This is not my first rodeo …

c) Andrew Carter, 2021

There are place-name typos in the article. I started at Springer Mountain, Georgia on February 24, 1977 and reached Mt. Katahdin, Maine on July 12, 1977.

I decided to hike the Appalachian Trail because I needed a break from college. Academically, I was over my head at Princeton. I realized my freshman year that if I didn’t take some time off in the middle, I wasn’t likely to graduate. Hiking the AT seemed like the perfect thing to do. It also proved less costly than attending college that one semester.

My father was a hiker, so I started hiking with him when I was a boy. We’d go on at least one hiking trip each year, and usually two or three. I had probably hiked 300 miles with him before I began my AT thru-hike.

Here’s a picture of me at the end.

I definitely look a little dirty. Those pants have been through hell, and I could use a hair-cut and a shave. It’s hard to see, but I’m sporting an Amish chin beard. Here’s another photo from that final day.

I absolutely adored my hike. I found that hiking agreed with me, which is not the case for all people. When I’m hiking, I get into a Zen-like meditative state. My brain goes where it wants to go. I have found that there is nothing so effective at clearing my brain and calming my soul than hiking. There is also something cleansing about the physical exertion. When I was hiking the AT, I came to believe that man was meant to get up with the sun, go to bed with the sun, and work hard the entire day in between.

The hike changed me, if just for a little while. I tend to be tightly wound. All those who have heard me talk to myself and curse at my computer while I work will attest to that. My thru-hike made me profoundly mellow. In the middle of the hike, I stopped off at college to see my friends. Their constant refrain after spending a little while with me was, “Who the heck are you?” That’s how different I was acting. Unfortunately, that mellowness only lasted a week or two after I got home.

Here’s a water color a friend of mine did of me while I was still in that mellow state just a two days after I finished. She called it, “Andrew in the Garden in his Brain.”

The desire to hike the Pacific Crest Trail has been with me ever since my AT thru-hike, but life — marriage, kids, a career — got in the way. That desire was sleeping until just a few years ago. What woke it up was my son William’s thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail in 2017/18. Just as I started hiking with my father, my son started hiking with me. Sometimes life comes full circle. William was between his first and second job after college, living in Alabama. Hiking the AT seemed like the perfect thing for him to do as well.

My son hiked the AT from Maine to Georgia instead of from Georgia to Maine. He started in the middle of July, 2017 and finished in the middle of January, 2018. It was very cold at the end, but he persevered.. Here’s a picture of him at the start in Maine and one of him at the end in Georgia. The picture he had taken at Mt. Katahdin was designed to mimic the one I’d had taken there 40 years before.

So, for the past four years, I’ve been thinking about hiking the PCT. Now, I’m about to start.