Before I decided to walk the Appalachian Trail, the longest hike I had ever completed was probably around 30 miles, which makes my decision to attempt a trail stretching roughly 2,200 miles from Georgia to Maine seem, even to me looking back, somewhat ambitious.
My friends certainly thought so. When I announced what I intended to do, several quite reasonably laughed, and I nervously laughed along with them because there was an obvious question hanging over the whole idea: what exactly made me think I could do this?
The truthful answer was that I didn’t know if I could.
Growing up in New Zealand, I had always loved the outdoors, but I wasn’t an experienced long-distance hiker, I had never subjected my body to anything remotely approaching this distance, and I had no previous achievement I could point to as evidence that walking thousands of miles through the mountains was within my capabilities. There was an enormous gap between what I knew I could do and what I was proposing to attempt.
Years later, I would come to realise that this uncertainty was one of the most valuable parts of the entire experience, because we often talk about knowing our limits as though they are boundaries we have carefully discovered through experience, when many of them are really just assumptions built from what we have done before, what seems reasonable and what other people expect someone like us to be capable of doing.
I was about to put some of mine to the test.
The idea had begun years earlier while visiting my outdoorsy friend Jock in Asheville, North Carolina. We were driving through the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains when we noticed some hikers crossing the road ahead of us, and Jock explained that they were walking the Appalachian Trail, a legendary route running through 14 states from Springer Mountain in Georgia all the way to Mount Katahdin in Maine.
Something about the scale of it immediately appealed to us, and we made one of those enthusiastic agreements friends often make while sitting comfortably in a car: Someday, we should do that.
The trouble with someday is that it is wonderfully accommodating. It allows us to feel as though we intend to do something without requiring us to decide when we are actually going to do it.
Someday never arrived for Jock, but eventually I realised that unless I attached a year to the idea, it probably wouldn’t arrive for me either. So I chose 2017, booked my flight back to the United States and began assembling what I thought was all the equipment an Appalachian Trail hiker could possibly need.
As I would soon discover, I had interpreted possibly need rather generously.
A good friend, Karen, had agreed to walk the first 76-mile Georgia section with me, and on a crisp spring day in 2017 we stood at Springer Mountain at the beginning of a journey whose scale I still don’t think I properly understood.
There were plenty of other hopeful hikers around us during those first few days, many carrying equally ambitious plans, and gradually the crowds began thinning as we moved farther into the mountains. My body also began delivering its first serious assessment of my preparation.
My backpack weighed around 25 kilograms. At home this had somehow seemed acceptable. On steep, rocky mountain trails, my knees had a rather different opinion. By the time we limped into an outfitter store, I was sufficiently uncomfortable to accept that perhaps I didn’t know quite as much about long-distance hiking as I had imagined. An experienced member of staff performed what hikers call a shakedown, going methodically through everything in my pack and questioning why on earth I was carrying some of it.
Two pairs of favorite jeans disappeared. The electric shaver went. So did a large power bank and various other possessions I had apparently believed were essential to survival in the American wilderness. About an hour later I walked out carrying roughly 10 kilograms less. Pasted text
It was one of my earliest lessons from the trail, and an important one because it wasn’t really about hiking equipment. I had gone into something unfamiliar carrying assumptions formed somewhere familiar, and reality had very quickly exposed which of them were wrong.
Being willing to test your limits doesn’t mean stubbornly ignoring evidence or pushing ahead with a bad plan simply because it was your plan. Sometimes the smartest thing you can do when entering unfamiliar territory is admit that somebody else knows considerably more than you do, swallow your pride and listen.
The Appalachian Trail was already teaching me, and I hadn’t even left Georgia.
During that first week, eight miles could feel like a serious day’s work, particularly when those miles involved endless climbs and descents while carrying everything needed to eat, sleep and survive on your back. Gradually, though, my legs strengthened, my pack became more manageable and the distances started increasing. What had seemed difficult on Day One began to feel normal.
This process continued throughout the trail. My body adapted to the work I was asking it to do, while my mind adapted to a life in which getting up, packing everything I owned into a backpack and walking through mountains for most of the day was simply what happened next.
That experience changed the way I think about capability, because we often make decisions about what we can accomplish by measuring a future challenge against the person we are before we have begun it.
If I had asked whether the Robbie whose longest previous expedition was around 30 miles was physically prepared to walk 2,200 miles, the sensible answer would probably have been no. But that wasn’t the person who would eventually need to walk the final miles in Maine. Every day on the trail was creating that person. The mountains weren’t becoming smaller, the distances weren’t shortening and my backpack wasn’t carrying itself. I was simply becoming more capable of dealing with them, one ordinary day at a time.
That distinction would become increasingly important as the trail became harder.
