down the slick faces, glissading the last few hundred feet on the banks of a frozen river. We returned to Deplar, covered in a little mud and bleeding from at least one knee and feeling totally victorious. It was my favorite moment at the Farm, the sensation that comes with the satisfaction of doing something about which the other guests weren’t so sure.

That flexibility and scope are key at Deplar. They will take you heli-skiing (for the price of the fuel) in aggressive terrain, or they will lead you on cross-country meanders. They will cut you loose to test your own skills on unknown slopes and trust that you will be back by dinner, or they will join you on a slow horseback trot along unpaved roads. Each morning, your guide presents some options and then lets you plot the course of your adventure, however heavy or light you hope to make it.

Eat and Drink

“Did you see those lights up the road, on the top of the hill?” the chef asked the table during our first night at Deplar Farm. “That’s where the lamb comes from.” He was talking about the lamb shank that stood on each plate like an obelisk, surrounded by a sea of blood-red beet puree, perfectly tender potatoes, and succulent mushrooms. It was the night’s main course and emblematic of the place’s culinary approach—take the standard fare of Iceland, source it as locally as possible, and then apply techniques imported from classic French cuisine. Dinner, then, was always full of surprises, where ingredients you came to anticipate, like cod, were recast in unexpected roles, as when the fish was diced so that it looked more like rice. Eating was a protracted and social process, too, each of the three courses patiently revealed and explained by the chef and sommelier.

But the true standouts were simpler. There was the ever-present table butter, so soft it seemed to spread itself over sourdough. There was the breakfast, dominated by crepe-like Icelandic pancakes and massive bowls of Skyr, Iceland’s wonderfully acidic and protein-loaded yogurt, piled generously with granola and fruit. And there were the blessed snacks, from the in-room refrigerator replenished each morning to standing spreads of nuts, trail mixes, and dried fruits, ready to be bagged before you headed out the door.

I should say that I stopped drinking years ago. But the drinks were so generous for everyone—and the non-alcoholic options so plentiful for everyone else—that I found myself playing bass during an impromptu karaoke jam with three women older than my mother on the final night as my successful, professional friends played beer pong nearby. When I woke up the next morning, the bar resembled the remains of a college party, and Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky was still playing. There were, suffice it to say, a lot of Icelandic pancakes at breakfast.

Choice Cabins

In my first few days on the Appalachian Trail, I became Gunner, an ignominious trail name bestowed upon me by someone who has somehow become a best friend because I looked like Elmer Fudd. It felt a little like fate, then, when we arrived at our room to see “Gunnar” painted across the white door in a tight, black hand. It was presumably a reference to Gunnar Hámundarson, a warring Icelandic leader a millennium ago. Each of the 13 rooms at Deplar has its own historic name, and they all share a deeply cozy design, from king beds piled high with sheepskin blankets to a slate shower with water hot enough to toast you after escaping the Icelandic winter. Each room is meant to be personalized, too, from separate sound systems in the bathroom and bedroom you can adjust yourself to a refrigerator that is constantly restocked with house-made hummus, jerky, and drinks.

But you’ll want to leave your room for the common spaces, too—a library with mountain views, a media room with deep couches, multiple gyms, and, my favorite, a hearthside hangout zone equipped with towering hi-fi speakers, a fancy turntable, and an assortment of very good records. (, the company that owns Deplar and a string of properties on several continents, is named for .) Each morning in Iceland, I woke up very early to write a profile about the singer . The record perched by the turntable when I arrived? Panda Bear’s masterpiece, Person Pitch. It was a coincidence (I think) by studio engineer Wade Koeman, but it wasn’t the only bit of magic I encountered at Deplar, where the tall troll hill feet from the front door is treated as sacred space.

When to Go

As we left Reykjavik, our small Icelandair plane shuddered when it broke through the clouds, pushing through the gray of the day in the capital city. But an hour later, we landed in Akureyri—a town of 20,000 at the edge of one of Iceland’s longest fjords—amid a blue-bird day, the sky so bright and the ground so free of snow you might not have guessed it was winter in Iceland. The two-hour drive to Deplar Farm was all horizon, cliffs tumbling into oceans into infinity. By the next morning, though, our valley was a mix of ocean air and white, a strange snow globe with no visibility. The conditions shifted constantly between these two states.

All this to say: Go anytime. Every person I spoke to at Deplar Farm recommended a summer return, when the hiking, biking, and fishing were as endless as the green of the valley. They also suggested being there with more snow, so that the barn of DPS skis and the stable of snowmobiles could take us far and fast.

How To Get There

Two airports serve Reykjavik. In all likelihood, you’ll fly into Keflavík International, a hub for Icelandair, which has 20 direct stateside destinations. A Deplar emissary will scoop you there, shuttling you either to a quaint guesthouse they keep near the city’s harbor for the night or straight to the second airport, Reykjavik Domestic. You’ll fly to Akureyri, at the country’s northern edge, and again be picked up by a Deplar representative, your adventure guide for your stay. Sit on the right side of the van for the best scenery, and don’t fret too much about the one-lane tunnels that cut beneath mountains. Deplar isn’t the easiest place to reach, but Akureyri is working to expand its international flights. And the remoteness, after all, is part of the reward.

Book Flights to KEF

Don’t Miss

As an American, it is tempting to look at Iceland as a speck of sparsely populated lava rock between two oceans, smaller than the state of Tennessee, and assume you can see it all quickly. If you’re spending major money to go stay at a luxe spot where your every wish becomes someone else’s task, isn’t that enough? How much can there really be to see? Don’t make that mistake.

As exceptional as my stay at Deplar Farm was, my time outside of it might have been my favorite part of my first Icelandic visit. After we returned to Reykjavik, Tina and I grabbed some pastries from the incredible bakery and a tiny rented Kia and headed for , where a volcano and glacier lord over a peninsula with a coastline so rugged it makes the crags of Maine look like a small-scale model. We climbed atop and drove into craters, waded into water loaded with seals, and stood on a beach where the tide lurched in and out of smooth lava rocks, creating one of the most psychedelic sound experiences of my life. There were hot springs, commanding columns of basalt, and, at the cheap motel we found halfway back to Reykjavik, the best Northern Lights of our trip. (Many hotels have a sign-up sheet; when the Lights appear, they call you, no matter the hour.) Don’t let guided adventures, however great, replace a self-guided one, especially in a country with as many uncanny spectacles as Iceland.

Details

Price: From $3,970 (winter) or $4,377 (summer), three-night stay required

Address: 570 Fljot, ÓlafsfjörĂ°ur, Iceland

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Why was čúČúłÔčÏșÚÁÏ hiking columnist and Backpacker contributor Grayson Haver Currin touring a music studio in Iceland? Long before he had finished the Triple Crown of Hiking, ever since he was a teenager in North Carolina, he was a music journalist. He continues to write about music for GQ, The New York Times, Pitchfork, and many more.

The post Yes, This Magical Icelandic čúČúłÔčÏșÚÁÏ Lodge Is Real—and Wonderful appeared first on čúČúłÔčÏșÚÁÏ Online.

The Appalachian Trail will change your life, but maybe no single mile of it will. Unlike its great western counterparts along the Pacific Crest or the Continental Divide, the United States’ most iconic footpath is subtle—a green tunnel through some of the oldest and most graceful mountains in the world, not some sizzle reel of endless panoramas. You can stand atop a 14er or a high Sierra pass and instantly feel altered; the AT takes time to shape you over miles, months, years.

While it’s hard to pick a birthday for the trail, which Benton MacKaye proposed in 1921 but wasn’t completed until 1937, you could reasonably say the founding of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy (ATC) in 1925 was when the AT became what it is. While the ATC has had its fair share of controversy, no other individual or organization has ever done more to protect and promote the trail’s 2,197.4 miles and the land around it. At a time when federal resources for public lands are in the air at best, the ATC continues its century-long mission to safeguard the trail, from volunteers they lead on crucial maintenance missions to their audacious .

