To backtrack for a moment, my name is Ben Cort and I'm a born and raised Bostonian. My catalogue of travels is from Florida to Quebec, but constrained to the Eastern Time Zone. When I was 10 I went to Camp Tohkomeupog (Tohko) in New Hampshire where I got my first taste of the great outdoors. I want to say that my first mountain was Mt. Madison, but regardless, I got hooked on trying to hike all of the New Hampshire 4000 Footers. I've even got an old camp T-Shirt from that first year with all of them on the back.
Hiking and I have an odd relationship. Thinking back on all my hikes, I'm good at smiling and looking wistfully off into the distance as I reminisce on all the good times. It's undeniable that a good hike leaves you with good stories, and it's even more undeniable for those who know me that I love nothing more than hunting down a good story. But there's a lot out there in the wilderness, and most of it terrifies me. Especially bears, despite how objectively cute I think they look.
For my 4 years at Tohko, from the Dear Clan to the Wolf Clan, hiking became the thing I did every summer. My trail name was Bort (Ben plus Cort...get it?), and my friend from school Rando and I would push each other to harder trips and higher peaks. I remember summiting Mt. Washington in a storm and finding Lake in the Clouds wreathed in beautiful mist. I remember having a snowball fight in Mahoosuc Notch and being terrified by the dead moose in a ravine and the hiker who put it out of its misery. And I remember the joy of sitting down at the end of the day to a pot full of chicken Montanna (chicken, rice, cheese, and all the hot sauce you could carry), or frying up buttered raisin bagels in bacon grease as the sun rose. And just as quickly as this became a part of my life, it stopped being one.
When I arrived in high school my priorities changed. Not only did I become busy with a whole new school, I lost touch with my old friends. Rando and I had at most a pair of conversations over Facebook, where we both expressed our lack of desire to return to Tohko. So when summer rolled around, I stayed in Boston.
Hiking stayed far back in my mind for the next four years. I would occasionally mention it, and even more rarely muse on the possibility of a trip up to the Whites, but I never acted on it. Until my senior year, where I got a nasty bug and missed a chunk of school, losing credit for a yoga extracurricular I was taking. Which meant losing half of an athletic credit I needed to graduate. So I could take another course, or do something a little more unorthodox. I met with the Athletic Director and convinced him to let me do a weekend of hiking for my half credit, and then roped in a few friends.
A few weeks later I found myself hauling my old frame pack out of the attic for the first time in years. Inside was half a mess kit (crusted with something foul that took awhile to wash off) and my old sleeping pad. On the outside a few yards of ratty yellow rope had been lashed. As I collected my old hiking gear and deposited it inside, fitting everything into familiar pockets, all those memories of camp came flooding back. I went to bed early, eagerly anticipating the weekend.
And what a weekend. We hiked the Osceolas the first day and the Hancocks the next. Being back in the woods was absolutely wonderful. I hit the trail running and didn't slow down. Halfway up the second peak a blizzard hit, catching me unawares in shorts and a hoody. Reaching the second peak I huddled amongst some rocks and waited for the rest of the group. One friend arrived after a half hour, and the two of us waited for another two for the others. Finally sick of sitting in the freezing cold, we set back down the mountain. When we reached the parking lot we found our car missing. Just as we were planning how to walk back to town, on the last of our food and water, it rolled back into the parking lot. Mistaking the first peak for the last, they had turned around early and, assuming us lost, gone to alert the police. We rectified the mistake and returned to the campsite. The next day was just as snowy, with a solid foot or so at the peaks. My copy of Jane Eyre I had brought for class became completely soaked through as I sat at the bottom of the loop waiting for the rest of them to finish the mountains. An objectively miserable experience, but I was grinning like a fool the whole time. I hadn't realized how much I had missed this.
Though my friends will probably never hike again, I was energized to keep it going. But then I received my letter of deferred admission off the wait list to my dream school, and upgraded my part time job to full time over the summer. Hiking was pushed aside again. I started taking classes at the local extension school and working to fill my gap year. I was content to wait out life until the next fall.
I can't for the life of me remember what it was, but one night, surfing the web, I saw a reference to the Appalachian Trail. Since I was 11 and saw the AT sign tattooed on my counselor's ankle I knew that a thru hike was something I would do in my life. But suddenly I realized that there would never be a better time to do it. And subsequently that I was completely wasting my gift of a year by sitting around my home town pretending to be a student.
I spent all night reading, and emerged even more certain. I would hike the Appalachian Trail this year. I announced my decision to my father, who laughed. I don't blame him. It sounded pretty crazy. But as the months went by and I started assembling gear, it became more and more real. To all of us. Telling people my intent cemented it for me. Now it wasn't just an idea (albeit a crazy one), I really was going to hike the Appalachian Trail.
Or at least try. I've got to get back by the time school starts, which means I'm going to aim to complete the trail in around 110 days. Which means knocking off an average of 20 miles per day. Has it been done? Sure. Can I do it? Hopefully. Is this a terrible idea? Probably. But nevertheless, on April 13th in the wee hours of the morning a plane is waiting to take me to the southern terminus of the trail. And I couldn't be more excited.
(Gosh that was long! Next up I'll chatter aimlessly some more about my gear choices (read: my completely uninformed opinion) and the trial run I took with them)
