PEEEEEEETE

         The day was friday, it was many moons ago, when I arrived home from work around 4:30 as I did everyday. Walking into the house I was shocked at how clean the house had gotten since I had left that morning. It was so clean you could've invited my Grandmother over with complete confidence. I'm greeted by Nick in his nicest shirt, showered and shaved. "To what the occasion Nick" I ask? "This girl from work is coming over and we're going out for Mexican Food". He is clearly nervous as he is pacing the house and watching the front window like a puppy waits for the mailman. A light bulb in my head turns on and I begin, quietly and discreetly, looking around for that gigantic Vaseline Intensive Care pump bottle of hand lotion that lives in the back corner of the linen closet. I find it along with a hand full of McDonalds napkins in the crumpled up bag in the small bin next to the fireplace. I sneak into his room like a Navy fuckin' Seal. The lotion bottle is cleverly placed on his night stand along with the napkins. I take a brief moment to crumple up a couple napkins for effect and leave them in front of the bottle. Fifteen minutes to half an hour pass and suddenly heard throughout the house is the guttural yell of Nick "Peeeeeeete"!
       

Gander Mountain Files for bankruptcy

Here is my photo journalism project titled "The Professionalism of Gander Mtn"

The first photo we see is of a customer service representative who felt dizzy and sat down. The only cashier at the time. Customers were forced to walk around for nearly fifteen minutes to find myself to ask to be checked out. She didn't look up the entire time, making this photo very easy to take.

The gun counter had a one hour wait and the phone calls that were coming in were being asked to leave a message for later callback, which, historically, was unlikely to occur. Meanwhile the manager of that department sat in the back office looking over social media and texting his girlfriend.  Another easy photo to take. He didn't even flinch as I moved a chair out of the way to take the photo. 

The Fishing department has no employees. None. All questions regarding anything fishing related are answered with "I don't know" or the classic "let me get the manager"

            Lastly, a photo of the tent sale last summer. If you look closely at the top left you'll see the five foot in diameter balloon I sent up into the stratosphere. This was the largest sale that store has ever had and the general manager, conveniently, took the entire week off. He never even saw that tent. 

          Of course, these are clever photos outlining the problems found throughout the retail industry. What's the real situation regarding Gander Mountain's bankruptcy?  As I saw it play out over its last couple years was the result of rapid growth that failed to bring in new customers in a saturated market. The holiday shopping season of 2015 was unsuccessful, and the inventory of march 2016 revealed higher than expected shrink numbers. Leadership responded by firing a VP's and regional managers leading to a mass firing of store managers and department mangers. The process was carried out with shocking speed. The 2016 holiday season became another flop and bad inventory numbers followed as well.

                  A company that once had a beating heart full of great people with beaming smiles. One that began in 1960 as a ski slope in Wisconsin. The focus had shifted from selling outdoor products to selling apparel with stiff metrics on credit card applications. It will live on in my heart forever. I'm really going to miss having coffee in the camping closet with such close friends. 

The Nautical Inn

   I spend a lot of time in Door County Wisconsin. It's a pleasant area and I really like being in the woods. A group of friends, family, and myself were spending a long weekend there during the winter a few years back and we made good on an idea we've been planning for quite a while. We went bar hoping down main street in Sturgeon Bay. The irony one discovers is in the way beers get little by little more expensive as you move west starting at Bud's, the Red Room and down to the most expensive being the Nautical Inn. There's a direct correlation to the quality of beer selections available as well. As an example; at Bud's 12 people get a beer in their hand for $8, and by the time you get to the Nautical Inn we're on separate tabs.
    In our bar hop evening we make it all the way down to the Nautical Inn. We all file in and order a round of Bell's Two Hearted Ale. I leave my beer on the bar and run to the bathroom. I had to go #2 suddenly and time was definitely a factor. In the mens room I find 2 stalls. One is out of order so I go to the other and it appears functional. I take a nasty ass dump, the kind I'm famous for, and flush. Wipe and drop it in and realize it isn't going down. The toilet isn't clogged. It's the situation where the water fills slowly and rises right up to the brim in a slow nasty brown water rotation. Looks nasty. I start to panic. There's no plunger. "What do I do" I ask myself. I choose the only viable option, sneak out.
       The bar is small. The bathroom door faces the bar and is only about 10 feet back from it. My friends are standing nearby and have my beer. As I approach they go to hand me my beer and I, quickly and deliberately, say "We gotta go". "what? Why?" I'm asked. Before I can get a single word out a country looking dude walks out of the bathroom and yells across the whole bar "Who just took a deuce?!!!!" the entire bar, crowded, goes silent. He yells again "Who just took a deuce?!!!" No one makes a peep. I connect eyes with my buddy Nick as he raises his glass to his mouth and chugs his beer down. He turns and connects glances with my dad who's at the far end of the bar. Nick raises his index finger and makes a horizontal circle motion to signify that we need to wrap things up. My dad nods. As we all walk out my dad looks at the group and asks "Which one uh'you assholes?" We all bust up laughing.