In that spirit, two of us who have had our lives changed by the Appalachian Trail—Backpacker writers and —have selected our “best” 100 miles of the Appalachian Trail. (Fine, it’s 103.8, but more trail is better than less.) All these mileage markers represent a northbound hike and are subject to change, like the trail itself.

We debated these picks, arguing about their accessibility, their beauty, the way they loom large in our memory. Underneath it all, we were discussing the ways certain bits of land strung together by white blazes had changed us. Not everyone has the opportunity to thru-hike, but there’s a chance, that these 19 chunks of trail, from a 14-mile roller coaster in Virginia to the climb up Katahdin in Maine, can still change you, anyway.

Prologue: The Arch to The Stairs, Georgia

Though the Appalachian Trail officially begins on Springer Mountain before heading (at least at the moment) 2,197.4 miles to Maine, you should begin at , beneath a simple stone arch. This is the 8.5-mile Appalachian Trail Approach, infamous for being debated by thru-hikers for its value and the 600-plus stairs to the top of the falls, which are as entertaining and challenging as almost anything on the actual Appalachian Trail. Legend has it that would-be thru-hikers have jettisoned their entire kits while climbing those stairs, returning to the parents still waiting below. And you will stun a dozen tourists when they ask you where you’re going and you simply answer “Maine!” The falls, it should be said, are beautiful; pose for a photo, and keep grunting up that hill. —G±á°ä

Blood Mountain to Neel Gap, Georgia (3.2 Miles: 28.1-31.3)

Blood Mountain is one of the first landmarks for northbound AT hikers. It’s also the highest peak on the Georgia section, the sixth highest in the state. But it’s best known for another reason: ghosts. Some hikers point to the peak’s history as a battleground between the Cherokee and the Muscogee people as the origin of the stories. Others point to , who went missing in 2008 on the mountain, to explain its shelter’s eeriness. The trail log is often full of stories about strange occurrences from those who are brave enough to stay the night. â€Äâ”țł§

Rocky Top and Thunderhead Mountain to Beechnut Gap, North Carolina/Tennessee (2.8 Miles: 184–186.8)

The 72-mile path that the AT takes through Great Smoky Mountains National Park could have commandeered nearly three-quarters of this list, but that would be a copout. Still, less than 200 miles into a northbound journey, the Smokies offer a quick study on how the trail will push you around (if you take four days to hike the Smokies, the adage goes, you will encounter four seasons) and how stunning the whole thing will be. I love the wide-open views from Rocky Top and Thunderhead, plus how quickly you exit and reenter tree line. (There are some century-old names carved into rocks along the trail, too, predating the park itself.) And I have a distinct memory of being battered by wind so much that these mountains, as low-slung and ancient as they are, reasserted their power. —G±á°ä

Max Patch Road to Lemon Gap, North Carolina (6.2 Miles: 254.6–260.8)

Before and after my first AT thru-hike, I lived in a cabin a few ridges over from Max Patch, one of those scattered through the South. They can be so idyllic you will feel like you’re in a beautiful dream. It was essentially my backyard, so I’ve hiked to, on, and around the iconic spot maybe more than anywhere else. Still, I’d accept an invitation right now. A panopticon of Appalachian grace, it offers views of multiple states, distant ridgelines, and several river drainages. And the northbound descent down its gentle slopes and across multiple creeks into Lemon Gap exemplifies the woods of the region—wildflowers sprouting through the damp forest floor in spring, a look at the bones of some of the world’s oldest mountains with fall’s arrival. —G±á°ä

Views of the Nolichucky River to Beauty Spot, Tennessee/North Carolina (11.7 Miles: 343.5–355.2)

Talk to a veteran AT hiker, and chances are you’ll get a strong opinion about the green tunnel, or the prevailing sense that you’re mostly navigating 2,200 miles of tree cover from Georgia to Maine. They’ll say it’s boring or it’s beautiful. I say it’s both, and the moments when it breaks affirm that. As you head into Erwin, Tenn., the trees split onto postcard-worthy shots of the Nolichucky River’s gorge far below. And after you cross the river (post-Tropical Storm Helene, you’ll do it ), you’ll steadily ascend a series of gaps and ridges, views offered by powerline clearings and natural overlooks alike. Just shy of 4,500 feet, you’ll reach Beauty Spot, a mountaintop meadow ringed by little trees, so picturesque you may be tempted to make it your permanent address. I first encountered Beauty Spot after getting off trail for a funeral; it was the sight that galvanized my northward quest. —G±á°ä

Cloudland Hotel on Roan Mountain to Little Hump Mountain, Tennessee/North Carolina (9.3 Miles: 378.7–388.0)

I have always struggled with the obvious question: What is your favorite part of the Appalachian Trail? No one ever accepts “all of it,” so I soon launch into a list that feels just shy of “all of it.” But if my life depended on recommending one stretch, this right here is the one: From the top of rhododendron-crowned Roan Mountain, where remnants of the grand remain, you drop into a seesaw of dips and dives, the rugged old trail carved across the faces of some of the oldest mountains in the world. You cross three balds in a little more than a mile, drop way down, and then climb Little Hump Mountain. (The section misses some charm now since the loss of the fabled , but it still goes.) I stupidly camped on its flanks once during a strong storm, and weathering that felt like preparation for future, bigger adventures. The next morning, the sky was all cotton candy, and I briefly wondered if I might have slipped off in my sleep toward heaven. —G±á°ä

Dennis Cove Road to Laurel Fork Falls, TennesseeÌę(1.2 Miles: 420.3-421.5)

Located in the just outside of Hampton, Tenn., a strenuous stretch of trail takes you to the 40-foot tall, 50-foot wide Laurel Fork Falls. While springtime air temperatures are often in the high 70s or low 80s, the falls are notoriously cold. That doesn’t stop hikers from going for a soak, even in early spring. My trail family and I packed out a few beverages from the Black Bear Resort and stuck them in the water during our ice baths. By the time we were done splashing, they were ready to sip. â€Äâ”țł§

Buzzard Rock to Mount Rogers, Virginia (7.3 Miles: 491.9-499.2)

By the time I made it to Buzzard Rock, I finally had my trail legs. The climb to the summit of Buzzard Rock is a little bit of a monster, but for the first time in nearly 500 miles, the strain barely phased me. What’s more, the whole section offered 360-degree views, made even more beautiful by springtime blossoms. The bald-style peaks in this region make for consistent views across the , a stretch of trail known for wild ponies grazing around Wilburn Ridge. â€Äâ”țł§

McAfee Knob to Tinker Cliffs, Virginia (5.6 Miles: 714.5–720.1)

is the most photographed overlook along the Appalachian Trail—and for good reason, since the view it offers feels so epic. But truthfully, I found nearby Tinker Cliffs to be equally stunning, minus the crowds. After McAfee Knob, the trail winds through trees and shrubs before climbing through some boulders to a cliffside that gives you access to several different overlook options. You can complete the Virginia “Triple Crown” by adding the .Ìęâ€Äâ”țł§

The Roller Coaster, Virginia (14.0 Miles: 996.4-1,010.4)

Reaching the 1,000-mile mark of a northbound thru-hike, which you do during this infamous stretch, is a bit of an emotional rollercoaster in itself, but these 14 miles are better known for their literal ups and downs. The elevation profile is so tedious and repetitive it’s almost comedic. I carried an avocado for a friend through this section, contemplating whether or not I should just eat it myself to save my knees from 7 ounces of extra weight. My spirit proved valiant despite more than 3,500 feet of gain. After failing to find my friend after three days, I sliced the avocado into fat chunks, placed it on a burger I bought, and ate it myself, anyway.Ìęâ€Äâ”țł§

Harpers Ferry, West Virginia (4.4 Miles: 1,025.4–1,029.8)