Karen finished the Georgia section as planned, and after saying goodbye I continued into North Carolina alone, although alone on the Appalachian Trail rarely means quite what it means elsewhere.
There are other hikers, trail towns, shelter companions, locals and unexpected characters constantly drifting into and out of your journey, while the wilderness itself has a habit of reminding you that you are not necessarily the only creature occupying the trail. I learned that rather dramatically shortly after entering the Smoky Mountains near Fontana Dam.
Barely half an hour into the national park, I rounded a bend and found myself looking at a black bear and her cub about 150 yards away. She saw me at almost exactly the same moment, the cub scrambled up a nearby tree, and suddenly I was standing in precisely the situation every piece of bear advice tells you not to create: between a mother and her young. She made a false charge toward me before I backed away and crouched behind some undergrowth, and for the next ten minutes or so the two of us watched each other while waiting for junior to come back down.
It was the first of roughly 25 bear encounters I would have on the Appalachian Trail. Some were frightening, others extraordinary and one in Shenandoah National Park remains among my favorite memories of the entire journey. A hiking friend and I noticed leaves inexplicably falling from a tree on a perfectly still day, looked upward and discovered a bear balanced on a branch attacking a large beehive. Eventually the hive came crashing down, followed by the bear, who proceeded to bury its face in the honey while being attacked by a furious cloud of bees.
People later asked why I hadn’t filmed the whole thing. Because sometimes the better option is simply to be there. We watched, laughed and absorbed one of those completely unplanned moments that stays in your memory far longer than another hundred photographs ever could.
Those experiences mattered because the Appalachian Trail was never simply an endurance test. If all I cared about was covering miles, I could have turned one of the greatest experiences of my life into a very long chore. The point was to keep moving north whilst still appreciating where I was.
After around three months of hiking, I reached the halfway region around Harpers Ferry and Pine Grove Furnace. I had always planned to divide the trail into two large sections rather than rush through the entire distance in a single year, so when I reached my stopping point I left the trail knowing there was still roughly half of it waiting for me. That decision created an unexpected challenge.
Starting something enormous requires motivation, but restarting it after two years away is different.
By 2019, the trail was no longer an imagined adventure. I knew exactly what long-distance hiking involved: the aching feet, repetitive climbs, wooden shelter floors, wet days, hunger, heavy pack and enormous amount of time spent simply putting one foot in front of another.
Two friends had planned to join me when I returned, but as the departure date approached both pulled out.
I could have postponed. Instead, I flew back to America, returned to Pine Grove Furnace and started walking from exactly where I had stopped.
There was something different about that second beginning because, although I still didn’t know whether I would reach Katahdin, I was no longer relying entirely on optimism. The first half of the trail had given me evidence. I knew I could tolerate bad days without interpreting them as a reason to quit. I knew my body would complain and then adapt. I knew plans would change, equipment would fail, weather would interfere and there would be mornings when a warm bed sounded considerably more appealing than another mountain. Most importantly, I knew that none of those things necessarily meant I couldn’t continue.
As I continued north through Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont, the trail kept producing experiences that no itinerary could have predicted.
There were rattlesnakes sunning themselves on rocky ledges, porcupines wandering across the path, butterflies and bright orange newts, nights spent on wooden shelter floors and one particularly memorable evening when I missed a shelter turnoff and ended up sleeping under the stars on a New York clifftop, only for it to start raining.
There were also moments of extraordinary kindness. People living near the trail would sometimes appear at road crossings with food and drinks for complete strangers, something hikers call Trail Magic, while those providing it are appropriately known as Trail Angels. On one occasion at Upper Goose Pond in Massachusetts, a woman arrived by boat carrying a dozen pizzas and several dozen beers for the exhausted hikers staying there. She wanted nothing in return.
In Vermont, after checking into a small hiker hostel and mentioning that I was from New Zealand, I woke the following morning to discover that the owners had taken down their American flag and replaced it with a New Zealand one in honor of their most distant guest. It was such a small gesture, yet thousands of miles from home it affected me enormously, and it still does when I think about it.
Author and the New Zealand flag flying in Vermont guesthouse
There is a popular version of motivational thinking that suggests we can achieve almost anything if we want it badly enough, as though determination alone can somehow overpower physical limitations, circumstances and reality. After spending so much time on the Appalachian Trail, I came away believing almost the opposite, because the mountains give you a healthy respect for genuine limits and can expose misplaced confidence remarkably quickly.
Bodies get injured, weather can turn a manageable mountain into a dangerous one, and experience, health, equipment and circumstances all matter. There were plenty of occasions when changing my plans, slowing down or listening to somebody who knew more than I did was considerably more sensible than stubbornly pushing ahead. My ridiculous 25-kilogram backpack had taught me that lesson almost as soon as I started.
