This post can originally be found on The Trek, here. Emergency Room visits! I am lucky enough to know someone in Maine who was able to pick me up from Baxter State Park. Remember how I mentioned that I noticed a swelling, hot, and painful feeling in my cheek in one of my last posts? Well by this point, I was convinced it was an infection. So instead of heading home, I was taken straight to the ER from Katahdin. The doctor in the ER diagnosed it as an abscess which needed to be cut opened and drained.  The now hole-in-my-cheek was then stuffed with a packing and bandaged Two…

Day #: 89 Miles Since Last Update: 5 mi. Total Miles Hiked: 1,173 mi. Miles Remaining: 1,025 mi. This post can originally be found on The Trek, here. Going up Katahdin As I wrote in my previous post, my tramily was placed in the Abol campground in Baxter State Park. This campground is ~2 miles from the Hunt trailhead (the official AT trail up Katahdin to Baxter Peak).  Most thru-hikers will opt to slackpack Katahdin, leaving the majority of their things at a ranger station, and climbing Katahdin with a daypack, typically taking the Hunt trail up, and the Abol trail is trail known for basically being a  giant boulder…

Day #: 88 Miles Since Last Update: 112 mi. Total Miles Hiked: 1,168 mi. Miles Remaining: 1,030 mi. This post can originally be found here, on The Trek. It was here. The 100 Mile Wilderness. The 100 Mile Wilderness stretches from Monson, ME to Abol Bridge, which lays on the outskirts of Baxter State Park, where one finds Mt Katahdin. It is called the 100 Mile Wilderness because it is 100 miles in which there is no option to resupply. 114.7 left to go until we reached the base of Katahdin. For me, this marked the beginning of the end of the northern half of my Flip-Flop; 1068.1 miles down.…

Day #: 83 Miles Since Last Update: 37 mi. Total Miles Hiked: 1,058 mi. Miles Remaining: 1,139 mi. This post can originally be found here, on The Trek. In comparison to the tough terrain of southern Maine, I was told that northern Maine would be easy. And… well.. yes… in comparison it was easier. But I would not define it as just plain ol’ easy. It was flatter, but that didn’t mean you were any less focused on watching your feet as you rock or root hopped around inundated trails that had simply become muddy swamps. It was beautiful to hike past lakes and rivers and not have to worry…

Even before entering New England, amidst conversation of The Whites and Mt. Washington, I would hear snippets of hikers saying "southern Maine is the hardest part of the trail."

Hiking 21.1 miles over the Wildcat/Carter/and Moriah Mountains , past Gorham, NH, and into Maine.

Grab your coffee and get comfortable cause this is a long post about my time hiking through The White Mountain Range, over iconic locations such as Franconia Ridge, Mt Washington, and forming a great tramily in the process.

Day #: 63 Miles Since Last Update: 70 mi. Total Miles Hiked: 800 mi. Miles Remaining: 1,398 mi. This post can originally be found here, on The Trek After finishing up my isolation in my cousins basemen (where I ate my weight in maple ice cream, watching ALL the new episodes of Black Mirror, and played hours upon hours of online Settlers of Catan with my family), I finally headed back out to the trail with a new set of Altra Olympus 4’s and new trekking poles (Leki Lhasa’s). It had been over a week of laying in bed, sleeping, and pretty much doing nothing, but as I carried myself…

Day #: 52 Miles Since Last Update: 46 mi. Total Miles Hiked: 731 mi. Miles Remaining: 1,467 mi. This post can originally be found here, on The Trek The Lookout Shelter Thanks to the fun events of the previous day, a group of us hikers headed out from Rutland all with the goal to meet up again at The Lookout Shelter on trail that night (The Lookout Shelter is really cool, it is an unofficial AT shelter on private land but the owner allows hikers to use the cabin, and it has an upper deck platform where one can watch stunning sunrises and sunsets, or in our case, Lizard almost…

For fun, I decided to start calculating how much the trail has cost me thus far, and while these are calculations I made on the back of scratch paper in a public library (and this, there is definitely human error in them and I rounded them to the closest $5), it is still eye opening. As you can see, the primary costs on the trail for me so far have been gear, food, and travel. I have tried saving money by avoiding hotels/hostels as much as possible and staying with Trail angels, doing work-for-stay, or simply camping on trail, but things still can really add up! As a result, I…