Death is Not the Worst Fate in This Life

Stories from the Calendar Year Triple Crown and the AT

May 9th, 2025

I’ve found it difficult to work on the book this week. So much has been happening in the world that writing about my hikes feels trivial. The regime has put forth concrete proposals to sell off public land in Utah and Nevada, “House Republicans approve amendment authorizing the sale of federal lands.” It’s no longer hypothetical. It’s not hysterical leftists overreacting. It’s written into the budget reconciliation bill which will likely pass the house and the senate. Just two months ago when I first started speaking out against the threat of this regime selling off our public lands, those were exactly the comments that I got - “you’re overreacting, you’re hysterical, no one is going to sell public lands.”

Well. It’s happening. And I’m afraid in another few months the rest of my predictions will come true. We will see brownshirt paramilitaries made up of white supremacist militias rounding up immigrants and US citizens alike in the streets, enacting violence against all of the regime’s enemies. This sounds defeatest and pessimistic but I honestly don’t see how we avoid a civil war at this point. My optimism now lies in the opportunity to rebuild something better from the ashes. I no longer hold out hope that the republic can be saved through peaceful efforts, if I am being truly honest.

Too many Americans are still asleep at the wheel. A video came out yesterday of a gang, a literal gang of 20+ local cops with ICE kidnapping a lone woman in Massachusetts. They did this in a stereotypical American neighborhood lined with single family homes, white picket fences and all. And with this idyllic neighborhood as their backdrop the new American gestapo ripped a mother away from the literal baby she held in her arms while the gathering crowd watched. The crowd was angry. They yelled strong words. But no one did anything, except for the woman’s teenage daughter who was violently shoved face first to the pavement and arrested while multiple grown men pushed their knees into her body. The crowd continued to yell as the cops dragged the mother away from her child.

I feel my own hypocrisy when I decry the inaction of Americans. After all, what am I doing about things? I’m safe in Europe. All I’m doing is screaming into the void.

I feel a strong urge to take strong action. I was planning to come back to the US and hike 1,776 miles this summer in protest. And then my Global Entry was revoked by Customs and Border Protection, a department of Homeland Security. I don’t want to go into it here, you can find videos that I’ve made on the topic. The short of it is I think the regime likely has a file on me now, likely using AI dragnets across social media. They’ve outright admitted that they’re screening the social media of immigrants on visas. “DHS to Begin Screening Aliens’ Social Media Activity for Antisemitism.” Please note, that’s not a news article or a sensational headline. That is a direct link to the official government website of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services.

I’m holding off on coming back because I don’t intend to be a martyr. I don’t think getting myself killed or thrown in prison will help anything. I imagine some of you are rolling your eyes right now, “getting yourself killed?” Being a bit too dramatic, am I? Well, I’ve made the personal decision that I will not be taken to a concentration camp alive. And I do again recognize the hollowness of these statements as I make them from Europe. But I am firm in this decision. I have made enough strong decisions, faced enough real dangers in my life to know that I have the resolve and will carry through with this if it comes to it.

If it comes to it, I will not be taken alive to a concentration camp. Death is not the worst fate in this life. “Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way.” - Alan Watts

Strong emotions aside, this is a logical decision. Humans getting sent to El Salvador have essentially had a death sentence placed on them, but without any sort of due process. If I’m going to die anyway I’d rather it be quick than be drawn out and be forced to labor for some asshole. I don’t want my last days on this Earth to be spent as a slave while a dictator extracts wealth from me even as they slowly kill me through starvation and torture. If I somehow survived a confrontation with the gestapo then at least I’d go through the American criminal justice system and be afforded some measure of due process. I’m not naive enough to believe that my justified claims of self-defense would hold up in a fascist court. I’d almost certainly be found guilty of various crimes but at least I’d be sentenced and incarcerated in the US. Well, until trump gets his way and starts sending “the homegrowns” like he’s discussed with Bukele to the sycophantic laughter of his minions.