The AT’s 2,200 miles are chockablock with history, from the indigenous thoroughfares it overlaps to the battlefields it bypasses. But few places in the United States are crucibles of the country’s struggles and progress quite like . A gap in the ridge and the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers so close to D.C. essentially ensured important events, like the de facto start of the Civil War, would occur here. An idyllic town suspended in amber, Harpers Ferry is glorious on a spring day. Cross the Shenandoah by footbridge and then the Potomac (and into Maryland). Cruise the first few miles of the state on the C&O Canal Trail, surrounded by lush woods and families pushing strollers. The home of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy (happy anniversary, and thanks!), Harpers Ferry offers a perfect break at what we call the AT’s “emotional halfway point.” —G±á°ä

New Jersey-New York State Line (1.9 Miles: 1,369.7–1,371.6)

A recovering van dweller, I was a state-line enthusiast long before I began thru-hiking, curious about how sometimes-arbitrary distinctions between this and that could impact people’s lives. Maybe the AT made a zealot out of me, crisscrossing as it does 14 states. My favorite crossing happens when, after dancing across the border multiple times, the northbound trail exits New Jersey (great AT state, by the way, for real) into New York. The distinction is painted blaze-white on a massive hunk of rock, part of a series of very brief scrambles (with occasional ladders for help) and open rock faces that offer expansive views of tree-lined ridges, deep blue lakes, and small towns. Few other bits of the AT are quite like it. Bonus: You’re very close to , some of the trail’s best ice cream. —G±á°ä

Bear Mountain Recreation Area to Anthony’s Nose, New York (2.3 Miles: 1,408.2-1,410.5)

The stretch of Appalachian Trail that runs past New York City marks an odd juxtaposition between the trail’s quiet backcountry and civilization. I made it to justÌębefore Father’s Day on a balmy summer afternoon, noticing locals gathering for picnics near the lake. Upon reaching Bear’s summit, I spotted a rattlesnake, poised and ready to strike, just seconds before I peered across the New York skyline. Continuing north, I made my way past a small zoo before crossing the Hudson River on the Bear Mountain Bridge. By the time I reached Anthony’s Nose on the other side, my brain was still processing a rattlesnake, a skyline, a zoo, and a sprawling bridge in a matter of miles. â€Äâ”țł§

Route 9/Split Rock to Glastenbury Mountain, Vermont (10.4 Miles: 1,618.0–1,628.4)

Vermont doesn’t get the Appalachian Trail love it deserves. If you’re headed north, you’re anticipating the big bosses at the end; if you’re headed south, you’re anticipating the four-state rush that begins with Massachusetts. But the 151-mile stretch through Vermont is memorable because of its seasonal mud, its rendezvous with the Long Trail, and its absolute wealth of rich forests, broad meadows, and dreamy ponds. Easily accessible from Bennington, this 10-mile span is an unexpected gem in the . You’ll pass through a striking split rock, ford a stream, navigate slippery boardwalks through forest so green it feels like a sea of melted crayon, and slowly climb nearly 2,000 feet to a lookout tower where the woods blur into a horizon of endless ridges and sky. Get there at sunset, and you’ll instantly understand that Vermont is possibly the AT’s most gently exquisite state. —G±á°ä

Franconia Ridge to Mount Garfield, New HampshireÌę(7.0 Miles: 1,827.0–1,834.0)

greeted me with 50-mile-per-hour winds, making it difficult to stand at my full height. Still, the views were worth it. The majority of this trail section is above treeline, making it high on exposure but easy on the eyes. As the day wore on, the wind died down just in time for me to make the steep climb up majestic Mount Garfield, studded with tiny trees like so many of its White Mountain kin.Ìęâ€Äâ”țł§

Lost Pond to Carter Notch Hut, New Hampshire (5.2 Miles: 1,878.5–1,883.7)

The White Mountains are not for the faint of heart, as the Wildcat Mountains taught me. This section of trail required rock scrambling, squeezing myself through small spaces, and crawling at a snail’s pace due to the relentless elevation gain. In fact, if this section were any steeper, it could be placed on the Yosemite Scale and given a rock-climbing grade. Some even call this the AT’s most challenging bit. One quality that makes the Whites so unique is its hut system. The Appalachian Mountain Club operates , a potential relief for hikers who are looking to get inside for a snack or stay. The Wildcat stretch includes the Carter Notch Hut—quiet, beautiful, and a great place for a cup of coffee before continuing on.Ìęâ€Äâ”țł§

Mahoosuc Notch to Speck Pond Shelter, Maine (3.4 Miles: 1,922.0–1,925.4)

For 2,000 miles of the AT, you will resent switchbacks and PUDS (that is, pointless ups-and-downs), all moves the trail makes to get you where you need to go without ruining the landscape. In Maine, where native son Stephen King must have convinced some poor trail builder that building switchbacks would haunt them, hikers face hard climbs. This wondrous little stretch starts with the Mahoosuc Notch, a mile-long jungle gym of enormous boulders that you will climb atop, under, and around. Finish that, and it’s time for the Mahoosuc Arm, a 1,600-foot climb on a little more than a mile of rock that’s so consistently wet it seems to be leaking grease. Finish that, and it’s time for your true reward: the glorious Speck Pond Shelter, one of the most stunning places to spend the night on the entire trip. —G±á°ä

Pemadumcook Lake, Maine (2.7 Miles: 2,149.1–2,151.8)

I will forever be grateful for the shores of Pemadumcook Lake, because that’s where, a few days into a trek of the , I inexplicably found a bag of unopened Pop-Tarts, my favorite trail food. I ate them all. But when I see photos of that moment, I am wowed again by how massive Mount Katahdin appears on the horizon, though it’s still 50 trail miles north. In its isolation, especially against a pale blue morning, it looks like the continent’s biggest peak. No wonder . If you’re heading north, summit fever will soon set in, so take time to enjoy the way Katahdin frames this placid Maine lake. And maybe eat a Pop-Tart? —G±á°ä

Katahdin Spring Campground to Katahdin Summit, MaineÌę(5.2 Miles: 2,192.2–2,197.4)

Within days of finding my trail family in Georgia, our peers dubbed us “the Breakfast Club,” because we were infamous for waking up before the sun to catch sunrise on a summit somewhere. My hiking partner and I tackled Katahdin in the same spirit, rising from our quarters at Katahdin Spring Campground at 3 a.m. before beginning the ascent. Halfway up the climb, we turned to the sky and glimpsed the Milky Way, peppering the darkness with color. We slogged on, equal parts ecstatic and devastated to be nearly done. By the time we reached the summit of Katahdin, the sun winked over the horizon, making us some of the first people to greet a new day along the east coast while we ended our thru-hike. â€Äâ”țł§

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Jack Jones was not a cheat-code kid.

When he played computer games like World of Warcraft or EverQuest, Jones always wanted to know about the next level, where the struggles and the stakes would both be a bit higher. This characteristic hasn’t changed. Jones, now 38, is better known as Quadzilla, a hiking powerhouse famous not only for the gams that gave him his trail name, as well as his , and his righteous political advocacy, but also for his willingness to push new extremes. Midway through a 100-mile race in 2021, for instance, Jones decided that he would pursue the Calendar-Year Triple Crown in 2022: the Appalachian, Continental Divide, and Pacific Crest trails in the same year. , Jones opted to level up in a different way during 2024: to hike the entire while spending just $1,000 total on gear, food, and shelter.

“I knew I could hike the AT, that I could do 30-mile days,” Jones tells me from Vietnam, where the Army veteran has begun an indefinite self-imposed political exile. “I knew this might force me to go two weeks without a shower. It might force me to eat a whole chicken in a Walmart parking lot—and then continue on.”