*My deepest apologies go to the good people at the Nautical Inn. They didn't deserve that.

Roy and his toy

 Some of you may know that while I was stationed at the Oak Island Coast Guard Station it burned down. Right down to the ground. Luckily, I was on leave at the time. Well, with it went our medical records and those needed to be replaced. This meant we all had to go get a physical at a Coast Guard Health office about an hour drive away. We went in groups of 5 and the first group was myself along with the usual suspects, Billie Ward, SN Roy, Hartfield, and another guy. This is a great example of how troublemakers aren't out causing trouble, we walk into it blindly.
    We get to this clinic and all sit down in the waiting room which is directly across from the only exam room in the clinic. The doctor, a women in her mid to late 70's, with hair so grey it looks blue, announces to the group that she'll see us one at a time and we should all be done in about an hour. First up is Seaman Roy, a short guy who can be a little up tight and professional at times, he was a reservist who was placed back on active duty as the Iraq war was getting started which put on hold his job at a local grocery store. He is led back to the exam room and the door is shut behind him. We wait patiently. After about fifteen minutes we hear someone fall to the floor. It's loud, like, someone really ate shit in there. A few minutes pass as we silently wonder what happened. Roy walks out and sits down in the waiting room with us. He says nothing, looking straight ahead and his face is beet red. Something definitely happened in there. Billie and I lean in and discreetly ask the question that's on everyones mind. "What the fuck happened dude"? He immediately becomes very animated as he describes the situation involving a hernia exam. For the sake of those who don't know what that involves, basically the doctor holds your balls and asks you to cough. In this case the elderly doctor had Roy stand up on a very small step stool and pull his pants all the way down to his ankles. He said her hand was so freezing cold that it jolted him, causing him to lose his balance and with his feet tied together by his pants down and the small area in which he was standing caused him to fall to the floor taking the doctor to the ground with him. Naked from the waist down with his sausage flopping all over this poor women as he rolls around on the floor trying to pull his pants up and regain control of the situation. Both Roy and the doctor were very embarrassed. There was a good half hour before the next person was brought back. The small stool was kept in the corner during the following exams which were notably awkward.

Free Injury Screening

   


A few years back I suffered an overuse injury as a result of over training for a marathon. I usually end up with some sort of running injury every year, but this particular injury didn't feel like most. The pain was just above my ankle on the front of my leg. I couldn't run down the block let alone 26.2 miles of a marathon. Over the following couple of weeks I made up my cardio work on the trusty elliptical machine at the gym. Right around the time frustration turns into desperation I received an email from my favorite running store, Dick Pond Athletics. The email outlined several sales going on at the time but it also advertised a free injury screening to be hosted by the good people at Athletico, a physical therapy and sports medicine place nearby. Perfect, I thought, I can get an idea of how long this will hurt and adjust my running accordingly. If only it had been that easy, you see, there's always free cheese in a mouse trap. Like a Swedish schoolboy I walk into the store happy to be there. They had me write my name on a clipboard and wait to be called. The screenings were happening right in the running store. A few awkward minutes of browsing and my name is called. I walk over to find the Athletico employee and completely lose any ability to speak. This women could've been a playboy centerfold. She wasn't a ten, she was a 20. She had blonde hair flowing all wavy like, she was thin and fit as hell with a set of canons, she was ridiculously hot. Of course I'm fumbling around looking completely foolish. She asks "where does it hurt"? It took every ounce of me to hold it together and tell her. She has me sit on a chair and take my shoe off. She squats down and picks up my foot by the heel and begins examining it. She's unknowingly rubbing my foot all over her boob. I just about hit the ceiling. The longer she massaged her breasts while examining my foot the further I was crawling up out of the chair. I was not prepared for this. My foot was rubbed across every inch of that breast. Had I gone in there under the pretense that I'd be feeling up the hottest woman on earth with my foot I probably would've been a little better equipped to handle it or ,more likely, avoid the whole thing. Your boy was looking dumb. I got played by a running store. I wish, now, that I could watch that situation play out. The look on my face. No longer relevant, but I had a shin splint right above my ankle.

