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Writer's pictureMike's Big Hike

Top Five Things I Disliked About Thru-Hiking

Updated: Feb 10, 2021

Another list! Where there's a yin, there's a yang. So to follow my post on the Top Six Things I Loved About Thru-Hiking, here are the Top Five Things I Disliked About Thru-Hiking.


1. The time pressure. While specific to this hike of the Long Trail, I often felt under the gun to make a certain amount of miles each day. I only had so much time off from work so I couldn’t lollygag. And for one of my town stops, I ran up against a weekend and had to pick up a resupply package at a post office. Unfortunately, I had only three days to hike 50 miles. That’s not as bad as it sounds except that I had to get to the post office before it closed so I had to complete my miles by mid-afternoon on that third day (a Friday). It was go, go, go. I did 20 miles the first day in a heavy thunderstorm, 15 the next day, and got up at 4:30 a.m. on the third to have enough time to do another 15 and get to the post office by 4:00 p.m. It all worked out but it wasn’t fun.


2. The heavy rain. Fortunately, I only had two days out of 23 in which I experienced downpours. Light rain, intermittent regular rain – not a big deal. But heavy rain is different. You get totally soaked. You get cold. The trail becomes a river. Your feet get soft and pruned and blistered. The smart thing to do is to get to shelter but that’s not always an option. The second time I got drenched was the day I needed to get 20 miles in so I could get into town on time (see #1). I sucked it up but I suffered a bit.


3. The monotony. Who knew that walking 15 miles a day for 20+ days could get a little boring? It’s true. Most of the time you are in the woods with little views beyond your immediate vicinity. And even when you get to the top of a mountain, there were often no views. The majority of time it didn’t bother me. It was enough just being out there generally speaking. There was enough change of scenery at different points of the day to make it interesting enough and then there were the special days on top of summits like Jay Peak, Mansfield, or Camel’s Hump. But there were plenty of stretches where I was just grinding out the miles in the middle of the woods. To help that at the end of the day, I’d listen to some music for the last two to three miles. It helped.


4. The pain. I suspect every long-distance hiker feels aches and pains. It's a physical activity. All that repetitive movement for hours and hours each day, climbing and descending two or three or four mountains a day, slipping and falling, walking on rocks and roots – it takes its toll. My feet were sore but actually held up well. No blisters and only a couple of lost toenails (which is pretty common). When I was hiking, I hardly felt any pain. It was in camp that I felt it. Besides the usual muscle soreness, I would experience a good amount of discomfort with my arthritic knee, especially once I lay down in my tent to go to sleep. All bearable and expected but if I had my druthers, I would have hiked without pain.


5. The end. Even with those mild dislikes listed above, the biggest dislike was reaching the end. Thru-hiking is work at times, a grind at times, uncomfortable at times, boring at times, but it is also glorious, a blast, an amazing adventure. I’d do it again in a heartbeat. So to paraphrase author Richard Bach, I won’t be dismayed by this goodbye because a farewell is necessary before I can meet the trail again.



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