So on May 21, 2024, Jones—and a younger hiking friend, Tate “Pyro” Dobson—left the trail’s southern terminus in Georgia, carrying he’d methodically made himself or ordered after hours of research on AliExpress, a sort of Chinese Etsy-meets-Amazon in overdrive. In the past, Jones had carried backpacks that cost more, but he was attempting to reach Maine with an , an , and shoes he purchased on clearance. “It was my extra layer of challenge,” he says, grinning. “Being a little more creative to be a little more comfortable is fun.”

The sacrifices came quickly. Aiming to finish in less than 100 days, or just more than half of the six-month average, Jones left Georgia late, which exposed him to the soaring Southern heat. An early encounter with a poison ivy stand left him with a massive rash that he suspects he could have mitigated with more showers and laundry. Those, however, would have cost money he intended to save.

The poison ivy was but a prologue for what came next, for what Jones worried would cost him not only his budget hike but also his left leg. He’d struggled with shoe selection; thru-hikes can often burn the tread and compress the cushion in a half-dozen pairs, a line item that can push a grand itself. Jones had ordered multiple shoes from AliExpress, only to realize that their floppy construction and nearly non-existent grip created their own dangers. So when he found a deeply discounted set of used name-brand kicks at REI, he rejoiced. “Turns out, if there’s a whole bunch of used stock of a shoe,” he says, “it’s probably junk.”

Less than 200 miles into the hike, a plastic piece inside the shoe began cutting into his foot. He knew he needed something else, so, in desperation, he grabbed a pair of waterproof trail runners from a North Carolina . Not long after he entered Virginia, the fever and cramps began, an infection steadily spreading up his left leg in visible lines. He caught a ride to an urgent care with a prison guard, happily popped open a bottle of antibiotics, and found a free place to stay courtesy of an old friend who happened to be a doctor.

“If I’d let that go for a week, I could have died. It was that serious,” says Jones. “I got cut because I tried to be cheap with shoes. So there’s a lesson, right? Don’t cheat on footwear.”

Jones knew his budget was permanently blown, since he estimated the doctor visit would cost him $250. (He hasn’t been billed yet, either thanks to a mistake or Missouri Medicaid; he’s not asking.) He opted to relax just enough to buy what was necessary—including new Altras for the rest of the trail—but not to splurge. He made it to New York, or two states beyond the AT’s halfway mark, on his preset $1,000. By the time he’d reached the northern endpoint at Mount Katahdin, after tacking on the tricky northern half of Vermont’s Long Trail and slowing down to enjoy Maine’s splendor, he’d spent $2,397.19, or less than half of the

Several lessons—buying robust hiking shoes included—emerged on the way to Maine. Where candy bars were once a fast-fuel staple of Jones’s diet, he realized they weren’t as cost-efficient as he’d assumed. He didn’t eat one on the entire trail. Instead, he made his own trail mix, combining cashews with coconut flakes and chocolate chips from the baking aisle, turning $10 into 100 miles of calories. For dinner, he stayed steady with two packets of Ramen noodles and a few spoons of peanut butter. This might, he says, have been his most nutritious thru-hike.

He would often camp on the edges of towns, too, so that he could get in and out with groceries while avoiding the temptation to sit down for an expensive restaurant meal, or to book a room. And in towns where he did stop, he looked to split a hotel room or hostel with other hikers, opting for a spot with a kitchen whenever possible so that they could cook big, cheap meals. And when a fast-food opportunity presented itself, Jones knew to look first for an app before ordering. His first restaurant meal came at a Tennessee McDonald’s, several hundred miles into his trip. “2,000 calories for $3?” he says, beaming as if reliving the experience in real time. “That’s amazing.”

As Jones walked, he kept a , clocking the costs of his resupplies and stays. I’m struck by the restraint evident in those numbers. If you’ve ever gone to a grocery store while hungry, you know well the temptation to throw everything into the cart. But he broke $80 only once, with many of his purchases landing around $35.

There are some higher-level takeaways, too, from Jones’ extreme budgeting. Jones is a longtime practitioner of Vipassana meditation, having done nearly ten silent retreats. He doesn’t maintain a formal practice on trail, because he’d fall asleep so fast, but it alters the way he handles hardships outside. “I knew it wasn’t going to be hot forever. I knew I wasn’t going to have poison ivy forever,” he says. “I try to maintain an equanimity of my mind and an awareness of my body, so if it’s cold, I can stop myself from saying ‘I wish I wasn’t cold.’ It’s a constant process.”

He also had his physical fitness to thank. If you’ve seen a , you know Jones is something of a beast—a veteran who started a Crossfit gym and went on to fight wildland fires, , and capture one of the rarest feats in American hiking with the Calendar-Year Triple Crown. His legs appear sculpted in marble by Michelangelo. But the more you can do to start a trail strong rather than relying on the trail to condition you while you walk, the faster you can move and the more money you can save. “If it took me twice as long to do it,” he says, “my cost might have doubled. Being in shape is a big one.”

Jones acknowledges that hiking on such a minuscule budget raises some ethical concerns, particularly when it comes to his gear. He knows that the down in the jacket he eventually left in a hiker box wasn’t sustainably sourced, and he knows that all of the gear he ordered on AliExpress was so cheap because the wages are low. But these, he says, are issues beyond the bounds of a thru-hike, questions that somebody slipping into the woods for a few months cannot answer. “Someone shouldn’t be kept out of the outdoors because they can’t afford the most ‘ethical’ gear,” he says. “If someone’s making good money, then, yes, buy all the cottage brands and support them. But there is no clear-cut answer here.”

There is a possible alternative, though. Jones’ hiking partner, Pyro, didn’t try to stick to $1,000 as a theoretical exercise or a challenge to himself. When he headed east to join Jones, he estimates he had $1,500 available for the whole trip. In the two weeks between deciding to join Jones’ mission and leaving for it, Pyro mailed some old shoes to assorted points along the trail and made his own backpack.

For 2,200 miles, Pyro raided hiker boxes for the best snacks he could find, dumpster-dove to find chocolate milk (“It was hot, but it tasted fine.”) and baby formula, and accepted the generosity of strangers, including a free pair of used shoes from a trail angel. He learned that a plastic bag full of spaghetti and eggs is a very cheap and delicious meal to pack out of town, and that shoes can be stitched together with mere dental floss. He barely bought new gear at all, and he spent $1,300.

I asked Pyro if he could have made it for $1,000, after all. “That was never my goal, but easy,” he says, laughing. “All you have to do is go out to eat less.”

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Almost every hiker box I have ever seen after 11,000 miles on American trails has the same litter problem: the thin plastic water bags that accompany the popular Sawyer Squeeze, the most efficient and reliable water filter I have ever used. In theory, these ubiquitous black-and-blue mylar bags are a hiker’s dream, able to hold nearly a liter of water in exchange for less than an ounce of weight.

But water filters get clogged, and gear gets dropped on jagged rocks, these thin bags rip in the middle during the second scenario and burst at the seams with the first. Weight savings and water filters are useless if you don’t actually have a way to hold your water.

Seven years ago, a product designer named Gilad Nachman began solving the problem caused by the flimsy bags when his fledgling company, Cnoc Outdoors, . A soft-sided and completely collapsible water bladder, the Vecto offered a simple but welcome upgrade: thicker walls and rugged seams that could withstand the pressure needed to force water through a dirty filter or the abrasive chaos of a long-distance hiker’s cluttered backpack. The Vecto’s real genius, though, is that one end screws neatly into a Sawyer Squeeze; the other end opens completely and easily, making it simple to scoop water from paltry sources, or dip the thing into a lake.

And so, as long-distance hikers have replaced their Sawyer water bags on trails with Cnoc bladders and bottles, they have gotten into the sensible habit of tossing the ones that come free with the Squeeze into our repositories of collective junk and gear, hiker boxes. The discarded bags wait for whatever unlucky walker next needs some emergency water-storage fix. I have donated at least a dozen during my adventures. Those bags are still sitting somewhere, I presume, awaiting oblivion or apocalypse.