*I'm not trying to objectify women at all. This is only meant to be comedy. Sorry if I offend anyone.

Surprise, you have a lot of running to do!

 



    Yesterday I received an email confirming my entry into the Chicago Marathon. My registration comes through the general lottery system that the marathon had put in place a few years ago. As I read through the confirmation email I was reminded of a Christmas day practical joke I pulled on my mom but the prank somehow ended up epically turning on my sister and brother in law in the process. It was a Christmas miracle  Let's review.
     The first weekend of December is an important time for me because the Fox Valley Marathon hosts their early registration event. At the time I was still very much trying to show the people around me that running is really important for your health and well being. I still feel that way, you may have heard me say "Running is my Religion". My mom has always been an active person. She rides her bike all the time and all sorts of other things too. She was talking, at the time, about doing some kind of athletic event to train for and improve her health but she has a bad knee so running really isn't in her wheel house.
     On Christmas morning my family exchanges gift like most of us do. For the Christmas gift exchange, however, my family draws names out of a hat and that's the person you buy a gift for, and as well, we put something in each others stockings. It's simple and it works. Well, this particular year I drew my mom's name from the hat. Expectedly, my mom said she wanted a bath robe from some high end store she frequents. I ordered it online. When it arrived I wrapped it real nice and set it aside. I also took the confirmation email sent to me by the Fox Valley Marathon and changed the pertinent information to my mom's name and address, printed that out and wrapped it in a smaller box.
     Christmas morning came and she is handed the fake gift. She holds it with much trepidation. She had to know something was up. She unwraps the box and pulls out this sheet of paper. Briefly scans the document and then asks me what it is. I respond "I signed you up for the Marathon! You were talking about doing something. Boom! I'll help you train and run it with you." She is immediately sent into a full blown hot flash. While fanning herself with the paper as her face turns bright red my sister yells "she can't even walk up a flight of stairs! You think she's running a marathon!" Her husband, Kevin, says "Sure you can, Kate and I will run it too! We were just talking about running." That's when Kate says "I wanted to have a kid next year!" and he says "What!!!" He was as shocked as the rest of us were overcome with laughter.
      I reassured my mom that it was a joke and she was not signed up for any marathon, presented her with the real gift, and she was pleased. She did take a moment to step out into the winter air to cool off and the following December we had a nephew.
   

Desk top Stapler

    The other day I ran into a guy I had gone to high school with, Ricky. He's always been a great guy and happens to be best friends with this other guy, Brett, who lived a block away from myself growing up. We chatted for a moment and he mentioned how he and Brett were "just talking about me". I can't imagine how it is that I would come up in conversation so I asked "about what"? He quickly responds "The stapler, Brett still has his". I shake my head to the fact that it's been 17 years and this still comes up. He went on to remind me how funny that was and I agreed faithfully.
    Back in my junior year of high school I had this part time job at Sears hardware. One evening I was tasked with cleaning out an area in the warehouse that was seldom used. Upon doing so I stumbled upon a big box full of desk top staplers that had been forgotten about for some time and long since discontinued. The manager makes a quick announcement that if any employee wants one they are 10 cents a piece and then we'll mark them to $1 for any interested customers. I reach in my pocket to reveal a crumpled up one dollar bill and say "I guess I'll take all ten".
    The next day I brought all ten staplers with me to school. My first class was this strange 2 period long English and History class. One teacher would teach English and another would teach History in the second hour. Neither teacher liked me personally. I passed out the staplers amongst friends in class. We were slowly making our way into the first hour when very suddenly a police officer walks in. He addresses the class that he's looking for me. The history teacher, Mr. Sullivan, promptly points me out to him. "Pete, why don't you get all the staplers back from your little buddies and come with me" he says firmly. The staplers are frantically handed back to me and I am escorted from class. He walks me to the police liaison office, sits me down, and asks "Where did you get all these staplers"? I told him very simply "I bought them".
Cop- do you have a receipt?
Me- Not with me
Cop- hmm, because it looks like you stole them.
Me- I work there
Cop- Well, where do we go from here?
Me- Why don't you just call them?
  He gets the phone from his desk and I provide him with the phone number. This really whacky and high strung lady who worked the customer service desk answers. The cop delicately says he has a student in possession of about ten staplers and is quickly cut off by her boastful and completely ecstatic "Pete!! Yeah, we sold him those. Ten cents each so he bought the whole box!"
   He had the dumbest look on his face as we both heard that coming from the phone. He thanked her and hung up the phone, turns to me and says "So what now"? I made it back to class right before the end of the second hour and gave everyone back their stapler. My legacy was made that day.
    The history teacher called the cops on me.

