Todd Rust and Braeden Allen walked with their graduating class to collect their diplomas in June. But when their classmates were preparing for their careers or planning their last summer before college, the two were traveling south, back to pick up where they had left off on their own summer adventure: traversing the Appalachian Trail.
The two were already several months into their journey, having completed enough credits to graduate early and depart in early March to begin the trek from Georgia to Maine. On Sept. 17, they finally completed their journey.
“I definitely wasn’t 100 percent prepared,” Rust, a New Ipswich native now living in Bath, said in an interview last week.
“It was almost surreal,” Allen said. “We’d been obsessing over this trip for two years, and there we were.”
The first few weeks on the trail were riddled with small inconveniences – a forgotten lighter, blisters, snowstorms from the early start in the year, mouse poop in their stove, and lost hiking poles to name a few – but as the two got into the rhythm of living on the trail, it just became a new routine. Especially in the relatively easy hiking on the southern tip of the trail.
“The terrain was so different,” Allen, a New Ipswich resident, said. “I was shocked at how easy it was at first. It was almost like walking on a sidewalk – there were no rocks or roots, even.”
Of course, when the climbing was harder, the rewards were bigger. Allen’s favorite views were in the Smokey Mountains on the Tennessee/North Carolina border. The hike was easier than New Hampshire’s White Mountains, which Rust and Allen had climbed as part of their conditioning, but the views were just as spectacular, Allen said.
The two took a teenage approach to their hiking schedule, usually sleeping in and starting off mid-morning, and hiking late, including night hikes. Sometimes that got dicey, Rust said, when the two ran into wildlife. The first time they attempted a night hike, they were discouraged by no less than three bears on the trail, which was enough to convince them to backtrack and make camp at a hostel.
“It was scary, because you’d look off the trail and see a set of eyes looking back at you,” Rust said. “Maybe several sets of eyes.”
But wildlife became a common sight, Allen said. He estimated the pair had seen about 15 bears over the course of their six-month hike. Once, while getting water, Allen saw a bear attack a fawn in Shenandoah National Park. Although the bear injured it, once it saw Allen, it abandoned the deer to wander off. Allen carried the deer in his pack in an attempt to bring it to a wildlife rehabber, but the fawn didn’t make it and died while Allen was hiking the five miles into town.
“That was one of the craziest things,” Allen said. “It was like I was in the middle of National Geographic.”
There were other memorable moments, such as reaching the halfway point in the trail, just out of Virginia, where Rust and Allen participated in an honored trail tradition, where they went into town to take a challenge where hikers eat an entire half-gallon of ice cream to mark the occasion. Which really only sounds fun, Rust admitted, as by the end, his mint chip had turned into “sad, warm, ice cream soup.”
The two earned their first trail names – nicknames hikers are given by others they meet on their journey – in Tennessee, when they made a trip into Gatlinburg to buy a meal extravagant by trail standards. They cooked steak and potato in tinfoil and on a shovel pan, leading to Rust being dubbed “Steak” and Allen “Spud”. Later, Allen adopted the new moniker of “Walker”.
Both said the last section of the trail, particularly hiking in New Hampshire and Maine, was the biggest challenge. Not only is it the most physically demanding section of the trail, but the mental fatigue is also an uphill battle.
“It dragged towards the end,” Rust said. “I really just wanted to get done. But if I’d quit at any time, I knew I would have regretted it a week later.”
Allen, who lost a total of 35 pounds over the course of the hike, said that nearly all of it went in that last section, as he struggled to eat enough to gain energy.
But it was worth it, to complete their mission.
“I probably met 2,000 new people,” Allen said. “In New Ipswich, we might have met 200.”
Now that they’re back in New Hampshire, Rust intends to take a gap year to work and consider whether he wants to apply to college. Allen intends to apply to colleges to start in the coming semester.
Ashley Saari can be reached at 924-7172 ext. 244 or asaari@ledgertranscript.com. She’s on Twitter @AshleySaariMLT.