Hopefully, this wasteful practice is over: In January, the two companies finally partnered, making the unofficial hydration fix of thru-hikers official by and selling them as complete units. Not only did they make this sensible pair a legitimate couple, but the combination costs less than buying the two products separately.

These units are sold through Sawyer’s distribution channels and on its website, and the Vectro bladders feature both brand logos on them. But make no mistake, the bladder is definitely made by Cnoc Outdoors. Sawyer’s own water bags should gradually become a little less common in trailside piles, making it easier to spot the free Knorr sides and Pop Tarts always lurking in hiker boxes.

The companies have considered this collaboration for years, since it made so much sense. If people were already doing it, after all, why not make it easier, cheaper, and less wasteful by slimming the packaging and shipping needed for two products into one? But Sawyer—which also makes splints and sunscreen, bug repellants and sting kits—was in the process of trimming its individual products, or of simplifying the assorted SKUs it sold. “We had hundreds, and it was so hard to manage,” Amy Stead, an account manager at Sawyer, recently told me during a call alongside Cnoc’s Nachman. “When Gilad approached us, we were fighting against that.”

Previous partnership talks proved preemptive for Nachman and Cnoc, too. From my own experience, I know he’s right when he says that the quality of the Vecto has improved in recent years. Today, the bladder’s seams are able to take much more pressure before they, too, succumb. (If you’ve ever superglued a Cnoc together in a hotel room while on trail, you know true Sisyphean frustration.) And in recent years, Cnoc has introduced and then upgraded a water bottle called the ; it’s one of a few items that is with me on day hikes and thru-hikes alike, and Sawyer is now selling one of those with .

What’s more, Cnoc’s production capacity needed to expand to keep up with the potential demand of a company as large as Sawyer. Still a relatively fledgling business, Cnoc has now tapped into the more robust distribution network of Sawyer, a brand that has been making life outside easier for 41 years.

“Our early bladders were just not as good, and there was a natural maturity curve for Cnoc,” Nachman said. “And then we had to grow to a point where we could teach our factory to produce at this scale. And now is finally the time.”

This is, admittedly, not some revolutionary shift. Sawyer and Cnoc have simply opted to sell a combination of their own products that lots of us have been pairing ourselves for years. But I appreciate the idea that their move makes this bit of semi-hidden thru-hiker wisdom accessible to anyone that doesn’t necessarily have long-distance dreams. Sure, you could have learned about this pair through Reddit, YouTube, or any number of hiking blogs, really. But now you can just walk into REI or so many of the outfitters that sell Sawyer products and ask for it. A Sawyer atop a Cnoc is the fastest route to reliably clean water on trail; now, it’s faster and easier to get in the first place.

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In a previous lifetime, my idea of a long-distance hike was a music festival. For four days, I’d parade across dusty fields or clotted city streets, traipsing from stage to stage in pursuit of the next show. Who knows how many miles I clocked in those peripatetic bursts, but at that extended moment—a music critic in his 20s, way more committed to partying than pulmonary fitness—it was the exercise I knew best.

Not long after I crossed the threshold into 30, though, that lifestyle caught up with me. Headed west on Gay Street in Knoxville, Tennessee, I sank onto the sidewalk and pulled off my boot, squeezing my left foot as though trying to force it back together. It was broken, I knew, a stress fracture from all these steps; why else would each step now feel like another new knife fight, as though someone were jamming a blade between my bones? I endured, switched into a pair of sneakers and limped around Tennessee until the festival’s end.

Back home, my symptoms suddenly subsided, appearing only sporadically during the next few years as I became obsessed with distance running. But in 2019, soon after I entered Maine some 2,000 miles into a northbound thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail, that old ache returned. Was my foot broken, my hike done? Nope.

After staying up late one night in an AT lean-to for a tailspin into online medical sleuthing, I realized it was cuboid syndrome, when the pointy joint on the side of your foot shifts slightly out of line for a spell. With just enough bandwidth to stream a , I learned something called the cuboid squeeze and fixed it myself.

But now, I don’t even need that technique. After 11,000 miles of hiking and countless more miles of road running in almost every state in the country, I simply never leave home without a 1.5-ounce piece of sculpted silicone that’s changed my fitness and the way I travel: toe spacers.

Wait, What Are Toe Spacers—And Why Are They So Popular?

Toe spacers are having an unexpected moment. There are, right now, some 38 million that mention them. The Wall Street Journal has suggested they’re a panacea, and the notes they are “transforming people’s lives.” Neurosurgeon and frequent TV medical commentator , Philadelphia Eagles star , body-positive model : They’ve all become advocates for a fitness craze I never expected to work, in late 2019, when I was desperate for anything to help me run again.

After finishing the Appalachian Trail, my first long-distance hike, my body was a mess—every attempt to return to running felt like another litany of physical insults. I’d already gone to multiple physical therapists and yoga classes, trying to recover, when a young pedorthist building custom inserts for my shoes took one look at my feet and told me I needed toe spacers. Bunions were forming on the sides of my feet, and my little toes were starting to scrunch into claws, or hammer toes. I needed, he said, to spread my toes back out after years of stuffing them into running and hiking shoes that squeezed them together. He pulled a clear zippered pouch from the wall and asked me to try them—, curved ribs of silicone with three holes through which your middle toes slide.

For the next several months, I wore them almost everywhere, tucked between the toe socks he’d also recommended and inside shoes with wide toe boxes, like Topos or Altras. I winced when I had to take my shoes off anywhere, knowing someone would inevitably exclaim “What are those?!” when they saw my spacers. But in the best way, my feet have never been the same again.

Which Toe Spacers Should I Buy and Try?

As best as I can tell, Correct Toes—developed by a podiatrist and runner named Ray McClanahan, who I interviewed for čúČúłÔčÏșÚÁÏ in 2022—are the most expensive models on the market, at $65 per pair. They’re also the only ones I’ve ever needed, because they haven’t warped or ripped after five years of sporadic use. (More on “sporadic” in a bit.) I’ve never once resented what I paid.

But there are more affordable options now: There’s a on Amazon, though some reviews there suggest you indeed pay for what you get. PrimalStep’s version for the same price looks more rugged, and I am certainly entertained by the idea of black toe spacers to match my endurance-black toenails. Correct Toes occasionally slip out from between my digits, so I like the way the and The Foot Collective’s wrap around all five. (The inclusion of an exercise band is a welcome bonus, too.)

You can even try with built-in toe spacers from Happy Feet, though I am slightly suspect of the oversized spacers that look more like toe bracelets from for a reason I’ll get into right now.

So, How Do I Use Toe Spacers?

At the start, slowly. Have you ever stretched a muscle for the first time in a while, maybe because you noticed a new stiffness in your body? It was uncomfortable, right? That’s how toe spacers will feel for a bit, as you begin the business of prying apart bones, tendons, and ligaments that have been stuck inside narrow shoes for most of your life. I started with 15 minutes a day and gradually increased until I was wearing them almost all of the time, taking care to remove them before I fell asleep. (There is some suggestion that they restrict blood flow, especially at night; my toes simply feel stiff when I wake up with them still on.) Yoga Toes aren’t appealing to me, because they’re too big to slip inside shoes.

These days, I don’t use them all the time. My feet feel better, because I’ve changed my entire routine—foot socks always, Topo tennis shoes with wide toe boxes unless I’m “dressing up,” and a regimen of toe exercises using resistance bands. But whether I’m hiking across the country or going to another music festival, I always have a single toe spacer in my bag, ready to slot between my toes if my cuboid slips its position, as it sometimes does, or my arches begin to ache as though they’re on fire. I rarely travel with two toe spacers these days, because both of my feet generally don’t hurt at the same anymore. I’ve spent years learning how to manage them, after all.

