Welcome! To my friends, family, and colleagues who are interested, I invite you to follow along on what I hope will be a safe and successful journey over the next 5 months as I follow the Pacific Crest Trail over 2,650 miles from Mexico to Canada. My goal is to update this blog with journal entries and photos as much as I can throughout the trip, so feel free to hit the "Follow Stone and Sky" button to automatically subscribe.
After a night of restless anticipation, morning came early. I strolled away from The Birches for an early reunion with my Mom and Dad who’d driven all the way from home to meet me, but even before I made it to the parking lot my hometown friend Shauna, herself having travelled to meet her brother NY Mule, came running down the trail towards me.
What a day! Very short on miles, but with a mere 10 miles between Abol Bridge and the final campsite tonight in Baxter State Park at the foot of Katahdin, we had plenty of time to enjoy the sights along the way and soak in another beautiful day in the Maine wilderness.
The dwindling miles that now separate me from Katahdin have been matched by a dwindling pace. My energy has slowly waned over the course of the past month, having long since consumed what fat reserves I had, so the leisurely pace has been a welcome change. It also has felt like a natural winding down of the hike, allowing each moment to stretch to its maximum.
After a massive group breakfast that featured all-you-can-eat blueberry pancakes, our merry band of thru-hikers loaded into the boat for a ride back across the lake and back to our default task of hiking north. Not 2 hours into the day, we came across a random woods road near the shore of a lake where a picnic tent had been setup to host trail magic…
When this day began, I had it in the back of my mind that if my luck had truly turned for the better and everything went right, there was an outside chance that I might catch up with Camel, Leki-less, and the Camera Crew by day’s end. The only problem was that their likely destination was 22 miles up the trail. What was it I had said about no more long days? Well, about that…
True story: It is now November of 2017, a mere 13+ years since I wrote the previous post from my AT thru-hike in 2004. I may have broken a record for the longest cliffhanger on how this adventure came to its end! The remaining posts for the final 6 days of my hike have lingered in my mind for all of those years…