What became more interesting over the thousands of miles that followed was not whether limits existed, because clearly they did, but how accurately I had understood where my own limits were before I tested them. Many of the things that would eventually become routine on the trail would have seemed daunting to me at Springer Mountain, not because I was incapable of ever doing them, but because I had no previous experience from which to imagine myself doing them.
There is an enormous difference between believing that limits don’t exist and accepting that you may not yet know where yours are. The first ignores reality, while the second leaves room for experience to reveal something about you that you couldn’t possibly have known beforehand.
That distinction became increasingly important as I headed north, because despite everything the trail had already thrown at me, some of its hardest terrain was still waiting.
By the time I reached New Hampshire I had already walked well over 1,500 miles, and after so many months on the trail it would have been tempting to think that I had experienced just about everything the Appalachian Trail could throw at me. New Hampshire quickly corrected that assumption.
The White Mountains have a fearsome reputation among Appalachian Trail hikers because the terrain becomes dramatically steeper, rockier and more technical, with climbs that demand far more concentration than simply putting one foot in front of the other. Mount Washington, at 6,288 feet, is the highest point in the Presidential Range and one of the most famous mountains on the entire trail, yet strangely enough I remember the descent being even more demanding than reaching the summit. For hours I had to negotiate jagged rocks where every foot placement mattered, knowing that a careless fall could bring the entire adventure to a very abrupt end.
By this stage, however, my response to difficult terrain had changed considerably from those first nervous weeks in Georgia. Thousands of miles hadn’t made me fearless or somehow immune to danger; they had simply given me enough experience to slow down, assess what was immediately in front of me and work through it without allowing the scale of everything still ahead to overwhelm me.
Tight squeeze through one of the many rock gaps to negotiate
That approach became particularly useful when I reached Mahoosuc Notch, often described as the hardest mile on the Appalachian Trail. Calling it a mile of hiking is rather generous, because it is really a giant natural obstacle course formed by enormous boulders, requiring hikers to climb over rocks, squeeze through narrow gaps and occasionally remove their backpacks and lower them into crevasses before following them through. Once you finally emerge from the Notch, the reward is Mahoosuc Arm, a brutally steep ascent that gains roughly 1,500 feet in a single mile. Pasted text
I occasionally thought during sections like this about the inexperienced hiker who had arrived at Springer Mountain carrying two pairs of jeans and an electric shaver. If you had shown that version of me photographs of what I would eventually be climbing through, I suspect I would have questioned whether I had any business being there at all.
Yet that comparison misses something important, because the person who arrived at Mahoosuc Notch was no longer the same hiker who had started in Georgia. Every previous climb, mistake, painful day, equipment adjustment and difficult section had contributed something, until situations I once might have considered beyond my abilities had become problems that simply needed to be worked through.
Capability had accumulated gradually, almost without me noticing it happen.
Eventually I crossed into Maine, the fourteenth and final state, with approximately 282 rugged miles still separating me from the end of the Appalachian Trail. After everything that had already happened, quitting now seemed almost unimaginable, but Maine was not interested in providing an easy victory lap.
One of its great psychological landmarks is the famous 100 Mile Wilderness, a remote section with few opportunities to resupply and a warning at the entrance advising hikers to carry enough food for the journey. That meant loading my pack with considerably more food than I normally carried, which immediately reminded my shoulders and back that every additional kilogram still had to travel over every mountain with me.
You know it is serious when there is a warning sign!
The terrain also demanded more care than speed. Endless exposed roots and rough ground created countless opportunities to twist an ankle, and by then I understood that stubbornly maintaining my previous daily mileage simply because I had been capable of it elsewhere would have been foolish. I reduced the distance I was covering each day, concentrated on where I was placing my feet and allowed myself to move through the wilderness at the pace the conditions required.
That may sound like a small decision, but it reflected something I had gradually learned over the previous couple of thousand miles: Persistence and speed are not the same thing. Sometimes continuing toward a goal means pushing harder, while at other times it means having enough patience to slow down rather than allowing pride or an arbitrary target to create an unnecessary problem.
After roughly a week I emerged from the 100 Mile Wilderness, having also had the bonus of seeing wild moose along the way, and soon stumbled upon a rest stop serving a buffet breakfast. To someone who had spent months burning enormous numbers of calories every day, the sight of unlimited food was almost as memorable as some of the mountain views. I ate an embarrassing amount before continuing the remaining distance to Katahdin Stream Campground, where I joined other hikers preparing for the final climb.
After all those miles, all those states and all the uncertainty that had existed when I began, there was now only one mountain between me and completing the Appalachian Trail.
I woke early on my final morning to beautiful weather and began walking through the forest toward Katahdin, the mountain that had existed in my imagination for years but was now physically rising in front of me.