My Last Day Working at Chase

             I worked at Chase for 7 years in the credit card services department.  It was awful.  The people that I worked with were a unique bunch. They had to put a policy in place because people would make popcorn at 7am, making the entire floor smell like it.  They had a rule that you couldn't have lunch at your desk, only a snack. The difference, after much litigation, is that a snack doesn't require a utensil. There's a mountain of bullshit I could happily outline for you but I'd rather we get right to it. 
              My last day was March, I don't know what day, 2014. On my last day I did what any respectable employee of a monolithic-peasant-fuck-machine would do and I put a microwavable popcorn pack in the microwave and turned it on high for as long as the piece of shit would go for and walked away.  
               I waited at my desk for about an hour before I would dare walk past the breakroom again.  There were several ladies standing outside of the breakroom muttering obscenities.  The smell was horrible.  You could cut the smell with a spoon, if you were allowed to have one at your desk.  Below you'll find the play by play I sent my brother via text.  It was great.

Pete:

Run to work, check

Burn popcorn, pending

Seth:

Ha ha

Pete:

Popcorn, check

Seth:

So what happened?  Any reactions?

Pete:

I just started it and walked away

Seth:

Ha ha

Pete:

5 min on high

I smell popcorn

Seth:

Ha

Pete:

No mass email yet

Oh shit

It stinks

Seth:

Ha ha

Pete:

Everyone's talking about it!

5 min is the magic number to burn popcorn

The whole floor smells bad

Seth:

I'm cracking up over here

Pete:

Good thing I didn't put it all the way to 6 min

Seth:

Ha ha

Pete:

This place is fucked

Seth:

Is it really that bad?

Pete:

I'm two isles from the farthest away

And it's strong 

Seth:

Ha ha

Pete:

I got one more pack

Seth:

Oh man

Pete:

I'll drop that one down stairs

Seth:

Yes

Pete:

Too bad I can't upper deck* the joint

Seth:

Oh man

Seth:

Any updates?

Pete:

No

The smell is clearing up

*an upper decker is when one goes number 2 into the tank of a toilet.

K1000

Sitting on the bookshelf behind me is a Pentax K1000. It’s a 35mm film camera that was made quite a long time ago. I bought the camera while in photography class back in high school. My dad took me to a camera swap meet where I paid a hefty $65 dollars for it and with an otherwise D average, I was proudly earning an A in photography. All of these years later and the camera is still working just fine. Where’s all these great photos you ask, well, I brought the camera with me to my first unit in the Coast Guard. I joined the Coast Guard for an adventure, as many kids my age had, but I had a passion for photography and a genuine desire to capture the next four years. I quickly earned the reputation on the ship for being the guy always taking pictures. Looking at this camera now I can recall so many times I was told to put it away. So many eye rolls and the all too often “Not now” as it was heard through the passageways of the USCGC Mobile Bay. A 140’ tug boat built for breaking ice on the Great Lakes. It also had a barge with a large crane used for pulling buoys out of the water every fall and replacing them with much smaller buoys that could handle the harsh environment of a frozen Lake Michigan, 173 in total. I began documenting every aspect of life aboard the ship.

