Goodbye writing blogs, hello White Blazes

By the time your eyes read this page, my feet will already be in Georgia hiking the Appalachian Trail. My heels were facing Springer and my toes were pointing toward their destination in Katahdin. Following the bare trees with the white paint. Unplugged and untethered.

Blogging in retrospect and off-peak hours

Before I close out the season, I wanted to explain my intentions and my schedule for future blogs. If you followed my CDT blogs, you know that I wrote and posted most of them after returning home from the trail. In retrospect, blogging worked great for me, so I’ll continue to do it that way. I prefer to keep these two things separate: experiencing the trail and telling the story. It allows me to be fully present during each endeavor and not sacrifice the quality or enjoyment of either.

This also gives me the unique perspective of having the entire story laid out before me. It allows for better organization, pacing, foreshadowing, and thematic patterns than if you were crafting it week by week in real time. The point, at least for me, is to share a compelling story of my hike. Not just making a long list in paragraph form of what I did each day along the way. That would be awfully dry.

Not to mention, my off-season blogging (always with puns) has a side benefit that some of you have shared with me. It fills the gap in publishing that arises with the end of the hiking season. From the looks of it, many of you appreciated having a blogger to follow during the winter months. I’m happy to play that role. It is a mutually beneficial agreement.

Blogging is much easier on a laptop than on a phone!

My plans for 2026

That being said, my plans for this year are as follows. If all goes according to our ideal schedule, I hope to finish the AT in early to mid-August. After that, The Show and I will immediately fly to Wyoming, where we will spend a couple of weeks completing The Winds, which we skipped on the CDT due to a wildfire last year. We will then fly back to New Hampshire and return in early September. Obviously, it is difficult to predict an exact end date for a hike. This could all happen a little earlier or a little later calendar-wise, but that’s the general idea.

I hope to get back to blogging in late September or October. I’ll probably start by coming back with a CDT blog about The Winds. Maybe it will end up being two or three parts, depending on how much material I have (I have a feeling I’ll have quite a few photos to share). It makes sense to me to complete the blog of that journey before moving on to share the AT.

For my AT blog, this time I will be posting on a weekly schedule (probably Wednesdays). I will have no shortage of time or need for self-imposed deadlines, which relieves me. I’m just going to share week by week until it’s ready, no matter how long it takes. I have proven it can do twice as much work in a week, but it didn’t leave much room for other things. I want to make sure I have a better blog/life balance next time.

Dear job

I am incredibly proud of myself for all the work I have put into this blog over the past few months, especially as a person with ADHD. I set a schedule and successfully stuck to it, and in the process came up with a word count that might well have been adequate for a full-fledged follow-up memoir. Collectively, my CDT trail update blogs totaled a staggering 108,883 words!

It has been a LOT of work and sacrifice to get two quality However, blogs of 4,000 words (on average) per week. I had to be extremely disciplined with myself to achieve it and essentially treat it like a full-time job. Between writing, researching, editing texts, editing photographs, uploading and captioning photographs and correcting proofs, I estimate that I spent in least 10 hours with each blog, but usually more. But at the end of the day it’s a labor of love. I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t have a lot of fun telling stories and keeping records.

I recently reached the one-year milestone of blogging for The Trek. It is one of the best decisions I have made in my hiking career. It’s amazing to have this platform to share my stories and thoughts and read those of others. My only regret is that I didn’t apply sooner. It would have been awesome to have my other one through to remember here too. So if you’re reading this and thinking about joining the Trek blogging team, DO IT. Do it now.

I bought this walking platform so I could blog and walk at the same time! He often walked 5 to 10 miles at a time while writing. I didn’t train much for the AT this time, but I at least wanted to keep my feet and legs used to the repetitive movement.

Calling all comments

I want to hear from you! Let me know in the comments below if you have any feedback for me on anything blog-related. Topics like…

• Do we like the extension of blogs? I’m way over The Trek’s recommended word count, but if it works, it works. Is it okay as it is or would we prefer there to be more blogs, but each one less extensive? I can always divide them further if I prefer.
• Is there a hiking topic you’d like me to write more (or less) about? For example, write more stories about the road and fewer stories within the city, or vice versa.
• Should I cool it down with the “old white guys” part? Personally, I think it’s fun. It’s meant to be tongue-in-cheek, social commentary, and funny from the perspective of a young woman in a traditionally male world. The people I refer to by this nickname are specifically the mansplainers, the know-it-alls, and the socially inept who can’t read a damn room. NOT literally everyone who fits the physical description. Most of you seem to understand that, but I recently got called «prejudice» (a pretty strong word in this day and age of «cancel culture») in a comment, which made me pause and wonder if this was being misperceived or not. If it’s unpleasant, I’ll consider toning it down. Although I admit it can be difficult to do so when writing about AT. That trail attracts OWGs like moths to a flame, and some of the more prominent examples at that. I guarantee you I’ll have at least a few good stories about them that I’ll be dying to tell.
• Can you think of anything else, positive or negative?

I’ve also been doing a lot of yoga lately. More info: wsx4. I instinctively felt like my body needed more stretching and recovery than strength training during my three-month break between trails.

This is not an LLBean ad, but: Exit

I’ll end this here with a final thank you to everyone who reads the blog! I really appreciate you all! I hope everyone has a nice spring and summer and is able to get outdoors, one way or another. Living vicariously through Trek blogs is great, but immersing yourself in the outdoors firsthand is better. It’s never too late to (get back) out. And it’s never too early to try something new: you only get experience by experimenting.

Officially saying goodbye,

T.S.

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