During a recent 1,200-mile trek along Wisconsin’s Ice Age Trail, I would often end 30-mile days by wearing toe spacers in my tent, letting my toes stretch as I massaged my legs and made my dinner. I don’t think you need to use toe spacers for the rest of your life; I do think, however, they can be crucial for taking care of the body part that actually makes contact with the ground and supports the rest of the body in the process.

Do Toe Spacers Actually Work?

Toe spacers have reached such a critical mass of popularity that you can easily find opposing answers to this question, bandied about from the to . I’m not a doctor or a foot-health researcher, so I won’t pretend to tell you anything prescriptive or definitive.

But in the last five years, or since I started using toe spacers, I have logged close to 20,000 miles on my feet, whether hiking long trails, running on roads, or, yes, attending music festivals. I also turned 40. But I have rarely felt stronger as a hiker or a runner than I do right now, and I’ve had no substantive problems with my feet in a long time. My knees are better, too, and knee pain was often linked with the foot woes I experienced.

Again, I’ve never seen toe spacers as a cure-all; I massage my feet, strengthen them, stretch them. But when they ache, whether I’m on a long hike or a reporting trip in another city, a day with toe spacers is my first line of defense. It’s perhaps the best $65 I’ve ever spent on a piece of fitness gear—so much so, in fact, that I bought a second pair in an alternate color so that I can mix and match them as I travel. Hey, I’ve got to keep them looking surprising and ridiculous, since so many people now seem curious about what toe spacers are and if they can change how you feel, too.

Or Here, From PrimalStep

Grayson Haver Currin is °żłÜłÙČőŸ±»ć±đ’s thru-hiking and trail columnist. He finished the Triple Crown in November 2023, ending with the Continental Divide Trail, and has written about his and others’ adventures on trails across the country since 2019—including, most recently, how you’re hiking downhill wrong, as well as the woman who smashed the Appalachian Trail record, and ridiculously expensive hiking shorts that chafed him anyways. He still takes toe spacers to music festivals and on his adventures.

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In early August, on the shoulderÌęof Colorado’s highest peak, 14,439-foot Mount Elbert, I suddenly found myself unable to do anything except apologize.

I had started up the mountain so early that morning you could still call it night, hiking the remote Black Cloud Trail that leads to Elbert’s southeast ridge. The trail was lit by so many stars I sometimes forewent my headlamp.

Delirious from a lack of sleep and the increasing altitude, I was barreling back down the mountain not long after dawn, visions of breakfast skillets back in Leadville dancing in my head. But my post-summit reverie was broken by a nightmare scenario: a trail-crew looking up from their work to judge me. They were silent, but their scowls might as well have been screams.

At a junction a few hundred vertical feet up from them, I’d instinctively taken what appeared to be the most direct route down, plunging across the slope. I thought the route seemed especially steep, not like the kind of steadily graded trail the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative typically builds and maintains. I hadn’t seen any obstacles blocking access to this part of the trail.

Alas, this wasn’t the trail at all, and I had inadvertently cut several switchbacks, realizing it only when I ran into the very crew that was managing them.

“I’m so, so sorry,” I repeatedly stammered to the Sunday morning gang, explaining that I was a strict switchback-cutting-is-for losers apostle and that I’d simply missed a turn.

“And it doesn’t look like I’m the only one who made that mistake,” I continued, pointing to the sizable rut I had followed. They sighed, less at me than their Sisyphean task: trying to maintain a mountainside in a world where most people simply want to get somewhere else as quickly as possible.

“It’s cheating,” Lloyd Athearn, the executive director of the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative, told me with a laugh two weeks later, the “it” in question being cutting switchbacks while coming down a mountain. “We just got done with the Olympics, and someone can’t just cut the turn on the track and still be in the race,” he added. “They’re disqualified. You’re not doing the trail any faster—because you’re not doing the trail.”

Indeed, switchbacks—and, namely, cutting them in an effort to save time—had a big year. A month after my conversation with Athearn, on Labor Day, Idaho pro runner Michelino Sunseri appeared to set a new for getting up and down one of the country’s most totemic peaks, Grand Teton. Trouble was, he cut a switchback to avoid what he called the “Congo line of hikers” who weren’t paid athletes, since his record was apparently more important than their joy or the trail itself. His FKT was revoked, and the National Park Service issued a hefty citation, prompted in part by his very public flouting of the rules on—where else?—Strava.

The outcry against Sunseri was swift and sustained; many in hiking and running communities rightfully resented someone who seemed to see himself as better or more important than the hoi polloi, “the Congo line.”

But Grand Teton National Park—like most every mountainous public land I’ve ever encountered in the United States—is often an endless spiderweb of unofficial trails created by cutting switchbacks, sometimes unintentionally built by individuals looking to save a little time. Collectively, though, these decisions lead to massive environmental degradation. It’s easy to scorn Sunseri, but we’ve all done it. I make every effort to never cut switchbacks, but, just as I did on Elbert, I still make mistakes. Making less in the future is a nearly effortless way to preserve the trails we all share.

“When trails switch back up a slope, it does two different things: It lessens the grade of the trail, as opposed to just going straight up that slope,” explains Athearn. “And then it allows water to flow down the backslope, across the tread, and then the bottom part of the slope. That’s much less impactful to the trail’s tread.”

That first reason is why people cut switchbacks at all. They see where the trail is eventually going and they trust they’re strong enough hikers or runners to get to the same place in a more direct albeit steep way. They shave off a few hundred feet and maybe a minute or so of movement; done enough times during a long day or even an FKT attempt, that adds up to getting to that breakfast skillet much faster. I understand the temptation entirely, and I’ve certainly done it in the past.

But switchbacks aren’t just for us; they’re for the benefit of the landscapes we’re there to see and the trails we use to visit them. Water wants to get from a high point to a lower one as quickly and efficiently as possible, so when we help foster a steep rut by cutting a switchback, we give water a chance to rush downhill—and bring precious soil with it. Athearn tells me that in high alpine environments, he expects only a foot of soil to linger above the rock, and it often takes a millennium to build just an inch of that soil. Cutting across a switchback can wipe it out immediately. “You’re looking at 10,000 years of evolutionary process just flowing down a hillside,” Athearn says.

And then, of course, there is the human effort that goes into building and maintaining these trails. It is easy to look at a trail and not understand the effort they require, but these things are built and maintained by people who, more often than not, love a place as much as you do. When Athearn describes the process of constructing a trail, my brain breaks a little—the scouting and inspecting and permitting and staging and building and maintaining. The folks on their hands and knees, moving rocks and smoothing dirt on that Sunday morning, were part of a multi-year effort to help that particular route endure increased traffic and erosion. Cutting a switchback is, then, a wordless “screw you.”

Athearn and his crews have heard hikers talk of trail gnomes who emerge in the middle of the night or pure divine intervention as explanations for trails and their maintenance. He can only laugh. “No, it’s just a bunch of us smelly workers out here for weeks at the time,” he says. “God didn’t place rocks there in a miraculous fashion. Mere mortals did.”

For me, this conjures the war against litter, which, as a species, we are still losing. If you’ve got trash in your car, the most expedient thing to do is toss it out, to make it someone else’s problem, to make it the environment’s issue. Why wait for a trash can when all the world’s available to be one? And why wait for a switchback when you can just head straight up hill? The same answer holds for both questions: because there’s more to the world than our immediate needs, and hoping to finish a trail a few minutes faster is not much of a need at all.

Grayson Haver Currin has written about long-distance hiking for čúČúłÔčÏșÚÁÏ since 2020. He completed the Triple Crown in 2023 and has logged more than 11,000 miles on the United States’ National Scenic Trails. He writes about music for The New York Times, GQ, Mojo, Pitchfork, and many more. He lives high in Colorado’s Front Range.