      There was so many incredible moments that unfolded on that ship that I’m grateful that I had that camera in my hand. Like the time I smuggled it on a CG helicopter by stuffing it in my drysuit where I was able to photograph the entire training day from the back seat. Reaching out over the airman as he hoisted the basket from the water and hanging it from the ceiling of the helo while it was my turn to get in the water. On another occasion I would document several crew members chainsawing out a 20ft square in the ice, several feet thick, and then as the tug boat, tied to it, would pull it out of the water. The entire ice shelf shook violently as it lifted out of the water and slid away scaring the shit out of us as we stood on the ice, mere feet away. The ice block weighed over 5000 lbs by a later estimate. We went swimming in the fridged waters and called it “training”. When an icebreaker stops in the ice the water freezes so fast that it's immediately safe to lower a ladder and walk out on the ice. Of course with the serious events also came the less serious, like, the time we went clay shooting off the stern smack in the center of Lake Michigan and then jumped off the 03 deck (the highest point on the ship) into the water as a morale outing. Once I snuck out on the bridge wing to get a shot of the captain while we passed beneath the famous Mackinac Bridge. I, to this day, believe he knew what I was doing and waited until the shutter snapped to yell at me thus satisfying the Executive officer (the bad cop in all situations). The Coast Guard used one of my photos in a training aid, it was of a lone seat cushion floating in still waters far from land. The fishing boat it belonged to was never found despite our surface search radar and a week of an expanding circle search pattern. The ships radar could locate a toilet paper tube 3 miles away and that was all that was found. I was shooting a roll of film a week for two straight years on that ship.

      My photo collection along with all my negatives were lost when my second duty station, Small Boat Station Oak Island, burned down. I walked away from photography for almost 5 years after that. There were so many opportunities for me to mail home or drop off the negatives, or copies of everything, but I didn’t.

Numismatics

          Sitting here at my desk with my notebook open and various office supplies spread about the surface. There's a small amount of pocket change directly to my left. I'm holding a penny that was minted way back in 1973, 37 years ago. I'm guessing if this coin could talk it would have a quite a story to tell, from world traveling to decades of storage in change jars around the country. It probably sat for years and years in various peoples change piles, under seats of cars, and having been found on the floor by countless janitors and school children alike. I can see why coin collecting can be an interesting hobby. Taped to the page is a coin given to me for collecting 4 payments or more (I collected 7) for the day here in the Debt Collections Dept. of Chase Bank. This coin would say "I got taped to a page in a journal for X number of years".

Schaumburg IL to Algoma WI Cannonball Run

 

    We're going back maybe 15 years for this one but I love this story. My Grandpa Pete was a man very set in his ways. He and my Grandma Ruth never traveled, ever. There's two fundamental problems with travel as he saw it; 1) Hotels are too noisy what with the elevator and the ice machine. 2) Relatives spare rooms are out of the question because it's probably going to be too hot and he can't sleep. Some holidays and rare occasions he would have no choice but to make the 250 mile trek from his home in Southern Door County WI to my parents house in Illinois. They would, without question, be driving home the same day. A four and a half hour drive to the average motorist one way. At some point in the stillness of rural WI my Grandpa became obsessed with trying to make the trip in record time. I recall he had made it in a blistering sub 3 hours. In a Buick Regal no less. Worth mentioning, as long as I remember his various cars, all big body Buicks, over the years the same Willy Nelson cassette tape made it's way into every one of them.
      Recently I asked my Dad about it. He knew exactly what i was talking about. "The Guy was nuts!!!!", he says. He told me how he and my Uncle had to have a "talk" with him. Asking him to stop what he was doing. He didn't listen of course and they ended up refusing to get in a car with him even on short trips around WI. He would run stop signs as if they weren't there. My Grandpa, as it turns out, would leave to drive all the way home and as soon as he would arrive he'd run to the phone to call my Dad just to make sure he knew how fast he'd made it in.
    His 3 hour record puts his average speed at least 85mph, and don't forget you have to stop for gas once. As far as I know he got only one ticket in the three attempts each year for roughly 5 years of the project, although it was a $900 ticket. He asked the police officer to give him a break and the officers responded "no one gets a break at 40mph over the limit".
   Grandpa Pete was a cool guy and, despite safety concerns, that's an awesome idea for someone to be so passionately adhered too. He passed away a few years ago and the record still stands. I think it'll stand for years to come.

