Radical Steps

The Greenville News (SC) carried this article about two former students of mine. They are taking off six months to hike the Appalachian Trail. I ate lunch with Joel's dad yesterday. He's going to help me connect with them once they make into Pennsylvania. The plan is to give them a couple night's rest in our home.

Radical steps: Appalachian Trail hike is trip of a lifetime for Greenville couple
Published: Tuesday, June 13, 2006 - 6:00 am

By Mike Foley STAFF WRITER (mfoley@greenvillenews.com)

When is it a good time to quit your job? To move out of your apartment? Cancel phone service, leave friends and family behind, and not worry about anything except the simple task of daily living? Oh yeah, and travel 2,175 miles, step by step by step. Jessica and Joel Koontz decided the time is now. “If we’re going to do something radical,” said Joel, looking at his wife of 20 months for a nod of acquiescence two days before they left to through-hike the Appalachian Trail, “we have to do it now.”
It’s an awesome task the Greenville residents set for themselves. Jessica and Joel — 23 and 25, respectively — figure the trail will give them time to think, a chance to plan their young lives, to become closer to God, prepare them for whatever life may hold and offer a physical challenge.
“At first, I had no desire to do the Appalachian Trail,” Jessica said. “I wanted to take a trip to Europe.”

When they measured costs — and figured six months of hiking would cost about the same as one month overseas — Jessica warmed to the idea. Her fate was sealed when a good friend of the couple’s sat them down and told them about his own through-hike on the epic trail.

It helped a little when the two won an essay contest to field test new backpacks for outdoors gear company Mountain Hardware. That earned them $800 in gear. It also helped when they found someone to sublet their apartment.

“The way this has all fallen together has been remarkable,” Joel said. “From winning backpacks, to subletting our apartment and being able to leave our furniture there, it’s been pretty obvious to us that this is what we’re supposed to be doing.”

That just left quitting their jobs, getting in shape, buying about $2,000 more in gear, planning a six-month trek through the wilderness and oh yeah, gaining weight.

Since many people lose weight along the trail due to the number of calories burned every day and because you have to carry all the food you’ll eat on your back, trail veterans advised them to gain weight before they left.

Ice cream and super-sized meals became their best friends.

Probably most important, they began to mentally prepare.

“We thought this was going to be a very isolated trip,” Jessica said. “But when we started to learn more about the trail, we saw how social it is.”

They started the trip June 3, doing the southward route from the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail at Mount Katahdin in Maine toward the southern exit at Spring Mountain, Ga. Along the way they’ll pass through 14 states, taking about 5 million steps.

They’ll encounter both extreme wilderness and many small towns that cater to hikers along the nation’s longest marked footpath.

In these small cities and towns, they can pick up provisions they’ve arranged to be mailed to them, including goodies from Starbucks, Joel’s former employer, and Great Harvest Bread Company, where Jessica worked.

They’re taking few luxuries, measuring every ounce of what they’ll carry to make the lightest load possible and even cutting their toothbrushes in half. Joel’s filled pack weighs in at slightly more than 19 pounds; Jessica’s is three pounds lighter. But that doesn’t count food and water.

“It will get lighter as we go,” Joel explained, saying they need some warmer clothes for the first 200-plus miles in Maine where temperatures can dip below freezing, even during the summer. Still, they’ve taken a few luxuries.

Joel’s taking along a French press to help feed his coffee addiction and a thick copy of “A Confederacy of Dunces” to read, while Jessica insisted on bringing a large supply of gel hand sanitizer.

Another luxury is two scheduled breaks along the way, one for a wedding just two weeks into their hike and another for a family reunion in August.

In the end, though — which they expect will come just before Thanksgiving — they want a chance to live simply, to focus on just being.

“We’re both trusting God that it will be a good trip,” Joel said. “If it’s not, we’ll learn from that, and we’ll learn a lot about ourselves.”

While neither is an exceptionally experienced backpacker, they trust themselves.

“The only thing I’m afraid of is things not under our control like an injury,” Jessica said. “We have too much pride to quit.”