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The Green Bay Packers were suddenly not the most interesting entertainment optionÌęin Mac’s Pub and Grub, a dim dive packed with people wearing Packers gear on a Sunday afternoon in October in the lakeside Wisconsin town of Merrimac. Unfortunately for me, I was.

Midway through the first quarter, I had slipped inside Mac’s, found an unoccupied stool, and leaned against a wall with clear sightlines of the bar’s TV gallery, exhausted and half-frozen like a piece of melting ice. I’d left camp 11 hours earlier, at 4 A.M., hustling 31 miles through a Sunday squall in order to make Mac’s, or to watch the Packers’ bout with the Detroit Lions among the locals. But I looked as if I’d emerged from the depths of Lake Wisconsin, as puddles of rainwater pooled beneath my feet and around my backpack. Every play or two, someone else glanced askance from the bar, as if Cheers had been invaded by some primordial beast from the bottom of Boston Harbor.

“Are you hungry?” a broad-chested man in a Packers jersey, belly to the bar and bottle in hand, finally asked. When I nodded, he grinned and pointed. “There’s food over there. Help yourself.” For the next three hours, my wife, Tina, and I gorged ourselves on what surely must have been the most delicious potluck ever—finger-thick slabs of candied bacon, brie wheels topped with baked salmon, tortilla chip smothered in cheese-laden chili. As we slowly warmed back to life after the windy November downpour, the regulars steadily realized we were hiking across their state, endeavoring to finish the 1,200-mile Ice Age Trail before the infamous Wisconsin winter arrived. Some of them, at least, became fans.

Mac had first said I looked like a wet rat; now, he spun our laundry in the bar’s dryer, then offered to let us camp beside the bar. A couple, Paul and Deb, peppered us with questions about the adventure, then feted us with their own wilderness stories—and several shots. Sue, a retiree who would soon head south for the winter, offered up a bathtub and bedroom, which we accepted after needlessly worrying we were being soft. “You kids be safe,” Mac said, smiling like a proud father as we followed Sue to her car, “and let us know when you finish.”

So goes my overall experience on the Ice Age Trail, a 40-day slog through pleasant but repetitive woods and along often-busy highways, alleviated by bouts of unexpected support and kindness from Wisconsin natives. Strangers handed us candy bars from open car windows. Fathers running errands made U-turns to scoop us from seemingly ubiquitous rainstorms, while trailside bar owners treated us like Edmund Hillary and Tenzig Norgay before offering to deliver us breakfast the next morning. A fleet of Ice Age Trail volunteers was seemingly always on call, too, ready to drive us from hotel toÌętrail or offer camping intel during extended road walks.

Though it is one of , alongside the more familiar and acclaimed Appalachian and Pacific Crest, the Ice Age Trail is decidedly not a premier thru-hike, best done in one continuous push. I do not recommend it as a thru-hike. But after 11,000 miles on such trails, I can say it is the friendliest long-distance experience I’ve ever had, both in terms of the people on or around it and the way its stewards have shaped and maintained it. Really, it is more of a linear community center that happens to stretch between the Minnesota and Michigan borders than a wilderness experience. The Ice Age Trail is, in every positive sense, Midwest Nice—pleasant to look at, if a tad boring, but as accommodating and kind as can be.

“Everybody takes pride in it in our own special way, whether it’s the person serving you breakfast in a trail town or the guy who walks the same five-mile segment every day,” Jared Wildenradt, who has now hiked the entire Ice Age Trail eight times, told me two weeks after I finished my walk.

“There’s a definite community here that people don’t expect when it comes to hiking in the Midwest,” he continued. “The people that power through here get to experience that, just like you did in 40 days.”

What is the Ice Age Trail?

More than many of its National Scenic Trail counterparts, the Ice Age Trail remains a work in progress. First envisioned in the fifties by a Milwaukee-born outdoors enthusiast named Ray Zillmer, it was only established by Congress during 1980. The trail roughly follows the terminal edge of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, as it about 10,000 years ago. Kettles, moraines, eskers, drumlins, wetlands, hanging valleys, outwash plains: Across, down, and up Wisconsin, you crisscross these glacial vestiges, repeated in random bursts like a particularly chaotic and tremendous .

Still, after more than four decades of route-finding, trail-building, and parcel-buying, only 700 miles of the 1,200-route is contiguous, winding across forests, around fields and farms, or through tiny towns. Nearly 500 miles still depend upon what the Ice Age Trail Alliance calls “connecting routes,” a euphemism for rural roads and busy highways. The imperative, then, is closing those gaps, pulling hikers off those connecting routes by securing land for actual footpaths.

Wildenradt has helped find six such parcels; he talks about the first one—a glacier-carved patch of property that interrupts a 25-mile road walk via a 0.7-mile roller coaster through the woods—like a father might extol a firstborn. When we spoke, he sat plucking seeds from pine cones that he intended to plant on that plot soon. “I went away and hacked at the dirt, started clearing away for trail. I was beat up from head to toe,” he said, laughing about the spot’s temporary nickname, Prickler’s Property. “I had close to 300 volunteer hours when it was done. I could easily drop 100 more.”

All that, mind you, for less than a mile. When the current executive director, Luke Kloberdanz, thru-hiked it in 2003, he was the eleventh person ever to do so. Only two decades ago, the mileage ratio was reversed, with nearly 700 miles of road walks to 500 on trail. He now believes the path will be finished within his children’s lifetimes, meaning his grandkids could walk from Minnesota to Michigan and touch very little asphalt.

“I always thought that completion was a long way off, that I was never going to be part of that,” Kloberdanz told me. “We may not reach the end of the tunnel in my lifetime, but we’re at least starting to see the light. I’ve never felt that way in my 20 years here.”

That aspirational pride animates the Ice Age Trail, end to end. I’ve never hiked a better-blazed path. Hikers can spotÌęits bright yellow stripes by headlamp as by sunlight. (When you fill out a thru-hiking certification upon completing the trail, the Ice Age Trail Alliance even asks how many times you get lost, so they can fix the problems.) And I’ve never encountered a volunteer network so robust and eager to help hikers; wherever you are in the state, you are almost always a phone call away from a free ride, meal, or bed. These volunteers raved about the contributions they and their friends had made to the trail, as if thanking me for using them, for making good on their hard work.

The trail is also dotted with benches, sometimes more than one per mile, and often dedicated to a late hiker who loved the place. They’re meant, of course, to make the trail more accommodating, to give people who aren’t aiming to finish 30 miles in a day a chance to rest. You won’t see that on any other National Scenic Trail. The friendliness is by both circumstance and design, pervading everything.

In 2020, to celebrate its 40th official year, the Ice Age Trail Alliance launched the Mammoth Hike Challenge—essentially, a reward for anyone who hikes 40 miles during the month of October, when the foliage of the Wisconsin fall is at its apex. The trail’s mascot is a . It’s so cute I now have one on my desk, dutifully carried for the last 400 miles. They’ve added one mile to that requirement each subsequent year.

On weekends, we’d meet couples and crews of friends in pursuit of their 44-mile quota. They were eager not only to share the best things they’d seen but also to hear ours. More than once, my answer was you, the people who love this trail so much.

Did I Like the Ice Age Trail?

On a cold Saturday morning at a Kwik Trip, a particularly bountiful chain of convenience stores launched in Wisconsin in the sixties, I was waiting in line at an automated espresso machine. “Are you hiking the Ice Age Trail?” said the woman ahead of me, her smile as bright as her pastel tie-dye. When I answered yes, her grin somehow grew wider. She introduced herself as Tarra. “I want to do that someday, too.” Several hours later, Tarra sent us an Instagram message with her phone number and an offer of help should we need it as we neared her home a few hundred miles east.