The Lawn Job

    The year is 1991, I'm 10 yrs old, and I was spending my summer as I always had, playing basketball, riding my bike, and building forts and club houses with the other kids on my street. Once in a while we would have a falling out as any group of children would. This occasion the particularly pompous kid, he was an only child, down the street, Danny Cristo, was not our friend. Well, one day Steve Lackic and I were hanging around outside when this older kid across the street, he was between 16 and 18 at the time, Brian, had a friend drive up in a Chevy Blazer. He drove right up on the lawn. This definitely got our attention. Somehow Steve and I, two 10 year olds, with little to no convincing talked the guy into doing a lawn job on Danny's front yard. This dude piles up both Steve and myself into his truck and tears down the street and around the block with heavy medal music blasting in our ears. Within a few seconds we're pulled up on the kids lawn when puts the gas pedal all the way to the floor. It felt like we were in a monster truck. The engine roared and the truck lurched backward! Grass was flying up on both sides of the truck as we did a perfect 180 degree spin in a snap, and then in a cloud of dirt and dust the truck hit the pavement and peeled off down the street.
    He let us out around the corner where we walked home. The next day Danny's Dad was seen hosing the grass down with a garden hose in his typical fashion. A wife beater, boxer shorts, and slippers. I can only imagine what he was thinking standing there facing the complete destruction that was his front lawn. That was so awesome and it may be the reason why I bought my red pickup truck so many years ago. That was so fun!

Right around sundown on the Appalachian Trail

Backpacking Food Guide

Backpacking Food - This is only a guide.

Cookpot

Rice sides

Noodle sides

Mac n cheese (not shells and cheese)

couscous

ramen noodles

dehydrated anything

Oatmeal
Instant Mashed Potatoes (There's all these great flavors out. All of them are great)

Meat Packets

beef crumbles

chicken

tuna

salmon

Spam
Pepperoni slices
summer sausage
smoked salmon

cheese (lasts 30 days in your pack)

Cheddar

habanero cheddar

gouda

breads

Tortillas

bagels

Spreads

peanut butter

nutella

Bars/snack food

protein bars

granola bars
Hershey Bars to dip in PB! (no amount of chocolate is too much)

snicker

payday

baby Ruths

Nutrageous
Pop Tarts
Trail mix
Bag of cereal (light weight and surprisingly good)

Reese’s Fucking anything!!!

Misc

Salt n pepper

Fritos
Cheetos

Hot sauce (crucial)

Cajun Seasoning

Instant Coffee

Gatorade packets
Taco Bell sauce packets
Mayo Packets

Things to consider; Get creative. The hardest thing in planning your food bag is understanding how little you actually will eat. You pack your fears. People tend to make one of two mistakes; either you carry way too much food and dance on the edge of running out of water or you carry next to no food and carry huge amounts of water despite an abundance of naturals springs. You can actually hike just fine with out cooking at all. I ate cold for 2 and a half months straight and never missed the stove ever. Everything listed under "Cookpot" you might consider adding a meat packet of your choice to. Like a mexican flavor Rice Side goes great with Taco flavored beef crumbles [wrapped in a tortilla with cheese] or a Alfredo Noodle Side is great with a tuna packet added to it. You may have heard the term "Ramen Bomb" that's when you make ramen noodles then put a packet of instant potatoes into it at the end of cooking. This is disgusting and sits like a rock in your stomach. In regards to cooking equipment, a good cook pot should work on multiple fuel sources. You can easily share any stove with someone, and should you run out of fuel it's great to be able to simply build a small fire and cook that way. Simply by forming the fire into a horseshoe and setting the pot down in it. Fuel becomes less critical and infinitely more abundant. I recommend the Stanley Cook pot but if you have some doe ray me then there's some really nice titanium pots. The Biolite stove that charges your phone is the worst choice. Mountain House meals, backpackers Pantry, or any of those dehydrated meals sold at REI are a poor choice for many reasons, here's a few; expensive, one doesn't fill you up, they're bulky, and eventually you're gonna eat the oxygen absorbing packet hidden in the bottom. They are, however, a great choice in a 3 or 4 day trip as a dinner option in conjunction with breakfast and lunch as described in the example below, additionally, should you get them free, the ones that contain egg will certainly give you the shits and are to be avoided. A Mountain House for dinner and regular store bought food as breakfast and lunch is a very smart plan for a short backpack trip. The cook stove, fuel, spork, and pot should pack up small and light. Think Cantaloupe. Worth mentioning; McDonalds burgers, plain, will last 5 days in your pack, a sub sandwich will last 2 days in reasonable heat. So don't be afraid to bring some leftovers.

