Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore Hike

After attending a wedding up north, my wife and I decided to spend a few days hiking in the Upper Peninsula. This was my wife's first multi-day backpacking trip and of course our first long hike together in preparation for the Appalachian Trail. We hiked the 42-mile long Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore which turned into more like a 50 mile hike since we took a few detours, some on purpose. Since this was my wife's first backpacking trip I thought this hike would be a big indicator of whether or not she can make it on the Appalachian Trail. I never told her, but I saw it as kind of a trial hike and I wanted to see how she would react to certain aspects of trail life such as walking many miles in one day, carrying a weighted pack, lack of comforts, and severe weather. Once I found out it might rain while we were out there, I must confess, I kind of hoped it would just so we would get soaked and uncomfortable. I wanted to see if those kinds of things would make her feel miserable. Often times we can choose how we are going to let external forces in our life affect us. Breaking a leg is not one of these times, but when you have no dry clothes and you are dirty and sweaty and thirsty and hungry and tired and mosquitos will not give you a break and you still have five more miles to walk, you can either break or not. One can practice to build up the ability to not let these external factors affect one's will to carry on with what must be done.

I was also excited for this backpacking trip since it was the first time we got to try out our three new lightweight pieces of gear: our tent, our sleeping bag, and our sleeping pads. And it was supposed to be a beautiful place, right along the southern shore of Lake Superior with pictured rocks, dunes, cliffs, waterfalls, and a lighthouse along the way.

I was a bit concerned with how the hike would turn out once I discovered we had to pay a fee for each overnight stay and reservations for campsites were recommended. I had to fill out a form and list my three top choices of where we would camp each night. It was difficult to make three congruent lists that did not overlap. It all seemed a little too bureaucratic to me. Being in nature is supposed to be an escape of this kind of thing and it seems odd to have to pay to spend some time outside. On top of that we had to schedule a shuttle to pick us up that left only at certain times. So now we also had a time schedule to adhere to. I am glad the Appalachian Trail is free and requires no reservations and does not have so strict of time limits. When our reservations were confirmed I saw they gave us our third choice which was all kinds of messed up. We were now required to walk 4 miles the first day, fourteen miles the second, three miles the third, ten miles the fourth, and ten miles on the last day before our shuttle would leave at 10 in the morning. This schedule seemed absurd and unnecessary and honestly made me quite angry. I just hoped my wife would be willing to break these crazy rules if it came to that. So I started out on the journey a little sad that we wouldn't be totally free.

The first few miles I could not focus on nature or the hike itself. I was not fully present even after my wife pointed out a swimming beaver in a lake and I almost stepped on a bright green snake. In all we saw many chipmunks, deer, and birds, a couple of rabbits, three snakes, and that beaver. At the end of that short hiking day my wife wanted to climb up a large sand dune right behind our camp site. When we slowly reached the top I felt a sting on my legs. I looked down and about twenty biting flies covered my bare legs. I danced a little, but they still attacked so I ran ahead toward Lake Superior to shake them. That is when the beauty struck me. That feeling of sublime you might have read about in books when someone reaches the top of the mountain. In front of me were hills rolling to the east and the west  at the edge of the vast expanse of water. Not a single manmade thing in sight. Pure nature. Behind me were the tops of the trees from which we came. From above they looked like a sea of green during a storm. The green crested randomly like choppy waters as the wind blew through them. And the beauty calmed my mind like a-- OUCH! Another fly bite! Nature is unrelenting in beauty and power, even the small parts of it.

Every time we were on or very near the beach, which was most of the time, the flies would not stop pestering me. Hiking, usually a leg workout, also became an arm workout as I had to constantly swing my arms up to my face and down to my legs as I walked with my wife hiked behind me snapping them away from me with a rolled up shirt. For some reason the flies liked me a ton better than my wife, at least one reason being because she wore pants while I wore shorts. Every time I have hiked anywhere I have read warnings about how bad the bugs are and to be prepared, but they have never been that bad so I decided a long time ago to ignore these warnings whenever I came across them. BIG MISTAKE! My wife knew. She had been up to the Upper Peninsula before and just as I had no idea what pasties were (when I first encountered a huge sign that read PASTIES, I confess, I thought they had made the unfortunate mistake of misspelling PASTRIES and didn't have the money or sign space to fix the error)  I did not know how big of a problem the stable flies were. So I wore shorts and paid the price. And if we were further away from the shore the mosquitos were just as bad. Our DEEP WOODS DEET bug spray was useless against them all.