Turns out, we did. Due to a few work deadlines, we’d pushed our pace on the Ice Age, hiking at least 30 miles every day with zero rest days. As we neared the 1,000-mile mark, my body—specifically, my left IT Band, suddenly as intractable as a massive team of mules—tightening to the point that each step felt as if a knife was being jammed into my joint. At night, crawling into the tent, my knee looked like a balloon. I knew it was time to stop. The next morning, I hobbled two miles to a gas station and texted Tarra, asking if she knew where I might rent a car nearby. The sun wasn’t up yet, but she told me she was on her way.

As I lamented my knee an hour later, she texted a friend who happened to be her physical therapist. How soon could she see me? For two hours that afternoon, Jeanie Crawford—a , a blessed sorceress per my experience—pulled, tugged, straightened, bent, jabbed, and corrected seemingly every bone in my body. I had almost crawled into her office, but I somehow walked out with a mostly normal stride. She charged me half of her hourly rate, ostensiblyÌęexcited enough by the effort to cross her state that she practically gave away her day.

For the next week, I returned to more than 30 miles every day, moving at my normal pace because a stranger had been willing to leave her home long before her workday began and find me help. The Ice Age Trail didn’t dazzle me with scenery or variety, and it didn’t prompt me to learn any new backpacking techniques. Most days, truth be told, I didn’t even like it. I contemplated quitting more often than I’ve ever considered such for anything in my life.

But it did remind me of something obvious, something that can be easy to forget high in the mountains or deep in the woods: Hiking trails are for all people, and those interactions can take a dozen different forms, from the married couple hustling from one end of a state to another to the bartender who keeps asking for more of their stories, from the gaggle of retirees out for a slow Sunday stroll high on an esker to the trail runner bombing down a rock face in the rain. The Ice Age Trail is a gift from Wisconsin’s past to Wisconsin’s present and future. I’m grateful its people share it so generously.

Grayson Haver Currin has written about long-distance hiking for čúČúłÔčÏșÚÁÏ since 2020. He completed the Triple Crown in 2023 and has logged more than 11,000 miles on the United States’ National Scenic Trails. He writes about music for The New York Times, GQ, Mojo, Pitchfork, and many more. He lives high in Colorado’s Front Range.

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French outdoor apparel brand Satisfy has perfected running shorts. Founded a decade ago by , the Paris-based company has performed a paradoxical miracle with distance running’s necessity. Their best shorts, the , feel as if you’re wearing absolutely nothing while actually being sturdy enough to store fuel (and even car keys) and prevent skin from rubbing against skin.

Since hiking the Pacific Crest Trail in a leopard-print pair in 2021, I have logged more than 10,000 miles in assorted versions of the Rippy with such devotion that, when it’s laundry day and I must wear something else outside, I will briefly consider not running or hiking at all. And despite the high price tag ($260), I’ve been stockpiling them for years, like a squirrel hoarding nuts, just in case Satisfy someday discontinues them.

Earlier this year, Satisfy announced it was upgrading the Rippy in an experiment, replacing the nylon ripstop shell for which it is named with a layer of Dyneema. Three decades ago, what would become known as Dyneema helped the AmericanÌęsailing team overcome the heavily favored Italians in the America’s Cup. As resilient as it was lightweight, the seemingly miraculous fabric—polyethylene sandwiched between polyester—has spread into cut-proof gloves, body armor, shoes, and both the waterproof backpacks and tents I have used for years. .

Still, the idea seemed silly, maybe even horrible, from the start: How would Dyneema, which repels water like a tin roof, respond to my excessive sweat? Where would it go? And how would material that can feel coarse and even stiff glide against my bare legs at high speeds and over long distances? Also, would they be hot? (“Hard boiled eggs,” one Reddit user said of his testicles when he imagined wearing them.)

Oh, and what about that price? Sure, the stateside shipping was free, but I wondered how many people could afford a $420 pair of shorts—and why did they cost that much, anyway? (In the sake of transparency, my pair was a sample sent to me by the company.) Aside from Satisfy’s limited-edition collaboration with eyewear brand Oakley, the Rippy Dyneema Trail Shorts are—as best as I or any of the multiple running aficionados I asked could remember—the most expensive pair of running or hiking shorts ever made. A Satisfy stan, I assumed they must be worth it.

I was absolutely wrong. All summer long, from the highest peaks in Colorado to long-distance lakeside runs in Chicago, I wore Satisfy’s Dyneema Rippy shorts, hoping to find a function that justified the indulgence. They have been hiking, running, swimming, and soaking in baking saunas, glacial lakes, slot canyons, and radiant deserts. And mostly what I’ve gained is a season of chafing so ghastly and intense that I’ve wondered more than once if I needed to see a dermatologist. Satisfy has perfected running shorts; by adding Dyneema, they have proven just how delicate perfection can be. Turns out, Satisfy agrees.

“If I had to do a Version 2 of these shorts, I would probably not go for Dyneema,” Partouche told me on a recent weekday, laughing from his office. “It’s a failure, because we tried to be over-technical. People overpaid for a technicality they didn’t have a chance to fully explore. It’s good to accept that some products are better than others.”

The idea to substitute nylon for Dyneema has a sensible-enough origin story. Satisfy wanted to build an ultra-durable pair of shorts that could withstand ultramarathonsÌęthroughÌędesert brambles and snagsÌęor forests dense with deadfall. What’s more, they wanted a fabric so strong it could hold heavy loads for runners moving long distances between aid stations. And, of course, it needed to be light. Dyneema fits those criteria.

These parameters, Partouche admitted, are very particular, and Satisfy never spelled them out clearly. They never specified how limited their functionality might be. It’s the kind of small-run experiment, he said, that big companies ship to athletes to try in challenging conditions. “For us, that would be way more expensive,” he said. “At Satisfy, what we give to athletes in terms of technology and what we offer the final consumer is exactly the same.”

All my apprehensions about the shorts were right. Satisfy’s regular Rippy shorts work so well because of the way they hold sweat. As the traditional nylon cover becomes saturated, it begins to cling to a base layer of “technical silk” Satisfy has dubbed “Justice”—basically, the most comfortable pair of biking tights you’ve ever worn. They stick together and move in tandem, meaning you mostly avoid the friction that leads to chafing over long distances.

This doesn’t happen with Dyneema. The top layer instead bunches up, so the silk beneath it rides upward as it absorbs water. You see where this is going, right? A discomfort so intense you want to bail on whatever miles you have left, then jump into a vat of Gold Bond.

Fall is coming quickly to the mountains of Colorado, where I now live. That means that my summer experiment with Dyneema—in which I tried but failed to test the second-most expensive running shorts ever until I fell in love with them—is almost over. Last Sunday, though, I slipped them on one more time for a long run followed by a long hike.

All season, I’d been stuffing gel packets and drink mixes into the three pockets that line the rear waistband. I finally remembered to try the two pockets that Satisfy added to the silk layer beneath the Dyneema, a first-time feature for the company. I loved them, slipping gels out of the pockets on the front of my legs without breaking stride, even as I made haste down a canyon. When I asked Partouche about those pockets a few days later, another Satisfy employee, Tommy Hubert, told me they would soon make several more appearances in their 2025 lineup. That is, I could have the pockets without the chafing.

At last, I realized that’s what makes Satisfy stand out—a willingness to try, fail, learn the lessons, and then succeed. They attempt outlandish things all the time, from that are a real joy to wear on a hot day to a with modular Primaloft padding that remains the single most confusing piece of clothing I own. Some work. Some don’t. All of it helped lead to the shorts I covet, and maybe, next year, willÌęget even better. Partouche often talks about Satisfy in terms of punk rock, which can be hard to square with a pair of shorts that costs as much as aÌęcar payment. Part of the ethos, at least, translates.

“We dare to try. We dare to change the status quo, to polarize. Big companies can’t polarize, but Satisfy can,” he told me. “I don’t care if people love us or hate us, which puts Satisfy in a very unique position where people say, ‘What the heck?’”

That’s when I learned to love the shorts I thought I hated, even if I don’t think I’ll ever wear them for long distances again.

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