Here's an example of one day on the trail:

• Breakfast- Bagel
• Lunch- wrap half the packet of pepperoni and a few chunks of cheese into 2 tortillas. Enjoy with the gatorade you mixed earlier. Supplement with a handful of Fritos.
• Snacks- protein bar and 2 granola bars (throughout the day)
• Dinner- One couscous box (garlic flavor) (cooked). eat a stack of pepperoni while you cook it and have a few fist loads of Fritos.
• Desert- Snicker bar

It's backpacking not a culinary adventure. I'll try and get some better examples and menu plans together. Remember that while you HYOH.

Backpacking Gear List

Backpacking gear list- This is only a guide

• Pack / rainfly

• Tent / stakes and poles

• Sleeping bag (30 or 40 deg is warm enough) / pad / ground sheet (optional, thin sheet of Tyvek is perfect)

• Water filter (I recommend the Sawyer Squeeze or steri pen) / bottles 2x 32oz

• Cook pot / stove / fuel / spork. (the small size fuel can lasts 2 weeks)

• clothes- 1 light jacket, 1 Raincoat or poncho, 1 long sleeve thermal, 1 T-shirt, 1 underwear, 2 pairs of socks, light shorts, small drawstring bag to hold it all. (this doesn’t include what you’re already wearing which would be Hiking pants (quick dry), a tech T, socks, underwear, shoes, camp shoes (crocs)

• Toiletries bag- toothbrush, toothpaste, toilet paper (i recommend coleman biowipes), first aid kit, lighter, bug spray, small Dr. Bronners, 50ft of paracord, 1 small carabiner, headphones, external battery to charge your cell phone, pocket knife, sunglasses

• Map- also have a pen and small compass (zipper fob type compass is more than enough). put it all in a freezer bag.

• Roll top dry bags- 1 10-20L to serve as a food bag, 1 20L to keep your sleeping bag and clothes bag dry in your pack, 1 8L to hold your Toiletries. Silnylon or the rubberized style waterproof bag is fine. whichever you prefer. You’re also going to want a few freezer bags.

• Trekking poles- I recommend it. They seem silly until you are balancing 30lbs on your back and trying to get across jagged boulders. Still not convinced, give someone a piggyback ride and try and climb over your car without using your hands.

• Things to consider: Your clothes should be able to dry fast. Cotton socks will destroy your feet by holding in moisture. Hiking boots are a thing of the past. Consider a trail running shoe and a thin merino wool sock. The Sawyer Mini water filter is incredibly difficult to squeeze water through, I use the regular size, both, however, are rendered useless if you let it freeze solid. A firearm is the most amateur thing to carry on the trail. So is bear spray. If you are afraid of bears then maybe give up on the outdoors. Bears are harmless and if you understand them then you'd learn how to avoid problems and how not dangerous they are. Your pack should weigh about 30lbs or less with food and 32oz of water, if it’s much more than this then I’ll be happy to help you go through your gear to find out what you're afraid of, council you on it, and remove the excess. You pack your fears. The small drawstring bag holding your clothes is also your pillow. You've probably seen people who put a trash bag in their pack as a liner to keep water out. This is a good idea but if everything except your tent is in it's own water tight bag, like a roll top or a freezer bag, then that's just as good, if not better. I skip the trash bag liner because they get holes in them pretty quickly. HYOH.