The only real thing stopping me from taking strong action is my Vipassana practice. In my heart I know that violence on my part will not solve anything. It will only create another cycle of violence. The only way to get off our samsaric wheel of violence is the same way we get off the samsaric wheel of death and rebirth. Through a shift in consciousness and developing our practice so that we can see through the illusion of this physical reality. We must see Truth with a capital T and see reality as reality. If we continue to be blinded by the illusions of hate and fear we will simply repeat this cycle again, and again, through the vast eternity of countless incarnations.

“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

“And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into the form of the typical inmate.” (Man’s Search for Meaning, p. 86-7). https://themeaningseeker.org/free-to-be-human

“I’m definitely feeling discouraged by some of the setbacks I’ve had. Any thoughts or advice would be appreciated.”

I got this message today from a hiker named Spoons currently attempting a Calendar Year Triple Crown. She’s had a few set-backs and is behind the schedule she wrote up on a spreadsheet for how far she “should be” by this time of the year.

“Assuming I maintain a certain average daily mileage, [my spreadsheet] has me finishing in late December, which is cutting it close. I’m heading into the High Sierra on the PCT(I started the CYTC on the PCT about a month ago), but given the time of year, snowpack, elevation, and big food carries, I don’t really see the Sierra as a section where I can pick up the pace… I’m definitely feeling discouraged by some of the setbacks I’ve had. Any thoughts or advice you may have would be appreciated.”

I gave her some advice on sections where she’d be able to hike faster. Like Wyoming and New Mexico on the CDT where it’s not all that difficult to hike 40 miles in a day because of the long flat road walks. And I told her once she’s on the AT and makes it through New Hampshire and into Vermont it’ll be smooth sailing from there.

“My advice is to focus on the day to day. You have no control right now over how the rest of your year will go. You have no control over what the snowpack will look like in Oregon, or the weather you’ll experience in November and December. But you can control what you do today. So focus on that, and have a good time. Don’t worry about the outcome.”

“Your success this year depends on what you learn and how you grow. You are successful if you’ve had an exciting adventure and a fun year of hiking. Not whether you walk an arbitrary amount of miles by an arbitrary date. Don’t let that stress you out too much. The CYTC is a big goal but ultimately it’s meaningless. It’s your real day to day experience on trail that matters. Don’t let your day to day experience get ruined by the stress of trying to complete this arbitrary goal.”

Prodigy and Legend

Twerk, Heaps, and Prodigy. Trail magic on the PCT.

When I started my Calendar Year Triple Crown I was full of piss and vinegar as they say. I’d come out of a long period of depression and went from 190lbs to 210lbs. I am not exaggerating when I tell you that I ate a dozen donuts every three days. I was depressed, using weed to manage the depression, and had the excuse that I was starting a CYTC soon and thus needed to bulk up in preparation.

The year before in 2021 I’d sold off the rest of my inventory and closed my business and then started southbound with a late PCT start. I made it through Washington state and arrived at Cascade Locks just in-time for PCT trail days. Totally unplanned but not a coincidence. I don’t believe in coincidence.

I met Prodigy at PCT trail days, the first and only Asian American hiker to complete a CYTC. He is Taiwanese American and had long hair like I did. The fact that we’re both Asian, and have long hair are our only two similarities yet that whole weekend people kept mistaking me for Prodigy and Prodigy for me. His quads are nice but come on people! When I started my CYTC people kept mistaking me for “Jay Wanders Outside,” another Asian YouTuber who was hiking the AT that same year. The number of times I get mistaken for a different Asian hiker highlights how little diversity there is in the outdoors.

From Halfway Anywhere’s 2024 PCT Survey. And this is the PCT, which has the MOST diversity of any of the triple crown trails

• 89.8% – White (↑1.2%)

• 3.1% – Two or More Races (↓0.5%)

• 2.7% – Asian (↓1.1%)

• 2.4% – Hispanic or Latino (↑0.9%)

• 0.6% – American Indian or Alaska Native (↓0.3%)

• 1.42% – Prefer not to answer

https://www.halfwayanywhere.com/trails/pacific-crest-trail/pct-hiker-survey-2024/#demographics

It was nice to chat with Prodigy and see that he was a real, and normal dude. This chance meeting is what planted the seed of hiking the Calendar Year in my mind. I also saw Legend again. He had a little booth where he was selling his book about his CYTC that he’d hiked in 2016.

