Sara Spittel has spent the last 20 years or more being a caregiver – a stay-at-home mother to her two daughters, and being with her parents as they went through the ends of their lives.
“I have always been a chameleon,” Spittel said in a recent interview. “I try to fit into whatever situation I’m in, to the point I have a hard time remembering who I am. I’m at the point I need to just strip that away and re-examine myself.”
She plans to take that time at the end of February, when she’ll travel to Georgia to start a six-month-long trek on the Appalachian Trail. It’s something she’s wanted to do for a long time, she said, and now that her youngest daughter is graduating from college, she wants to take some time to figure out who she is, now that her daughter’s are grown.
Spittel said she grew up with the outdoors. She hiked Mount Monadnock several times a year as a child, and when she graduated high school, her parents gifted her with a month-long Outward Bound excursion, where she really fell in love with hiking, white water rafting, rock climbing and camping.
She returned to Outward Bound in college, while attending the University of New Hampshire for an Environmental Economics degree. In fact, they offered her a job, she said, but she wanted to finish her degree first. But when she went back to school, she moved to a new place with her roommates, and across the hall, met Rob Spittel, who would become her husband.
Out of college, Spittel worked as a town planner for the Strafford Regional Planning Commission for several years, before becoming a full-time mother to her two daughters, Ali and Caroline. She stayed active with volunteer work, becoming a member of Wilton’s Planning Board, a supervisor of the checklist, and treasurer at Wilton’s library, and a member of the Monadnock Tennis Club.
But for most of the last 25 years, she’s been a caretaker, she said. Not only to her two daughters. She moved back to New Hampshire from Arizona in 2000, to help take care of her parents, who were dealing with health issues, including cancer and Alzheimer’s until their deaths, only a few years apart. At the same time, she also lost her sister, Malin, to breast cancer.
Now, she said, her youngest daughter is about to graduate from college, and her life as a caretaker has come to an end – but she doesn’t know what her next phase will be.
She decided to take on the Appalachian Trail as a way to figure it out.
Spittel, who calls herself an “incrementalist,” decided to do some other hikes to prepare, including the Long Trail, which follows part of the northern end of the Appalachian Trail from the southern border of Vermont to Canada. She said the best part of the trip was the 100 miles the Long Trail intersects with the Appalachian Trail.
“When it came time to split off, it was everything I could do to stay on the Long Trail,” Spittel said. “The energy was just contagious, and I wanted to be part of it.”
The camaraderie, she said, has shown to be one of the things she needs, she said. As she was on Mount Mansfield, the highest peak in Vermont, she was alone, and hit with a wave of loneliness so strong, she said she almost didn’t finish the trek. Instead, she said, she made a detour home to collect her black Labrador, Maddie, to finish the hike with her.
Maddie, at 11, is too old to hike the entire Appalachian Trail with her, Spittel said, but she’ll be coming along virtually as Spittel makes a video log of her trip for public and homeschool groups to track her progress, and use geographic clues to research what area of the country she’s in week-to week, and learn basic camping and survival skills.
Spittel said the Long Trail also convinced her that her body wasn’t quite ready for the trail, despite being an avid hiker who has climbed all of New Hampshire’s 4,000-foot mountains, and most of its other scenic views. Her knees had deteriorated, she said, and she decided to have surgery to replace her cartilage so she could complete the journey. Now a year out from that surgery, plus vision-correction surgery, and she’s ready for the hike.
“When I do something, I do it 1,000 percent,” Spittel said. “When I was a mother, I was a mother 1,000 percent. Now, there’s a void. A sense of ‘What now?’ And I guess this is what.”
Spittel will begin the hike on Feb. 28. Her cousin, Sandra North, who is an endurance biker, will be joining her for the first section of the trail.
Spittel’s progress can be followed on her two YouTube channels, one designed for school children, available at “Maddie’s AT Adventure” and a general one available at “Sara Hikes NH.”