*in regards to filtering water. This is always a source of debate and discussion. I recommend the regular size sawyer squeeze. It's easy to use, works well, and is small and light. You simply fill a bag from a water source, screw the filter on, and squeeze the water through into a bottle or your face. The Sawyer mini is very difficult to get water through and can pop your bag. UV filters, like the steri pen, are a great choice and I may go to this option myself. The only draw back, which I'm cool with, is that you can end up drinking a small amount of particulate like dirt or sand from a water source. Other filters on the market all seem to have something about them that causes them to not be very practical. Purifying tablets and bleach drops work fine too but the water will taste like sulfer and who wants that when you're drinking from the most beautiful mountain springs that taste so fresh. The spring water was one of my favorite parts of my AT thru hike. Now, I'm going to say this but please don't go all crazy, I didn't filter water for the entire second half of my hike. For 2 and a half months I didn't get sick. Water is safer than you think but that doesn't mean every drop of water out there is fair game. Use your head. Here's the criteria to look for; 1)  do you know it's source? 2) is there no agricultural or human development nearby? 3) is the water cold? 4) narrow 5) and lastly, is it fast moving? If you can answer yes to all those then by all means enjoy that shit. Raw dog it. Camel up, as they say. The water issue, I think, taps into people's fear of what they don't know. It's funny to watch someone drink water they filtered for the first time. Lastly, agricultural run off, a stream of water passing through farmland. There is nothing you can do to make that safe to drink. Boil it, squeeze filter it, fucking distill that shit and you'll still end up puking out both ends on your way to the ER.

Strange things happen in three out on the AT

(Notes on the photo; I took several pictures with my camera and used them to form this panoramic from that day as best I could. This is not a fabrication, I assure you)


                      There’s a saying "The trail will provide" that, as you continue along your hike, becomes something to take comfort in. Moments when food is provided or water sources found after fully accepting a hopeless situation and the only explanation is that the trail provided. I certainly do feel the trail has the power to influence one’s thru hike. Every hiker who sets foot on the AT is looking for personal growth in some form or another. The lessons you expect to learn are rarely what you take away with you. The trail has something unique to teach each and everyone out there. One enters the secular pilgrimage open to experience and growth. Without question, I too found growth that I rely upon everyday. On my AT thru hike there were three separate occasions where I found myself stopped dead in my tracks with no possible way to explain what just happened. I'd like to share those experiences with you.
                      About a month into the hike this happened; it's Saturday and it's rained all day. 47 degrees out, 16 miles from Ice Mountain shelter to Jerry's Cabin shelter. I'm sitting next to a guy who goes by the trail name Shortcut and he looks exactly like my grandpa Pete in every way. He's even wearing his winter hat the same way my Grandpa wore his by not folding it at the bottom causing it to form a nipple shape on top of his head. We didn't get a chance to talk because he got in his sleeping bag and went to sleep just after we got there. I didn't connect the dots until several miles into the following day but Grandpa Pete's real first name was Jerry.
                     Now I'm in Vermont and I posted a photo with text across the front that read "Don't be afraid to move on and start a new chapter" with it I included a little caption that, in summary said how glad I was that I decided to hike the trail and how great the whole experience was going.  The mother of my best friend from high school reached out to me with a text saying how inspirational my journey has been. She went on to say how I gave her that little extra motivation she needed to take a leap of her own. She was planning to enroll in school for Chaplaincy. The next day I reached Stratton Pond and took a break with another thru hiker, an older retired gentleman. Stratton Pond is famous for being the very spot where Benton Mackaye, in the 1930's, would have the very idea for what would be the Appalachian Trail. Sitting here looking out on the lake I tell my friend I'm going to get moving and hike out. I drag my pack closer to me and start getting ready when he asks me to pass him his backpack as it's slumped over in the grass on the other side of me. I drag it up onto my lap and notice a patch is sewn to the edge of the waistband. It read "Trail Chaplaincy, hiking in the spirit of the journey". I stared at that patch for a few long seconds.
                      The last day of the entire journey, the day I arrive to Abol Bridge campground after five months of hiking; The tent site we've been given has the greatest view of Khatadin, a massive and wondrous mountain serving as the northern end of the trail. The mountain is elusive, mythical, and sacred ground to indigenous people of the area. So many people dream of hiking the trail in its entirety yet so few make it. We'd summit Khatadin the following day completing the thru hike. It's raining out, as it did most days in Maine. Suddenly the rain stops and the sky begins to clear so I move to sit on the picnic table facing the mountain. As the clouds are parting, just to the east of the mountain, appears a rainbow. Bright blue skies over the mountain I've been almost afraid to talk about is standing right before me, and a bright rainbow should appear. This moment was powerful.
                     An AT thru hike is a secular pilgrimage of the grandest proportions. I'm blessed to have been a part of it. I'm grateful for these experiences and I wouldn't trade them for anything. The reality we live in is a mere fraction of whats going on around us. Try to open your heart and see it. The lessons you’ll learn are yours.