I first met Legend in Chama, NM in 2018. It was early October. Our group had finally pushed through Colorado much to everyone’s relief. The most difficult part of the hike was over, now it’d just be smooth sailing until we finished at the border of Mexico. The hike through the last section from Pagosa Springs to Chama was miserable. More freezing rain. It was so cold and miserable that we all stopped filtering our water. For one, we were afraid our filters would freeze and then break. We knew that we’d need fully functional filters for the gross cow poop water in New Mexico. Northbounders we encountered loved to describe in explicit detail all the poop and dead animals that they’d found in various water sources in the south. And secondly it was too cold to stop. Even stopping for five minutes by a stream would cause my body to jackhammer uncontrollably.

We spent two fruitless hours trying to hitch into Chama, NM on highway 17 while a cold rain fell. We were finally able to convince the elderly owner of the one motel in town to come pick us up. He’d been reluctant to come out when we first called and told us to try hitching. Hitching in the rain is always a crapshoot. Sometimes people feel sorry for you and you get a ride right away. Other times you stand in the cold rain for two hours because drivers don’t want a wet hiker to get their car dirty.

We got a family room that had 4 different beds and even a kitchen. It hadn’t been updated since it was built in the early 60s, but the price was right. $60 total, for six hikers. When we were checking in I noticed a tall and skinny homeless looking man wearing a psychedelic lion t-shirt.

I walked over and introduced myself. “Hi, I’m Quadzilla, are you on the CDT?”

“Hi, I’m Legend, nice to meet you. Yeah just finishing up the CDT” said the bearded homeless looking hiker. I invited him to come hangout with us in our palace of a room. I actually never spoke to Legend again that trip. I would develop severe diarrhea that night and skipped going to the one bar in town with the rest of the group. I learned later from them that Legend was finishing the Great Western Loop, he’d been hiking for 8 or 9 months and had already completed the PCT, part of the PNT, had hiked back to New Mexico along the CDT and would finish in the desert by stringing together parts of the Grand Enchantment Trail and AZT to complete a 8,000 mile loop. He’d had to average something like 30 miles a day everyday for the last 8 or 9 months.

The next morning I started vomiting in addition to having severe diarrhea. The rest of the group headed back to trail. That was the last time I’d see the group. I moved to a different room, this time with only one bed at the cost of $20/night. The elderly owner had to come in everyday to relight the pilot light under my hot water heater. I would go on to be sick for a week in that room and eventually get off-trail. I had contracted giardia due to not filtering my water and ended up losing 15 pounds in two weeks and it was the sickest I’ve ever been in my life, even to this day. I was so weak that I had to call an Uber to drive me a quarter mile in Santa Fe(where I waited a few days to have less severe diarrhea before flying back to Missouri). I’d walked to the Target to buy food and felt so weak and tired I couldn’t walk the quarter mile back to my Motel 6. It took me three full months to recover from this ordeal. Stubbornly, I never went to the doctor. God bless the American healthcare system where I would literally rather risk by dehydration than visit the ER because I was too broke to afford the bill.

I stepped onto the plane in Beijing as Yang Yue Ling.

I definitely started my CYTC with something to prove. Reading my early posts it’s so clear that I was hiking just as much for a boost to my ego as any other reason. Each post started with how many miles I’d hiked in the previous days. In my writings I was clearly hyper concerned with letting everyone know how challenging the trail conditions were and had a need to prove to the reader that I was super tough and special. This need to be special has been a core desire in my life. Here’s an excerpt from a post I wrote in February of 2023:

I hike to escape my social isolation. This isolation is an aspect of myself that I haven't been able to accept until recently.

I used stories to keep this truth from myself. "I'm special. I'm not like other people. They don't get me. Nobody understands."

But the reality is I never developed the skills to maintain connections. I didn't allow myself to form strong relationships. My heart was closed.

Spending time back home I'm confronted with this reality. I was adopted. And on top of that I was adopted into an entirely different culture and race.

