The Trail Provides

c) Andrew Carter, 2022

There’s an old hiker saying, “the trail provides.” What that means is that when you least expect it and when you most need it something truly amazing will happen to help you out of a bad situation. You can call this good luck, providence, a miracle. It doesn’t really matter. You can even say, “the Lord provides,” if that conforms to your belief system.

On both of my long-distance hikes, I’ve experienced this over-the-top trail magic.

In 1977 on my Appalachian Trail thru-hike, it happened to me in Hanover, NH when a Dartmouth student took me in off the street, gave me a cold drink, let me use her shower to clean up, and was prepared to let me spend the night in her apartment if I wanted to.

She’d seen me on the street, looking distressed, hot and tired, walking back and forth between a bench and a payphone. It was a very hot day. I was out in the bright sun. I was expecting to spend the night with some friends of my father while I was in Hanover, but I couldn’t reach them on the telephone. This young woman, just a year or two older than me, walked across the street from her apartment to talk to me and offered to take me in.

I will always think of her as my “Dartmouth Angel.” Getting off the street, getting cool, and getting clean were exactly what I needed at that moment.

Trail magic also happened to me during my PCT hike in Snoqualmie Pass, WA. In this case, I’d lost my hiking sticks and I didn’t know what to do to replace them. My hiking sticks are crucial, especially since they help prevent me from falling on the trail, and I was about to head into a very rocky section of trail.

I was spending the night at a motel. It wasn’t until I was checking out that I realized I no longer had my hiking sticks. I was pretty sure I had left the sticks in the lobby when I was checking in, but they were no longer where I thought I left them. The motel maintains a hiker box, and the desk clerk said the sticks would be there if anyone at the motel had found them. The sticks weren’t there. What to do?

First, I went next door to a convenience store which carried hiker supplies. After much looking, I was able to find and purchase a wooden hiking staff to use instead of my hiking sticks. I would have bought two if the store had two, but they didn’t. Not a perfect solution, but better than nothing.

After buying the staff, I sat outside the store and took time to put duct tape on the staff where I planned to grip it, so my hand wouldn’t slip off while in use. I also went online to order a pair of hiking sticks to be sent to me at the next trail town I would pass through. This took a while because I had to make sure the sticks I ordered would reach that trail town before I arrived.

Then I remembered there was an outdoors store a quarter mile down the street. Maybe that store would have hiking sticks for sale. I walked down to the store, but they didn’t have hiking sticks. The store’s focus was bicycle supplies, not hiking supplies. (There’s a ski area at Snoqualmie Pass which attracts mountain bikers during the off-season.)

The clerk at the store was friendly. She asked me if I was certain the convenience store didn’t have hiking sticks. I began to think, “Perhaps she’s right.” The convenience store was a mess, with things stored hither and yon and similar items often in two different places. So I walked back the quarter mile to the convenience store. I did a thorough search. No hiking sticks. It looked like the hiking staff I purchased would have to do.

I went outside again and decided to text Marta to tell her of my plight before walking to the trailhead. Before I left, however, I decided to go back to the motel to check one last time before heading off. After all, the motel was next door. How could it hurt?

I walked in, looked in the hiker box, and holy heck, my sticks were there! I know for certain they weren’t there before, but now they were. Perhaps another hiker had found them the day before and taken them to their room with the plan of putting them in the hiker box later. Perhaps the motel desk clerk had decided to go check the motel’s lost-and-found after I talked to her earlier. I’ll never know. All I do know is the sticks weren’t there, then they were, and so many things had happened to delay my departure from Snoqualmie Pass and bring me back to the motel one last time.

There have been other lesser instances of trail magic on both my AT and PCT hikes. I’m grateful every time it happens. The trail provides.