Katahdin isn’t the highest mountain on the Appalachian Trail, but by the time a northbound hiker reaches it, height is almost irrelevant because the mountain represents everything that has happened before it. Every wet morning, every painful descent, every wooden shelter floor, every encounter with wildlife, every stranger who offered kindness and every occasion when continuing seemed considerably less attractive than stopping had somehow led to this final climb.
The terrain became increasingly steep and technical as I gained elevation, eventually requiring rock scrambling through sections where I preferred not to spend too much time contemplating what would happen if I fell. Even after negotiating the most difficult part there was still a substantial amount of climbing ahead, but eventually the famous wooden sign at Baxter Peak appeared.
I made it!
2200 miles hiked.
For Appalachian Trail hikers, that simple sign marks the end of an extraordinary journey, and standing beside it after travelling all the way from Georgia was one of those moments where the numbers suddenly become almost difficult to comprehend. I had walked roughly 2,200 miles through 14 states, worn out seven pairs of hiking shoes and watched my body weight fall from approximately 84 kilograms at the beginning to around 70 kilograms by the end.
Yet standing there, the most interesting distance to me was no longer the geographical distance between Georgia and Maine. It was the distance between the person who had stood at Springer Mountain wondering what he had got himself into and the person now standing on Katahdin knowing exactly what had been required to get there.
That difference could never have been discovered beforehand, because I couldn’t think, research or plan my way into knowing what 2,200 miles would eventually teach me about myself. I had to walk them.
When I first contemplated hiking the Appalachian Trail, the obvious question was whether I was capable of walking 2,200 miles, but looking back, I now think that question was fundamentally flawed.
The person asking it had never hiked more than roughly 30 miles on a single expedition, so naturally he had no evidence that he could cross fourteen states on foot. What he also couldn’t possibly know was what would happen after the first hundred miles, then five hundred and eventually fifteen hundred; how his body would adapt, what mistakes he would learn from, how much unnecessary weight he would discard, how his judgement would improve and how situations that initially seemed intimidating would gradually become familiar.
We often think of capability as something we must possess before beginning, when many capabilities only develop because we begin. That doesn’t mean every enormous challenge can be completed if we simply persevere long enough, nor does it mean determination magically overcomes physical limitations or difficult circumstances. Sometimes we push against a boundary and discover that it really is a boundary, and recognising that can be every bit as intelligent as continuing.
But there is another possibility that is much easier to overlook: Sometimes the boundary we have been respecting for years was never actually a boundary at all. It was simply the furthest point we had previously reached.
That distinction reaches far beyond hiking. People decide they aren’t entrepreneurial enough to start something, confident enough to speak publicly, adaptable enough to change careers, independent enough to travel alone, disciplined enough to learn a difficult skill or young enough to begin something completely different, often because they are comparing the challenge ahead with the person they are today.
Sometimes those assessments will be accurate, and NoRuleBook thinking shouldn’t encourage us to reject reality simply because reality is inconvenient. But sometimes the only evidence supporting those conclusions is that we have never attempted anything sufficiently difficult to discover whether they are actually true.
The Appalachian Trail didn’t teach me that I have no limits. After 2,200 miles through mountains, bad weather, injuries, exhaustion and terrain where one careless decision could have serious consequences, I probably came away with more respect for genuine limits, not less. What changed was my willingness to assume that I already knew where those limits were.
Before the Appalachian Trail, 2,200 miles was something I had never done and had no evidence that I could do. Afterward, it was something behind me. That is an important distinction, because :
One of the easiest ways to make our lives smaller is to mistake the edge of our experience for the edge of our ability.
NoRuleBook is about recognising the assumptions that quietly influence the boundaries of our lives, including those we create about ourselves. Statements such as I’m not that kind of person, I’m too old, I’m not confident enough or I couldn’t do that can gradually stop sounding like opinions and begin sounding like facts, even when we have gathered remarkably little evidence to support them.
Some of those conclusions may eventually prove correct, because genuine limitations exist and pretending otherwise serves nobody. Others, however, may simply have remained untested for so long that we have forgotten they were assumptions in the first place.
The NoRuleBook eBook explores how to recognise those assumptions, decide which ones deserve questioning and make choices based more on evidence from your own life than on inherited expectations or self-imposed rules.
You don’t need to walk 2,200 miles to discover where one of your limits really lies, but every so often it is worth going far enough beyond what you already know you can do to find out.
-
-20%
NoRuleBook
Original price was: $9.95.$7.95Current price is: $7.95. -
-50%
No Rules Start-Up
Original price was: $19.95.$9.95Current price is: $9.95. -
-35%
NoRuleBook Bundle
Original price was: $22.90.$14.95Current price is: $14.95.
Submitted 1.0
Manual 5.0