Of course I felt different and alone and separate.

This feeling of being separate and different grew into a core piece of my identity. I always have to do something more than others. Do something crazy and wild because that affirms my separateness.

If I'm doing the same thing as everyone else and struggling to find connection then that means something is wrong with me. And that's an idea I just couldn't face.

Thru hiking is a manifestation of this need. At first doing one thru hike was the big crazy thing. But as that became normal I had to do more. I had to go bigger. Because even in the community of weirdo thru hikers I still had to be different and special.

The reason I've found so much joy on trail(and in the Army and firefighting) is because these situations forced me to be part of a group. To have a community. These are the brief times in my life where I feel that "everything is ok." I remember being in the buggy going to a fire thinking how safe I felt. How I didn't have any worries at that moment even though we were driving into the maw of a wildfire.

But then the trail ends, the season ends, and I come home and I'm confronted with this empty, lonely life.

The trail shows us how full life can be. The challenge is to come home and face the parts of ourselves that no longer serve our needs. To integrate and change.

We don't have to be trapped in our stories or our old identities.

There needs to be awareness and honesty and the courage to face the painful and difficult realities of our lives.

I didn’t start to face these difficult truths about myself until I’d finished the CYTC and had time to process the experience. My first of the three trails in the CYTC, the AT, was certainly all about proving something to others and satisfying my own ego. What was I trying to prove? I think ultimately I was trying to prove to the outside world that “I was good enough.”

I’ve grown up with a deep deep insecurity that I wasn’t good enough. Remember how I’m interested in Special Forces? Each time I have a fantasy about being a big tough SF soldier it inevitably gets mixed up with a fantasy of showing up to my 20 year high school reunion wearing a dress uniform with my combat infantryman’s badge, my Special Forces and Ranger tab, my green beret, and impressing all of my high school classmates with how successful and special I was. Isn’t that odd? I mean how much more on the nose can it get, my fantasy in life is to become SPECIAL Forces.

What a ridiculous reason to sign up to face immense discomfort, see combat, kill people, risk injury and death, and lose friends in traumatic ways. Clearly there was a deep deep hurt I’d experienced as a kid and now I was spending the rest of my life to fix that hurt. I know what the hurt is now. Deep down I feel like my parents gave me away. That they gave me away because they didn’t want me. They gave me away because I wasn’t good enough.

I know intellectually that’s not true. But that’s what eight year old Jack felt as he stepped onto the plane, leaving every single person he knew in the world. At eight outwardly I parroted what my parents had told me. “I’m coming to America for a better life.” Emotionally, eight year old me felt abandoned and discarded. Deep down on a subconscious level I felt unworthy of love and abandoned by the people who were supposed to be my protectors. I felt that my parents had thrown me away. The people who were supposed to love me and accept me more than anyone else in life had found something irrevocably wrong with me and sent me away.

You’d think a kid ripped away from his family, transplanted into an entirely foreign culture literally halfway around the world might cry himself to sleep at night missing his family and friends. I never did that. Not once. I can’t remember thinking about my China once after I left. I stepped onto the plane in Beijing as Yang Yue Ling. I stepped off the plane in Kansas City, Missouri as Jack Jones.

So is it any wonder that I developed deep rooted insecurities? Is it any wonder that I suppressed all emotions and completely shut off my heart? The only time I can remember crying in my childhood after leaving China was at my father’s funeral, at the age of 13, and then I didn’t cry again for many years after that. I never once felt homesick. I never once missed my friends or family. I never once missed my father or my mother. I didn’t care when their care-packages and letters from China slowed, and then stopped. I didn’t care when the expensive international calls stopped.

But that’s not true. I know now that I cared. I cared deeply. I cared so deeply that I couldn’t feel the pain because I wouldn’t have survived the pain. The human mind and body are such miracles. The survival instinct dominates. In order to keep me safe, sane, and most importantly, alive, my mind repressed and buried my emotions. It shut off my heart. It shut off all the parts of me that could feel human connection and thus could feel the pain of being given away by my parents. I know now that what I am describing is dissociation. But back in 1995 therapy just wasn’t in-vogue. No one thought that “hey, maybe this eight year old kid who just got adopted to a completely new country might have some emotional baggage and should talk to someone about it.”

