And we’re off! It’s day 5 of my thru-hike, and it still feels a little surreal that we’re doing this, but we’re certainly doing this! I’m not going to bury the lede here, I’m having a GREAT time so far.

The night before starting the trail, I felt very antsy to begin. I still had trouble packing my pack, which made me nervous. I went to bed early to stave off the nerves, get it over with, and get a good night’s sleep before everything changed. Saturday morning dawned bright and beautiful, and thankfully Andrea was willing to wake up early to give me a ride. We met up with Sophie and Jake, and I rode with them the rest of the way to the trailhead at Amicalola Falls State Park. I was so excited at this point!

We arrived at AT “base camp”, where we checked in, got our numbered thru-hiker tags (Sophie is #729 and I’m #730), and weighed our packs. Mine came in at 32.4 pounds! It was better than I expected, and right where I wanted it to be. We listened to a brief seminar about Leave No Trace (LNT) practices, and before I knew it, we were leaving the iconic arch and officially starting our hike! It was 9:04am when we set off.

Not long after, we caught our first glimpse of Amicalola Falls. The falls were HUGE, a lot taller than I expected, and spectacular! And, of course, we saw the dreaded stairs to climb up that distance. It was a pretty brutal start! There are 600 steps according to the signs, although I suspect they rounded (I did not bother to count). That was a tough first leg right off the bat! Luckily spirits had started high and they remained that way.

The rest of the approach trail, from Amicalola Falls to the official southern terminus at the summit Springer Mountain, paled in comparison to the falls. The 8.8 miles felt longer than I expected, but the terrain wasn’t difficult and the rest of our day was pretty chill. It was such a nice first day hiking with Sophie!

At 3:03pm, we summited Springer Mountain. It was cool to finally see the plaques in person and see our first white blaze, as well as the nice view from the top. To be honest, it felt less grand and overwhelming than I expected; I knew our journey was just beginning.

We camped for the night at Springer Mt. Shelter, 0.2 miles beyond the summit. We set up our tents for the first time, filtered water for the first time, and cooked dinner for the first time. There were a lot of firsts. When setting up my tent, I was annoyed to find that one of the rainfly tent stake loops had snapped off. I’m not sure when that happened. But thanks to a patented Sophie Wiltse Stick Stake™️, I was able to get it set up ok (we’ll see how well it truly holds up when the rain comes, knock on wood). Lunch and dinner were our biggest struggles that first day, as we ironed out kinks with our food bags and cooking systems. But we met some other cool hikers at the shelter as we ate, and it was a very pleasant evening. Everyone is very friendly.

I did not sleep well at ALL that night. Luckily, that didn’t stop us from having a great, relatively easy day 2. I really enjoy how the character of the trail changes so much. One minute you’re walking through a bare deciduous forest on a ridgeline, the next you’re in a lush valley by a stream surrounded by rhodedendrons. Sophie and I entertained each other playing Name That Tune that morning. We took a short side trail to have a lovely lunch at Long Creek Falls, which was super cool in a different way from Amicalola. No stairs this time, for one thing.

Shortly after lunch, we encountered our first trail magic!! It was really exciting. A nice family group gave us chips, candy, and Gatorade. Unfortunately (and perhaps foolishly), we declined their offer of burgers since we had just eaten lunch, but it was still super nice and fun to get good food and trail magic for the first time.

We also met a really helpful and inspiring hiker named Sparky. He finished the Triple Crown in 2019 and had a lot of good and humble advice for us. (The Triple Crown is thru-hiking the AT, the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), and the Continental Divide Trail (CDT). Macy has already warned me not to get any ideas.) We really enjoyed talking to Sparky for a while on the trail; he’s probably my favorite character we’ve met so far.

We arrived early at Hawk Mountain Shelter, where we had decided to camp for the night. For a while, it looked like it might just be us and one other hiker there; it made me feel a bit sad and lonely. I had heard about overcrowding on the trail at this time of year, and had even had concerns about getting a campsite, but this was the opposite problem. Sophie and I played cards (I brought a deck as a luxury item) for a while, and then the hikers started rolling in. It made me happy to see the campsite fill up (although I started to better understand the issue of overcrowding for the trail itself. Sorry AT) and make some new friends, including Julie, or her new trail name “Downfall.” People on the AT (and elsewhere) get special nicknames that they go by on the trail, usually because of some way they look or act or something they do. (Yeah, turns out Sparky wasn’t his real name either.) We also met Zigzag, an awesome section hiker who has done almost the whole AT at this point, who gave us Tootsie Pops for a second bit of trail magic. I felt great after an 8-mile day 2.

Day 3 was the hardest yet. In the morning, we got yet more trail magic from a nice man who had hiked the Georgia section last year! His wife had done trail magic then, and now they were switching places with her hiking a section that day. We got the first difficult terrain (since the Amicalola Falls stairs) after Horse Gap climbing Sassafras Mountain.

Originally, we were heading for Gooch Mountain Shelter for the night, but after arriving at 1:30pm and having lunch, we were feeling good and decided to hike on. I’m SO glad we did. Not a mile further, we came across even more trail magic, and it was the nicest spread yet! Having learned our lesson from the previous day, and with growing hiker hunger, we had burgers (they even had veggie burgers for Sophie), diced peaches, more Gatorade, fresh fruit, and homemade brownies; they were so generous. A cheeseburger never tasted so good! We really enjoyed sitting and talking to the people there for a while. It’s super cool to hear the stories of people doing trail magic. We heard one man’s touching story about his fight with cancer and the spiritual connection he found with the trail.

