Interested in a really long hike? The Adirondack Park has the Northville-Placid Trail (133 miles) and Vermont has the Long Trail (272 miles), but these are mere steppingstones to the granddaddy of long-distance routes, the Appalachian Trail.
The AT, as it’s known, stretches 2,200 miles from Georgia to Maine, traversing 14 states. That might be a bit more than you want to do. If so, you can enjoy the trail vicariously through Cady Kuzmich’s blog, which she calls “In the Woods.”
Cady is a freelance writer for the Daily Gazette in Schenectady who is hiking the AT right now. As she explains here, she first tried to do the trail in 2015 but for a variety of reasons had to abandon the quest. In March, she returned to the trail and began hiking north. As I write this, she is somewhere in Virginia.
In her posts, she writes about the characters she meets on the trail, with such sobriquets as Honest Abe, Clunk, Shaggy, Spaceman, and Maneater, and the joys and hardships of hiking day after day in the wilderness.
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She also writes about her own thoughts. In one post, for example, she confronts her fears of hiking alone as woman. And in her latest post (from May 1), she talks about the tendency to slip into reverie while grinding out the miles.
“Walking state to state by yourself leaves you with a lot of time to think. What’s interesting is where your mind will wander when you give it hours upon hours, day after day, to freely go through the many chapters of your life and to imagine what the chapters ahead, yet to be written, may entail.
“The mind can be a difficult ship to steer.”
It’s clear she knows how to write.
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If you want to follow Cady’s wanderings, on foot and in the mind, check out “In the Woods.”
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