100 Miles in 2 Days: Part 3 "The Master Plan"

Friday afternoon of the fateful weekend rolled around. Benji and I met up and went to Wal-Mart (the poor man's REI) to get some last minute supplies. We were packing pretty light. I had a small generic brand camelback in which I managed to fit an army poncho and poncho liner. If you have never seen a poncho liner, it is a wonderful thing. It’s a Soldier’s best friend - light, warm and comfy. Most Soldiers treat it like Linus’ blanky, and refer to it as their Woobi. Anyways, I also tossed in my Swiss army knife, an emergency blanket, a pair of socks, a head lamp, and a butt load of power bars. Benji’s pack was slightly larger, but still just a day pack. Although he decided to jerry rig his sleeping bag to the bottom of it. After picking up our last minute supplies, we headed for the mountains. Of course, we were in two cars because Benji didn’t want to see the same terrain twice. So we drove about eight hours to the northern point of the trail and parked one of the cars. Then we drove all over, around and down the mountains trying to find somewhere to camp near our starting point. After shifting my Jeep into four wheel drive, we managed to climb some massive hill of mud and find a spot to camp. I’m not sure it was technically a camping area, but I was pretty sure most people couldn’t make it up the hill to find us there, as we had experienced a brief moment of “holy crap we’re going to roll” during our barely successful summit attempt. We finally went to sleep at about one in the morning. Our plan was to get up at six and be at the start point by seven. We would hike all day, only stopping to pump water and quickly eat a power bar. We had our time broken down and knew exactly how many miles we needed to go each hour. I can’t remember if we were trying to do three or four miles an hour. That doesn’t sound like much, but when you’re walking straight up a mountain, it becomes quite difficult. We planned on hiking pretty late into the night using our headlamps. The idea of it made us feel like super hiking bad asses who would be admired by all backpackers and stinky trail hippies. We would then stop and take a three to four hour nap to recuperate. After our beauty rest we would wake up muttering, “Sleep is a crutch,” and continue hiking with our headlamps until the sun came up. At this point we would be halfway into the flattest part of the AT and well on our way to a hero’s welcome at the end. We managed to envision and discuss this welcome, but somehow we never managed to discuss how the heck we were going to drive 8 hours back home after walking 100 miles and only getting four hours of sleep. To be continued . .