After that physical and mental boost, we pushed on to Woody Gap for the night. It ended up being our longest day so far at over 12 miles, and we were definitely tired by the end of it. Woody Gap was a nice place with beautiful views; some gaps are like that and some are just a dirt road in the woods. We stealth camped for the first time there, though we were still near a privy since it was at the gap, which was handy. We hung our bear bags for the first time (the shelters in GA have bear boxes), and crossed our fingers.

Stealth camping turned out to be pretty fun, and we didn’t have any problems with our Ursacks. That day we aimed for Neels Gap and our first night off trail, about 11 miles further. We hiked most of the day with our trail friend Jacob, who we had met the first night. It was nice to get to know him better, and he also had the honor of giving me my trail name(!)…drumroll, please…Shaggy! It’s fitting, as my hiking outfit does resemble a certain cartoon character, and my hair…it started out rather shaggy, and it’s going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better! People seem to like the name. (To tell the truth, I had received a few subpar options for trail names before that point, including “Sunscreen” about 30 minutes into the approach trail (can you guess what I was doing?) and “Boston” (although I will admit I’m surprised that I have yet to meet a single other hiker from New England). Sophie doesn’t have a trail name yet, although she has also gotten a few suggestions.)

We got brief pleasant trail magic from a man with a cute dog who gave us a bag of homemade dried apples. They were surprisingly very yummy (way better than storebought). We had lunch shortly after Jarrard Gap, and spoke to an interesting, entertaining, and loud, GATC volunteer while we ate. He knew what a garbage plate was when we told him we were from Rochester, so you know he was legit.

Next up was Blood Mountain, the highest point on the Georgia section of the AT. The climb had been pretty hyped up, but it wasn’t too bad, and in fact was pretty fun, with varied terrain and a rocky summit. It was beautiful at the top, with easily the best views so far! The descent was tough, and it reminded me of the Whites. Lots of stone stairs and big dropoffs made for a challenging but interesting time. Blood Mountain was the highlight of the terrain so far for me.

Soon, we got to Neels Gap and Mountain Crossings! Mountain Crossings is a rather famous outdoor outfitter directly on the AT. It was cool inside and absolutely packed with gear. It’s tradition to pick up any gear you feel you need after the first few days there, or send home unneeded items. I got a scrubber to better clean my pot, and Sophie got a knee brace and insoles for her shoes. It’s also tradition for 25% of thru-hikers to call it quits there (at least that’s the number we kept hearing, I don’t know how true that is). There’s a huge tree out front where people who are leaving the trail throw their shoes. Couldn’t be us!

You may have noticed I haven’t mentioned any bad weather yet. That’s because it has been implausibly gorgeous so far. Every day has been 60s-70s and sunny. It feels like I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. I have had a great time, and it has been easy to have a great time. We are expecting some rain over the next few days, so we will be tested more. I’m sort of looking forward to it in a macabre way, so that we can see more of what the trail can throw at us and learn how to react and adapt to it.

Coming into Neels Gap, we were excited to have our first night off trail and get a shower and a real bed for the night. We booked a nice cabin just down the road from the trail at Blood Mountain Cabins; we had the Rabbit cabin. It worked well as a place to stay for 5 of us; Sophie and I were sharing with Jacob and a pair of fun older hikers.

Unfortunately, after the excitement of getting off trail and finding a cool place to stay, we had a sort of frustrating evening. We were still in the middle of nowhere, so there weren’t any dinner options around and nowhere would deliver. Cell service was spotty so we couldn’t reach any shuttle drivers to get into town to find something to eat. Instead, we just ate our sad backpacking food in our cabin. Not what we had in mind for our first night off trail, but it still tasted better in our kitchen than in the woods. Ultimately, most of the frustration was due to being very hungry after a long day of hiking. After dinner, I talked to Macy for the first time since before the trail. That really turned my evening around! It was still good to have my first shower in days and a warm bed for the night.

Sophie and I took our first “zero day” today. A zero day means zero miles hiked, and it’s a good chance to relax, recover, and resupply. We spent the morning relaxing at the cabins, and it was honestly a bit jarring not to have to hit the trail. We both felt a bit anxious not to be doing anything as we ate a yummy brunch we had ordered from the cabins and waited for our laundry to be done (it was great to have laundry done though!). We were determined to make it into town for real to resupply and get the trail town experience. Again it took a little while to reach a shuttle driver, but luckily we eventually did and Bret, who had thru-hiked SOBO(=southbound) in 2017, picked us up at noon. We had a nice time chatting with him on the beautiful drive down into Blairsville, Georgia! Sophie and I booked a night at the Seasons Inn motel right on the cute town center which was super hiker-friendly. After the uncertainty and difficulty figuring out off-trail things for the first time, it felt really good to be in a town and sort of know what we were doing. We got lunch at a cool coffee shop, where we hung out for several hours talking to family and I had a lot of fun working on a 1000-piece puzzle that was in progress there. It turns out, there are a lot of hours in the day when you aren’t hiking, and even not getting into town until the afternoon we still felt like we had plenty of time to do what we wanted to. We walked a ways through classic American car-centric infrastructure to the supermarket where we resupplied the groceries we’d need for the next four or five days hiking. Then we got a big dinner at a good Mexican restaurant, where I was gifted a ninja balloon animal. I felt very silly and I loved it. Finally it was back to our motel, where we had a really nice time talking to the owner for a while before getting ready for bed and preparing to get back on the trail tomorrow morning.

It was a great first zero day and a fitting end to an excellent first leg of the AT. On to the next one!