I don’t blame my adopted mother. She did her best. This is just life. It’s messy. People do their best. And we all get hurt in the process. We try to find someone to blame for our pain and suffering, but even if we can find a true and legitimate target, what would that help in the end?

At my core I didn’t feel deserving of love. I didn’t feel deserving of friendship. I didn’t feel deserving of anything. And each time a kid at school made fun of me for having squinty eyes or a flat face(I don’t know why this was such a common insult in 3rd grade) I accepted it. Yes, of course it was my fault that kids were mean and racist. I deserved it. I had to do better. My own parents didn’t want me, so of course the kids at my new school would hate me too.

But even underneath all of this pain there was some part of me that knew this wasn’t right. Some part of me fought, everyday. It knew that I was more than this broken husk of a child. That I had worth, and that I was special. That I could accomplish great things. Some part of me fought back every single day. Fuck that. I am somebody. I do have value. It doesn’t matter if none of my friends in school can see it. It doesn’t matter if my parents can’t see it. I will prove it to the world that I am somebody. That I am special. That I matter. That I am worth it.

I don’t know where this part of me comes from. If I had to guess I’d call it my true self. My soul. Maybe it’s the essence of who I am from countless past lives. Lives where I’ve been a soldier and a monk. Wherever this part of me comes from I am grateful for it. Because without it, I would certainly have taken my own life years ago.

Something in my core is a fighter. A warrior. I think that’s why it feels so good today to be speaking out against fascism. I’ve lost many real life friends now because I’ve called them traitors to their faces when they asked “I support trump, do you consider me a traitor?” I told my old First Sergeant in the Army, a man that I had respected, that I wasn’t interested in his opinion if he thought it was acceptable to send immigrants to foreign hell-hole prisons without due process regardless of what crimes they’d been accused of. It is immensely liberating to stand up and fight for what is right even if it alienates most of the people I grew up with.

This is so different from who I was for most of my life. Really until a few years ago I was an inconsolate people pleaser. My highest priority was to be liked. You can see this come across clearly in my social media posts through the years. I was always very careful to craft my image and how I came across to people. In real life I avoided confrontation at all cost. Often this led to me sitting in sullen silence as I was forced to do things I didn’t want to do, and it was no one’s fault but my own because I didn’t speak up to voice my desires.

But through my hikes that small part of me which fought and railed against all of this grew louder and louder. I think ultimately that’s why I kept hiking. I knew deep down that somehow the process of hiking(and then later the process of Vipassana meditation) was allowing me to shed all of these defensive layers I’d taken on and to allow my truest inner being to come out. I’d put on these masks of being a people pleaser, of being non-confrontational, of being the quiet shy nice guy in order to survive. I couldn't bear the thought of being rejected again. My own parents had rejected me, every future rejection forced me to relive that pain.

It’s so obvious to me now looking back that each time I was dumped by a romantic partner I would spiral into a deep pit of depression, exactly because it echoed the rejection of being given up for adoption by my parents. I was dumped from every relationship I entered until I was 29, and even then it wasn’t really me leaving the relationship. I literally physically left the state and moved to Montana and became so distant that my partner eventually asked if we should break up. So again she was the one that really initiated the breakup. It’s only been the last two years that I’ve finally worked up the courage to leave a relationship that wasn’t compatible with my life’s goals, and that was still the most difficult decision I’ve had to make.

With each thru-hike I completed my fighting spirit grew a little stronger. The fake parts of me I’d taken on got a little weaker. I came to feel a little bit more “like myself.”

And starting the Calendar Year Triple Crown I really felt myself coming into my true power. I could feel it radiating in my chest. I didn’t take a single day off for the first 40 days, making it to Harper’s Ferry, 1,023 miles in, averaging 25.75 miles a day. Far exceeding my expectations because I started the trail relatively unconditioned and 20lbs overweight. I routinely hiked late into the night, not setting up camp until after 11pm most days. I remember one memorable night I hiked until 1am, up to Roan mountain high shelter, covering over 35 miles and climbing around 9,000 feet(the same elevation gain from Everest Base Camp to the summit).