On our third day, we experienced another side of the awesome power of nature. Since we were alone at both of the campsites we had reserved we decided to hike further than our reserved camp site on that third day so we didn't have to hike so far the next two days. Earlier, we decided to walk all the way to the end of the trail on the fourth day so we wouldn't have to hike ten miles before ten in the morning. Instead, we would hike to the nearby town and get a nice meal, and a nice hot shower, and a nice bed at a motel. After hiking those few miles on the third day and arriving at what would have been our campsite for the night, my wife said we should move on, for which I was extremely grateful. So we walked on and came upon a large rock that jutted out so we could see into the vast expanse of Lake Superior, which has the largest surface area of any freshwater lake in the world. Distant booms floated by us as we saw one large storm off to the far east and one large storm off to the far west. We seemed to be aligned with the middle where no storms were and I casually remarked that we might be spared the storm. Ha ha ha. Within minutes the sprinkling began, and then the heavy downpour and the incredible BOOMS. It felt good to be wet . . . at first, especially because the bugs went away. But it rained and rained for hours and the trail quickly became one large muddy puddle after another. We were soaked through and through in no time before the storm passed. We arrived at another campsite with one space left for us and set up our tent, everything damp and mud-smeared, still hearing the distant booms. Just as we finished setting up our small living quarters, moments after we both crawled safely inside and on our pads a BOOM as loud as any I've heard and a light fierce enough to be seen through two layers of tent cracked simultaneously. My wife whimpered something about wishing she was home and I kept imaging a giant tree blasted by lighting above us and crushing our tent. The rain struck our tent like it was hail and I sat up to peer out the one mesh side of our tent where our shoes and backpacks lay on the ground under the outer tent fly. Rainwater flooded around them. I've never seen water accumulate so fast and they were almost covered. Everything not already in the tent would be wet and remain wet for the rest of the hike including all of our clothes, our shoes, and our camera and my cell phone that I forgot to put back in the waterproof bags I so thoughtfully brought along. In fact both of these items are currently resting in a bag of rice, but I have little hope they can be rescued. This is why none of the beautiful photos we took along the way are included in this blog post. But this isn't too disconcerting because the phone was a cheap pay-as-you-go phone which can be replaced for ten dollars and the camera was already broken as it could not read memory cards and so could only store about thirty photos at a time. When I set my hand down on the floor of the tent it squished and I realized that water was amassing beneath us, under the tent. Even though we were on the top of a hill, the water quickly formed beneath the entire length and width of our tent so the entire bottom felt like a water bed. Despite this, the inside of the tent remained dry, except for the inevitable splash-back along the edge, a testament to the quality of the tent. In my next post I will review the tent, sleeping bag, and sleeping bags. After a couple of scary hours the storm finally subsided and we fell asleep.

The next morning we put back on our wet clothes and walked the rest of the way to the end of the trail. My wife decided to walk in some non-hiking shoes that weren't as wet and tied her cheap hiking boots to her pack, dangling. At some point when we had a break from hiking she noticed only one was dangling there and we laughed knowing someone would come across one hiking boot on the path and wonder what had happened. We hiked around fifty miles in seventy-two hours.

My wife did great. She did better than I expected her to. I shouldn't have been surprised because she also did well on our first two-day bike ride together. All in all, we did walk faster and longer than we should have and in the very end she did have a difficult time with each step, and I was hurting as well, but I am not very concerned about this because on the Appalachian Trail we will not walk as far or as fast for the first several weeks, until we are in shape and used to the ups and downs of the 270 mountains we will encounter along the way. We will have few time restraints since we have decided to give ourselves about seven months to complete the hike. She never let the weather or discomfort or lack of bed and shower get to her, except for that one moment when the huge storm suddenly burst on top of us. I am confident that we will both do well on the Trail and make it to the end at Mt. Katahdin.

Lessons for the Trail:
Ensure all gear is waterproofed at the very first sign that it might begin to rain.
Figure out a way to attach the two sleeping pads together so they do not slip apart (we already have an idea).
If setting up the tent on a slope, place pads so that our heads will be closest to the top so we don't keep slipping down and crash our heads into the back wall of the tent.  
Keep up with reducing weight in our packs since all of the other long-distance hikers we came across had packs that looked a ton heavier than ours were and hiked slower and probably were in a great deal more pain.