I felt strong and powerful. I felt like how I’d always wanted to feel my whole life. I felt like I was finally seeing who I truly was. That I’d finally stripped away enough layers of bullshit and I was finally coming into my own true power. Even writing this I can feel a golden burst of power radiating from my chest and it feels fantastic. It makes me want to go out and punch every Nazi in the face and single handedly fight off the whole damn fourth reich.

I hiked on through Pennsylvania where it poured every single day. I hiked through a flooded New Jersey where the trail was often under a foot of cold, standing water. I hiked through New York where my friend Yo-Yo met me on trail with Chinese takeout. I hiked through Vermont where I encountered my first real snow, post-holding up to my waist at times on the higher peaks.

I hiked through New Hampshire and climbed the White Mountains in conditions that very few thru-hikers have braved. There’s less than 20 hikers who have completed a CYTC. Legend is the only other CYTC hiker who hiked the northern part of the AT in the ice and snow. Most hikers who have completed a CYTC will leave the AT when they encounter significant snow(usually around Vermont) and move onto the desert sections of the CDT and PCT in order to keep up their daily mileage. I was moving like a demon through the middle states and was averaging 28 miles a day when I reached New Hampshire. I was on pace to set a FKT for the whole damn CYTC and I was hiking with that new goal in mind now.

“Wow, if I can set a FKT then I will truly be somebody.” This thought that I could actually do something that no one else has done drove me on.

Well, that all went out the window once I hit the icy slopes of New Hampshire. The day I crossed from Vermont into NH it dumped a foot of fresh powder. The trails here went through a thaw/refreeze cycle daily. During the day the snow would melt and then at night they would freeze into ice, creating foot-thick sheets of slick ice over the bare rock-faces of the White Mountain range.

My daily miles went from 30-35 miles a day down to 12-15. It was all I could do to maintain a one mile per hour pace as I slogged through the ice and snow. The high peaks and sheer rock-faces were all ice, while the parts of trail in-between and under tree cover were filled with deep snow. Much of the trail was completely fresh - no one had hiked here since the winter before. I had to plow my way through thigh and waist deep powder making agonizingly slow progress.

But I kept pushing on. I’d gotten it into my head that I wanted to complete the AT without leaving the trail. As far as I know the only other person to have completed the AT in snow and ice conditions was Legend. I think only two other hikers besides Legend completed their CYTC by “one shotting” each trail to borrow a term from my MMORPG days. They both started their CYTC by hiking the PCT NOBO, then the CDT and AT SOBO. So they encountered harsh snow conditions in the High Sierra(which I avoided) but didn’t face the ice and snow like Legend and I did in New Hampshire. Everyone else broke their CYTC up into pieces, with the most common method to start on the AT, get off around the midpoint, then hiking the PCT and CDT and coming back to finish the rest of the AT last.

I had Legend’s audiobook downloaded on my phone, “Free Outside,” and made a fun habit of listening to each section of the book as I walked through the same section in real time. It made me proud and energized that I was actually moving faster than him through the middle states, but to be fair I think he encountered more snow in that section than I did. I had a wonderful weather window aside from massive amounts of rain(my shoes got soaking wet every single day for almost two straight months). My pace exceeded my wildest expectations right up until New Hampshire. Then there were two late-season dumps of fresh snow and my daily mileage dropped off a cliff.

It really helped to listen to Legend’s account. I’d met him, he was a normal flesh and blood hiker, and if he could push through NH in the snow and ice then so could I.

My worst day in that stretch was pushing through Mahoosuc Notch, described as the "most difficult mile" on the entire AT. Located in southern Maine near the New Hampshire border,
“The Notch” is a deep ravine filled with a mess of rocks. It requires hikers to navigate through, over, and under massive granite boulders that have fallen from the surrounding cliffs over millennia. On my way into The Notch I heard the deep rumble of what was either a rock-fall or an avalanche just ahead of me. It was a reminder that each of those giant boulders in The Notch had at some point rolled there from above.

At first I thought the deep snow might make traversing The Notch easier as many of the obstacles were simply buried in feet of deep snow and rather than climbing over, under, and around the rocks I could just walk over them. But then I realized I hadn’t even entered The Notch proper yet. When I finally got into the maze of snow covered rocks I was hours behind schedule and still had a mile to move before I was through the worst of it. It would be full dark within two hours. I knew that I didn’t want to be clambering around in there in the dark. The Notch is notorious for the deep holes within the boulder field, holes that in previous years moose and other large game animals have fallen into, become trapped in, and then died a dark miserable death.

I was extra careful as I slowly navigated through the boulders. There was no following the AT. Much of it was buried. I had to find my own way and still climb over, under, and through. I used my trekking poles to try to find the deep holes before I stepped into them. Still, I have a video where I’d sunk into snow up to my chest even while wearing snowshoes. Slowly, carefully, painstakingly I made my way through. Two hours later night was descending and I’d only made it 3/4ths of a mile.

My legs got cut everyday in the deep ice and snow

In the twilight hours I came across a small stream. I remember this spot vividly on my 2024 thru-hike. In 2024 I passed through in September, like a normal hiker. In September was just a small stream that was easily hoppable. In 2022 this stream was frozen over. I stepped out onto the ice trusting the sharp metal teeth on my snowshoes to keep me from slipping. Crack! The ice broke and my feet slid out from under me. I fell backwards and smashed my head on another piece of ice. Thankfully that piece of ice broke off and absorbed most of the energy rather than redirecting it back into my brain. I would have likely drowned in that shallow stream if that fall had knocked me out. A very lucky and close call. Growing up kids always made fun of me for having a big head. Well, joke’s on you losers, my big thick skull saved my life.

Finally I made it to the end of the Notch. It was 6pm. I entered at 3pm. It had taken me three hours to hike one mile. And I still wasn’t done. Now I needed to climb up the Mahoosuc Arm, another infamous section. In 2016 I’d come down the Arm and have a memory of an older gentleman hiking up with his old golden retriever. The golden had white all in his face and was moving up the trail ponderously by walking from one side of the trail to the other, making his own switch-backs. Smart dog. That trail is about as steep as a trail can be before it’s no longer a trail and just a climbing route.

And now I had to climb it, in the dark, while it was covered by feet of ice. And to top it all off I’d lost my microspikes somewhere in The Notch. They must’ve fallen out while I was maneuvering through the boulders. In 2016 I lost a water bottle to The Notch. By 2024 I’d finally learned my lesson and secured everything inside my pack before entering the boulder field. Sorry for all the littering. If you see a rusted pair of microspikes at the bottom of some hole, that’s mine, thanks.

I first tried maneuvering up Mahoosuc Arm by hiking through the woods on the side of the trail but I still couldn’t get good purchase in the snow/ice mix and found it too troublesome to try to push my way through the branches. One really annoying thing about hiking in these conditions is that there was often so much snow on the ground that I’d get hit in the face with branches that would normally be 7-8ft off the ground. When there’s 4ft of snow all the branches that would normally be above your head are right at chest and eye-level. I conceded defeat, sat down, and put my snowshoes back on.

If you have an enemy, you should invite them on a trip to climb the Mahoosuc Arm in the Spring after the trail has melted and refrozen a couple dozen times. If you really hate them you should make sure that snowshoes are their only source of traction. If you really really hate them you should scrap the whole trip and tell them to go carry a bicycle through the Grand Canyon.

“Oh this is so stupid.” I muttered to no one in particular as I grabbed a small tree with my left hand. I moved first my left foot and then my right foot up making sure the metal teeth had found good purchase in the ice. Then I grabbed another tree with my right hand and repeated the maneuver. Step by tedious step like this I climbed 1,200ft up the Arm. Then just as meticulously I descended the other side. Then I climbed up Old Speck and I finally made camp at 3am, sleeping in the middle of the trail because there was nowhere else I could set-up my tent. I had hiked for twenty straight hours and only made it 16 miles. This would be one of my hardest days on the entire trail.